superiority as offensive in public
bodies as in private individuals. They were narrow and exclusive, and
had little effect on the masses, who were left to go to the bad, if not
with supercilious scorn, at any rate with genteel indifference. There
was in the old-fashioned Unitarian meeting-houses something eminently
high and dry. In these days, when we have ceased to regard heaven--to
quote Tom Hood--as anybody's rotten borough, we smile as a handful of
people sing--

"We're a garden walled around,
Planted and made peculiar ground;"

yet no outsider a few years ago could have entered a Unitarian chapel
without feeling that such, more or less, was the abiding conviction of
all present. "Our predominant intellectual attitude," Mr. Orr confesses
to be one reason of the little progress made by the denomination. A
Unitarian could no more conceal his sect than a Quaker. Generally he
wore spectacles; his hair was always arranged so as to do justice to his
phrenological development; on his mouth there always played a smile, half
sarcastic and half self-complacent. Nor was such an expression much to
be wondered at when you remembered that, according to his own idea, and
certainly to his own satisfaction, he had solved all religious doubts,
cleared up all religious mysteries, and annihilated, as far as regards
himself, human infirmities, ignorance, and superstition. It is easy to
comprehend how a congregation of such would be eminently respectable and
calm and self-possessed; indeed, so much so, that you felt inclined to
ask why it should have condescended to come into existence at all. Mrs.
Jarley's waxworks, as described by that lady herself, may be taken as a
very fair description of an average Unitarian congregation at a no very
remote date. Little Nell says, "I never saw any waxworks, ma'am; is it
funnier than _Punch_?" "Funnier?" said Mrs. Jarley, in a shrill voice,
"it is not funny at all." "Oh," said Nell, with all possible humility.
"It is not funny at all," repeated Mrs. Jarley; "it's calm, and what's
that word again--critical? No, classical--that's it; it's calm and
classical. No low beatings and knockings about; no jokings and
squeakings like your precious _Punch's_, but always the same, with a
constantly unchanging air of coldness and gentility." Now it was upon
this coldness and gentility that the Unitarians took their stand; they
eliminated enthusiasm, they ignored the passions, and they fail