Well, I take a listening attitude, and try to believe I am in church. I hear a great many original, a great many _startling_ things said. I see the gauntlet thrown at the dear old orthodox sentiments which I nursed in with my mother’s milk, and which (please God) I’ll cling to till I die. I see the polished blade of satire glittering in the air, followed by curious, eager, youthful eyes, which gladly see the searching “Sword of the Spirit” parried. Meaning glances, smothered smiles and approving nods follow the witty clerical sally. The orator pauses to mark the effect, and his face says, That stroke _tells_! and so it did, for “the Athenians” are not all dead, who “love to see and hear some new thing.” But he has another arrow in his quiver. Now his features soften--his voice is low and thrilling, his imagery beautiful and touching. He speaks of human love; he touches skilfully a chord to which every heart vibrates; and stern manhood is struggling with his tears, ere his smiles are chased away. Oh, there’s intellect there--there’s poetry there--there’s genius there; but I remember Gethsemane--I forget not Calvary! I know the “rocks were rent,” and the “heavens darkened,” and “the stone rolled away;” and a cold chill strikes to my heart when I hear “Jesus of Nazareth” lightly mentioned. Oh, what are intellect, and poetry, and genius, when with Jewish voice they cry, “_Away with_ HIM!” With “Mary,” let me “bathe his feet with my tears, and wipe them with the hairs of my head.” And so, I “went away sorrowful,” that this human preacher, with such great intellectual possessions, should yet “lack the _one thing needful_.” “CASH.”[A] Don’t think I’m going to perpetrate a monetary article. No fancy that way! I ignore anything approaching to a _stock_! I refer now to that omnipresent, omniscient, ubiquitous, express-train little victim, so baptized in the dry-goods stores, who hears nothing but the everlasting word cash dinned in his juvenile ears from matin to vespers; whose dangerous duty it is to rush through a crowd of expectant and impatient feminines, without suffering his jacket-buttons to become too intimately acquainted with the fringes of their shawls, or the laces of their mantillas! and to dodge so dexterously as not to knock down, crush under foot, or otherwise damage the string of juveniles that said women are bound to place as obstructions in said “Cash’s” way!