I will now offer for your remorseful consideration, a counterblast. Have you reflected upon the responsibility you have incurred in leading us astray from the glorious system of rewards and punishments offered for the encouragement and correction of indulgences, by the “good” old mother church? Why did you not leave us in ignorance of the audacious Manatitlan system of education, that dares usurp with self legislation the infallible promulgations of law and gospel for the correction of excessive indulgences. The substitution of direct responsibility for salvation by saving grace, deprives instinctive humanity of its barter privilege of using the gold of its god as a compromising compensation for indulgence, and the consolations of confession and absolution, causing us, especially, to hold them in extreme contempt as subterfuges begot from the vileness of hereditary cause and effect. The instinctive reverence we once paid to priestly mediums of heavenly assurance against the devices of hell, you have turned into the bitterness of shame, from the reflection of past humiliation imposed by their impudent assumptions of delegated divine authority.
Our present feeling of responsibility for perfection in purity and goodness, revolts at the thought that our perceptions were ever so weak as to believe there ever existed in the pampered bodies of priests, other than a swinish divinity endowed with an instinctive audacity that prefers deception to honest labor. We now avoid church and street mummeries of host processions and masses, as a profanation of good instinctive common sense, as our presence would implicate us in the blasphemous degradation. To our chance acquaintance with you, fostered with affectionate sympathy, I must charge this defection, also the retrospective pangs of shame engendered from sensitive regrets for my stupidity, which suffers from revival with every rattling peal of church bells. Not content with casting these heretical shadows across our path, you have devised to rob us of our niñas, our abiding source of love. Bethink you of the accountability you have incurred, with your chances of self-forgiveness.
With a falcon script in acknowledgment we shall feel assured that you will bestow upon our niñétas a father’s care and love.... P. G.
Mr. Welson joyfully exclaimed, as he closed the letter, “It is really reviving to hope, to hear a provincial, of Spanish descent, express himself with such perceptive clearness, in freedom from the thraldom of sensual embargo, which has rendered our race the phantasmal victims of stomach indulgence, from time out of date!”
The Dosch, in confirmation of Mr. Welson’s train of thought, urged, “It has required our utmost efforts to hold our feelings of contempt subdued that they might not altogether usurp the rule of discreet generosity, in view of the obstinate stupidity of civilized Giga races; who, with star gazing, and moon conjectures, forget their preservative accountability to Creative indications designed for the attainment of a living realization of immortality. How it has been possible for the races of civilized humanity to exist in individual communion with self, and the advantage it affords for deductive comparison, aside from the mutations of attrition, through so many cycles of re-degradation, without discovering the active cause and remedial source, puzzles our comprehension. The ridiculous abstractions of your philosophers, which in thoughtless aberration leads them to lose the substance while pursuing the shadow, was aptly illustrated by some of our frolicsome dames, who decoyed Dr. Baāhar, in successful test of his lack of discernment, to follow the shadow, more vehemently, from its supposed evasions, than he had previously bestowed upon the gossamer substance of a butterfly. While amusing themselves with a morning volant airing upon a beautiful azure-tinted specimen of the L. Matutinal in its wafting sips from the flowers of the latifundium, it caught the covetous gaze of the doctor, who was on his way with his net for a hunt beyond the walls. After pursuing its doubling variations in flight, which from graceful composure seemed void of evasive intention, to the verge of vexatious anxiety, while his back was to the sun, it suddenly soared, substituting its shadow, which the dames made still more attractive by prismatic colors rayed from their silicoth mantles. His efforts grew more frantic from the apparently miraculous escape of the coveted prize through the meshes of the net; which caused the infatuated pursuer to suppose that its illusive power indicated a new species. To our surprise the illusive chase continued with increased avidity as the prismatic colors were varied, the shadow being kept just in advance of the net’s swoop, until after an hour’s pursuit, the excited naturalist fell exhausted upon his knees in the formulistic attitude of prayer. In this position, with upraised eyes and hands, he watched imploringly the lessening shadow of his morning’s devotions. Although surrounded with evidences, which should have led to an impulsive detection of the cause of the tantalizing movements, previous to substitution, there never was for a moment the least hesitation that indicated suspicion or doubt of the limn’s substance reality.”
