I'll puff your sermon
beforehand, I assure you, and bring all I can to hear it."
So Frank preached a noble sermon, most rational, and most spiritual
withal; but he, too, like his tutor, took little by his motion.
All the present fruit upon which he had to congratulate himself was,
that the Brianite preacher denounced him in chapel next Sunday as a
German Rationalist, who impiously pretended to explain away the Lord's
visitation into a carnal matter of drains, and pipes, and gases, and
such like; and that his rival of another denomination, who was a
fanatic on the teetotal question, denounced him as bitterly for
supporting the cause of drunkenness, by attributing cholera to want of
cleanliness, while all rational people knew that its true source was
intemperance. Poor Frank! he had preached against drunkenness many
a time and oft: but because he would not add a Mohammedan eleventh
commandment to those ten which men already find difficulty enough in
keeping, he was set upon at once by a fanatic whose game it was--as it
is that of too many--to snub sanitary reform, and hinder the spread of
plain scientific truth, for the sake of pushing their own nostrum for
all human ills.
In despair, Tom went off to Elsley Vavasour. Would he help? Would he
join, as one of two householders, in making a representation to the
proper authorities?
Elsley had never mixed in local matters: and if he had, he knew
nothing of how to manage men, or to read an Act of Parliament; so,
angry as Tom was inclined to be with him, he found it useless to
quarrel with a man so utterly unpractical, who would, probably, had he
been stirred into exertion, have done more harm than good.
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