in respect of church government, and that the
CONSTITUTION, which delegates to one the power to negative the vote of
all the rest, is SUBVERSIVE OF THE NATURAL RIGHT OF MANKIND AND REPUGNANT
TO THE WORD OF GOD."

The Reverend Mr. Welch replied to the lawyer's attack, pronouncing him
to be "destitute of delicacy, decency, good manners, sound judgment,
honesty, manhood, and humanity; a poltroon, a cat's-paw, the infamous
tool of a party, a partisan, a political weathercock, and a ragamuffin."

No Fourth-of-July orator would in our day rant like the lawyer, and no
clergyman would use such language as that of the Reverend Moses Welch.
The clergy have been pretty well republicanized within that last two or
three generations, and are not likely to provoke quarrels by assertion of
their special dignities or privileges. The public is better bred than to
carry on an ecclesiastical controversy in terms which political brawlers
would hardly think admissible. The minister of religion is generally
treated with something more than respect; he is allowed to say undisputed
what would be sharply controverted in anybody else. Bishop Gilbert
Haven, of happy memory, had been discussing a religious subject with a
friend who was not convinced by his arguments. "Wait till you hear me
from the pulpit," he said; "there you cannot answer me." The
preacher--if I may use an image which would hardly have suggested itself
to him--has his hearer's head in chancery, and can administer punishment
ad libitum. False facts, false reasoning, bad rhetoric, bad grammar,
stale images, borrowed passages, if not borrowed sermons, are listened to
without a word of comment or a look of disapprobation.

One of the ablest and most conscientiously laborious of our clergymen has
lately ventured to question whether all his professional brethren
invariably give utterance to their sincerest beliefs, and has been
sharply criticised for so doing. The layman, who sits silent in his pew,
has his rights when out of it, and among them is the right of questioning
that which has been addressed to him from the privileged eminence of the
pulpit, or in any way sanctioned by his religious teacher. It is nearly
two hundred years since a Boston layman wrote these words: "I am not
ignorant that the pious frauds of the ancient, and the inbred fire (I do
not call it pride) of many of our modern divines, have precipitated them
to propagate and maintain truth as well as falsehoo