SEMI-LUNAR FARDELS OF THE CLERICAL SEX.
By Leonard Woolsey Bacon
THE use of the LL.D. is the most droll and incongruous, but the use of the D.D. is the most discreditable. The wild profusion with which the pages of the clergy list of every sect in America are spotted all over with the symbols described by the late Dr. Cox as "semi-lunar fardels," is due not only to the amiableness or the business enterprise of the colleges, but to the small vanity of what George Eliot unsympathetically characterizes as the clerical sex. Here is a curious paradox,—that the one set of men to whom this sort of distinction is forbidden, under the command, "Be ye not called rabbi," should be the only set of men in America to seek it, and make much of it, and ostentatiously parade it. The lawyer who should put LL.D. on his tin sign, on his briefs, or at the head of his note-paper, would soon find his life made a burden by the wags of his profession. It is only the Christian minister who, being tapped on the one cheek with this accolade, promptly turns the other also. It is well understood that ministers as a class do very much like this kind of thing; and faithfully doing to others as they would that these should do to them, are punctilious in bandying complimentary titles among themselves, such as are disused by the good taste and self-respect of mere secular men.—Rev. Dr. Leonard Woolsey Bacon, in the June Forum.