Scenes of Clerical Life
any lady's constitution, it is probable that a change accompanied by so few
outward and visible signs, was rather the pretext than the ground of his
dismissal in those additional cases. Mr Dunn was threatened with the loss of
several good customers, Mrs Phipps and Mrs Lowme having set the example of
ordering him to send in his bill; and the draper began to look forward to his
next stock-taking with an anxiety which was but slightly mitigated by the
parallel his wife suggested between his own case and that of Shadrach, Meshech,
and Abednego, who were thrust into a burning fiery furance. For, as he observed
to her the next morning, with that perspicacity which belongs to the period of
shaving, whereas their deliverance consisted in the fact that their linen and
woollen goods were not consumed, his own deliverance lay in precisely the
opposite result. But convenience, that admirable branch system from the main
line of self-interest, makes us all fellow-helpers in spite of adverse
resolutions. It is probable that no speculative or theological hatred would be
ultimately strong enough to resist the persuasive power of convenience: that a
latitudinarian baker, whose bread was honourably free from alum, would command
the custom of any dyspeptic Puseyite; that an Arminian with the toothache would
prefer a skilful Calvinistic dentist to a bungler stanch against the doctrines
of Election and Final Perseverance, who would be likely to break the booth in
his head; and that a Plymouth Brother, who had a well-furnished grocery-shop in
a favourable vicinage, would occasionally have the pleasure of furnishing sugar
or vinegar to orthodox families that found themselves unexpectedly "out of"
those indispensable commodities. In this persuasive power of convenience lay Mr
Dunn's ultimate security from martyrdom. His drapery was the best in Milby; the
comfortable use and wont of procuring satisfactory articles at a moment's notice
proved too strong for Anti-Tryanite zeal; and the draper could soon look forward
to his next stock-taking without the support of a Scriptural Parallel.
On the other hand, Mr Dempster had lost his excellent client, Mr Jerome?a loss
which galled him out of proportion to the mere monetary deficit it represented.
The attorney loved money, but he loved power still better. He had always been
proud of having early won the confidence of a conventicle-goer, and of being
able to "turn the prop of Salem round his thumbn." Like most other men, too, he
had a certain kindness towards those who had employed him when he was only
starting in life; and just as we do not like to part with an old weather-glass
from our study, or a two-feet ruler that we have carried in our pocket ever
since we began business, so Mr Dempster did not like having to erase his old
client's name from the accustomed drawer in the bureau. Our habitual life is
like a wall hung with pictures, which has been shone on by the suns of many
years: take one of the pictures away, and it leaves a definite blank space, to
which our eyes can never turn without a sensation of discomfort. Nay, the
involuntary loss of any familiar object almost always brings a chill as from an
evil omen; it seems to be the first finger-shadow of advancing death.
From all these causes combined, Mr Dempster could never think of his lost client
without strong irritation, and the very sight of Mr Jerome passing in the street
was wormwood to him.
One day, when the old gentleman was coming up Orchard Street on his roan mare,
shaking the bridle, and tickling her flank with the whip as usual, though there
was a perfect mutual understanding that she was not to quicken her pace, Janet
happened to be on her own door-step, and he could not resist the temptation of
stopping to speak to that "nice little woman," as he always called her, though
she was taller than all the rest of his feminine acquaintances. Janet, in spite
of her disposition of take her husband's part in all public matters, could bear
no malice against her old friend; so they shook hands.
"Well, Mrs Dempster, I'm surry to my heart not to see you sometimes, that I am,"
said Mr Jerome, in a plaintive tone. "But if you've got any poor people as wants
help, and you know's deservin', send 'em to me, send 'em to me, just the same."
"Thank you, Mr Jerome, that I will. Goodby."
Janet made the interview as shot as she could, but it was not short enough to
escape the observation of her husband, who, as she feared, was on his mid-day
return from his office at the other end of the street, and this offence of hers,
in speaking to Mr Jerome, was the frequently recurring theme of Mr Dempster's
objurgatory domestic eloquence.
Associating the loss of his old client with Mr Tryan's influence, Dempster began
to know more distinctly why he hated the obnoxious curate. But a passionate
hate, as well as a passionate love, demands some leisure and mental freedom.
Persecution and revenge, like courtship and toadyism, will not prosper without a
considerable expenditure of time and ingenuity, and these are not to spare with
a man whose law-business and liver are both beginning to show unpleasant
symptoms. Such was the disagreeable turn affairs were taking with Mr Dempster,
and, like the general distracted by home intrigues, he was too much harassed
himself to lay ingenious plans for harassing the enemy.
Meanwhile, the evening lecture drew larger and larger congregations; not,
perhaps, attracting many from that select aristocratic circle in which the
Lowmes and Pittmans were predominant, but winning the larger proportion of Mr
Crewe's morning and afternoon hearers, and thinning Mr Stickney's evening
audieness at Salem. Evangelicalism was making its way in Milby, and gradually
diffusing its subtle odour into chambers that were bolted and barred against it.