In character, nothing has surprised us more than the insensibility of Gigas, who claim the disciplined aid of collegiate education, to the effects evolved from their own experience. Yet, notwithstanding the contempt you personally feel for the selfish enactments of your past life, your relapse, in partial degree, would not appear strange if subjected to reversed example. But with the Heracleans, from hereditary usage the impression has become immutable. The contrast will lead you to realize the great difficulties that will attend the inceptive stages required for reversing the progressive position of your people; as they have been accustomed to advance with their backs to the future from time immemorial, the change will prove embarrassing for many generations. These contrasted facts, which expose in extremity the habits of usage, with the inveteracy incurred for good or evil, has caused us to view the act of self-denial on the part of the parents of your pets, as a trustful deviation that exceeds any in our former experience, and it will certainly insure a harmonious transmission. If the mother’s affection had been void of delusive infatuation, permitting her to act in accordance with the promptings of its natural expression, the devisement of the children to the Heraclean school would not have appeared strange, as unprejudiced by delusive agency and its evil tendencies the love of maternity extends to the future. In exemplification of the evil tendencies of your delusive legendary book of creeds, that has defied the efforts of ninety-five thousand human commentators to render it comprehensible, with accumulating legions of preaching expounders, I will relate an event that transpired during the inceptive period of my auramental labors.
The dramatis personæ in the triangular scriptural duel I am about to relate, for exemplifying the utter perversion of intelligent affection, wrought by this precedental tramway to discord, were in scenic representation, a grandmother of Scotch extraction, derived from the amiable clan McGregor, her daughter, and granddaughter, who in passionate exacerbation occupied counter positions in domestic antagonism. The locale of the scenic enactment, for your more perfect understanding of its mouthpat entente cordiale, we will award to Londonderry, Ireland. Having, by a strange fatality peculiar to auramentation in youth, been led by diverse circumstances to become a member of the household, I was forced to witness the repulsive drama in all the progressive stages to culmination. When in the morning avocations the three “fell out” to disagree, from a flux of hereditary passion, they would exhaust their store of word provocations, and then have recourse to prayer, after the mid-mother had read a formal challenge from the creed “omnium gatherum.” These formulistic rites concluded, and the male members dispersed to their employments foreign to the house, the three antagonists would enter the “sitting-room” to decide their quarrel, each taking a corner of the room with their book of missals in hand. With the room appropriately darkened, they would each, with hasty avidity, hurriedly search for some virulent passage of “scripture” of innuendic import, and when found it would be hurled in venomous recital against her adversaries. Often the voices of the three would be intermingled in the combined discharge of offensive similitudes, each vying in the melée encounter for ascendancy in loudness of report, and precision in the diabolic aim of their denunciations. Slight wounds, of Jezabelic imputation, were borne heroically, but the grandam of eighty when severely hurt by thrusts into old wounds rankling with the personal reflection of her accountability for whatever was amiss from lack of amiability in the tempers of daughter and granddaughter, would seize her plaid, and, in defiance of weather, would seek an asylum in the house of her son, distant two miles from the scene of action. The flight of the grandam would add new vigor to the vituperative discharge of invective quotation between mother and daughter, which generally resulted in a drawn battle, leaving the envenomed cause to smoulder in belligerent tendency, until their magazines were replenished with holy war munitions, sufficient for the adventure of another trial of anathematizing strength. When one of these encounters had proved fatal to the grandam, from a severe cold caught from wading through the snaw broo in her retreat from the battle-field, her grandsons invoked from day the fall of darkness, to stay the portended renewal of hostilities, in opposition to the commands of Joshua, but coincident with the prayer of the modern battle hero of Waterloo, for Blucher or night. These belligerent domestic inconsistencies incited by creed incongruities, and indigestible food, and lack of bodily exercise, are by no means rare among the civilized peoples of the old and new world. As with the Scotch, singed sheep’s head, haggis, and whiskey, were the inciting cause of religious intolerance and border warfare, it will be found that like causes rule as a source of provocation for distempered aberrations of every kind.
“We will now seek your infantile protégés, and see how it fares with the newly united.”
“First resolve me of my doubts with regard to your consistency,” urged Mr. Welson. “How do you reconcile the hasty unions you have sanctioned, with your ‘invariable custom,’ that requires three months probationary test of compatibility before the full consummation of unity.”