all in the other six
days of the week put together, and it is of a more bitter
and malignant character than the week-day profanity, too.
It is produced by the cracked-pot clangor of the cheap
church-bells.

We build our churches almost without regard to cost;
we rear an edifice which is an adornment to the town, and we
gild it, and fresco it, and mortgage it, and do everything
we can think of to perfect it, and then spoil it all by
putting a bell on it which afflicts everybody who hears it,
giving some the headache, others St. Vitus's dance,
and the rest the blind staggers.

An American village at ten o'clock on a summer Sunday is
the quietest and peacefulest and holiest thing in nature;
but it is a pretty different thing half an hour later.
Mr. Poe's poem of the "Bells" stands incomplete to this day;
but it is well enough that it is so, for the public reciter
or "reader" who goes around trying to imitate the sounds
of the various sorts of bells with his voice would find
himself "up a stump" when he got to the church-bell
--as Joseph Addison would say. The church is always trying
to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea
to reform itself a little, by way of example. It is still
clinging to one or two things which were useful once,
but which are not useful now, neither are they ornamental.
One is the bell-ringing to remind a clock-caked town
that it is church-time, and another is the reading from
the pulpit of a tedious list of "notices" which everybody
who is interested has already read in the newspaper.
The clergyman even reads the hymn through--a relic
of an ancient time when hymn-books are scarce and costly;
but everybody has a hymn-book, now, and so the public reading
is no longer necessary. It is not merely unnecessary,
it is generally painful; for the average clergyman could
not fire into his congregation with a shotgun and hit a worse
reader than himself, unless the weapon scattered shamefully.
I am not meaning to be flippant and irreverent, I am only
meaning to be truthful. The average clergyman, in all
countries and of all denominations, is a very bad reader.
One would think he would at least learn how to read
the Lord's Prayer, by and by, but it is not so. He races
through it as if he thought the quicker he got it in,
the sooner it would be answered. A person who does not
appreciate the exceeding value of pauses, and does not know
how to measure their duration judiciously, canno