On Religious Grumblers

When a man is particularly empty headed, he generally thinks himself to be a great judge, especially when it comes to religion. None is so wise as the man who knows nothing. His ignorance is the mother of his impudence and the nurse of his obstinacy; and though he does not know a bee from a bull’s foot, he settles matters as if all wisdom were at his fingertips—the Pope himself is not more infallible. Hear him talk after he has been at a meeting and heard a sermon, and you would know how to pull a good man to pieces if you didn’t know it before. He sees faults where there are none; and if there is anything amiss, he makes every mouse into an elephant. Although you might put all his wit into an eggshell, he weighs the sermon in the balances of his conceit with all the airs of a born-and-bred Solomon. If it is up to his standard, he lays on his praise with a trowel; but if it be not to his taste, he growls and barks and snaps at it like a dog at a hedgehog. Wise men in this world are like trees in a hedge; sparingly planted. When these rare men talk together upon a discourse, it is good for the ears to hear them; but the bragging wiseacres I am speaking of are vainly puffed up by their fleshly minds, and their quibbling is as senseless as the cackle of geese on a common. Nothing comes out of a sack but what was in it; and as their bag is empty, they shake nothing but wind out of it. The best garden may have a few weeds in it; the cleanest corn may have some chaff—but a petty quibbler will grumble at anything or nothing and find fault for the sake of showing off their deep knowledge. Sooner than let their tongues have a holiday, they would complain that the grass is not a nice shade of blue and say that the sky would have looked neater if it had been whitewashed.

One tribe of these Ishmaelites is made up of high-flying ignoramuses who are very mighty about the doctrine of a sermon: here they are as decisive as sledgehammers and as certain as death. Every clock, and even the sundial, must be set according to their watches. The slightest difference from their opinion proves a man to be rotten at heart. Venture to argue with them, and their little pots boil over in quick style; ask them for a reason, and you might as well go to a sand pit for sugar. They have bottled up the sea of truth and carried it in their waistcoat pockets. As for the things which angels long to know, they have seen them all as boys see when they peep through the cosmorama at the fair. Having sold their modesty and become wiser than their teachers, they ride a very high horse and jump over all five-barred gates of Bible texts which teach doctrines contrary to their notions. When this mischief happens to good men, it is a great pity for such sweet pots of ointment to be spoiled by flies, yet one learns to bear with them just as I do with old Violet, for he is a rare horse, though he does set his ears back and throw out his legs at times.

But there is a type of bragging folk, who are all sting and no honey, all whip and no hay, all grunt and no bacon. They are the heavenly watchdogs to guard the house of the Lord from those thieves and robbers who don’t preach sound doctrine. The Lord’s dear people, as they call themselves, they have enough to do just to stay clinging to their sound doctrine; and if their manners are cracked, who can wonder! No man can see to everything at once.

For every hen has its speckles, and every man has failings. I never knew a good horse which had not some odd habit or other, and I never yet saw a minister worth his salt who had not some quirk or oddity: now, these are the bits of cheese which the petty quibblers smell out and nibble at, this man is too slow, and another too fast; the first is too flowery, and the second is too dull. Dear me, if all God’s creatures were judged in this way, we should wring the dove’s neck for being too tame, shoot the robins for eating spiders, kill the cows for swinging their tails and the hens for not giving us milk. When a man wants to beat a dog, he can soon find a stick. .

A countryman is as warm in his homespun wool as a king is in his velvet, and a truth is as comfortable in homely words as in fine speech. As to the way of dishing up the meat, hungry men leave that to the cook; only let the meat be sweet and substantial. If the hearers were better, the sermons would be better. “There’s no one so deaf as those who will not hear.” Where whims and fancies sit in the seat of judgment, a man’s opinion is only so much wind; therefore, take no more notice than of the wind whistling through a keyhole.

Dogs, however, always will bark, and what is worse, some of them will bite too. Small is the edge of the wedge, but when the devil beetles with his sledgehammer, churches are soon split to pieces, and men wonder why? The fact is, the worst wheel of the cart creaks the most, and one fool makes many; and thus many a congregation is set at odds with a good and faithful minister who would have been a lasting blessing to them if they had not chased away their best friend. Those who are at the bottom of the mischief have generally no part or lot in the matter of true godliness but, like sparrows, fight over corn, which is not their own, and, like jackdaws, pull to pieces what they never helped to build. May we be delivered from all the mad dogs, critical “name only” Christians and the petty quibbling professors, and may we never catch the dreadful disease from either of them.