These Romish customs have the most baneful effect
on the morals of our clergy; for the idle vermin who two or three
times a day perform, in the most slovenly manner a service which
they think useless, but call their duty, soon lose a sense of duty.
At college, forced to attend or evade public worship, they acquire
an habitual contempt for the very service, the performance of which
is to enable them to live in idleness. It is mumbled over as an
affair of business, as a stupid boy repeats his task, and
frequently the college cant escapes from the preacher the moment
after he has left the pulpit, and even whilst he is eating the
dinner which he earned in such a dishonest manner.
Nothing, indeed, can be more irreverent than the cathedral service
as it is now performed in this country, neither does it contain a
set of weaker men than those who are the slaves of this childish
routine. A disgusting skeleton of the former state is still
exhibited; but all the solemnity, that interested the imagination,
if it did not purify the heart, is stripped off. The performance
of high mass on the continent must impress every mind, where a
spark of fancy glows, with that awful melancholy, that sublime
tenderness, so near a-kin to devotion. I do not say, that these
devotional feelings are of more use, in a moral sense, than any
other emotion of taste; but I contend, that the theatrical pomp
which gratifies our senses, is to be preferred to the cold parade
that insults the understanding without reaching the heart.
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