re judiciously. Yet this in effect is the
reasoning of those who say that a call, signed by fifty-one persons out of
a hundred, is more valid than another signed only by twenty-six, or by
nobody; it being in the mean time fully understood that neither is valid
in the least possible degree. But if the "_call_" was a Barmecide call,
there was another act open to the congregation which was not so.

For the English reader must now understand, that over and above the
passive and less invidious mode of discountenancing or forbearing to
countenance a presentee, by withdrawing from the direct "_call_" upon him,
usage has sanctioned another and stronger sort of protest; one which takes
the shape of distinct and clamorous _objections_. We are speaking of the
routine in this place, according to the course which it _did_ travel or
_could_ travel under that law and that practice which furnished the pleas
for complaint. Now, it was upon these "objections," as may well be
supposed, that the main battle arose. Simply to want the "call," being a
mere _zero_, could not much lay hold upon public feeling. It was a case
not fitted for effect. You cannot bring a blank privation strongly before
the public eye. "The 'call' did not take place last week;" well, perhaps
it will take place next week. Or again, if it should never take place,
perhaps it may be religious carelessness on the part of the parish. Many
parishes notoriously feel no interest in their pastor, except as a quiet
member of their community. Consequently, in two of three cases that might
occur, there was nothing to excite the public: the parish had either
agreed with the patron, or had not noticeably dissented. But in the third
case of positive "objections," which (in order to justify themselves as
not frivolous and vexatious) were urged with peculiar emphasis, the
attention of all men was arrested. Newspapers reverberated the fact:
sympathetic groans arose: the patron was an oppressor: the parish was
under persecution: and the poor clergyman, whose case was the most to be
pitied, as being in a measure _endowed_ with a lasting fund of dislike,
had the mortification to find, over and above this resistance from within,
that he bore the name of "intruder" from without. He was supposed by the
fiction of the case to be in league with his patron for the persecution of
a godly parish; whilst in reality the godly parish was persecuting _him_,
and hallooing the world _ab extra_ to join in