The movement, like all other religious "revivals," had a mixed effect. Religious
ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken
up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of
tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is
detestable. It may be that some of Mr Tryan's hearers had gained a religious
vocabulary rather than religious experience; that here and there a weaver's
wife, who, a few months before, had been simply a silly slattern, was converted
into that more complex nuisance, a silly and sanctimonious slattern; that the
old Adam, with the pertinacity of middle age, continued to tell fibs behind the
counter, notwithstanding the new Adam's addiction to Bible-reading and family
prayer; that the children in the Paddiford Sunday-school had their memories
crammed with phrases about the blood of cleansing, imputed righteousness, and
justification by faith alone, which an experience lying principally in
chuck-farthing, hop-scotch, parental slappings, and longings after unattainable
lolly-pop, served rather to darken than to illustrate; and that at Milby, in
those distant days, as in all other times and places where the mental atmosphere
is changing, and men are inhaling the stimulus of new ideas, folly often mistook
br />
itself for wisdom, ignorance gave itself airs of knowledge, and selfishness,
turning its eyes upward, called itself religion.
Nevertheless, Evangelicalism had brought into palpable existence and operation
in Milby society that idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived
for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, which is to the moral life what the
addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to
mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of
experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced
into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and
impulses. Whatever might be the weaknesses of the ladies who pruned the
luxuriance of their lace and ribbons, cut out garments for the poor, disributed
tracts, quoted Scripture, and defined the true Gospel, they had learned
this?that there was a divine work to be done in life, a rule of goodness higher
than the opinion of their neighbours; and if the notion of a heaven in reserve
for themselves was a little too prominent, yet the theory of fitness for that
heaven consisted in purity of heart, in Christlike compassion, in the subduing
of selfish desires. They might give the name of piety to much that was only
puritanic egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin; but they
had at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted, and
colour-blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total
blindness which sees no distinction of colour at all. Miss Rebecca Linnet, in
quiet attire, with a somewhat excessive solemnity of countenance, teaching at
the Sunday School, visiting the poor, and striving after a standard of purity
and goodness, had surely more moral loveliness than in those flaunting
peonydays, when she had no other model then the costumes of the heroines in the
circulating library. Miss Eliza Pratt, listening in rapt attention to Mr Tryan's
evening lecture, no doubt found evangelical channels for vanity and egoism; but
she was clearly in moral advance of Miss Phipps giggling under her feathers at
old Mr Crewe's peculiarities of enunciation. And even elderly fathers and
mothers, with minds, like Mrs Linnet's, too tough to imbibe much doctrine, were
the better for having their hearts inclined towards the new preacher as a
messenger from God. They became ashamed, perhaps, of their evil tempers, ashamed
of their worldliness, ashamed of their trivial, futile past. The first condition
of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence. And
this latter precious gift was brought to Milby by Mr Tryan and Evangelicalism.
Yes, the movement was good, though it had that mixture of folly and evil which
often makes what is good an offence to feeble and fastidious minds, who want
human actions and characters riddled through the sieve of their own ideas,
before they can accord their sympathy or admiration. Such minds, I dare say,
would have found Mr Tryan's character very much in need of that riddling
process. The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to
be done by perfect men; and I should imagine that neither Luther nor John
Bunyan, for example, would have satisfied the modern demand for an ideal hero,
who believes nothing but what is true, feels nothing but what is exalted, and
does nothing but what is graceful. The real heroes, of God's making, are quite
different: they have their natural heritage of love and conscience which they
drew in with their mother's milk; they know one or two of those deep spiritual
truths which are only to be won by long wrestling with their own sins and their
own sorrows; they have earned faith and strength so far as they have done
genuine work: but the rest is dry barren theory, blank prejudice, vague hearsay.
Their insight is blended with mere opinion; their sympathy is perhaps confined
in narrow conduits of doctrine, instead of flowing forth with the freedom of a
stream that blesses every weed in its course; obstinacy or self-assertion will
often interfuse itself with their grandest impulses; and their very deeds of
self-sacrifice are sometimes only the rebound of a passionate egoism. So it was
with Mr Tryan: and any one looking at him with the bird's-eye glance of a critic
might perhaps say that he made the mistake of identifying Christianity with a
too narrow doctrinal system; that he saw God's work too exclusively in
antagonism to the world, the flesh, and the devil; that his intellectual culture
was too limited ?and so on; making Mr Tryan the text for a wise discourse on the
characteristics of the Evangelical school in his day.
But I am not poised at that lofty height. I am on the level and in the press
with him, as he struggles his way along the stony road, through the crowd of
unloving fellow-men. He is stumbling, perhaps; his heart now beats fast with
dread, now heavily with anguish; his eyes are sometimes dim with tears, which he
makes haste to dash away; he pushes manfully on, with fluctuating faith and
courage, with a sensitive failing body; at last he falls, the struggle is ended,
and the crowd closes over the space he has left.
