It excites your wonder not a little to find people, who talk gravely and
heartily of the excellence of sermons and of church-going, sometimes
fall asleep under it all. And you wonder--if they really like preaching
so well--why they do not buy some of the minister's old manuscripts, and
read them over on week-days, or invite the clergyman to preach to them
in a quiet way in private.
----Ah, Clarence, you do not yet know the poor weakness of even
maturest manhood, and the feeble gropings of the soul toward a soul's
paradise in the best of the world! You do not yet know either, that
ignorance and fear will be thrusting their untruth and false show into
the very essentials of Religion.
Again you wonder, if the clergymen are all such very good men as you are
taught to believe, why it is that every little while people will be
trying to send them off, and very anxious to prove that, instead of
being so good, they are in fact very stupid and bad men. At that day you
have no clear conceptions of the distinction between stupidity and vice,
and think that a good man must necessarily say very eloquent things. You
will find yourself sadly mistaken on this point, before you get on very
far in life.
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