The Ministerial Union had ruled out Beecher—­a point gained.  He would get up an excitement about it in public.  But that was a miscalculation.  He never mentioned it.  They waited and waited for the grand crash, but it never came.  After all their labor-pains, their ministerial mountain had brought forth only a mouse—­and a still-born one at that.  Beecher had not told on them; Beecher malignantly persisted in not telling on them.  The opportunity was slipping away.  Alas, for the humiliation of it, they had to come out and tell it themselves!  And after all, their bombshell did not hurt anybody when they did explode it.  They had ceased to be responsible to God for Beecher, and yet nobody seemed paralyzed about it.  Somehow, it was not even of sufficient importance, apparently, to get into the papers, though even the poor little facts that Smith has bought a trotting team and Alderman Jones’s child has the measles are chronicled there with avidity.  Something must be done.  As the Ministerial Union had told about their desolating action, when nobody else considered it of enough importance to tell, they would also publish it, now that the reporters failed to see anything in it important enough to print.  And so they startled the entire religious world no doubt by solemnly printing in the Evangelist the paragraph which heads this article.  They have got their excommunication-bull started at last.  It is going along quite lively now, and making considerable stir, let us hope.  They even know it in Podunk, wherever that may be.  It excited a two-line paragraph there.  Happy, happy world, that knows at last that a little congress of congregationless clergymen of whom it had never heard before have crushed a famous Beecher, and reduced his audiences from fifteen hundred down to fourteen hundred and seventy-five at one fell blow!  Happy, happy world, that knows at last that these obscure innocents are no longer responsible for the blemishless teachings, the power, the pathos, the logic, and the other and manifold intellectual pyrotechnics that seduce, but to damn, the Opera House assemblages every Sunday night in Elmira!  And miserable, O thrice miserable Beecher!  For the Ministerial Union of Elmira will never, no, never more be responsible to God for his shortcomings. (Excuse these tears.)

(For the protection of a man who is uniformly charged with all the newspaper deviltry that sees the light in Elmira journals, I take this opportunity of stating, under oath, duly subscribed before a magistrate, that Mr. Beecher did not write this article.  And further still, that he did not inspire it.  And further still, the Ministerial Union of Elmira did not write it.  And finally, the Ministerial Union did not ask me to write it.  No, I have taken up this cudgel in defense of the Ministerial Union of Elmira solely from a love of justice.  Without solicitation, I have constituted myself the champion of the Ministerial Union of Elmira, and it shall be a labor of love with