Piccadilly: A Fragment of Contemporary BiographyOliphant, Laurence
General
Piccadilly: A Fragment of Contemporary Biography
Oliphant, Laurence
Piccadilly (London, England) -- Fiction
On which a general silence. It seems as impossible and incongruous for
me to write here what now takes place, as it did at the time to take
part in it. It requires no stretch of imagination on the part of my
readers to divine what movement it was which caused the next general
rustle. Remember that a great proportion of these young ladies were
brought here by their mammas, and in their secret souls would have
rather been at a ball; but their mammas disapproved of balls, and made
them do this instead. Now, tell me, which was most wrong? I knew of one
young lady, at least, whose object in coming was not to do what she was
then doing. How many young men would have been there had there been no
young ladies? and what were they all thinking about now? And as I looked
at the subscription-vase, and listened to the monotonous voice of a
"dear Christian friend" behind it, who had been called upon to open the
proceedings, I thought, Can it be possible that these are those of whom
it is said, "they devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long
prayer"? Can it be possible to put anything into that vase without the
right hand knowing what the left hand is doing, and all the people
seeing both hands? Is not "the trumpet" even now being "sounded" by "the
hypocrites" that they may have "glory of men"? Is there, in fact, any
difference, practically, between kneeling in Lady Broadhem's
drawing-room, by way of an after-dinner entertainment, and loving "to
pray standing in the synagogues, and in the corners of the streets, that
you may be seen of men"? Is there any part of a clergyman's dress called
a phylactery; and if so, when he becomes a bishop, does the hem of it
become broader? and if it was wrong for a priest in Jerusalem, eighteen
hundred years ago, to be called "Rabbi, Rabbi," is it less wrong for one
in London now to be called "My lord, My lord"?
I was thinking how much more usefully Bishop Colenso would have been
employed in pointing out those anomalies in the practice of his
religion, instead of the discrepancies in its records, and what a much
stronger case the Zulu might have made out against Christians if he had
known as much of the countries which they inhabit as I do, when the
rustling again became general, and the monotonous voice ceased.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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