Dr. Stiggins:
Church than anything else with which I am acquainted. I need scarcely say that neither I, nor any Free Church minister known to me, would be at all happy or even comfortable during the performance of such a ceremonial as John describes. Taking into consideration the fact that we spend our whole lives in denouncing such ceremonial, in warning our people against its insidious, meretricious, and theatrical attractions (whoredoms of the Scarlet Woman, our plain-spoken forefathers called such rites), considering that our Puritan ancestors fought and bled and died and feared not even kings, so that such abominations should be swept out of the land, considering that even in these days stout John Kensit was martyred for his efforts to make all such idolatries impossible; considering all this, I say, is it not a little ridiculous that we should bid our people look forward to certain things as the perpetual joys of heaven, while, with what seems to me startling inconsistency, we order them to shun these very things like the pestilence on earth?
86
