The barber's chair; and, The hedgehog letters

by Douglas William Jerrold

Juniper Hedgehog.

Letter XIII.—To Mrs Hedgehog of New York.

Dear Grandmother,—You ought to be in England just now, we’re in such a pleasant pucker. The Church is in danger again! I have myself known her twenty times in peril, but now she really is at the very edge of destruction.

You know there’s a place called Maynooth College, where they bring up Roman Catholic priests for the use of Ireland. Well, there’s a lot of folks who will have it that this college is not a bit better than certain tanks I’ve read of in India, where they breed young crocodiles to be worshipped by people who know no better. Sir Robert Peel intends to give £26,000 a year to this place—it used to have an annual grant of £9000—that the scholars may be increased in number, and that they may be better taught and more comfortably boarded and lodged. Well, the members of the Church of England—although here and there they have grumbled at the matter, and have called the Pope names that pass in small-change at Billingsgate—have been mute as fish compared to the Dissenters. It is they who have fought the fight; it is they who have raised the price of parchment by darkening the House of Commons with clouds of petitions. It is they who have risen to a man, and have patted the British Lion, and twisted his tail, and goaded him—as you’d set a bulldog on a cat—to tear Popery to pieces.

But, dear grandmother, don’t be afraid. Before you get my next letter, with all this noise and bouncing, we shall have settled down as quiet as stale sodawater. And then for the Church being in danger—bless you! the very folks who are now holding up their hands, thinking it will drop to pieces (from its very richness, I suppose, like some of your plum-puddings)—why, they’ll sleep quietly in their beds, and take their glass of wine and chicken with their usual appetite, until the Church shall be once more in trouble, once more to give ’em a pleasant, healthful shaking,—and then once more to let ’em easily down again. I’ve known some girls who’ve thought they best showed how tender they were by always going into fits: well, I do think that, just like ’em, some people believe they best show their religion when they scream and foam at the mouth about it.

It’s a settled belief with a good many pious people, who are as careful of their religion as of their best service of china—only using it on holiday occasions, for fear it should be chipped or flawed in working-day wear—it’s a belief with them that a Papist is a sort of human toad, an abomination in the form of man. Dr Croly has surely a notion of this sort. A few days ago he appeared on Covent Garden stage (I think his first appearance there since his comedy of “Pride shall have a Fall”), and called upon the Lord, with thunder and lightning and the sword, to kill His enemies—meaning Roman Catholics! And then the Doctor showed how Providence had punished all naughty kings who had cast an eye of favour on the Pope. Capping this, the Doctor more than hinted that George the Fourth, the first gentleman in Europe—for he had a greater number of coats than all the rest of the kings put together—was somewhat suddenly called from his loving people because he had passed the bill that ’mancipated the Catholics. Well, when we think how many Catholics there are in the world—when we remember the millions of ’em scattered about the earth—it does appear to me a little bold in a worm of a man (whether the said worm wears clergyman’s black or not) praying to the Lord to destroy, crush, burn, whole nations of men and women because he wasn’t born to think as they do. But so it is with some folks very proud indeed of their Christianity. Hear them talk and pray, and you would think that Satan himself, the father of wickedness, had been the creator of ninety-nine men out of a hundred, and it was the pure, elect, and lucky hundredth that religiously begged for the destruction of the ninety-nine. But all the noise is about the largeness of the sum—the £26,000. The £9000 was every year quietly voted—for I call the cackling of two or three Parliament geese as nothing—and still the Church stands unshaken on her foundation. By this it would seem that with some folks it is the money that wrong costs, and not the wrong itself, that is objectionable. Thinking after this fashion, drunkenness is not to be thought a vice if it be drunkenness gratis; it, however, increases in enormity with the increase of its price: thus gin-drunkenness is merely wrong, but burgundy-drunkenness is infamous to the last degree. Haven’t I read somewhere of an old Greek philosopher—if some of these chaps had lived in these times, they’d now and then have found themselves at the police-office—who felt mightily disposed for what was immoral, and only held back at the purchase-money! I think he said he wouldn’t “buy repentance at so dear a price.” Now, if he could have had the sin at a cheap pennyworth, the sin itself had been light, indeed. It’s the weight of money that makes the weight of crime.

But I suppose Dr Croly, Mr M’Neile, and such folks—who seem to read their Bibles by the blue light of brimstone—believe that the extra money given to the Roman Catholic priests of Ireland will only be so much powder and shot with which they may bring down Protestants. Well, if money is to make converts, what has the Irish Protestant Church been about, that has always had a full money-bag at her girdle, and more than that—plenty of leisure to reclaim the fallen? She has always had a golden crook whereby to bring stray lambs into the fold, and yet has added nothing to her flock.

Now, according to my opinion, the folks who abuse Maynooth ought rather to feel glad that money is to be given to her priests, seeing what an abundance of money, and good things purchased by money, have done for the Irish Protestant Church. It has become slow as it has become fat. Stuff even a pulpit-cushion with bank-notes, and it is strange to see how religion will sleep upon it. And therefore people ought to rejoice that the Catholic is to be made a little comfortable in worldly matters! Excellent, worthy Churchmen, who can command the sports of the field and all the pleasures of the table, are not the busy, troublesome folks to go about converting their benighted neighbours! And though the Maynooth pupils may not—like their beneficed rivals—keep fox-hounds, and enjoy the dearest turtle, pineapples, and all that, they will not, I think, be in after-life more dangerous to the Protestant Church, because when at college they slept not more than two in a bed.

But there’s a sort of people in the world that can’t bear making any progress. I wonder they even walk, unless they walk backwards! I wonder they don’t refuse to go out when there’s a full moon, and all out of love and respect for that “ancient institution,” the old one. But there always were such people, grandmother—always will be. When lucifers first came in, how many old women, stanch old souls—many of ’em worthy to be members of Parliament—stood by their matches and tinder-boxes, and cried out “No surrender!” And how many of these old women, disguised in male attire, every day go about at public meetings professing to be ready to die for any tinder-box question that may come up! Yes, ready, quite ready to die for it; all the readier, perhaps, because dying for anything of the sort’s quite gone out of fashion.

Even Sir James Graham says the time is gone by for ill-using Ireland. “The time is gone by!” And yet how many men before Sir James, have stood up and declared their time—the time “gone by”—was the best time possible for Ireland, that what was doing for her could not be improved; and having thundered this, have sat down, secure in a majority that has voted for the evil to continue! What a long time it is before men in power will learn to call things by their proper names! What a time it takes to teach ministers to call evil, evil—and lies, lies!