THE FASHIONABLE PREACHER.
Do you call this a church? Well, I heard a prima-donna here a few nights ago: and bright eyes sparkled, and waving ringlets kept time to moving fans; and opera glasses and ogling, and fashion and folly reigned for the nonce triumphant. I can’t forget it; I can’t get up any devotion here, under these latticed balconies, with their fashionable freight. If it were a good old country church, with a cracked bell and unhewn rafters, a pine pulpit, with the honest sun staring in through the windows, a pitch-pipe in the gallery, and a few hob-nailed rustics scattered round in the uncushioned seats, I should feel all right; but my soul is in fetters here; it won’t soar—its wings are earth-clipped. Things are all too fine! Nobody can come in at that door, whose hat and coat and bonnet are not fashionably cut. The poor man (minus a Sunday suit) might lean on his staff; in the porch, a long while, before he’d dare venture in, to pick up his crumb of the Bread of Life. But, thank God, the unspoken prayer of penitence may wing its way to the Eternal Throne, though our mocking church spires point only with aristocratic fingers to the rich man’s heaven.
—That hymn was beautifully read; there’s poetry in the preacher’s soul. Now he takes his seat by the reading-desk; now he crosses the platform, and offers his hymn-book to a female who has just entered. What right has he to know there is a woman in the house? ’Tisn’t clerical! Let the bonnets find their own hymns.
Well, I take a listening attitude, and try to believe I am in church. I hear a great many original, a great many startling things said. I see the gauntlet thrown at the dear old orthodox sentiments which I nursed in with my mother’s milk, and which (please God) I’ll cling to till I die. I see the polished blade of satire glittering in the air, followed by curious, eager, youthful eyes, which gladly see the searching “Sword of the Spirit” parried. Meaning glances, smothered smiles and approving nods follow the witty clerical sally. The orator pauses to mark the effect, and his face says, That stroke tells! and so it did, for “the Athenians” are not all dead, who “love to see and hear some new thing.” But he has another arrow in his quiver. Now his features soften—his voice is low and thrilling, his imagery beautiful and touching. He speaks of human love; he touches skilfully a chord to which every heart vibrates; and stern manhood is struggling with his tears, ere his smiles are chased away.
Oh, there’s intellect there—there’s poetry there—there’s genius there; but I remember Gethsemane—I forget not Calvary! I know the “rocks were rent,” and the “heavens darkened,” and “the stone rolled away;” and a cold chill strikes to my heart when I hear “Jesus of Nazareth” lightly mentioned.
Oh, what are intellect, and poetry, and genius, when with Jewish voice they cry, “Away with Him!”
With “Mary,” let me “bathe his feet with my tears, and wipe them with the hairs of my head.”
And so, I “went away sorrowful,” that this human preacher, with such great intellectual possessions, should yet “lack the one thing needful.”
“CASH.”[A]
Don’t think I’m going to perpetrate a monetary article. No fancy that way! I ignore anything approaching to a stock! I refer now to that omnipresent, omniscient, ubiquitous, express-train little victim, so baptized in the dry-goods stores, who hears nothing but the everlasting word cash dinned in his juvenile ears from matin to vespers; whose dangerous duty it is to rush through a crowd of expectant and impatient feminines, without suffering his jacket-buttons to become too intimately acquainted with the fringes of their shawls, or the laces of their mantillas! and to dodge so dexterously as not to knock down, crush under foot, or otherwise damage the string of juveniles that said women are bound to place as obstructions in said “Cash’s” way!
See him double, and turn, and twist, like a rabbit in a wood, while that word of command flies from one clerk’s lip to another. Poor, demented little Cash! Where is your anxious maternal? Who finds you in patience and shoe leather? Does your pillow ever suggest anything to your weary brain but pillarless quarters, and crossed sixpences, and faded bank bills? When do you find time, you poor little victim, to comb your hair, digest your victuals, and say your catechise? Do you ever look back with a sigh to the days of peppermints, peanuts and pinafores? Or forward, in the dim distance, to a vision of a long-tailed coat, a high-standing dickey, and no more “Cash,” save in your pantaloons’ pocket? Don’t you ever catch yourself wishing that a certain rib of Adam’s had never been subtracted from his paradisiacal side?
Poor, miserable little Cash! you have my everlasting sympathy! I should go shopping twenty times, where I now go once, didn’t it harrow up my feelings to see you driven on so, like a locomotive! “Here’s hoping” you may soon be made sensible of more than one meaning to the word change!
[A] The boy employed in stores to fetch and carry change.