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Show 1836- 1837! Fogg's Far West 337 their heads that the priest himself manifested hardly that quantum of the regenerated spirit that beseemed so considerable a functionary. Among other peccadilloes, he had unhappily fallen into a habit every Sabbath morning, when he rode in from his farmhouse - a neat little edifice which the good people had erected for his benefit in the outskirts of the village - of trotting solemnly up before the grocery- door upon his horse, receiving a glass of some dark- coloured liquid, character unknown, drinking it off with considerable gusto, dropping a picayune into the tumbler, then proceeding to the pulpit, and, on the inspiration of the mysterious potation, holding vehemently forth. Sundry other misdeeds of the reverend man near about the same time came to light, so that at length the old women pronounced that terrible fiat, " the preacher was no better than he should be;" which means, as everybody knows, that he was a good deal worse. And so the men, old and young, chimed in, and the priest was politely advised to decamp before the doctrine should get unsavoury. Thus ended the glorious discovery of New- lightism 1 It is a humiliating thing to review the aberrations of the humah mind: and, believe me, reader, my intention in reviewing these instances of religious fanaticism has been not to excite a smile of transient merriment, nor for a moment to call in question the [ 88] reality of true devotion. My intention has been to show to what extremes of preposterous folly man may be hurried when he once resigns himself to the vagaries of fancy upon a subject which demands the severest deductions of reason. It is, indeed, a melancholy consideration, that, in a country like our own, which we fondly look upon as the hope of the world, and amid the full- orbed effulgence of the nineteenth century, there should exist a body of men, more than twelve thousand in number, as is estimated, professing belief in a faith so |
