Two of my nearer neighbours, who had travelled a long mile through the
storm to see whether I had got my newspaper, had taken their seats
beside me when I was engaged with my dream; and after reading your
railway report, they were now busied in discussing the various
speeches and their authors. My dream is, I am aware, quite unsuited
for your columns, and yet I send it to you. There are none of its
pictured calamities that lie beyond the range of possibility--nay,
there are perhaps few of them that at this stage may not actually be
feared; but if so, it is at least equally sure that there can be none
of them that at this stage might not be averted.
THE TWO MR. CLARKS.
Among the some six or eight and twenty volumes of pamphlets which have
been already produced by our Church controversy, and which bid fair to
compose but a part of the whole, there is one pamphlet, in the form of
a Sermon, which bears date January 1840, and two other pamphlets, in
the form of Dialogues, which bear date April 1843. The Sermon and the
Dialogues discuss exactly the same topics. They are written in exactly
the same style. They exhibit, in the same set phrases, the same large
amount of somewhat obtrusive sanctimoniousness. They are equally
strong in the same confidence of representing, on their respective
subjects, the true mind of Deity. They solicit the same circle of
readers; they seem to have employed the same fount of types; they have
emanated from the same publishers. They are liker, in short, than the
twin brothers in Shakespeare's _Comedy of Errors_; and the only
material dissimilarity which we have been yet able to discover is,
that whereas the Sermon is a thorough-going and uncompromising defence
of our Evangelical majority in the Church, the Dialogues form an
equally thorough-going and uncompromising attack upon them. This,
however, compared with the numerous points of verisimilitude, the
reader will, we are sure, deem but a trifle, especially when he has
learned further that they represent the same mind, and have employed
the same pen--that the Sermon was published by the Rev. Alexander
Clark of Inverness in 1840, and the Dialogues by the Rev. Alexander
Clark of Inverness in 1843.