but the game of the bulk has a powerful reference to money. Those
who have got the most of the current coin of the realm receive the
blandest smile from the parson, the politest nod from the beadle,
the promptest attention from that strange mixture of piety and pay
called "the chapel-keeper;" those who have not got it must take what
they can get, and accept it with Christian resignation, as St. Paul
tells them. This may be all right; we have not said yet that it is
wrong; but it looks suspicious, doesn't it?--shows that in the arena
of conventional Christianity, as in the seething maelstrom of
ordinary life, money is the winner. Our parsons and priests, like
our ecclesiastical architecture and general church management, do
not seem to have improved upon their ancestors. Priests are not as
jolly as they once were. In olden days "holy fathers" could wear
horse-hair shirts and scarify their epidermis with a finer cruelty
than their modern successors, and they could, after all that, make
the blithest songs, sing the merriest melodies, and quaff the oldest
port with an air of jocund conscientiousness, making one slyly like
them, however much inclined to dispute the correctness of their
theology. And the parsons of the past were also a blithesome set of
individuals. They were perhaps rougher than those mild and refined
gentlemen who preach now-a-days; but they were straightforward,
thorough, absolutely English, well educated, and stronger in the
brain than many of them. In each Episcopalian, Catholic, and
Dissenting community there are new some most erudite, most useful
men; but if we take the great multitude of them, and compare their
circumstances--their facilities for education, the varied channels
of usefulness they have--with those of their predecessors, it will
be found that the latter were the cleverer, often the wiser, and
always the merrier men. Plainness, erudition, blithesomeness, were
their characteristics. Aye, look at our modern men given up largely