But after we got home we saw the wickedness of being in such dread. As the Lord got us out of that predicament, we resolved never again to be cornered in one similar. Forthwith the thralldom was broken, we hope never again to be felt. How demeaning that a man with a message from the Lord Almighty should be dependent upon paper-mills and gasometers! Paper is a non-conductor of gospel electricity. If a man have a five-thousand-dollar bill of goods to sell a customer, he does not go up to the purchaser and say, "I have some remarks to make to you about these goods, but just wait till I get out my manuscript." Before he got through reading the argument the customer would be in the next door, making purchases from another house.
What cowardice! Because a few critical hearers sit with lead-pencils out to mark down the inaccuracies of extemporaneousness, shall the pulpit cower? If these critics do not repent, they will go to hell, and take their lead-pencils with them. While the great congregation are ready to take the bread hot out of the oven shall the minister be crippled in his work because the village doctor or lawyer sits carping before him? To please a few learned ninnies a thousand ministers sit writing sermons on Saturday night till near the break of day, their heads hot, their feet cold, and their nerves a-twitch. Sermons born on Saturday night are apt to have the rickets. Instead of cramping our chests over writing-desks, and being the slaves of the pen, let us attend to our physical health, that we may have more pulpit independence.
It would be a grand thing if every minister felt strong enough in body to thrash any man in his audience improperly behaving, but always kept back from such assault by the fact that it would be wrong to do so. There is a good deal of heart and head in our theology, but not enough liver and backbone. We need a more stalwart Christian character, more roast beef rare, and less calf's-foot jelly. This will make the pulpit more bold and the pew more manly.
Which thoughts came to us this week as we visited again the village church aforesaid, and preached out of the same old Bible in which, years ago, we laid the ten-minute manuscript, and we looked upon the same lights that once behaved so badly. But we found it had been snowing since the time we lived there, and heads that then were black are white now, and some of the eyes which looked up to us that memorable night when the gasometer failed us, thirteen years ago, are closed now, and for them all earthly lights have gone out for ever.
CHAPTER XLIII.
SHELLS FROM THE BEACH.
Our summer-house is a cottage at East Hampton, Long Island, overlooking the sea. Seventeen vessels in sight, schooners, clippers, hermaphrodite brigs, steamers, great craft and small. Wonder where they come from, and where they are going to, and who is aboard? Just enough clovertops to sweeten the briny air into the most delightful tonic. We do not know the geological history of this place, but imagine that the rest of Long Island is the discourse of which East Hampton is the peroration. There are enough bluffs to relieve the dead level, enough grass to clothe the hills, enough trees to drop the shadow, enough society to keep one from inanity, and enough quietude to soothe twelve months of perturbation. The sea hums us to sleep at night, and fills our dreams with intimations of the land where the harmony is like "the voice of many waters." In smooth weather the billows take a minor key; but when the storm gives them the pitch, they break forth with the clash and uproar of an overture that fills the heavens and makes the beach tremble. Strange that that which rolls perpetually and never rests itself should be a psalm of rest to others! With these sands of the beach we help fill the hour-glass of life. Every moment of the day there comes in over the waves a flotilla of joy and rest and health, and our piazza is the wharf where the stevedores unburden their cargo. We have sunrise with her bannered hosts in cloth of gold, and moonrise with her innumerable helmets and shields and swords and ensigns of silver, the morning and the night being the two buttresses from which are swung a bridge of cloud suspended on strands of sunbeam, all the glories of the sky passing to and fro with airy feet in silent procession.
We have wandered far and wide, but found no such place to rest in. We can live here forty-eight hours in one day, and in a night get a Rip Van Winkle sleep, waking up without finding our gun rusty or our dog dead.
No wonder that Mr. James, the first minister of this place, lived to eighty years of age, and Mr. Hunting, his successor, lived to be eighty-one years of age, and Doctor Buel, his successor, lived to be eighty-two years of age. Indeed, it seems impossible for a minister regularly settled in this place to get out of the world before his eightieth year. It has been only in cases of "stated supply," or removal from the place, that early demise has been possible. And in each of these cases of decease at fourscore it was some unnecessary imprudence on their part, or who knows but that they might be living yet? That which is good for settled pastors being good for other people, you may judge the climate here is salutary and delectable for all.