VIII. THE STATE OF DENMARK 387

brought each in its turn to a vigorously pointed climax, delivering the last words of each paragraph with two or three energetic nods of his head, as if he were hammering that much of the subject into the pulpit cushion with a round-headed mallet.* Then all the congregation wiped their eyes, blew their noses, coughed the coughs they had choked over for the last quarter of an hour, and settled themselves to the more devoted acceptance of the next section.

158. It is the habit of many good men-as it was confessedly, for instance, that of the infant Samuel-Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford-not to allow themselves to doubt or

* The hackneyed couplet of Hudibras respecting clerical use of the fist on the pulpit cushion is scarcely understood by modern readers, because of the burlesqued rhythm leaning falsely on the vowel:-

“The pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,

Is beat with fist instead of a stick.”

The couplet, like most of the poem, has been kept in memory more by the humour of its manner than the truth of its wit. I should like myself to expand it into-

“The pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,

Keeps time to truth politely plastic,

And wakes the Dead, and lulls the Quick,

As with a death’s-head on a stick.”

Or, in the longer rhythm of my old diary-

“Who, despots of the ecclesiastic drum,

Roll the rogues’ muffled march, to the rogues’ ‘kingdom come.’”-

For indeed, since I wrote the paragraph about the pulpit of Torcello, in The Stones of Venice, Vol. II., Chap. II.,¹ it has become hourly more manifest to me how far the false eloquence of the pulpit-whether Kettledrummle’s at Drumclog, with whom it is, in Gibbon’s scornful terms, “the safe and sacred organ of sedition,” or the apology of hired preachers for the abuses of their day-has excited the most dangerous passions of the sects, while it quenched the refiner’s fire and betrayed the reproving power of the gospel.²

¹ [Vol. X. pp. 30, 31.]

² [Compare Ruskin’s sermon against sermons in Vol. XVIII. p. 290 n. He calculates elsewhere that he had heard five thousand in the course of his life: see Vol. XXXIV. pp. 204, 217. For another reference to Kettledrummle (Old Mortality, chaps. 16, 17), see Vol. XXXIV. p. 382. The passage in Gibbon is in chapter xxxvii. (“The pulpit, that safe and sacred organ of sedition, resounded with the names of Pharaoh and Holofernes”).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]