ow the
bread of life (doubtless that they might be thereafter incapacitated for
swallowing the filthy gobbets of Mahound) by angels of heaven, who cried
to the king and his knights,_--Seigneurs, tuez! tuez!_ providentially
using the French tongue, as being the only one understood by their
auditors. This would argue for the pantoglottism of these celestial
intelligences, while, on the other hand, the Devil, _teste_ Cotton
Mather, is unversed in certain of the Indian dialects. Yet must he be a
semeiologist the most expert, making himself intelligible to every
people and kindred by signs; no other discourse, indeed, being needful,
than such as the mackerel-fisher holds with his finned quarry, who, if
other bait be wanting, can by a bare bit of white rag at the end of a
string captivate those foolish fishes. Such piscatorial persuasion is
Satan cunning in. Before one he trails a hat and feather, or a bare
feather without a hat; before another, a Presidential chair or a
tide-waiter's stool, or a pulpit in the city, no matter what. To us,
dangling there over our heads, they seem junkets dropped out of the
seventh heaven, sops dipped in nectar, but, once in our mouths, they are
all one, bits of fuzzy cotton.

This, however, by the way. It is time now _revocare gradum_. While so
many miracles of this sort, vouched by eye-witnesses, have encouraged
the arms of Papists, not to speak of Echetlaeus at Marathon and those
_Dioscuri_ (whom we must conclude imps of the pit) who sundry times
captained the pagan Roman soldiery, it is strange that our first
American crusade was not in some such wise also signalized. Yet it is
said that the Lord hath manifestly prospered our armies. This opens the
question, whether, when our hands are strengthened to make great
slaughter of our enemies, it be absolutely and demonstratively certain
that this might is added to us from above, or whether some Potentate
from an opposite quarter may not have a finger in it, as there are few
pies into which his meddling digits are not thrust. Would the Sanctifier
and Setter-apart of the seventh day have assisted in a victory gained on
the Sabbath, as was one in the late war? Do we not know from Josephus,
that, careful of His decree, a certain river in Judaea abstained from
flowing on the day of Rest? Or has that day become less an object of His
especial care since the year 1697, when so manifest a providence
occurred to Mr. William Trowbridge, in answer to whose