Nothing Of Value To Tempt A Man To Steal Was
Kept In The Church.
He had never locked it, but once in his
fifty years it had been locked against him by the
churchwardens.
This happened in the days of the Joseph Arch
agitation, when the agricultural labourer's condition was
being hotly discussed throughout the country. The vicar's
heart was stirred, for he knew better than most how hard these
conditions were at Coombe and in the surrounding parishes. He
took up the subject and preached on it in his own pulpit in a
way that offended the landowners and alarmed the farmers in
the district. The church wardens, who were farmers, then
locked him out of his church, and for two or three weeks there
was no public worship in the parish of Coombe. Doubtless
their action was applauded by all the substantial men in the
neighbourhood; the others who lived in the cottages and were
unsubstantial didn't matter. That storm blew over, but its
consequences endured, one being that the inflammatory parson
continued to be regarded with cold disapproval by the squires
and their larger tenants. But the vicar himself was
unrepentant and unashamed; on the contrary, he gloried in what
he had said and done, and was proud to be able to relate that
a quarter of a century later one of the two men who had taken
that extreme course said to him, "We locked you out of your
own church, but years have brought me to another mind about
that question.
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