's heat, merely to end their days in the parish workhouse,
refused to be comforted. Good people grew alarmed, and goody tracts were
circulated more than ever. The edifying history of the "Shepherd of
Salisbury Plain" was to be seen in many a cottage in our village. The
shepherd earned a shilling a day; he lived in a wretched cottage which
had a hole in the thatch which made his poor wife a martyr to rheumatism
in consequence of the rain coming through. He had eight children to
keep, chiefly on potatoes and salt, but he was happy because he was pious
and contented. A gentleman says to him, "How do you support yourself
under the pressure of actual want? Is not hunger a great weakener of
your faith?" "Sir," replied the shepherd, "I live upon the promises."
Yes, that was the kind of teaching in our village and all over England,
and the villagers got tired of it, and took to firing stacks and barns,
and actually in towns were heard to cry "More pay and less parsons."
What was the world coming to? said dear old ladies. It was well Hannah
More had died and thus been saved from the evil to come. The
Evangelicals were at their wits' end. They wanted people to think of the
life to come, while the people preferred to think of the life that
was--of this world rather than the next.

I am sure that in our village we had too much religion. I write this
seriously and after thinking deeply on the matter. A man has a body to
be cared for, as well as a soul to be saved or damned. Charles Kingsley
was the first to tell us that it was vain to preach to people with empty
stomachs. But when I was a lad preaching was the cure for every ill, and
the more wretched the villagers became the more they were preached to.
There was little hope of any one who did not go to some chapel or other.
There was little help for any one who preferred to talk of his wrongs or
to claim his rights. I must own that the rustic worshipper was a better
man in all the relationships of life--as servant, as husband, as father,
as friend--than the rustic unbeliever. It astonished me not a little to
talk with the former, and to witness his copiousness of Scripture
phraseology and the fluency of his religious talk. He was on a higher
platform. He had felt what Burke wrote when he tells us that religion
was for the man in humble life, to raise his nature and to put him in
mind of a State in which the privileges of opulence will cease, when he
will be equal b