Peninsula enterprise. [volume] (Accomac, Va.) 1881-1965, 1892-04-02

They say, sob, what class of frauds
you have in the church of God in this
day." and when an elder of church, OF
q deacon. or minister of the Gospel, or
a superintendent of u Sabbath school
turns out a defaulter, what display heads
there are in many of the newspapers.
Great primer type. Five line plea.
Another Saint Abscondcd," Clerical
Scoundrelism, "Religion at a Dis
count, Shame on the Churches. while
there are thousand scoundrels outside
the church to where there is ono in
side the church, anil the lnisbehavior of
those who never see tho inside of a
church is SO great it is enough TO tempt
nun to become u Christian to get out
of their company.
But in all circles, religious and ire
hgious, the tendency is to excuse sin in
proportion as it is mammoth Even
John Milton in his Paradise Lost, u
while he condemns satan, gives such a
grand description of him you have hard
work to suppress your admiration. Oh,
this strainiug out of small sins like
gnats, and this gulping down of great
iniquities like camels.
This subject does not give the picture
of one or two persons, but is a gallery
in which thousands of people may sec
their likenesses. For instance. all those
people who, while they would not rob
their neighbor of farthing, appropriate
the money and the treasure of the pub
lie A man has house to sell, and he
tells his customer it is worth 1000.
Next day the assessor comes around and
the owner says it is worth $4,000. The
government of the United States took
off the tax from personal income, among
other reasons, because so few people
would tell tho truth, and many a man
with an income of hundreds of dollars a
day made statements which seemed to
imply he was about to be handed over
to the overseer of the poor.
Careful to pay their passage from
Liverpool to New York, yet smuggling
in their Saratoga trunk ten silk dresses
from Paris and half dozen watches
from Geneva. Switzerland, telling the
custom house officer OH the wharf,
"Thcre is nothing in that trunk but
wearing apparel" and putting five
dollar gold piece in his hand to punctu-
ate the statement.
Described in the text are all those who
are particular never to break the law
of grammar and who want all their
language an elegant specimen of syn
tax, straining out all the inaccuracies of
speech with a fine sieve of literary criti-
cism, while through their conversation
go SANDER and innuendo and profanity
and falsehood larger than whole cara
van of camels, when they might better
fracture every law of the language and
shock their intellectual taste, and better
let every verb seek in vain for its NOM
NATIVE and every noun for it's govern
nent, and every proposition lose its way
in the sentence and adjectives and par
ticiples and pronouns get into grand
riot worthy of the Fourth ward on cleo
ton day, than to commit moral mac
curacy. Better swallow thousand
gnats than one camel.
THE cENsoRIoUs HYPocRITE.
Such persons are also described in the
text who are very much alarmed about
the small faults of others, and have no
alarm about their own great transgres-
sions. There are in every community
and in every church watchdogs who
feel called upon to keep their eyes on
others and growl. They are full of sus-
picions. They wonder if that man is not
dishonest, if that man is not unclean, if
there is not something wrong about the
other man. They are always the first to
hear of anything wrong. Vultures are
always the first to smell carrion. They
are self appointed detectives. Hay this
down as a rule without any exception,
that those people who have the most
faults themselves are most merciless in
their watching of others. From scalp
of head to sole of foot they are full of
iealousies and hypercriticisms.
They spend their life in hunting for
muskrats and mud turtles instead of
hunting for Rocky mountain eagles, al
ways for something mean instead of
something grand. They look at their
neighbors' inperfections through a mi
croscopo and look at their own imper-
fections through telescope upside
down. Twenty faults of their own do
not hurt them half SO much as one
fault of somebody else. Their neigh
bors' imperfections are like gnats and
they strain them out; their own imper-
fections are like camels and they swal
low them.
But lest any might think they escape
the scrutiny of the text have to tell
you that we all come under the divine
satire whom we make the questions of
time more prominent than the questions
of eternity. Come now, let US all so
into the confessional. Are not ell
tempted to make the question, Where
shall 1.-Two now? greater than the ques-
ton, Where shall live forever How
shall get more dollars here? greater
than tho question. How shall | lay up
treasures in heaven? the question, How
shall pay my debts to man? greater
than the question. How shall l meet
my obligations to God? the Ques-
ton, How shall gain the world?
greater than the question, What if
| lose my soul? the question, Why did
God let sin come into the world? greater
than the question. How shall get it
extirpated from my nature? the ques-
ton, What shall | do with the twenty
or forty or seventy years of my sublunar
existence? greater than the question,
What shall do with the millions of
cycles of my post-terrestrial existence?
Time, how small it is! Eternity, how
vast it is! The former more insignificant
in comparison with the latter than a
gnat is insignificant when compared
with camel. We lodged the text. We
said, "That doesn't mean me, and that
doesn't mean me-" and with ruinous