Some men were born backward, and have been going that way ever since.  Opposition to everything has become chronic.  The only way they feel comfortable is when harnessed with the face toward the whiffletree and their back to the end of the shafts.  They may set down their name in the hotel register as living in Boston, Chicago, Savannah or Brooklyn, but they really have been spending all their lives on the plain of O-no.  There let them be buried with their face toward the west, for in that way they will lie more comfortably, as other people are buried with their face to the east.  Do not impose upon them by putting them in the majority.  O-no!

We rejoice that there seems more liberality among good men, and that they have made up their minds to let each one work in his own way.  The scalping-knives are being dulled.

The cheerfulness and good humor which have this year characterized our church courts is remarkable and in strong contrast with the old-time ecclesiastical fights which shook synods and conferences.  Religious controversies always have been the most bitter of all controversies; and when ministers do fight, they fight like vengeance.  Once a church court visiting a place would not only spend much of their own time in sharp contention, but would leave the religious community to continue the quarrel after adjournment.  Now they have a time of good cheer while in convention, and leave only one dispute behind them among the families, and that arising from the fact that each one claims it had the best ministers and elders at their house.  Contention is a child of the darkness, peace the daughter of the light.  The only help for a cow’s hollow horn is a gimlet-hole bored through it, and the best way to cure religious combatants is to let more gospel light through their antlers.

As we sat at the head of the table interested in all that was going on, and saw Governor Wiseman with his honorable name, and Quizzle and Heavyasbricks with their unattractive titles, we thought of the affliction of an awkward or ill-omened name.

When there are so many pleasant names by which children may be called, what right has a parent to place on his child’s head a disadvantage at the start?  Worse than the gauntlet of measles and whooping-cough and mumps which the little ones have to run is this parental outrage.

What a struggle in life that child will have who has been baptized Jedekiah or Mehitabel!  If a child is “called after” some one living, let that one be past mid-life and of such temperament that there shall be no danger of his becoming an absconder and a cheat.  As far as possible let the name given be short, so that in the course of a lifetime there be not too many weeks or months taken up in the mere act of signature.  The burdens of life are heavy enough without putting upon any one the extra weight of too much nomenclature.  It is a sad thing when an infant has two bachelor uncles, both rich and with outrageous names, for the baby will have to take both titles, and that is enough to make a case of infant mortality.