f God.

Dr. Beaumont was not an inactive spectator, while he beheld his
parishioners thus exchanging the infirmities of the flesh for spiritual
contumacy; but the evil had spread beyond the reach of lenient remedies.
It is possible to instruct the ignorant, and reform a conscious culprit,
but who shall teach those who are wise in their own eyes, or convince an
offender, who, while he condemns righteousness as filthy rags, boasts of
his freedom from the power of sin. The church was deserted, or
frequented only by the Doctor's most inveterate opponents, who came not
to reform their lives, but to impugn the doctrine of one, whom they had
previously denounced, as not preaching the gospel, and what with
omissions, transpositions, inuendoes, and insertions, they took care so
to disguise his discourses in their reports, as to make him appear to
maintain what he had uniformly controverted.

As his ministerial credentials were thus discredited, even while he
stood by the mercy-seat, as priest of the Most High, so when he
performed the social part of his pastoral functions, his visits to his
flock exposed him to derision and insult. The smile of respectful
affection, and the salute of humility and gratitude, no longer greeted
His Reverence; his charity was received as a right, and the legal
maintenance which the law allowed him was grudgingly paid, or
vexatiously withheld from him, being deemed a pledge of servitude to a
preacher whom the people had not chosen, and who fed them with garbage
instead of wholesome food. Even his own tithe-holder, farmer Humphreys,
was led away by the delusion. He was a man of rough manners and gloomy
unsocial disposition, but he had hitherto never ventured to rebel,
farther than occasionally to absent himself from church, on the Sunday
after every admonition which Dr. Beaumont from time to time privately
gave him to abstain from too free indulgence at market. He would have
thought it sacrilegious as well as impudent to question the lawful
endowment of the church, and he reproved his wife for being piqued at
Mrs. Mellicent's blaming her passion for high-crowned hats, ruffs, and
farthingales, which the sage spinster thought indecorous for yeomen's
wives, though very suitable to Lady Waverly. He silenced the good dame's
remarks on Mrs. Mellicent's interfering disposition, by reminding her of
the value of that lady's green ointment, adding that though she was apt
to be domineering and outrageous, she w