A View of Dr. Homily on his Hobby-Horse.

The mind of good Dr. Homily found a relief from its sorrows, in this tribute paid to the memory of the deceased, and in the resources of piety and devotion; but what most favourably diverted its attention from these melancholy subjects, was an elaborate performance in which he had been for some years seriously engaged. This was a defence of our religious establishment, and an abridgment of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, ⁴⁹⁸ with the language familiarized and adapted to the most common capacity, enriched with copious annotations, and a very instructive introduction and appendix. In this noble employment, the Doctor found himself detached from all selfish and personal / concerns, and his heart and all his faculties were devoted to the cause of our glorious civil and ecclesiastical institutions. But he was most cruelly drawn from this digression, to subjects of chagrin and mortification, from which a soul so generous and harmless as his, ought to have been for ever shielded. There were (as we have before observed) in the Doctor’s neighbourhood, and indeed at this time through most of the colonies, a number of fanatics, gloomy and morose, devoid of every liberal sentiment, and eager to detect and censure the errors and infirmities of their neighbours, who studied religion, as the Romans did the Greek philosophy, causa disputandi, non ita vivendi, ⁴⁹⁹ as a subject of controversy, and not for practice; who condemned gaiety as presumption, measured the growth of men’s sanctity by the decrease of their common sense and good-nature, and thought no one could be fit for the joys of another world, who did not assist in / turning this into a gloomy theatre of ignorance, obstinacy, sullenness, melancholy, despair, and madness: in short, like the Turks, who held him to be most a saint, who was most idiotic and irrational. ⁵⁰⁰ These zealots, puffed up with spiritual pride, greedily embraced the opportunity for censure, which Dr. Homily’s simplicity gave them, in his late, perhaps eccentric, sacrifice to his affection for his grandson. They pronounced it ‘a revival of popery, which ought not to be endured; that the adorning the figures of two mortals with the wings of angels, was a species of idolatry, and the performance of the funeral service on that occasion, rank image worship: that it was the duty of every saint to 359imitate Moses in his holy zeal, and grind these images and idols, which the Doctor had set up, into dust, as he did the brazen calf, that the land might not be polluted.’ ⁵⁰¹ The leaders (among whom was squire Aaron, who endeavoured, like a frail sister, to / compensate for his own vices, by an unforgiving zeal, and abhorrence of the faults of others) used every art to induce the grand jury to indict the Doctor for antichristian and papistical practices, and nonjuring and jacobitical principles; but he was so generally beloved through the country, and the deed of commemoration was in itself so innocent, if not laudable and dignified, that the complaint was quashed with contempt. Disappointed in this attempt, they worked on the distempered heads and hearts of their followers so effectually, that a chosen party sallied out one night, and most sacrilegiously stole into the arbour, made sacred by the ashes of the lamented Matilda, and broke the busts of our hero and Sancho in pieces, carrying each of them a fragment, as a trophy of their holy zeal. This ungenerous and Gothic conduct much affected the gentle bosom of Dr. Homily, who had been a father to the fatherless, and a husband to the widow, / regardless of their religious prejudices; but, on the other hand, it roused him to new exertions against the monster fanaticism, and led him to drive on his favourite hobby-horse with more spirit and energy.