al is his fluency of tongue, how presumptuous his hope, how
unfounded his joy, is a thankless task. All I would suggest is, that he
should exercise a little of that charity of which he stands in need
himself, and not fancy that to him has been revealed what men of greater
piety and higher intellect have been unable to discover. Another
objection may also be taken. In an ancient town, with a fine old castle,
many, many years ago, there was an attempt to form a volunteer regiment.
Unfortunately all wanted to be officers; the consequence was, the
regiment came to grief. The Peculiar People have too many officers.
Where every one has an equal right to teach, the number of the taught
will be small indeed.

THE SANDEMANIANS.

In this our day one of the expiring sects of Christendom is that of the
Sandemanians. At no time have they been a very powerful denomination
either from their numbers, their influence, or their wealth. They have
never yet made their mark upon the world, nor are they likely to do so
now. The late Professor Faraday was one of their elders, and for a time
conferred on them a little of his world-wide reputation; but one swallow
does not make a summer, nor does one great man confer greatness on a
church. The eccentricity of men of genius is proverbial. Sharp, the
engraver, believed in the lunatic Brothers and the impostor Joanna
Southcote; Irving in the gift of tongues and the power of working
miracles; Swedenborg in his faculty of piercing the veil which envelopes
all sublunary affairs and realizing what we are taught to consider will
only be revealed to us when the heavens and earth shall pass away as a
scroll, and time shall be no more. Even our great emancipator Luther,
the Moses who led forth--to borrow a figure from Cowley--our modern
Israel from its house of bondage, and brought them into the promised
land, testified to a visible appearance of the Prince of Darkness, to get
rid of whom he had to dash his ink-bottle, a type, as it always seems to
me, of the victory yet to be achieved by means of print over the devil
and all his works. But Faraday is gone. No longer can the Sandemanians
boast the possession of one of England's greatest philosophers; and they
have now little power of influencing or predominating in society. They
seem to me a very plain and humble folk, aiming at keeping up in their
own hearts Christian love, and in their own circle primitive practices,
rather than in a