The Professor at the Breakfast Table | Page 8

leaves all its magnetism
behind it. Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo mythology. Even
a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy Pundit would shut
his ears and run away from you in horror, if you should say it aloud.
What do you care for O'm? If you wanted to get the Pundit to look at
his religion fairly, you must first depolarize this and all similar words
for him. The argument for and against new translations of the Bible
really turns on this. Skepticism is afraid to trust its truths in depolarized
words, and so cries out against a new translation. I think, myself, if
every idea our Book contains could be shelled out of its old symbol and
put into a new, clean, unmagnetic word, we should have some chance
of reading it as philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read
it,--which we do not and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read
the "Gayatri" as a fair man and lover of truth should do. When society
has once fairly dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done
yet, it will perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.
I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
young fellow near me.
A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.

--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
observers from two very different points of view. If you wish to get the
distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two
observations from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer
and midwinter, for instance. To get the parallax of heavenly truths, you
must take an observation from the position of the laity as well as of the
clergy. Teachers and students of theology get a certain look, certain
conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a professional neckcloth,
and habits of mind as professional as their externals. They are scholarly
men and read Bacon, and know well enough what the "idols of the
tribe" are. Of course they have their false gods, as all men that follow
one exclusive calling are prone to do.--The clergy have played the part
of the flywheel in our modern civilization. They have never suffered it
to stop. They have often carried on its movement, when other moving
powers failed, by the momentum stored in their vast body. Sometimes,
too, they have kept it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were
like to grind the bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for
the soil that yields the bread of life. But the mainspring of the world's
onward religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men,
let me tell you. It is the people that makes the clergy, and not the clergy
that makes the people. Of course, the profession reacts on its source
with variable energy.--But there never was a guild of dealers or a
company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after.
Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time
since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in
Harvard College yard.
--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man.--The bonfire when Robert Calef's
book was burned?
The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
President of the College and Minister of the Gospel. You remember the
old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef, trader
of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what a set of
fools and worse than fools they were-
Remember it?--said the little man.--I don't think I shall forget it, as long
as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what it wears.
There was a ring on it.

May I look at it?--I said.
Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it falls off
from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.
He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the table,
and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being only a little
above the level of the table, as he stood. With pain and labor, lifting
one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his sticks, he took a few
steps from his place,--his motions and the deadbeat of the misshapen
boots announcing to my practised eye and ear the malformation which
is called in learned language talipes varus, or inverted club-foot.
Stop! stop!--I said,--let me come to you.
The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with an
ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high