ntioned it. They waited and waited for the grand crash, but
it never came. After all their labor-pains, their ministerial mountain
had brought forth only a mouse--and a still-born one at that. Beecher
had not told on them; Beecher malignantly persisted in not telling on
them. The opportunity was slipping away. Alas, for the humiliation of
it, they had to come out and tell it themselves! And after all, their
bombshell did not hurt anybody when they did explode it. They had ceased
to be responsible to God for Beecher, and yet nobody seemed paralyzed
about it. Somehow, it was not even of sufficient importance, apparently,
to get into the papers, though even the poor little facts that Smith has
bought a trotting team and Alderman Jones's child has the measles
are chronicled there with avidity. Something must be done. As the
Ministerial Union had told about their desolating action, when nobody
else considered it of enough importance to tell, they would also publish
it, now that the reporters failed to see anything in it important enough
to print. And so they startled the entire religious world no doubt
by solemnly printing in the Evangelist the paragraph which heads this
article. They have got their excommunication-bull started at last. It is
going along quite lively now, and making considerable stir, let us hope.
They even know it in Podunk, wherever that may be. It excited a two-line
paragraph there. Happy, happy world, that knows at last that a little
congress of congregationless clergymen of whom it had never heard before
have crushed a famous Beecher, and reduced his audiences from fifteen
hundred down to fourteen hundred and seventy-five at one fell blow!
Happy, happy world, that knows at last that these obscure innocents
are no longer responsible for the blemishless teachings, the power, the
pathos, the logic, and the other and manifold intellectual pyrotechnics
that seduce, but to damn, the Opera House assemblages every Sunday
night in Elmira! And miserable, O thrice miserable Beecher! For the
Ministerial Union of Elmira will never, no, never more be responsible to
God for his shortcomings. (Excuse these tears.)

(For the protection of a man who is uniformly charged with all the
newspaper deviltry that sees the light in Elmira journals, I take this
opportunity of stating, under oath, duly subscribed before a magistrate,
that Mr. Beecher did not write this article. And further still, that he
did not inspire it. And fur