230 SECTARIAN STRIFE. 'Tis false; unmanly spleen your bosom warms, Speaking of the most conspicuous of Wesley's antiArminian adversaries, the brothers Hill (Rowland and Sir Richard), and Augustus Montague Toplady, whose writings were so "thoroughly saturated with the essential acid of Calvinism," Southey alleges that it would scarcely be credible that three persons, of good birth and education, and of unquestionable goodness and piety, should have carried on controversy "in so vile a manner, and with so detestable a spirit-if the hatred of theologians had not unhappily become proverbial.” The names of opprobrium flung to and fro in this sort of free fight, remind us of a celebrated letter of Paul Louis Courier: "Il m'appelle jacobin, révolutionnaire, plagiaire, voleur, empoisonneur, faussaire, pestiféré ou pestifère, enragé, imposteur, calomniateur, libelliste, homme horrible, ordurier, grimacier, chiffonnier. . . . Je vois ce qu'il veut dire; il entend que lui et moi sommes d'avis différent." An eminent reviewer of our day has remarked, with regard to the distinction between theological language and secular, that when certain persons say, "You will infallibly be damned," they must be understood to mean simply, "Your opinion differs from ours." Mr. Motley cannot look back upon the passionate days of controversy between Maurice and Barneveld without being "appalled at the depths to which theological hatred could descend." Yet, deeper and deeper still, might seem its subsequent descents, to some observers. M. Louis Veuillot is declared by a Saturday Reviewer to have probably never had an equal in the virulence, the coarseness, and the recklessness of his theological vituperation; and a censor in the British Quarterly holds ODIUM THEOLOGICUM. 231 that when the history of contemporary Atheism shall be written, Veuillot must come in for much of the blame, "for if anything could inspire a horror of religion, or extenuate the blasphemies of the time, it may be found in the career of this furious zealot." The contests of religious newspapers are apt to be personal, says Mr. Trollope, who speaks of heavy, biting, scorching attacks as the natural vehicle of Christian Examiners; for how, he asks, is a newspaper writer to refrain himself when his opponent is "incurring everlasting punishment, or, worse still, carrying away others to a similar doom, in that they read, and perhaps even purchase, that which the lost one has written?" Malice and mutual hatred come to be accounted a duty in certain cases; and peace there cannot be, because any resting from the duty of hatred towards those who reciprocally seem to lay the foundations of their creed in a dishonouring of God, is, in De Quincey's words, "impossible to aspiring human nature." Rousseau describes two such conflicting parties as fastening each on the other in the extreme of fury, resembling rather enraged wolves acharnés à s'entre-déchirer, than Christians and philosophers who sought to enlighten and convince each other, and bring back the erring into the way of truth. Poundtext and Kettledrummle, in the camp of the Covenanters at Loudonhill, scandalize Balfour of Burley himself by the disunion implied in their virulent strife of tongues; and for a moment his interposition is availing. But although the two divines were thus for the time silenced, they continued to eye each other like two dogs who, having been separated by the authority of their masters while fighting, have retreated, as Sir Walter describes it (and he was cunning in canine characteristics), each beneath the chair of his owner, still watching each other's motions, and indicating by occasional growls, by the erected 232 A CONTENTIOUS WIFE. bristles of the back and ears, and by the red glance of the eye, that their discord is unappeased, and that they only wait the first opportunity afforded by any general movement or commotion in the company, to fly once more each at the other's throat. XXI. THE CONTINUAL DROPPING OF A CON- FAL PROVERBS xix. 13; xxvii. 15. AR above rubies is the price set, in the words of King Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him, upon the true womanly wife who openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in whose tongue is the law of kindness. But in the proverbs of Solomon it is written that the contentions of a wife are a continual dropping; and again, that a continual dropping in a very rainy day, and a contentious woman, are alike. With such a wife, to adopt Bishop Patrick's paraphrase, “a man is no more able to live at home, than to dwell in a rotten and ruinous house, through the roof of which the rain • drops perpetually." There is a worse thing even than wretchedness in 66 the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof," and that is, when the rain comes through. Xantippe, as M. St. Marc Girardin takes it, was not the only vixenish, shrewish, cross-grained, acariâtre woman of antiquity; but her violence, as associated. with the serene wisdom of her husband, made a name for her that will be long-lived as his. She is the established type of the contentious woman. Nor was she much less of a torment to her son than to her husband. Socrates, however, putting up patiently with SHREWS AND SCOLDS. 233 the whims and caprices of his wife, enforced upon Lamprocles the duty of bearing with respect the irritating outbreaks of his mother. Seasoned topers have a less sentimental way of regarding the sage: Petruchio is nothing daunted by Hortensio's report of Katharine as "intolerably curst, and shrewd, and froward; so beyond all measure, that," adds the reporter, "were my state far worser than it is, I would not wed her for a mine of gold." Petruchio will woo and wed her off-hand, were she as curst and shrewd As Socrates' Xantippe, or a worse; were she as rough As are the swelling Adriatic seas." Of shrewish Xantippe it has been shrewdly said, that had she been married to a small tradesman of Athens, she would most likely never have risen above the rank of a mere ill-tempered woman ;-but to have an eminent popular lecturer to badger-a man who was one of the foremost figures of the day, whose carte de visite, so to speak, might be seen in every window-this was a chance too good to be neglected by a genuine sportswoman; and she seized it, and won herself a deathless name, in Dr. Lempriere's Dictionary, as the most accomplished Tartar of ancient times. In illustration of the fact that a number of good oldfashioned words, those pictorial and uncompromising epithets in which our forefathers delighted, have gone out of use, and been replaced by polite paraphrases which avoid nothing so much as calling things by their right names, the remark has been made, that we have no shrews or scolds now, but sensitive temperaments and 234 WEDLOCK WORRIES OF SOCRATES, LUTHER, nervous organizations, irritable natures and difficult tempers. "Of shrews and scolds we have as little as of the ducking-stool which was their punishment. And yet the class survives, though its name and award have both passed away." Such a young person as "Katharine the curst" could not, indeed, exist for a moment in any modern drawingroom; but for all its softer manifestation, humanity is not yet purged of its evil humour of shrewishness. It is shown to have been the lot of many great men besides Socrates to have had the same illluck in their matrimonial ventures, and to have drawn a vixen when they put in for a wife. We are referred to Albert Dürer as having drawn such a questionable prize, Milton another. Luther is held by some to have been deservedly punished for marrying at all, by finding in his Catherine a needle-tongued shrew, whose small-beer chroniclings and persistent prate vexed his righteous soul amid his theological meditations, and broke the peace of his sanctum with the din and babble of womanhood when it will not be stilled, like waves that cannot rest. That to Richard Hooker the happiness of Heaven should seem to consist primarily in Order, as indeed in all human societies this is the first thing needful, has been suggestively accounted for, not only because he had been employed in contending against a public spirit of disorder and insubordination, but because his life. had been passed under the perpetual discomfort of domestic discord. Of his wife Joan, Izaak Walton says that she brought him neither beauty nor portion; and "for her conditions, they were too like that wife's, which is by Solomon compared to a dripping house so that he had no reason to 'rejoice in the wife of his youth,' but rather to say with the holy prophet, 'Woe is me, that I am constrained to have my habitation in the tents of Kedar!"" If Hooker was a reader of Chaucer, there |