the revelation of God.

A number of years ago, while engaged in journalism in a large American
city, one of us violated all journalistic precedents by printing an
article denouncing the local evangelical clergy as, with few exceptions,
a pack of scoundrels, and offered in proof their brisk and constant
trade in contraband marriages, especially the marriages of girls under
the age of consent. He showed that the offer of a two dollar fee was
sufficient to induce the majority of these ambassadors of Christ to
marry a girl of fourteen or fifteen to a boy a few years older. There
followed a great outcry from the accused, with the usual demands that
the offending paper print a retraction and discharge the guilty writer
from its staff. He thereupon engaged a clipping bureau to furnish him
with clippings from the newspapers of the whole country, showing the
common activities of the evangelical clergy elsewhere. The result was
that he received and reprinted an amazing mass of putrid scandal,
greatly to the joy of that moral community. It appeared that these
eminent Christian leaders were steadily engaged, North, East, South and
West, in doings that would have disgraced so many ward heelers or
oyster-shuckers--shady financial transactions, gross sexual
irregularities, all sorts of minor crimes. The publication of this
evidence from day to day gave the chronicler the advantage of the
offensive, and so got him out of a tight place. In the end, as if
tickled by his assault, the hierarchy of heaven came to his aid. That is
to say, the Lord God Jehovah arranged it that one of the leading
Methodist clergymen of the city--in fact, the chronicler's chief
opponent--should be taken in an unmentionable sexual perversion at the
headquarters of the Young Men's Christian Association, and so be forced
to leave town between days. This catastrophe, as we say, the chronicler
ascribes to divine intervention. It was entirely unexpected; he knew
that the fellow was a liar and a rogue, but he had never suspected that
he was also a hog. The episode demoralized the defence to such an extent
that it was impossible, in decency, to go on with the war. The
chronicler was at once, in fact, forced into hypocritical efforts to
prevent the fugitive ecclesiastic's pursuit, extradition, trial and
imprisonment, and these efforts, despite their disingenuous character,
succeeded. Under another name, he now preaches Christ and Him crucified
in the far West, and is,