In France, religion is a monopoly; in England, it is a race, a steeple-chase.
In France, a new idea, a theory that sees the light and meets with success, is the foundation of a new school; in England, the foundation of a new church.
You will soon hear also of a sect that will be immensely popular, I do not doubt: it is the sect of the Rubbers, or to give them a more technical name, the Frictionary Christians. That it is of American importation, it is scarcely needful to add. This is what the English papers of the 5th February, 1884, say on the subject:—“A writer in the Boston Advertiser (U.S.) of January 18th, gives an account of what he considers to be a new development of a very common form of hysteria. This new development is the latest doctrine of a sect founded some years ago in Park Street, Boston, under the name of Christian Scientists; the meeting being attended by devout if not strictly philosophical or scientific ladies. The new doctrine is this: Matter in itself, they say, is inert, insensate, lifeless, and unpotential; the power which animates matter is divine. Illness is want of vital power, therefore want of divinity. A mind healer is a person who is full to superabundance upon his own cognizance of the Almighty, and who is willing to allow his, or more generally her, superfluity or abundance to overflow into the person of some patient in whom it is declared the presence of disease proves the absence of the Lord. The process is of the simplest. The healer sits down with her back in contact with the corresponding portion of the patient’s person, and for the moderate price of a dollar an hour allows the supposed divine influence to filter from vertebræ to vertebræ.”
Now this is what I call easy and convenient, and I might even add, most pleasant; you rub and rub until your salvation is an accomplished fact. If your priestess is a nice smooth-backed plump young woman, the operation cannot fail to be pleasant as well as novel.
As you see, it is the embrocation of salvation, and nothing more. Success warranted after a few applications.
If the Rubbers are in search of a motto or a trade-mark, I would suggest: Asinus asinam fricat.
XIX.
The Vicar’s Wife.
Fragments.
I.
The Reverend Bartholomew Goodman, vicar of E... was the only representative of orthodoxy in that pretty little town of Devonshire. Though rheumatic, this salaried believer in apostolic succession was, correctly speaking, neither saint nor martyr. He had a wife and children, and, one year with another, his living brought him in about five hundred pounds.