our mariners as _Cape Cod
Clergymen_.

It has been a refreshment to many nice consciences to know that our
Chief Magistrate would not regard with eyes of approval the (by many
esteemed) sinful pastime of dancing, and I own myself to be so far of
that mind, that I could not but set my face against this Mexican Polka,
though danced to the Presidential piping with a Gubernatorial second. If
ever the country should be seized with another such mania _de propaganda
fide_, I think it would be wise to fill our bombshells with alternate
copies of the Cambridge Platform and the Thirty-nine Articles, which
would produce a mixture of the highest explosive power, and to wrap
every one of our cannon-balls in a leaf of the New Testament, the
reading of which is denied to those who sit in the darkness of Popery.
Those iron evangelists would thus be able to disseminate vital religion
and Gospel truth in quarters inaccessible to the ordinary missionary. I
have seen lads, unimpregnate with the more sublimated punctiliousness of
Walton, secure pickerel, taking their unwary _siesta_ beneath the
lily-pads too nigh the surface, with a gun and small shot. Why not,
then, since gunpowder was unknown to the apostles (not to enter here
upon the question whether it were discovered before that period by the
Chinese), suit our metaphor to the age in which we live, and say
_shooters_ as well as _fishers_ of men?

I do much fear that we shall be seized now and then with a Protestant
fervour, as long as we have neighbour Naboths whose wallowings in
Papistical mire excite our horror in exact proportion to the size and
desirableness of their vineyards. Yet I rejoice that some earnest
Protestants have been made by this war,--I mean those who protested
against it. Fewer they were than I could wish, for one might imagine
America to have been colonized by a tribe of those nondescript African
animals the Aye-Ayes, so difficult a word is _No_ to us all. There is
some malformation or defect of the vocal organs, which either prevents
our uttering it at all, or gives it so thick a pronunciation as to be
unintelligible. A mouth filled with the national pudding, or watering in
expectation thereof, is wholly incompetent to this refractory
monosyllable. An abject and herpetic Public Opinion is the Pope, the
Anti-Christ, for us to protest against _e corde cordium_. And by what
College of Cardinals is this our God's-vicar, our binder and looser,
elected? Very like, b