Go on, please.”

“On the other side of those mountains, Jack, is a desert. It is three hundred miles across it from here to the land of Egypt. The children of Israel entered Canaan at this place where we are when they came out of that desert. That great chief, Moses, staid with them, all through that weary march of forty years, and his wisdom, more than any other human aid, guided them safely and wonderfully to the Promised Land. It was a great task, but splendidly did Moses perform it.”

“What, forty years? Only three hundred miles? Why, Ben Holladay would have fetched them through in thirty-six hours!”

We did not laugh, because Jack was very sensitive about his blunders. He was merely given to understand that he must not make damaging comparisons between Moses and Ben Holladay, and there the matter dropped. But here, all of a sudden, this anecdote, all garbled and mutilated, turns up in San Francisco, and I am accused of making that remark. I did not make it, and never thought of making it. I get enough abuse, without having to suffer for the acts of others. I acknowledge that I have written irreverently, but I did it heedlessly, or when out of temper—never in cold blood. I did fail somewhat in reverence for Jacob, whose character all the bookmakers praise so highly, but that was honest. I revered the really holy places, and deliberately and intentionally derided only the manifest shams. The bookmakers all deride them in private conversation, themselves, but weep over them in their books. I am acquainted with some of those people, and I speak by the card. A missionary in Constantinople, a personal friend of the Rev. Mr. Prime, told me that that favorite Palestine authority used to read his lugubrious chapters aloud, after he had written them, and then laugh at the fine humor of flooding them with tears which came wholly from his inkstand. Any unprejudiced person who reads his Tent Life in the Holy Land will not doubt that statement. That sentimental fire-plug would have gone entirely dry if he had actually shed half the tears there are in his book. Deceived by that book, our passengers really felt that they were lacking in depth of feeling because they could not cry. They went about trying to cry, they sincerely wanted to cry, they often hoped, and promised and threatened to cry, but they always failed to connect. They were members of the church, and had a genuine reverence for sacred things, but they found at last, that it is possible for sound veneration to exist below the water level.

If the Rev. Dr. Thomas, who gave me such a terrific setting-up in his sermon last Sunday night—and in very good grammar, too, for a minister of the gospel—had only traveled with me in the Holy Land, I could have shown him how much real harm is done to religion by the wholesale veneration lavished upon things that are mere excrescences upon it; which mar it; and which should be torn from it by reasoning or carved from it by ridicule. They provoke the sinner to scoff, when he ought to be considering the things about him that are really holy. It is all very well to respect the devotee’s feelings, but let us have a thought for the sinner’s failings, in the meantime—he has a soul to be saved, as well as the devotee. Remove the things that seduce his attention from objects that are truly holy. Increase his chances for salvation, even though the means resorted to to do it may cause the devotee a pang. The devotee being safe, had better in charity suffer a little, than that the sinner be damned. The devotee learns his unreasoning, uncriticising veneration in unthinking infancy; and that he possesses it, is no merit of his; but the matured sinner can only learn to reverence such things as his thinking and reasoning faculties teach him are worthy of it.