, a Church-Apparatus has been
got together,--roofed edifice, with revenues and belfries; pulpit,
reading-desk, with Books and Methods: possibility, in short, and
strict prescription, That a man stand there and speak of spiritual
things to men. It is beautiful;--even in its great obscuration and
decadence, it is among the beautifulest, most touching objects one
sees on the Earth. This Speaking Man has indeed, in these times,
wandered terribly from the point; has, alas, as it were, totally lost
sight of the point: yet, at bottom, whom have we to compare with him?
Of all public functionaries boarded and lodged on the Industry of
Modern Europe, is there one worthier of the board he has? A man even
professing, and never so languidly making still some endeavour, to
save the souls of men: contrast him with a man professing to do little
but shoot the partridges of men! I wish he could find the point again,
this Speaking One; and stick to it with tenacity, with deadly energy:
for there is need of him yet! The Speaking Function, this of Truth
coming to us with a living voice, nay in a living shape, and as a
concrete practical exemplar: this, with all our Writing and Printing
Functions, has a perennial place. Could he but find the point
again,--take the old spectacles off his nose, and looking up discover,
almost in contact with him, what the _real_ Satanas, and
soul-devouring, world-devouring _Devil_, now is! Original Sin and
suchlike are bad enough. I doubt not: but distilled Gin, dark
Ignorance, Stupidity, dark Corn-Law, Bastille and Company, what are
they! _Will_ he discover our new real Satan, whom he has to fight; or
go on droning through his old nose-spectacles about old extinct
Satans; and never see the real one, till he _feel_ him at his own
throat and ours? That is a question, for the world! Let us not
intermeddle with it here.

Sorrowful, phantasmal as this same Double Aristocracy of Teachers and
Governors now looks, it is worth all men's while to know that the
purport of it is and remains noble and most real. Dryasdust, looking
merely at the surface, is greatly in error as to those ancient Kings.
William Conqueror, William Rufus or Redbeard, Stephen Curthose
himself, much more Henry Beauclerc and our brave Plantagenet Henry:
the life of these men was not a vulturous Fighting; it was a valorous
Governing,--to which occasionally Fighting did, and alas must yet,
though far seldomer now, superadd itself as an accident, a