To make this
bountiful communication, they adjourned from the church in the Old Jewry
to the London Tavern, where the same Dr. Price, in whom the fumes of his
oracular tripod were not entirely evaporated, moved and carried the
resolution, or address of congratulation, transmitted by Lord Stanhope
to the National Assembly of France.
I find a preacher of the Gospel profaning the beautiful and prophetic
ejaculation, commonly called "_Nunc dimittis_," made on the first
presentation of our Saviour in the temple, and applying it, with an
inhuman and unnatural rapture, to the most horrid, atrocious, and
afflicting spectacle that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and
indignation of mankind. This "_leading in triumph_," a thing in its best
form unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such
unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste of every
well-born mind. Several English were the stupefied and indignant
spectators of that triumph. It was (unless we have been strangely
deceived) a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages
entering into Onondaga after some of their murders called victories, and
leading into hovels hung round with scalps their captives overpowered
with the scoffs and buffets of women as ferocious as themselves, much
more than it resembled the triumphal pomp of a civilized martial
nation;--if a civilized nation, or any men who had a sense of
generosity, were capable of a personal triumph over the fallen and
afflicted.
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