that the only possible solution of these sad difficulties is a
spiritual one."

The pity of it all is that he is so entirely complacent, so absolutely
unaware that there is anything amiss. He does not see that people have
to be tenderly and simply wooed to religion, and that they have to be
led to take an interest in their own characters and lives. His idea is
that the Church is there, a holy and venerable institution, with
undeniable claims on the allegiance and loyalty of all. Worship is to
him a man's first duty and privilege; and if he finds that one of his
parishioners thinks the services tedious, tiresome, or unintelligible,
he looks upon him as a child of wrath, perverse and ungodly. The one
chance a clergyman has to gain the confidence of the men of his
congregation is when he prepares the boys for confirmation; but the
vicar sees them, each alone, week after week, and initiates them into
the theory of the Visible Church and the advisability of regular
confession. I confess sadly that it does not seem to me to resemble
Christianity at all; in the place of the shrewd, simple, tender, and
wise teaching of Christ about daily life and effort, the duties of
kindness, purity, unselfishness, he gives an elaborate picture of rites
and ceremonies, of mystical and spiritual agencies, which play little
part in the life of a day-labourer's son. If he would learn something
about the points of a horse instead of about the points of an angel, if
he would study the rotation of the crops instead of the rotation of
Easter-tide, he would find himself far more in line with his flock: if
he would busy himself with getting the boys and girls good places, he
would soon have a niche in the hearts of his parishioners; all that he
does is to give a ploughboy, who is going off to a neighbouring farm, a
little manual of devotion, with ugly and sentimental chromo-lithographs,
and beg him to use it night and morning.

His wife is of the same type, a prim and colourless woman, who believes
intensely in her husband, and devotes herself to furthering his work.
They have three rather priggish children, whose greatest punishment is
not to be allowed to teach in the Sunday-school.

One does not like to laugh at a man whose whole life is spent in doing
what he believes to be right; but he seems to have no hold on
realities, and to be quite unable to throw himself, by imagination or
sympathy, into what his people want or need. He has no belief in