II.—Samuel Butler’s Parody
1. Beware! Beware! Beware! The enemy sowed tracts in the night, and the righteous men tremble.
2. There are only 10 good men in John’s; I am one; reader, calculate your chance of salvation.
3. The genuine recipe for the leaven of the Pharisees is still extant, and runs as follows:—Self-deceit ⅓ + want of charity ½ + outward show ⅓, humbug ∞, insert Sim or not as required. Reader, let each one who would seem to be righteous take unto himself this leaven.
4. “The University Church is a place too much neglected by the young men up here.” Thus said the learned Selwyn, [269] and he said well. How far better would it be if each man’s own heart was a little University Church, the pericardium a little University churchyard, wherein are buried the lust of the flesh, the pomps and vanities of this wicked world; the veins and arteries, little clergymen and bishops ministering therein; and the blood a stream of soberness, temperance and chastity perpetually flowing into it.
5. The deluge went before, misery followed after, in the middle came a Puseyite playing upon an organ. Reader, flee from him, for he playeth his own soul to damnation.
6. Church music is as the whore of Babylon, or the ramping lion who sought whom he might devour; music in a church cannot be good, when St. Paul bade those who were merry to sing psalms. Music is but tinkling brass, and sounding cymbals, which is what St. Paul says he should himself be, were he without charity; he evidently then did not consider music desirable.
7. The most truly religious and only thoroughly good man in Cambridge is Clayton, [270] of Cams.
8. “Charity is but the compassion that we feel for our own vices when we perceive their hatefulness in other people.” Charity, then, is but another name for selfishness, and must be eschewed accordingly.
9. A great French king was walking one day with the late Mr. B., when the king dropped his umbrella. Mr. B. instantly stooped down and picked it up. The king said in a very sweet tone, “Thank you.”