At length when, upon a single line of road, six thousand people were all riding at once fare-free as a flock of pigeons; and when people who held "complimentaries" were asked to hold their tongues when they ought to tell the truth, and shut their eyes when they ought to keep them open; and when editors began to discover that their passes made them about the cheapest commodities in the market, and that, by reason of the bit of pasteboard, they were doing more work for less money than anybody else in America, then there began to be a lull in the pass-system. Railroad Companies had spasms of resolutions that they would confer the degree of D. H. upon nobody. That was incredible, for when a railroad finds it for its _interest_ to issue a pass, you may believe the pass will be forthcoming without a pang. But the clergymen's half-loaf always seemed to me a sort of half-handed charity that should have been resented, in a Christian way, instead of being accepted. That, to-day, they generally recognize the fact that the people who do not pay them should furnish their tickets, instead of the people who never heard of them till they produced their credentials in order to be numbered with the infants, is a more truthful and manful view of the situation.
There are D. H.'s beyond the meaning of the railways. There was a church in Otsego County, N.Y., with as many brains and as much grace in it as in any country church of its time. It had a minister, faithful, able, earnest, who preached out-and-out and through-and-through Bible sermons. He was not a "star-preacher." He knew little about astronomy save the Star of Bethlehem. That man preached forty years for that church, and they never paid him a dollar. They made "bees," and drew up his winter's wood, and cut his grain. That was all.
Well, he was gathered to his fathers, but he had spoiled the church. He had educated it to be D. H. without knowing it. After he died, the deacons went looking about for a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar minister, and you can get about as much minister for that price as you can get psalm-tune out of a file. Finally they tried five hundred dollars' worth. It was a cheap article they got. It was hard to hear him preach, but harder for them to pay him for it. They had been deplorably educated. They were Dead-Heads.