THE ELEVEN COMMANDMENTS.
A certain bishop who lived some hundred years ago, and who was very unlike what is reported of her Majesty’s new almoner; also very unlike the Christian bishops of old, before titles were invented for them; very unlike Fenelon too, who nevertheless had plenty of titles; very unlike St. Francis de Sales, who was for talking nothing but “roses;” very unlike St. Vincent de Paul, who founded the Sisterhood of Charity; very unlike Rundle, who “had a heart,” and Berkeley, who had “every virtue under heaven,” and that other exquisite bishop (we blush to have forgotten his name), who was grieved to find that he had a hundred pounds at his banker’s when the season had been so bad for the poor;—this highly unresembling bishop, who, nevertheless, was like too many of his brethren,—that is to say, in times past (for there is no bishop, now, at least in any quarter of England, who is not remarkable for meekness, and does not make a point of turning his right cheek to be smitten, the moment you have smitten his left);—this unepiscopal, and yet not impossible bishop, we say, was once accosted, during a severe Christmas, by a Parson Adams kind of inferior clergyman, and told a long story of the wants of certain poor people, of whose cases his lordship was unaware. What the dialogue was, which led to the remark we are about to mention, the reporters of the circumstance do not appear to have ascertained; but it seems that, the representations growing stronger and stronger on one side, and the determination to pay no attention to them acquiring proportionate vigour on the other, the clergyman was moved to tell the bishop that his lordship did not understand his “eleven commandments.”
“Eleven commandments!” cried the bishop; “why, fellow, you are drunk. Who ever heard of an eleventh commandment? Depart, or you shall be put in the stocks.”
“Put thine own pride and cruelty in the stocks,” retorted the good priest, angered beyond his Christian patience, and preparing to return to the sufferers for whom he had pleaded in vain. “I say there are eleven commandments, not ten, and that it were well for such flocks as you govern, if it were added, as it ought to be, to the others over the tables in church. Does your lordship remember—do you in fact know anything at all of Him who came on earth to do good to the poor and woeful, and who said, ‘Behold, I give unto you a new commandment, Love one another?’”
A
JAR OF HONEY FROM MOUNT HYBLA.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.