f the fishermen of Palestine, on the
lonely sea-shore; of the hunted fugitives of Italy and Scotland; we
think of it as something lowly, and suited to the lowly,--a refuge for
the forsaken and the defeated, not the luxury of the rich and the
ornament of the strong. It may be an infirmity of our mind; but we
experience a certain difficulty in realizing that the sumptuous and
costly apparatus around us has anything in common with what we have
been accustomed to think of as Christianity.

Sometimes, the incongruity reaches the point of the ludicrous. We
recently heard a very able and well-intentioned preacher, near the
Fifth Avenue, ask the ladies before him whether they were in the habit
of speaking to their female attendants about their souls'
salvation,--particularly those who dressed their hair. He especially
mentioned the hair-dressers; because, as he truly remarked, ladies are
accustomed to converse with those _artistes_, during the operation of
hair-dressing, on a variety of topics; and the opportunity was
excellent to say a word on the one most important. This incident
perfectly illustrates what we mean by the seeming incongruity between
the ancient cast of doctrine and the modernized people to whom it is
preached. We have heard sermons in fashionable churches in New York,
laboriously prepared and earnestly read, which had nothing in them of
the modern spirit, contained not the most distant allusion to modern
modes of living and sinning, had no suitableness whatever to the
people or the time, and from which everything that could rouse or
interest a human soul living on Manhattan Island in the year 1867
seemed to have been purposely pruned away. And perhaps, if a clergyman
really has no message to deliver, his best course is to utter a jargon
of nothings.

Upon the whole, the impression left upon the mind of the visitor to
the fashionable church is, that he has been looking, not upon a living
body, but a decorated image.

It may be, however, that the old conception of a Christian church, as
the one place where all sorts and conditions of men came together to
dwell upon considerations interesting to all equally, is not adapted
to modern society, wherein one man differs from another in knowledge
even more than a king once differed from a peasant in rank. When all
were ignorant, a mass chanted in an unknown tongue, and a short
address warning against the only vices known to ignorant people,
sufficed for the whole c