While, however, critics and reformers fail to furnish a fit substitute
for the sermon, and the finest essays show not only Bacon's "dry
light," but a very cold one too, and the wit and humor of the lyceum
fall short of any mark in the conscience of mankind, and philanthropy
uses stabbing often instead of surgery, a clerical institution, on
whose basis direct admonition can be administered by individuals
without egotism or impertinence, maintains an indefeasible claim.
Indeed, as was fancied of the innocent in the ordeal by fire, or like
the children from the furnace, it comes out the other side of all
censure, with some odor of sanctity yet on its unsinged robes and new
power in higher quarters in its hands. Defective, indeed, it is. If
some of its organs could speak a little more in their natural voice,
and could, moreover, wash off the deformity of this Indian war-paint
of high-wrought rhetoric,--if they could use a little more of the
colloquial earnestness of the street and table in their style, instead
of those freaks of eloquence which, among all our associations,
there ought to be a society to put down,--they would more honor their
vocation, and effect its purpose of saving human souls.
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