population.
Fixed benches, or a strong muster of chairs, or such modes of
congregational accommodation as public meeting-rooms and ordinary
lecture-rooms present, seems to me more consistent and more convenient.
But all this again is vain talking--a very empty expenditure of words;
we must be satisfied with churches as they are; and, after all, let me
readily admit that steeples are imposing in the distance, and of use as
belfries; (probably of like intent were the strange columnar towers of
Ireland;) and with regard to pews, let me confess that practice finds
perfect what theory condemns as wrong, so--let these things pass.

Nevertheless, let me begin upon the threshold with the extortionate and
abominable race of pew-women, beadles, clerks, vergers, bell-ringers,
and other fee-hungry ravens hovering around and about almost every
hallowed precinct: pray you, reform all that, and copy railroad
companies in forbidding those begrudged gratuities to mendicant and
ever-grumbling menials. Next, give more sublunary heed, we beseech you,
to the comforts or discomforts incidental to doors, windows, stoves,
paint, dust, dirt, and general ventilation; consider the cold, fevers,
lumbagos, rheums, life-long aches, and fatal pains too often caught
helplessly and needlessly by the devout worshipper in a town or country
church. Look to your organist, that he wot something of the value of
time and the mysteries of tune; or, if a country parson, drill cleverly
that insubordinate phalanx of _soi-disant_ musicians, a rustic
orchestra; and exclude from the latter, at all mortal hazards, the
huntsman's horn, the volunteer fiddle, and the shrill squeaking of the
wry-necked pipe. Much is being now done for congregational psalmody; but
when will country folks give up their murderous execution of the
fugue-full anthem, and when will London congregations understand that
the singing-psalms are not set apart exclusively for charity-children?
When shall Bishop Kenn's '_Awake my soul_,' cease to be our noonday
exhortation; and a literal invocation for sweet sleep to close our
eye-lids no longer be the ill-considered prelude to an afternoon
discourse? Take some trouble to improve and educate, or get rid of, if
possible, your generally vulgar, illiterate, ill-conditioned clerk;
insist upon his v's and h's: let him shut up his shoe-stall; and raise
in the scale of society one of the leaders of its worship: as, at
present, these stagnant, recreant, ign