He could be indeed nothing short of seraphim-revealed, for he discoursed with them in winning tones of mists and mysteries. He told them bald tales of angels with whom he had been on terms of intimacy; for he sagaciously kept his master, Swedenborg, mainly in the background throughout.
Representing himself as the individual recipient of these revelations, from the spherical ladies who wear wings, and who are habitually designated as angels by both the sexes, on our little clod of earth, our champion became, of course, the hero of all such semi-whiskered maidens or matrons, who, though essentially “pard-like spirits,” were yet, to reverse the words of Shelley, more “swift,” alias “fast,” than “beautiful!” It is, of course, to be comprehended that beauty is comparative as well as wit, and we would no more be understood as insinuating that these thinly-hirsute virgins and dames, who at once constituted the principal audience of the mighty Professor, were themselves in any degree deficient in sympathy either with the man and his profound doctrines, or the man per se, than that we would assert they understood one word of what he mouthed to them, with his hair behind his ears.
Boanerges Phospher, the Spiritual Professor, was successful, and never was there anything so professionally brilliant as the crowded houses that he nightly drew. The immense Tabernacle seemed a mere nut-shell; he could have filled half-a-dozen such houses nightly. The mob had grown excited by the novelty. The paper of the Patron Saint, at so many pennies a line, day by day, continued to prostitute its columns to this vulgar trap of silly servant-maids and profound clerks.
The Professor’s lectures were attended by countless swarms of inquirers after truth, who, as they were willing to accept a spoken for a written language of which they knew nothing, permitted him to stumble through propositions, which, in themselves, were so ridiculously absurd as even to disarm contempt in the wise, and make denunciation harmless as superfluous.
CHAPTER V.
BOANERGES AND THE YOUNG MATHEMATICIAN.
Famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression stareth in thy eyes,
Upon thy back hangs ragged misery.
Shakspeare.
There’s no more