them. A clergyman without a flunkey was an
anomaly, belonging to neither of these classes. Mr. Fitchett had an
irrepressible tendency to drowsiness under spiritual instruction, and in
the recurrent regularity with which he dozed off until he nodded and
awaked himself, he looked not unlike a piece of mechanism, ingeniously
contrived for measuring the length of Mr. Barton's discourse.

Perfectly wide-awake, on the contrary, was his left-hand neighbour, Mrs.
Brick, one of those hard undying old women, to whom age seems to have
given a network of wrinkles, as a coat of magic armour against the
attacks of winters, warm or cold. The point on which Mrs. Brick was still
sensitive--the theme on which you might possibly excite her hope and
fear--was snuff. It seemed to be an embalming powder, helping her soul to
do the office of salt.

And now, eke out an audience of which this front benchful was a sample,
with a certain number of refractory children, over whom Mr. Spratt, the
master of the workhouse, exercised an irate surveillance, and I think you
will admit that the university-taught clergyman, whose office it is to
bring home the gospel to a handful of such souls, has a sufficiently hard
task. For, to have any chance of success, short of miraculous
intervention, he must bring his geographical, chronological, exegetical
mind pretty nearly to the pauper point of view, or of no view; he must
have some approximate conception of the mode in which the doctrines that
have so much vitality in the plenum of his own brain will comport
themselves _in vacuo_--that is to say, in a brain that is neither
geographical, chronological, nor exegetical. It is a flexible imagination
that can take such a leap as that, and an adroit tongue that can adapt
its speech to so unfamiliar a position. The Rev. Amos Barton had neither
that flexible imagination, nor that adroit tongue. He talked of Israel
and its sins, of chosen vessels, of the Paschal lamb, of blood as a
medium of reconciliation; and he strove in this way to convey religious
truth within reach of the Fodge and Fitchett mind. This very morning, the
first lesson was the twelfth chapter of Exodus, and Mr. Barton's
exposition turned on unleavened bread. Nothing in the world more suited
to the simple understanding than instruction through familiar types and
symbols! But there is always this danger attending it, that the interest
or comprehension of your hearers may stop short precisely at the po