It occurs to me to suggest, as a topic of inquiry in this connection, whether, on that momentous occasion when the goats and the sheep shall be parted, the Constitution and the Honorable Mr. Bagowind, M.C., will be expected to take their places on the left as our hircine vicars.

  Quid sum miser tunc dicturus? 
  Quem patronum rogaturus?

There is a point where toleration sinks into sheer baseness and poltroonery.  The toleration of the worst leads us to look on what is barely better as good enough, and to worship what is only moderately good.  Woe to that man, or that nation, to whom mediocrity has become an ideal!

Has our experiment of self-government succeeded, if it barely manage to rub and go? Here, now, is a piece of barbarism which Christ and the nineteenth century say shall cease, and which Messrs. Smith, Brown, and others say shall not cease.  I would by no means deny the eminent respectability of these gentlemen, but I confess, that, in such a wrestling match, I cannot help having my fears for them.

  Discite justitiam, moniti, et non temnere divos.

H.W.]

No.  VI

THE PIOUS EDITOR’S CREED

[At the special instance of Mr. Biglow, I preface the following satire with an extract from a sermon preached during the past summer, from Ezekiel xxxiv. 2:  ’Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel.’  Since the Sabbath on which this discourse was delivered, the editor of the ‘Jaalam Independent Blunderbuss’ has unaccountably absented himself from our house of worship.

’I know of no so responsible position as that of the public journalist.  The editor of our day bears the same relation to his time that the clerk bore to the age before the invention of printing.  Indeed, the position which he holds is that which the clergyman should hold even now.  But the clergyman chooses to walk off to the extreme edge of the world, and to throw such seed as he has clear over into that darkness which he calls the Next Life.  As if next did not mean nearest, and as if any life were nearer than that immediately present one which boils and eddies all around him at the caucus, the ratification meeting, and the polls!  Who taught him to exhort men to prepare for eternity, as for some future era of which the present forms no integral part?  The furrow which Time is even now turning runs through the Everlasting, and in that must he plant, or nowhere.  Yet he would fain believe and teach that we are going to have more of eternity than we have now.  This going of his is like that of the auctioneer, on which gone follows before we have made up our minds to bid,—­in which manner, not three months back, I lost an excellent copy of Chappelow on Job.  So it has come to pass that the preacher, instead of being a living force, has faded into an emblematic figure at christenings, weddings, and funerals.  Or, if he exercise any other function, it is as keeper and feeder of certain theologic dogmas, which, when occasion offers, he unkennels with a staboy! “to bark and bite as ’tis their nature to,” whence that reproach of odium theologicum has arisen.