n't follow Oliver Cromwell in the Puritan
path heavenward, so steep was it, and beset with thorns,--and becoming
uncertain withal. He much preferred, at that juncture, to go heavenward
with his Charles Second and merry Nell Gwynns, and old decent
formularies and good respectable aristocratic company, for escort; sore
he tried, by glorious restorations, glorious revolutions and so
forth, to perfect this desirable amalgam; hoped always it might be
possible;--is only just now, if even now, beginning to give up the
hope; and to see with wide-eyed horror that it is not at Heaven he
is arriving, but at the Stygian marshes, with their thirty thousand
Needlewomen, cannibal Connaughts, rivers of lamentation, continual wail
of infants, and the yellow-burning gleam of a Hell-on-Earth!--Bull, my
friend, you must strip that astonishing pontiff-stole, imperial mantle,
or whatever you imagine it to be, which I discern to be a garment of
curses, and poisoned Nessus'-shirt now at last about to take fire upon
you; you must strip that off your poor body, my friend; and, were it
only in a soul's suit of Utilitarian buff, and such belief as that a
big loaf is better than a small one, come forth into contact with your
world, under _true_ professions again, and not false. You wretched man,
you ought to weep for half a century on discovering what lies you have
believed, and what every lie leads to and proceeds from. O my friend, no
honest fellow in this Planet was ever so served by his cooks before; or
has eaten such quantities and qualities of dirt as you have been made
to do, for these two centuries past. Arise, my horribly maltreated yet
still beloved Bull; steep yourself in running water for a long while, my
friend; and begin forthwith in every conceivable direction, physical and
spiritual, the long-expected _Scavenger Age_.

Many doctors have you had, my poor friend; but I perceive it is the
Water-Cure alone that will help you: a complete course of _scavengerism_
is the thing you need! A new and veritable heart-divorce of England from
the Babylonish woman, who is Jesuitism and Unveracity, and dwells not
at Rome now, but under your own nose and everywhere; whom, and her foul
worship of Phantasms and Devils, poor England _had_ once divorced, with
a divine heroism not forgotten yet, and well worth remembering now: a
Phantasms which have too long nestled thick there, under those
astonishing "Defenders of the Faith,"--Defenders of the Hypocris