Ellen Gray or, The dead maiden's curse. A poem, by the late Dr. Archibald Macleod [i.e. W. L. Bowles] |
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 | Ellen Gray |  |
That Hubert's heart confess'd another flame:
That, cold and wayward falsehood made him prove
At once a traitor to his faith and love;
That, with our Bailiff's daughter he was seen,
At the new Tabernacle on the green;
Had join'd the Calvinistic flock, and there
Renounc'd his pray'r-book, yea, our Saviour's pray'r ;
Poor Ellen's heart to break—it was decreed!
The poet is unhappily borne out in this incident, by the actual fact of the rejection of the Lord's Prayer and Ten Commandments, in the service of certain places of dissenting worship. It is in the recollection of our readers, that during the course of last year, a witness appeared to give evidence in one of our courts of justice, who had constantly attended a place of worship with her mother, but never heard of the Lord's Prayer, or the Ten Commandments: the judge, very properly, refused to admit her evidence, until she had been six months under the instruction of a clergyman of the Church of England. Such a fact speaks volumes, and may be considered as a practical comment upon an expression of Bunyan, in his “Pilgrim's Progress,” who calls going to church, going to the town of morality.
The Doctor, in the lines to which this note refers, cannot be supposed to allude to the philosophical, or at least sober, Calvinism of the Scotch and Genevan churches; but to the vulgar and terrible Calvinism mouthed out by the ignoramuses, enthusiasts, or something worse, of some of our own conventicles.
| Ellen Gray | |