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 falsehoods, in such an unfair manner as has given advantage to the
enemy to suspect the whole doctrine these men have profest to be nothing
but a mere trick."

So wrote Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, whose book the Reverend