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, {269} 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.
5. The deluge went before, misery followed after, in the middle came a
Puseyite playing upon an organ. Reader, flee from him, for he playeth
his own soul to damnation.
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, {270} of Cams.
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.
12. Faith and Works were walking one day on the road to Zion, when Works
turned into a public-house, and said he would not go any further, at the
same time telling Faith to go on by himself, and saying that “he should
be only a drag upon him.” Faith accordingly left Works in the ale-house,
and went on. He had not gone far before he began to feel faint, and
thought he had better turn back and wait for Works. He suited the action
to the word, and finding Works in an advanced state of beer, fell to, and
even surpassed that worthy in his potations. They then set to work and
fought lustily, and would have done each other a mortal injury had not a
Policeman providentially arrived, and walked them off to the
station-house. As it was they were fined Five Shillings each, and it was
a long time before they fully recovered.
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 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.