Surely, no men have such opportunity of speech and power as these thirty thousand ministers.  What have they to show for it all?  The hunter, fisher, woodman, miner, farmer, mechanic, has each his special wealth.  What have this multitude of ministers to show?—­how much knowledge given, what wise guidance, what inspiration of humanity?  Let the best men answer.

This ministerial army may be separated into three divisions.  First, the Church Militant, the Fighting Church, as the ecclesiastical dictionaries define it.  Reverend men serve devoutly in its ranks.  Their work is negative, oppositional.  Under various banners, with diverse, and discordant war-cries, trumpets braying a certain or uncertain sound, and weapons of strange pattern, though made of trusty steel, they do battle against the enemy.  What shots from antique pistols, matchlocks, from crossbows and catapults, are let fly at the foe!  Now the champion attacks “New Views,” “Ultraism,” “Neology,” “Innovation,” “Discontent,” “Carnal Reason”; then he lays lance in rest, and rides valiantly upon “Unitarianism,” “Popery,” “Infidelity,” “Atheism,” “Deism,” “Spiritualism”; and though one by one he runs them through, yet he never quite slays the Evil One;—­the severed limbs unite again, and a new monster takes the old one’s place.  It is serious men who make up the Church Militant,—­grim, earnest, valiant.  If mustered in the ninth century, there had been no better soldiers nor elder.

Next is the Church Termagant.  They are the Scolds of the Church-hold, terrible from the beginning hitherto.  Their work is denouncing; they have always a burden against something. Obsta decisis is their motto,—­“Hate all that is agreed upon.”  When the “contrary-minded” are called for, the Church Termagant holds up its hand.  A turbulent people, and a troublesome, are these sons of thunder,—­a brotherhood of universal come-outers.  Their only concord is disagreement.  It is not often, perhaps, that they have better thoughts than the rest of men, but a superior aptitude to find fault; their growling proves, “not that themselves are wise, but others weak.”  So their pulpit is a brawling-tub, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  They have a deal of thunder, and much lightning, but no light, nor any continuous warmth, only spasms of heat. Odi presentem laudare absentem,—­the Latin tells their story.  They come down and trouble every Bethesda in the world, but heal none of the impotent folk.  To them,

  “Of old things, all are over old,
  Of new things, none is new enough.”

They have a rage for fault-finding, and betake themselves to the pulpit as others are sent to Bedlam.  Men of all denominations are here, and it is a deal of mischief they do,—­the worst, indirectly, by making a sober man distrust the religious faculty they appeal to, and set his face against all mending of anything, no matter how badly it is broken.  These Theudases, boasting themselves to be somebody, and leading men off to perish in the wilderness, frighten every sober man from all thought of moving out of his bad neighborhood or seeking to make it better.—­But this is a small portion of the ecclesiastic host.  Let us be tolerant to their noise and bigotry.