II.——Samuel Butler’s Parody

1. Beware! Beware! Beware! The enemy sowed tracts in the night, and the righteous men tremble.

2. There are only 10 good men in John’s; I am one; reader, calculate your chance of salvation.

3. The genuine recipe for the leaven of the Pharisees is still extant, and runs as follows: —Self-deceit ⅓ + want of charity ½ + outward show ⅓, humbug ∞, insert Sim or not as required. Reader, let each one who would seem to be righteous take unto himself this leaven.

4. “The University Church is a place too much neglected by the young men up here.” Thus said the learned Selwyn, ^* and he said well. How far better would it be if each man’s own heart was a little University Church, the pericardium a little University churchyard, wherein are buried the lust of the flesh, the pomps and vanities of this wicked world; the veins and arteries, little clergymen and bishops ministering therein; and the blood a stream of soberness, temperance and chastity perpetually flowing into it.

6. Church music is as the whore of Babylon, or the ramping lion who sought whom he might devour; music in a church cannot be good, when St. Paul bade those who were merry to sing psalms. Music is but tinkling brass, and sounding cymbals, which is what St. Paul says he should himself be, were he without charity; he evidently then did not consider music desirable.

7. The most truly religious and only thoroughly good man in Cambridge is Clayton, ^* of Caius.

8. “Charity is but the compassion that we feel for our own vices when we perceive their hatefulness in other people.” Charity, then, is but another name for selfishness, and must be eschewed accordingly.

9. A great French king was walking one day with the late Mr. B., when the king dropped his umbrella. Mr. B. instantly stooped down and picked it up. The king said in a very sweet tone, “Thank you.”

10. The Cam is the river Jordan. An unthinking mind may consider this a startling announcement. Let such an one pray for grace to read the mystery aright.

11. When I’ve lost a button off my trousers I go to the tailors’ and get a new one sewn on.

13. What can 10 fools do among 300 sinners? They can do much harm, and had far better let the sinners seek peace their own way in the wilderness than ram it down their throats during the night.

14. Barnwell is a place near Cambridge. It is one of the descents into the infernal regions; nay, the infernal regions have there ascended to the upper earth, and are rampant. He that goeth by it shall be scorched, but he that seeketh it knowingly shall be devoured in the twinkling of an eye, and become withered as the grass at noonday.

15. Young men do not seem to consider that houses were made to pray in, as well as to eat and to drink in. Spiritual food is much more easily procured and far cheaper than bodily nutriment; that, perhaps, is the reason why many overlook it.

16. When we were children our nurses used to say, “Rock-a-bye baby on the tree top, when the bough bends the cradle will rock.” Do the nurses intend the wind to represent temptation and the storm of life, the tree-top ambition, and the cradle the body of the child in which the soul traverses life’s ocean? I page 272 cannot doubt all this passes through the nurses’ minds. Again, when they say, “Little Bo-peep has lost her sheep and doesn’t know where to find them; let them alone and they’ll come home with their tails all right behind them,” is Little Bo-peep intended for mother Church? Are the sheep our erring selves, and our subsequent return to the fold? No doubt of it.

17. A child will often eat of itself what no compulsion can induce it to touch. Men are disgusted with religion if it is placed before them at unseasonable times, in unseasonable places, and clothed in a most unseemly dress. Let them alone, and many will perhaps seek it for themselves, whom the world suspects not. A whited sepulchre is a very picturesque object, and I like it immensely, and I like a Sim too. But the whited sepulchre is an acknowledged humbug and most of the Sims are not, in my opinion, very far different.

the end