But it is often the antagonist of
school-divinity.
Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines.
Come down a little later. Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant
prelate, tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-third
of October, four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ.
Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-eight years
B.C.--Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the elephant on a
tortoise. One statement is as near the truth as the other.
Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as _moral
surgery_. I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more
picture to his four stages of Cruelty. Those wretched fools, reverend
divines and others, who were strangling men and women for imaginary
crimes a little more than a century ago among us, were set right by a
layman, and very angry it made them to have him meddle.
The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their
clergyman,--a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain mechanical
processes as Babbage's calculating machine. The commentary of the laymen
on the preaching and practising of Jonathan Edwards was, that, after
twenty-three years of endurance, they turned him out by a vote of twenty
to one, and passed a resolve that he should never preach for them again.
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