AUDREY AWAKES


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