"His sermon’s in him, I presume," said Budlong, inspecting a recess in the figure. "Yes; about half delivered. He’ll begin somewhere in the middle; for we don’t wind them up until they are entirely run down, to avoid uneven wear of the works."
Then he touched another spring; and the automaton preacher, ceasing to "blaat out"—if we may use an expressive rustic verb—his "Ah!" slid from it into the midst of a passage in the first part of Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s "Discourse of Lukewarmness and Zeal," somewhat on this wise: "A—a—a-—a—and to make it possible for us"—and here the image subsided into a graceful, impressive, and powerful delivery of the strong old-fashioned English sentences—’’to come to that spiritual state where all felicity does dwell. The religion that Christ taught is a spiritual religion: it designs (so far as the state will permit) to make us spiritual; that is, so as the Spirit be the prevailing ingredient. God must now be worshipped in spirit; and not only so, but with a fervent spirit."
And so the minister went on with the solid and sonorous rhetoric of the powerful old bishop.
"That," said Budlong, "is the principal stop, or even tone. I will now set the damnatory, or threatening stop"—
"Stay a moment," I interrupted. "It would be a pity to have such noble thoughts as Bishop Taylor’s inappropriately delivered. Couldn’t you illustrate the other stops by inserting other matter?"
"Oh, yes!" he replied. "Here is a list of our prepared printed compositions, arranged with directions for the stops. Just select at your pleasure, and we’ll insert them accordingly. We generally use the principal for exhibition."
I took the little catalogue, and selected from under the head of "Triumphant" the Ninety-fifth Psalm, in the Vulgate Latin, "Venite exultemus Domino."
This having been taken from a closet, inserted in the combined-action minister, and delivered by him in an overpowering strain of congratulatory eloquence, my friend proceeded, at my request, to cause the enunciation by the figure of the Athanasian Creed, with all the curses complete (I looked for that of Ernulphus, but it was not on the list), as an exemplification of the damnatory or threatening stop. After that he gave me Wesley’s "Sinners, turn; why will ye die?" on the hortatory, or didactic stop; and other pieces in the three other sermon styles—the hifalutin or camp-meeting, the intoning or liturgic, and the sweet-cream or dearly-beloved.
Having thus seen all that was to be seen in the factory, we completed our circuit by returning to the office, where I had a long and interesting conversation with Budlong, of which I may reproduce some of the chief points, without pretending to verbal accuracy.
The first of these points, if I may say so, was an interruption. I had hardly sat down, when I jumped up again; not because I sat on a cat or a pin, but because a great awful voice cried, "Twelve o’clock!" The tone was really awful. It was musical, but vast, booming, and deep; and the sound throbbed in my ears like the note of a heavy bell close at hand; and its reverberations filled all the air; so that it came, seemingly, from everywhere—not from any place.
Budlong laughed until he cried. "I forgot to tell you," he said when he could speak, "we have Friar Bacon’s brazen head, discovered at Oxford, and imported expressly for us at great expense. We use it instead of a bell or a whistle, just as the American Organ Factory in Boston plays a common chord for the same purpose."
I recovered myself as well as I could, and told him, that, after all, he had only revived an old device in his mechanical devotions; that his clock-work sermonizing bore much analogy to the Buddhist praying-mills, that are turned by water-wheels or by wind.
Budlong laughed again. "I confess," he said, " this much. I am a member of the First Radical Club; and you know they run a Buddhist prayer-mill in the back-room all the time, by a little hydraulic ram supplied from the Cochituate pipes. Not one of them will admit that they believe there’s any thing in it; but still, you know, it can do no harm to be right on the record. You remember the old story of the Englishman in Rome, who took off his hat and made a low bow to Jupiter, and requested the civility should be remembered in case the Olympian dynasty should ever be re-established? I am not sure but our modern wise men of the western east may have given me the idea, really. But I have made it practical."
"In a certain sense," I admitted. "But have you made it pay? What is the present state of the enterprise financially?"
