Tractarian book. The task was not easy: for it was necessary to
make the two sacraments the most prominent objects in the
allegory; and of all Christian theologians, avowed Quakers
excepted, Bunyan was the one in whose system the sacraments held
the least prominent place. However, the Wicket Gate became a
type of Baptism, and the House Beautiful of the Eucharist. The
effect of this change is such as assuredly the ingenious person
who made it never contemplated. For, as not a single pilgrim
passes through the Wicket Gate in infancy, and as Faithful
hurries past the House Beautiful without stopping, the lesson
which the fable in its altered shape teaches, is that none but
adults ought to be baptised, and that the Eucharist may safely be
neglected. Nobody would have discovered from the original
"Pilgrim's Progress" that the author was not a Paedobaptist. To
turn his book into a book against Paedobaptism was an achievement
reserved for an Anglo-Catholic divine. Such blunders must
necessarily be committed by every man who mutilates parts of a
great work, without taking a comprehensive view of the whole.

...


OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

(February 1856.)

Oliver Goldsmith, one of the most pleasing English writers of the
eighteenth century. He was of a Protestant and Saxon family
which had been long settled in Ireland, and which had, like most
other Protestant and Saxon families, been, in troubled times,