things that give your brain a twist--called “Festus.” There was a passage in it that certainly did bother me; but now I can perfectly understand it. Somebody says to another-- “Why, how now! You look as though you fed on _buttered thunder_.” Now, the Bishop of Exeter--I say it with all respect, grandmother, for you know you always taught me to love the bishops--is this very man. You’ve only to read his letters, really so noisy, and yet, as he declares, meaning to be so soft--to be sure that what he lives and thrives upon is _buttered thunder_. The Bishop, of course, isn’t alone in his happiness at the row. One of his best friends, the _Morning Post_, believes it will do a deal of good. True piety, like physic, wants shaking to have its proper effect. The _Post_ talked a little while ago about “the means which have made the Church arise from its slumbers _like a giant refreshed_;” that is, getting up in a white surplice, to be refreshed with ready money from the pews. I don’t know how it is, but I don’t think the Church ought to be compared to a giant. All the giants I know are people of very queer character. The best of ’em gluttonous, swaggering, overbearing chaps, with nothing too hot or too heavy for ’em to carry off: now, these are not at all the sort of creatures that we are likely to think of when we’re reading the Bishop of Exeter’s letters. No; they rather remind us of a shepherd playing on his pipe--I’ve only read of these things--to his sheep and lambkins. The _Morning Post_ further says:-- “We are not among those who feel alarm at the present state of the Church. _The fermentation_ will throw off the scum, and what is good will remain.” Now, grandmother, you know enough of boiling to know that “the scum” always floats on the top. Now, is anything on the top to be thrown off? Don’t flurry yourself; the _Post_ doesn’t mean that. What it means is, that a whole lot of the vulgar members of the Established Church will be so fermented by the surplice, the offertory, and other Popish ingredients--grains of Paradise, as they tell us--that they’ll be thrown clean out of it. You know how Bill Wiggins once poisoned the pond, so that the fish was floated dead ashore. In the same way the Church may get rid of its small fry, and “what is good will remain.” Then the Church will be something like. Now, it’s old and weather-stained, with time blotches and cracks about it. But how fine it will look with crucifixes and pictures of the Virgin inside--a clean white surplice always in the upper pulpit--and the whole building beautifully and thickly faced with _Roman_ cement!