“There is where you are in error, Murty,” said the parson.  “Churches, pulpits, Bibles, and ministers are the machinery the Lord makes use of to secure the perseverance of the elect.”

“That talk appears to me silly,” rejoined Murty.  “The elect are to be saved, or they are not; if they are to be saved by the decree of God, then there is no use of you and your machinery; if they can lose their ‘election,’ and become reprobate, then your theory is contradictory, absurd, and grossly perversive of the gospel.  Take your choice of the horns of the dilemma.”

The parson here entered into a very unintelligible explanation of a subject which constitutes, in defiance of common sense and of the plainest teaching of the gospel, the leading dogma of Presbyterianism; namely, foreordination, or the eternal decree of every man’s election or reprobation, irrespective of free will, good works, or even the all-saving merits of our Lord Jesus Christ.

“How contradictory the tenets of sectarianism!” said Murty.  “You, that accuse Catholicity of teaching absurd and incredible doctrines, are yourselves enslaved by the most incredible and contradictory creeds.  It is the same in every sect.  Take the Methodists, and they are the very contrary of what their name signifies.  Instead of following any method in their mad orgies, they would seem to be, intellectually, the successors of the ancient bacchanalians.  They would carry man back to his primitive woods, and, by the medium of plenty of ‘straw,’ would annihilate the distinctions between the sexes, by introducing a promiscuous intercourse, and legalizing, by custom, the most indecent practices.”

“You have been at a camp meeting then, I see,” said the parson, glad that attention was turned from his own sect to one that was a rival of it.

“Yes, sir, I have, I regret to be obliged to confess,” said Murty; “and I must say that the Methodists, by their conduct there, showed themselves more ingenious in inventing the means of election than those of the church of Calvin.”

“How so, Murty?  In what do they exceed the Presbyterians?”

“Why, in this, that they have beat you hollow in securing salvation.  You make use of churches, pulpits, parsons, Bibles, and anti-Popery lectures to secure the election for the brethren; but the Methodists secure the same gift by means of some ‘straw.’  At the camp meeting held last year at M——­ville, of which the Irish laborer who spent a night there said, ’that there were more souls made there than convarted,’—­at that meeting, where there were twenty thousand persons present, I heard a preacher cry out, ’More straw! more straw!  Fifty souls lost for the want of straw!’ Now,” continued Murty, “this is what I call progress, to make as much out of a good bed of straw as you do out of all your church machinery for saving souls.”

“Ha! ha! ha!” said the parson, turning to Mrs. Prying.  “He is right; I saw and heard them myself at such absurdities.”