“I propose, therefore, that he be appointed our standard bearer, our sword wielder, our lightning discharger, our thunderer against our enemy.” (Immense and prolonged acclaim.) “Is he not most fit, I say, to be our champion? Is he not most valorous of mouth? Pours there not therefrom the most undammed torrent of eloquence that ever tumbled from the lips of mortal barker? Is he not the tried and proven champion Reason destroyer? Yea, verily, brethren. How many times has my soul been exalted with pride, as I have seen him in battle with Reason, belt him over the head, give it him in the neck, upper and under cut him, roast him in the ribs, cross buttock him, overthrow him, kick him, kill him.” (Great barking.) “Yea, verily, brethren, there never was, in all this world, a barker so contrary to Reason, so deadly a foe to it as he. He is worthy to be our leader.” (Loud and prolonged acclaim, and cries of, “He is; he is; he is;” and calls of “Blatherskite, Blatherskite, Blatherskite.”)
Whereupon the great Reverend Tee de Little Wit Blatherskite arose and opened his mouth and spake:
“Brethren of the Most Holy Order of Divine Barkers: I feel proud of the high honor ye have conferred upon me in calling me to be your champion against this Goliath, who so impudently cometh forth to defy the armies of the living Almighty. Who is this dog that imagineth, with his great spear of Reason, to smite and slay our ancient Simple Faith? With my little sling and stone will I smite him, and he shall be no more. My brother, who proposed me to be your leader, was right in his generous eulogy of me; I do despise and hate Reason with all my soul. I hate it as a deadly snake and trample it under foot every time I get the chance—which is every time I speak. This wielder of the spear of Reason, this Bob, this God-stealer, is an infidel and a blasphemer, and will go straight down to Hell, like that friend of his, that dirty dog, that Tom who wrote the ‘Age of Reason,’ and was tormented of our God for it. Oh, my brethren, he suffered untold agonies in his conscience, and served him right, too. At least we barkers have always said he did, because he ought to have suffered if he didn’t. Some there are who say we lie when we say he suffered, but I don’t believe that our God would allow any one to preach Reason without making it all-fired hot for him; at least I know if I had been God, I would have made his soul shriek with pain; I would have tormented him, for there is nothing more fatal to our religion and our interests than Reason. Then down with Reason, I say, for it is the whole Devil, and every truly sanctified barker’s eternal enemy.
“As for this other Reasoner, this Bob, surely we can kill him, just as we killed his predecessor, Tom. Never call him by his respectable name of Robert; none but barkers and true believers are entitled to be called by their respectable names. That’s how we overthrew Thomas—by contemptuously calling him Tom. We got the world to deride him; that was far more easy than to refute his book. Call him ‘Bob,’ then; and brethren, in a cause so momentous and holy as this, ye may even lie about him; for the world will always believe anything evil about a dog with a bad name; but if by any miracle of grace he should ever be converted, then ye shall call him Robert, and esteem him respectable.
“This Bob is an awful public danger; if he be allowed to run around loose he will steal our God, he will overthrow the Almighty; he will deprive the dogs of the inestimable blessing of having something to worship. Already hath he somewhat loosened his eternal foundations, and shaken his immovable fixtures, and on several occasions, had it not been for us rushing to his rescue, our Almighty must have been overthrown.
“Now, brethren, this constant strain upon our minds, this perpetual anxiety to ward off this beast’s constant attacks upon our omnipotent God, is wearing us to skin and bone. Something ought to be done to restrain him. Have we not laws to imprison such as he? Yea, verily, have we. Have we not laws against blasphemy? Yea, we have. Then why is this dog allowed to go about putting our God in peril? Why is he allowed to go about sapping and mining under his feet with intent to make him fall? He has been caught many times boring holes in his anatomy and letting in the daylight; he has been convicted many times of exposing the mystery of his flaming eyes and his smoking mouth and nostrils, yet nothing has been done to him. Where are the police? Where are the good old Blue Thunderbolts? Alas! they rust and rot in the swampy places, where our cowardly police dogs dropped them when Unbelief reared its ugly head in our midst.
“Oh brethren, what we need is a great revival of the good old-fashioned Blue Laws and the Blue Thunderbolts. We need the re-erection of the good old safeguards wherewith our fathers surrounded our Almighty God, and preserved him, which the degenerate dogs of this day have allowed to fall into innocuous desuetude. Oh! we need the revival of the good old methods, by which Reason and Unbelief were held down by the strong hand of the Law, and the eternal, almighty and all-convincing truths of our only genuine and original Gospel were given a show.
“No wonder that True Religion and Simple Faith prospered and prevailed in those days; for the authorities were all holy and did their duty—the police were effective. And no wonder that Reason and Unbelief stalk haughtily abroad to-day and our omnipotent Almighty is despised, rejected and shoved to the rear; for our laws are obsolete, and our authorities careless and indifferent about helping him.