P. T. Barnum

“ If you eat a piece of pork, it will go crooked through you, and the Holy Ghost will not stay in you; but one or the other must leave the house pretty soon. The pork will be as crooked in you as rams’ horns.” Again, he made these pleasant points about the ladies: “They who teach women are of the wicked. All females who lecture their husbands their sentence is: ‘Depart, ye wicked, I know you not.’ Everything that has the smell of woman will be destroyed. ”

“ His New York city dupes, Elijah Pierson and Benjamin H. Folger and their families, together with a Mr. Mills and a few more, figured prominently in the chief chapter of Matthews career, during two years and a half, from May, 1832, to the fall of 1834.
Pierson and Folger were the leaders in the folly. These men, merchants of wealth and successful in business, were of that sensitive and impressible religious nature which is peculiarly credulous and liable to enthusiams and delusions. ”

“ Or, Yankee Superstitions.—Matthias the Impostor.—New York Follies Thirty Years Ago.
There is a story that on a great and solemn public occasion of the Romish Church, a Pope and a Cardinal were, with long faces, performing some of the gyrations of the occasion, when, instead of a pious ejaculation and reply, which were down in the programme, one said to the other gravely, in Latin “mundus vult decipi;” and the other replied, with equal gravity and learning, “decipiatur ergo:” that is, “All the world chooses to be fooled.”—“Let it be fooled then.” ”

“ It may seem inapplicable to cool, sharp, school-trained Protestant Yankees. It is not, however—at least, not entirely. Intelligent Northerners have, sometimes, superstition enough in them to make a first-class Popish saint. ”