te man importunately offers to celebrate Funeral
Games for him in the manner of the Greeks! Such mummery is not only not
to be accepted,--it is hateful, unendurable. It is what the old Prophets
called "Idolatry," worshipping of hollow _shows_; what all earnest men
do and will reject. We can partly understand what those poor Puritans
meant. Laud dedicating that St. Catherine Creed's Church, in the
manner we have it described; with his multiplied ceremonial bowings,
gesticulations, exclamations: surely it is rather the rigorous formal
Pedant, intent on his "College-rules," than the earnest Prophet intent
on the essence of the matter!

Puritanism found _such_ forms insupportable; trampled on such forms;--we
have to excuse it for saying, No form at all rather than such! It stood
preaching in its bare pulpit, with nothing but the Bible in its hand.
Nay, a man preaching from his earnest _soul_ into the earnest _souls_ of
men: is not this virtually the essence of all Churches whatsoever?
The nakedest, savagest reality, I say, is preferable to any semblance,
however dignified. Besides, it will clothe itself with _due_ semblance
by and by, if it be real. No fear of that; actually no fear at all.
Given the living _man_, there will be found _clothes_ for him; he will
find himself clothes. But the suit-of-clothes pretending that _it_ is
both clothes and man--! We cannot "fight the French" by three hundred
thousand red uniforms; there must be _men_ in the inside of them!
Semblance, I assert, must actually _not_ divorce itself from Reality.
If Semblance do,--why then there must be men found to rebel against
Semblance, for it has become a lie! These two Antagonisms at war here,
in the case of Laud and the Puritans, are as old nearly as the world.
They went to fierce battle over England in that age; and fought out
their confused controversy to a certain length, with many results for
all of us.

In the age which directly followed that of the Puritans, their cause or
themselves were little likely to have justice done them. Charles Second
and his Rochesters were not the kind of men you would set to judge what
the worth or meaning of such men might have been. That there could be
any faith or truth in the life of a man, was what these poor Rochesters,
and the age they ushered in, had forgotten. Puritanism was hung on
gibbets,--like the bones of the leading Puritans. Its work nevertheless
went on accomplishing itself. All true work of a m