attended his church and heard him preach; but the sermons
which I have heard are either expositions of high doctrine, or else
discourses of what I can only call a very feminine and even finicking
kind of morality; he preaches on the duty of church-going, on the
profane use of scriptural language, on the sanctification of joy, on
the advisability of family prayer, on religious meditation, on the
examples of saints, on the privilege of devotional exercises, on the
consecration of life, on the communion of saints, on the ministry of
angels. But it seems all remote from daily life, and to be a species of
religion that can only be successfully cultivated by people of abundant
leisure. I do not mean to say that many of these things do not possess
a certain refined beauty of their own; but I do feel that farmers and
labourers are not, as a rule, in the stage in which such ideas are
possible or even desirable. I have seen him conduct a children's
service, and then he is in high content, surrounded by clean and
well-brushed infants, and smiling girls. He sits in a chair on the
chancel steps, in a paternal attitude, and leads them in a little
meditation on the childhood of the Mother of Christ. Whenever he
describes a scene out of the Bible, and he is fond of doing this, it
always sounds as if he were describing a stained-glass window; his
favourite qualities are meekness, submissiveness, devotion, holiness;
and he is apt to illustrate his teaching by the example of the
Apostles, whom we are to believe were men of singular modesty because
we hear so very little about them. The modern world has no existence
for him whatever; and yet one cannot say that he lives in the Middle
Ages, because he knows so little about them; he moves in a paradise of
cloistered virgins and mild saints; and the virtue that he chiefly
extols is the virtue of faith; the more that reason revolts at a
statement, the greater is the triumph of godly faith involved in
accepting it unquestioned.

The result is that the little girls love him, the boys laugh at him,
the women admire him, the men regard him as not quite a man. The only
objects for which he raises money diligently are additions to the
furniture of the church; he takes a languid interest in foreign
missions, he mistrusts science, and social questions he frankly
dislikes. I have heard him say, with an air of deep conviction, when
the question of the unemployed is raised, "After all, we must remember