ollope has read--it was a long time ago!--there was
a woman taken in sin; the people brought her before a great Teacher of
Truth, who lived in those days. Shall we not kill her? said they; the
laws command that all adulteresses be killed. We can fancy a Mrs.
Trollope in the crowd, shouting, "oh, the wretch! oh, the abominable
harlot! kill her, by all means--stoning is really too good for her!" But
what did the Divine Teacher say? He was quite as anxious to prevent the
crime as any Mrs. Trollope of them all; but he did not even make an
allusion to it--he did not describe the manner in which the poor
creature was caught--He made no speech to detail the indecencies which
she committed, or to raise the fury of the mob against her--He said "let
the man who is without sin himself throw the first stone!" Whereupon the
Pharisees and Mrs. Trollope slunk away, for they knew they were no
better than she. There was as great a sin in His eyes as that of the
poor erring woman--it was the sin of pride.

Mrs. Trollope may make a licentious book, of which the heroes and
heroines are all of the evangelical party; and it may be true, that
there are scoundrels belonging to that party as to every other; but her
shameful error has been in fixing upon the evangelical _class_ as an
object of satire, making them necessarily licentious and hypocritical,
and charging everyone of them with the vices which belong to only a very
few of all sects....

There are some books, we are told, in the libraries of Roman Catholic
theologians, which, though written for the most devout purposes, are so
ingeniously obscene as to render them quite dangerous for common eyes.
The groom, in the old story, had never learned the art of greasing
horses' teeth, to prevent their eating oats, until the confessor, in
interrogating him as to his sins, asked him the question. The next time
the groom came to confess, he _had_ greased the horses' teeth. It was
the holy father who taught him, by the very fact of warning him against
it. By which we mean, that there are some scenes of which it is better
not to speak at all.

Our fair moralist, however, has no such squeamishness. She will show up
these odious evangelicals; she will expose them and chastise them,
wherever they be. So have we seen, in that beautiful market in Thames
Street, whither the mariners of England bring the glittering produce of
their nets--so have we seen, we say, in Billingsgate, a nymph attacking
anothe