He
really thought that a god was on the watch to trip up those men
who followed any secular work on this day, and did not see that
it was the evil conscience of the workers that did it. The
country is full of this superstition, so that when one enters a
village, the church, not only really but from association, is the
ugliest looking building in it, because it is the one in which
human nature stoops the lowest and is most disgraced. Certainly,
such temples as these shall erelong cease to deform the
landscape. There are few things more disheartening and disgusting
than when you are walking the streets of a strange village on the
Sabbath, to hear a preacher shouting like a boatswain in a gale
of wind, and thus harshly profaning the quiet atmosphere of the
day. You fancy him to have taken off his coat, as when men are
about to do hot and dirty work.
If I should ask the minister of Middlesex to let me speak in his
pulpit on a Sunday, he would object, because I do not _pray_ as
he does, or because I am not _ordained_. What under the sun are
these things?
Really, there is no infidelity, now-a-days, so great as that
which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches.
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