These last commonly need no
satirist, but, to use a common phrase, make themselves absurd, as if
Nature intended them for parodies on some of her graver productions. For
example, how could the attempt to make application of mystical prophecy
to current events be rendered more ridiculous than when we read that two
hundred years ago it was a leading point in the teaching of Lodowick
Muggleton, a noted heresiarch, "that one John Robins was the last great
antichrist and son of perdition spoken of by the Apostle in
Thessalonians"? I remember also an eloquent and distinguished person
who, beginning with the axiom that all the disorders of this microcosm,
the body, had their origin in diseases of the soul, carried his doctrine
to the extent of affirming that all derangements of the macrocosm
likewise were due to the same cause. Hearing him discourse, you would
have been well-nigh persuaded that you had a kind of complicity in the
spots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into an
epigram which made it instantly ludicrous. "I consider myself,"
exclaimed he, "personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's
axis." A prominent Come-outer once told me, with a look of indescribable
satisfaction, that he had just been kicked out of a Quaker meeting. "I
have had," he said, "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks,
Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but I never
succeeded in getting a Quaker kick before.
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