“I thought as much.  It was no better in my time.  Admonitions fell gently upon those gold tassels; and they ripened degrees as glass and sunshine ripen cucumbers.  We priests, forsooth, are catechised!  The worst question to any gold tasseller is, ‘how do you do?’ Old Alma Mater coaxes and would be coaxed.  But let her look sharp, or spectacles may be thrust upon her nose that shall make her eyes water.  Aristotle could make out no royal road to wisdom; but this old woman of ours will shew you one, an you tip her.

“Tilley valley! {124a} catechise priests, indeed!”

Sir Thomas.

“Peradventure he did it discreetly.  Let us examine and judge him.  Repeat thou what he said unto them.”

William Shakspeare.

“‘Many,’ said he, ’are ingenuous, many are devout, some timidly, some strenuously, but nearly all flinch, and rear, and kick, at the slightest touch, or least inquisitive suspicion of an unsound part in their doctrine.  And yet, my brethren, we ought rather to flinch and feel sore at our own searching touch, our own serious inquisition into ourselves.  Let us preachers, who are sufficiently liberal in bestowing our advice upon others, inquire of ourselves whether the exercise of spiritual authority may not be sometimes too pleasant, tickling our breasts with a plume from Satan’s wing, and turning our heads with that inebriating poison which he hath been seen to instil into the very chalice of our salvation.  Let us ask ourselves in the closet whether, after we have humbled ourselves before God in our prayers, we never rise beyond the due standard in the pulpit; whether our zeal for the truth be never over-heated by internal fires less holy; whether we never grow stiffly and sternly pertinacious, at the very time when we are reproving the obstinacy of others; and whether we have not frequently so acted as if we believed that opposition were to be relaxed and borne away by self-sufficiency and intolerance.  Believe me, the wisest of us have our catechism to learn; and these, my dear friends, are not the only questions contained in it.  No Christian can hate; no Christian can malign.  Nevertheless, do we not often both hate and malign those unhappy men who are insensible to God’s mercies?  And I fear this unchristian spirit swells darkly, with all its venom, in the marble of our hearts, not because our brother is insensible to these mercies, but because he is insensible to our faculty of persuasion, turning a deaf ear unto our claim upon his obedience, or a blind or sleepy eye upon the fountain of light, whereof we deem ourselves the sacred reservoirs.  There is one more question at which ye will tremble when ye ask it in the recesses of your souls; I do tremble at it, yet must utter it.  Whether we do not more warmly and erectly stand up for God’s word because it came from our mouths, than because it came from his?  Learned and ingenious men may indeed find a solution and excuse for all these propositions; but the wise unto salvation will cry, “Forgive me, O my God, if, called by thee to walk in thy way, I have not swept this dust from the sanctuary!"’”