were, for the most part, verbal quips and quibbles. True humor is an
outgrowth of character. It is never found in greater perfection than in
old clergymen and old college professors. Dr. Sprague's "Annals of the
American Pulpit" tells many stories of our old ministers as good as Dean
Ramsay's "Scottish Reminiscences." He has not recorded the following,
which is to be found in Miss Larned's excellent and most interesting
History of Windham County, Connecticut. The Reverend Josiah Dwight was
the minister of Woodstock, Connecticut, about the year 1700. He was not
old, it is true, but he must have caught the ways of the old ministers.
The "sensational" pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass him in the
drollery of its expressions. A specimen or two may dispose the reader
to turn over the pages which follow in a good-natured frame of mind. "If
unconverted men ever got to heaven," he said, "they would feel as
uneasy as a shad up the crotch of a white-oak." Some of his ministerial
associates took offence at his eccentricities, and called on a visit
of admonition to the offending clergyman. "Mr. Dwight received their
reproofs with great meekness, frankly acknowledged his faults, and
promised amendment, but, in prayer at parting, after returning thanks
for the brotherly visit and admonition, 'hoped that they might so hitch
their horses on earth that they should never kick in the stables of
everlasting salvation.'"

It is a good thing to have some of the blood of one of these old
ministers in one's veins. An English bishop proclaimed the fact before
an assembly of physicians the other day that he was not ashamed to say
that he had a son who was a doctor. Very kind that was in the bishop,
and very proud his medical audience must have felt. Perhaps he was not
ashamed of the Gospel of Luke, "the beloved physician," or even of the
teachings which came from the lips of one who was a carpenter, and the
son of a carpenter. So a New-Englander, even if he were a bishop, need
not be ashamed to say that he consented to have an ancestor who was a
minister. On the contrary, he has a right to be grateful for a probable
inheritance of good instincts, a good name, and a bringing up in a
library where he bumped about among books from the time when he was
hardly taller than one of his father's or grandfather's folios. What are
the names of ministers' sons which most readily occur to our memory
as illustrating these advantages? Edward Everett,