Presently we heard anew, half-distinctly, half-confusedly, "O expectatio gentium!" We looked towards the starting-point of that Latin spray, but nothing followed upon our sudden rousing save the burst of the organ. All about us was a rustling and a stirring, such as the Ephesian sleepers might make at the awakening. Horrible! Dreams were over for many others beside the solitary culprit we had supposed ourself. Bonnets nodded; furs were smoothed; numbed feet were tapped upon the carpet for resuscitation; and Chubbuck in the next pew rubbed his eyes, to the imminent extinction of those useful auxiliaries. Heaven forgive us our drowsiness! How much æsthetic pleasure, how much spiritual profit Brentford missed that night, befits us not to conjecture. Yet we palliate the disgraceful circumstances, due in no wise to lack of virtue on our part, or of eloquence on the Reverend M.'s, by surmising that the general slumber was a tribute of itself; not, indeed, a protest of weariness, or ungracious abstraction from duty, but rather an affiliation with the time and the theme
——"made all of sweet accord."
Who shall gainsay it?
The like hap, we are sorry to state, never befell us under the spell of that austere prelate, Theophilus A. One could as soon have grown mindless of a Gatling gun in full activity. He was an ecclesiastical thunderbolt. Ferdinand would have put him on the Inquisition. He could have served the mediæval writs of excommunication on kings, or stood with high-hearted Hildebrand to confront the German at Canossa.
A. was pale, but not weakly, with his dauntless eye, his luminous front, his unrelaxed lips drawn like a bowstring. He was all vehemence; his dearly-beloveds had scintillations to them; his very firstlys and secondlys had the heroic ring.
Did he wear the armor of the ancestral Franks under his clerical dress? Whence got he that tremendous vigor, that aptitude for great and hazardous things? Apollyon could scarcely have lessened the vitality of this Christian by any combat, however long and fierce.
You must have felt his presence helpful or harsh, as your organization prompted. A harp will quiver with a concussion in its vicinity. So with mortal men and women in juxtaposition with the Reverend A. He had aroused splendid impulses, so it was said, in many lands; but the ultra-sensitive soul was scarcely adapted to his touch. He it was who could make Willard, serene as a child, shake like an aspen-leaf at his mildest peroration.
More comfortably enchanting wert thou, O K.! whom every tongue praised. Welcome was thy young cherubic countenance, dawning midway between the roof and the aisles! Worthy of Talma was that shining dramatic gift which brightened a hundred-fold the utterances of thy manly piety! Who could make doubtful issues surer than thou, least didactic, yet most practical of preachers? Who could so boldly pursue a simile, eking analogies out of stones? Who so pitiless on impostures and shams, when thy gallant oratory
"Blew them transverse, ten thousand leagues awry"?
Peter the Hermit, with his crusading spirit, would have loved thee.