Audrey

There had lately come to Virginia, and to the convention of its clergy at

Williamsburgh, one Mr. Eliot, a minister after the heart of a large number

of sober and godly men whose reputation as a body suffered at the hands of

Mr. Darden, of Fair View parish, Mr. Bailey, of Newport, Mr. Worden, of

Lawn's Creek, and a few kindred spirits. Certainly Mr. Eliot was not like

these; so erect, indeed, did he hold himself in the strait and narrow path

that his most admiring brethren, being, as became good Virginians,

somewhat easy-going in their saintliness, were inclined to think that he

leaned too far the other way. It was commendable to hate sin and reprove

the sinner; but when it came to raining condemnation upon horse-racing,

dancing, Cato at the playhouse, and like innocent diversions, Mr. Eliot

was surely somewhat out of bounds. The most part accounted for his turn of

mind by the fact that ere he came to Virginia he had been a sojourner in

New England.

He was mighty in the pulpit, was Mr. Eliot; no droning reader of last

year's sermons, but a thunderer forth of speech that was now acrid, now

fiery, but that always came from an impassioned nature, vehement for the

damnation of those whom God so strangely spared. When, as had perforce

happened during the past week, he must sit with his brethren in the

congregation and listen to lukewarm--nay, to dead and cold adjurations and

expoundings, his very soul itched to mount the pulpit stairs, thrust down

the Laodicean that chanced to occupy it, and himself awaken as with the

sound of a trumpet this people who slept upon the verge of a precipice,

between hell that gaped below and God who sat on high, serenely regardful

of his creatures' plight. Though so short a time in Virginia, he was

already become a man of note, the prophet not without honor, whom it was

the fashion to admire, if not to follow. It was therefore natural enough

that the Commissary, himself a man of plain speech from the pulpit, should

appoint him to preach in Bruton church this Sunday morning, before his

Excellency the Governor, the worshipful the Council, the clergy in

convention, and as much of Williamsburgh, gentle and simple, as could

crowd into the church. Mr. Eliot took the compliment as an answer to

prayer, and chose for his text Daniel fifth and twenty-seventh.

Lodging as he did on Palace Street, the early hours of the past night,

which he would have given to prayer and meditation, had been profaned by

strains of music from the Governor's house, by laughter and swearing and

much going to and fro in the street beneath his window. These disturbances

filling him with righteous wrath, he came down to his breakfast next

morning prepared to give his hostess, who kept him company at table, line

and verse which should demonstrate that Jehovah shared his anger.