Being early they had a
choice of seats, and Florimel placed herself beside a pretty young
woman of gentle and troubled countenance, who sat leaning against
the side of the cavern.
The preacher on this occasion was the sickly young student--more
pale and haggard than ever, and halfway nearer the grave since his
first sermon. He still set himself to frighten the sheep into the
fold by wolfish cries; but it must be allowed that, in this sermon
at least, his representations of the miseries of the lost were not
by any means so gross as those usually favoured by preachers of
his kind. His imagination was sensitive enough to be roused by the
words of Scripture themselves, and was not dependent for stimulus
upon those of Virgil, Dante, or Milton. Having taken for his text
the fourteenth verse of the fifty-ninth psalm, "And at evening let
them return; and let them make a noise like a dog, and go round
about the city," he dwelt first upon the condition and character
of the eastern dog as contrasted with those of our dogs; pointing
out to his hearers, that so far from being valued for use or beauty
or rarity, they were, except swine, of all animals the most despised
by the Jews--the vile outcasts of the border land separating
animals domestic and ferine--filthy, dangerous, and hated; then
associating with his text that passage in the Revelation, "Blessed
are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the
tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city;
for without are dogs," he propounded, or rather asserted, that it
described one variety of the many punishments of the wicked, showing
at least a portion of them condemned to rush howling for ever about
the walls of the New Jerusalem, haunting the gates they durst not
enter.
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