Of course they have their false gods, as all men that follow
one exclusive calling are prone to do.--The clergy have played the part
of the flywheel in our modern civilization. They have never suffered it
to stop. They have often carried on its movement, when other moving
powers failed, by the momentum stored in their vast body. Sometimes,
too, they have kept it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were
like to grind the bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for
the soil that yields the bread of life. But the mainspring of the
world's onward religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of
men, let me tell you. It is the people that makes the clergy, and not
the clergy that makes the people. Of course, the profession reacts on
its source with variable energy.--But there never was a guild of dealers
or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after.
Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time since,
must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in Harvard College
yard.
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