O no!"

You propose to build a new church. About the site, the choice of architect,
the upholstery, the plumbing and the day of dedication there is almost a
unanimity. You hope that the crooked sticks will all lie still, and that
the congregation will move in solid phalanx. But not so. Sanballat sends
for Nehemiah, proposing to meet him in the plain of O-no.

Some men were born backward, and have been going that way ever since.
Opposition to everything has become chronic. The only way they feel
comfortable is when harnessed with the face toward the whiffletree and
their back to the end of the shafts. They may set down their name in the
hotel register as living in Boston, Chicago, Savannah or Brooklyn, but they
really have been spending all their lives on the plain of O-no. There let
them be buried with their face toward the west, for in that way they will
lie more comfortably, as other people are buried with their face to the
east. Do not impose upon them by putting them in the majority. O-no!

We rejoice that there seems more liberality among good men, and that they
have made up their minds to let each one work in his own way. The
scalping-knives are being dulled.

The cheerfulness and good humor which have this year characterized our
church courts is remarkable and in strong contrast with the old-time
ecclesiastical fights which shook synods and conferences. Religious
controversies always have been the most bitter of all controversies; and
when ministers do fight, they fight like vengeance. Once a church court
visiting a place would not only spend much of their own time in sharp
contention, but would leave the religious community to continue the quarrel
after adjournment. Now they have a time of good cheer while in convention,
and leave only one dispute behind them among the families, and that arising
from the fact that each one claims it had the best ministers and elders at
their house. Contention is a child of the darkness, peace the daughter of
the light. The only help for a cow's hollow horn is a gimlet-hole bored
through it, and the best way to cure religious combatants is to let more
gospel light through their antlers.

As we sat at the head of the table interested in all that was going on, and
saw Governor Wiseman with his honorable name, and Quizzle and Heavyasbricks
with their unattractive titles, we thought of the affliction of an awkward
or ill-omened name.

When there are so many pleasant names by whi