"Eminently satisfactory. We are just now, for instance, filling an order for ministers. But the next is for lecturers"—
"Lecturers!" I interrupted, as that grim row of portrait heads in the Bluebeard chamber flashed across my mind in a new light—"then those likenesses"—I stopped; but I had let it out. Budlong turned quite red, and looked, I may say, almost sheepish; but finally he made the best of it by saying good-naturedly—
"Ah, peeping Tom!"
"I confess," I said; "but I couldn’t possibly have imagined the door forbidden."
"And it is our own fault too," rejoined he. "We ought to have locked it, and hidden the key. So I’ll confess too. The fact is, that we are running a pretty important part of the lecturing business at present. Don’t you remember that odd little newspaper controversy a few weeks ago, in consequence of ‘The Leavenworth Champion’ and ‘ The Bangor Courier’ each saying that a certain eminent speaker lectured at its respective city on one and the same evening?"
I did.
"Well, we had a terrible time to quiet it down. You see, the first-class speakers receive ten times as many invitations as they can accept. Now, we furnish a facsimile, who exactly duplicates the eminent gentleman; and we have half the money. Between you and me, we have had as many as five of one or two men speaking in different parts of the United States at the same time. Very likely it won’t last; but we’re coining money out of it now!"
"And the celebrated foreign gentlemen?" I asked.
"Pshaw!" said Budlong. "They’re all safe at home, minding their own business. Nobody knows them: so that it’s a great deal easier to put their doubles on the stage than the domestic article."
I parodied Campbell—
"Both Pepper and his Ghost a shade!"
and then I added; "but really you’ll do away with all public speaking, seems to me?"
"None of my lookout if we do," was his cynical answer. "Not with real speaking, though. Reading a manuscript isn’t speaking. We have done away with some of that. What do you suppose it is, except our invention, that has caused the decrease that the religious papers are always complaining of, in the number of graduates from the theological seminaries?"
"But, my dear fellow," I remonstrated, "what the dickens— What is the effect of all this, pray tell me, on the stated religious observances of the country? You surely do not think it right to impede them, or to push them out of use?"
"No. But what I do think is this, that real religion will harmonize just as readily and perfectly with improvements in art as with advances in science. The question isn’t what the new invention or scientific truth will bring to pass: that will take care of itself. The only question is, whether it is a truth, whether it is a discovery."
"I can’t bring myself to give up sermons."
"Give up? You’re going to have ’em cheaper than ever. Why, the interest on one of our first-class ministers isn’t one-tenth of a decent salary; and I’ll guarantee him to outlive a crow. He’ll save his own first cost full up in from five to ten years; and with care he won’t cost five dollars a year for repairs. Then, look at the economy of the whole plan. Here are your human ministers that must have a salary, and a family and houseroom, and grow old or sick or heretical or tiresome; or they quarrel with the parish; or the parish quarrels with them. But the patent minister is exempt from all the weaknesses of humanity. He requires neither wife, child, nor friend; neither house, land, nor salary; bed nor board, rest, exchange, nor vacation—nothing in the world except a cool cupboard and a very little sweet oil. He is conveniently stored in a closet in the vestry, or covered with a dust-cloth in the pulpit; or he can stand on a trap, and go up and down by a bell-wire arrangement running under the floor, that the senior deacon can pull where he sits in his pew. If you choose to have him wound up once in six hours, he will maintain a perpetual discourse day and night, like the perpetual chant in the chapel of Mr. Ferrar’s famous religious establishment at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire. He cannot quarrel; he says only what he is inspired (literally) to say; and the congregation can have whatever approved discourse they like, instead of taking their chances of getting one they do not. There are at least thirty thousand ministers of the gospel in the United States: at four hundred dollars a year, they are paid twelve million dollars. What would this annual sum not accomplish—I do not say in secular enterprises, but for benevolent undertakings, the missionary work, home charities, education, reformatory institutions?"