Better touch up the fresco, and put on a new roof, and tear out the old pews which ignore the shape of a man's back, and supersede the smoky lamps by clarified kerosene or cheap gas brackets.

Lower you high pulpit that your preacher may come down from the Mont Blanc of his isolation and solitariness into the same climate of sympathy with his audience.

Tear away the old sofa, ragged and spring-broken, on which the pastors of forty years have been obliged to sit, and see whether there are any cats in your antediluvian pulpit.
Would it not be well for us all to look under our church sofas and see if there be anything lurking there that we do not suspect?
A cat, in all languages, has been the symbol of deceit and spitefulness, and she is more fit for an ash barrel than a pulpit.

Since we heard that story of feline nativity, whenever we see a minister of religion, on some question of Christian reform, skulking behind a barrier, and crawling away into some half-and-half position on the subject of temperance or oppression, and daring not to speak out, instead of making his pulpit a height from which to hurl the truth against the enemies of God, turning it into a cowardly hiding place, we say, "Another cat in the pulpit." Whenever we see a professed minister of religion lacking in frankness of soul, deceitful in his friendship, shaking hands heartily when you meet him, but in private taking every possible opportunity of giving you a long, deep scratch, or in public newspapers giving you a sly dig with the claw of his pen, we say: "Another cat in the pulpit!" Once a year let all our churches be cleaned with soap, and sand, and mop, and scrubbing brush, and the sexton not forget to give one turn of his broom under the pastor's chair.

Would that with one bold and emphatic "scat!" we could drive the last specimen of deceitfulness and skulking from the American pulpit!.