"One of the Evangelical clergy, a disciple of Venn," says the critic from his
bird's-eye station. "Not a remarkable specimen; the anatomy and habits of his
species have been determined long ago."
Yet surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which
enables us to feel with him?which gives us a fine ear for the heartpulses that
are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion. Our subtlest
analysis of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up
by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and work, the life and death
struggles of separate human beings.
CHAPTER XI.
Mr Tryan's most unfriendly observers were obliged to admit that he gave himself
no rest. Three sermons on Sunday, a night-school for young men on Tuesday, a
cottage-lecture on Thursday, addresses to school-teachers, and catechising of
school-children, with pastoral visits, multiplying as his influence extended
beyond his own district of Paddiford Common, would have been enough to tax
severely the powers of a much stronger man. Mr Pratt remonstrated with him on
his imprudence, but could not prevail on him so far to economise time and
strength as to keep a horse. On some ground or other, which his friends found
difficult to explain to themselves, Mr Tryan seemed bent on wearing himself out.
His enemies were at no loss to account for such a course. The Evangelical
curate's selfishness was clearly of too bad a kind to exhibit itself after the
ordinary manner of a sound, respectable selfishness. "He wants to get the
reputation of a saint," said one; "He's eaten up with spiritual pride," said
another; "He's got his eye on some fine living, and wants to creep up the
bishop's sleeve," said a third.
Mr Stickney, of Salem, who considered all voluntary discomfort as a remnant of
the legal spirit, pronounced a severe condemnation on this self-neglect, and
r /> expressed his fear that Mr Tryan was still far from having attained true
Christian liberty. Good Mr Jerome eagerly seized this doctrinal view of the
subject as a means of enforcing the suggestions of his own benevolence; and one
cloudy afternoon, in the end of November, he mounted his roan mare with the
determination of riding to Paddiford and "arguying" the point with Mr Tryan.
The old gentleman's face looked very mournful as he rode along the dismal
Paddiford lanes, between rows of grimy houses, darkened with handlooms, while
the black dust was whirled about him by the cold November wind. He was thinking
of the object which had brought him on this afternoon ride, and his thoughts,
according to his habit when alone, found vent every now and then in audible
speech. It seemed to him, as his eyes rested on this scene of Mr Tryan's
labours, that he could understand the clergyman's self-privation without
resorting to Mr Stickney's theory of defective spiritual enlightenment. Do not
philosophic doctors tell us that we are unable to discern so much as a tree,
except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate
sensations; that no one sense is independent of another, so that we can hardly
taste a fricassee, or tell whether our pipe is alight or not, in the dark, and
the most intelligent boy, if accommodated with claws or hoofs instead of
fingers, would be likely to remain on the lowest form? If so, it is easy to
understand that our discernment of men's motives must depend on the completeness
of the elements we can bring from our own susceptibility and our own experience.
See to it, friend, before you pronounce a too hasty judgment, that your own
moral sensibilities are not of a hoofed or clawed character. The keenest eye
will not serve, unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtle nerve
filaments, which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible
world of human sensations.
As for Mr Jerome, he drew the elements of his moral vision from the depths of
his veneration and pity. If he himself felt so much for these poor things to
whom life was so dim and meagre, what must the clergyman feel who had undertaken
before God to be their shepherd?
"Ah!" he whispered, interruptedly, "it's too big a load for his conscience, poor
man! He wants to mek himself their brother, like; can't abide to preach to the
fastin' on a full stomach. Ah! he's better nor we are, that's it?he's a deal
better nor we are."
Here Mr Jerome shook his bridle violently, and looked up with an air of moral
courage, as if Mr Stickney had been present, and liable to take offence at this
conclusion. A few minutes more brought him in front of Mrs Wagstaff's, where Mr
Tryan lodged. He had often been here before, so that the contrast between this
ugly square brick house, with its shabby bit of grass-plot, stared at all round
by cottage windows, and his own pretty white home, set in a paradise of orchard,
and garden, and pasture, was not new to him; but he felt it with fresh force
to-day, as he slowly fastened his roan by the bridle to the wooden paling, and
knocked at the door. Mr Tryan was at home, and sent to request that Mr Jerome
would walk up into his study, as the fire was out in the parlour below.
At the mention of a clergyman's study, perhaps, your too active imagination
conjures up a perfect snuggery, where the general air of comfort is rescued from
a secular character by strong ecclesiastical suggestions in the shape of the
furniture, the pattern of the carpet, and the prints on the wall; where, if a
nap is taken, it is in an easy-chair with a Gothic back, and the very feet rest
on a warm and velvety simulation of church windows; where the pure art of
rigorous English Protestantism smiles above the mantel-piece in the portrait of
an eminent bishop, or a refined Anglican taste is indicated by a German print