The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their clergyman,—­a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain mechanical processes as Babbage’s calculating machine.  The commentary of the laymen on the preaching and practising of Jonathan Edwards was, that, after twenty-three years of endurance, they turned him out by a vote of twenty to one, and passed a resolve that he should never preach for them again.  A man’s logical and analytical adjustments are of little consequence, compared to his primary relations with Nature and truth:  and people have sense enough to find it out in the long ran; they know what “logic” is worth.

In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many men can do this.  But common sense and common humanity were unfortunately left out from their premises, and a layman had to supply them.  A hundred more years and many of the barbarisms still lingering among us will, of course, have disappeared like witch-hanging.  But people are sensitive now, as they were then.  You will see by this extract that the Rev. Cotton Mather did not like intermeddling with his business very well.

“Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions,” he says, “and God will smite thro’ the loins of those that rise up against them.  I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds among us know to be true.  The Godly Minister of a certain Town in Connecticut, when he had occasion to be absent on a Lord’s Day from his Flock, employ’d an honest Neighbour of some small Talents for a Mechanick, to read a Sermon out of some good Book unto ’em.  This Honest, whom they ever counted also a Pious Man, had so much conceit of his Talents, that instead of Reading a Sermon appointed, he to the Surprize of the People, fell to preaching one of his own.  For his Text he took these Words, ’Despise not Prophecyings’; and in his Preachment he betook himself to bewail the Envy of the Clergy in the Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord’s People to be Prophets, and call forth Private Brethren publickly to prophesie.  While he was thus in the midst of his Exercise, God smote him with horrible Madness; he was taken ravingly distracted; the People were forc’d with violent Hands to carry him home.  I will not mention his Name:  He was reputed a Pious Man.”—­This is one of Cotton Mather’s “Remarkable Judgments of God, on Several Sorts of Offenders,”—­and the next cases referred to are the Judgments on the “Abominable Sacrilege” of not paying the Ministers’ Salaries.

This sort of thing does n’t do here and now, you see, my young friend!  We talk about our free institutions;—­they are nothing but a coarse outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought.  The President of the United States is only the engine driver of our broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a seat in the first-class cars behind him.