n the whole, I
think the old-fashioned New England divine softening down into
Arminianism was about as agreeable as any of them. And here I may
remark, that a mellowing rigorist is always a much pleasanter object to
contemplate than a tightening liberal, as a cold day warming up to 32
Fahrenheit is much more agreeable than a warm one chilling down to the
same temperature. The least pleasing change is that kind of mental
hemiplegia which now and then attacks the rational side of a man at about
the same period of life when one side of the body is liable to be
palsied, and in fact is, very probably, the same thing as palsy, in
another form. The worst of it is that the subjects of it never seem to
suspect that they are intellectual invalids, stammerers and cripples at
best, but are all the time hitting out at their old friends with the well
arm, and calling them hard names out of their twisted mouths.

It was a real delight to have one of those good, hearty, happy, benignant
old clergymen pass the Sunday, with us, and I can remember some whose
advent made the day feel almost like "Thanksgiving." But now and then
would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a wailing voice,
which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead up stairs, who
took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as being in a bad
way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize us with his
woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish in the other
direction. I remember one in particular, who twitted me so with my
blessings as a Christian child, and whined so to me about the naked black
children who, like the "Little Vulgar Boy," "had n't got no supper and
hadn't got no ma," and hadn't got no Catechism, (how I wished for the
moment I was a little black boy!) that he did more in that one day to
make me a heathen than he had ever done in a month to make a Christian
out of an infant Hottentot. What a debt we owe to our friends of the
left centre, the Brooklyn and the Park Street and the Summer street
ministers; good, wholesome, sound-bodied, one-minded, cheerful-spirited
men, who have taken the place of those wailing poitrinaires with the
bandanna handkerchiefs round their meagre throats and a funeral service
in their forlorn physiognomies! I might have been a minister myself, for
aught I know, if this clergyman had not looked and talked so like an
undertaker.

All this belongs to one of the side-shows, t