"Scarcely any bishop," says Sydney Smith, "is sufficiently a man of the world to deal with fanatics. The way is not to reason with them, but to ask them to dinner. They are armed against logic and remonstrance, but they are puzzled in a labyrinth of wines, disarmed by facilities and concessions, introduced to a new world, and come away thinking more of hot and cold and dry and sweet than of Newman, Keble, and Pusey." A number of years ago, when long tables were in vogue at the great hostelries at Saratoga, Bishop Onderdonk of New York was among the guests. The bishop, in accordance with his station, was seated at the head of the table, where the attentive head waiter had just placed his bottle of hotel "Pontet-Canet." Among the other clerical guests was a Connecticut divine and teetotaler who had come to test the restorative virtues of Congress water, so delicious when drunk at the fountainhead in the morning. "Ah!" said the cynical dominie to a ministerial vis-à-vis, as he frowned over his Oolong and the portly prelate beamed over his Bordeaux, "he wants to prove his apostolic descent by showing that if he drink of any deadly thing it shall not hurt him." Later, when his Right Reverence was informed of the remark, he observed, quoting Ecclesiasticus as his would-be detractor had quoted St. Mark, "'Wine measurably drunk and in season bringeth gladness of the heart and cheerfulness of the mind,' and as a churchman it were heretical for me to take exception to so orthodox a precept." The minister whose knowledge of gastronomy is far exceeded by his zeal in "reforming," notably in an attempted extermination of all joyous fluids, is far more prevalent in the United States than abroad. While no one will object to his denunciation of "King Rum" or the "Wine-cup,"--though rum is but little used as a beverage, and wine is supposed to be consumed in glasses at the dinner-table,--one must nevertheless deplore the inconsistency which would annihilate all alcoholic fluids and permit the grossest heterodoxness of diet to pass unscathed. Not undeserved, perchance, are the lines addressed to this class of the clergy by a Western versifier: "He preached 'gainst whisky, rum, and gin, All use of liquor he'd decry; He said that drinking was a sin-- But eat the toughest kind of pie. "He said there was no greater vice Than that which made of man a sot-- But took not water without ice, And gorged himself on biscuit hot. "He flouted the advice of Paul To drink wine for the stomach's sake-- But give him dumpling in a ball, And any quantity he'd take. "Tobacco in each form he spurned, Its soothing virtues he denied; For him no soft Havana burned-- But he would eat a beefsteak fried. "Jaundiced he lived, and died of spleen, And some kept green his memory then-- Called him 'reformer,' who had been The most intemperate of men."