It Is The Society Of All Those Who, For Want
Of A Better Expression, I May Term The Humble-Minded,
Those who have no
aristocratic or exclusive tastes, very simple in their reading and
studies even if well-to-do,
And simple in their daily habits, rising
early and retiring early, and plebeian in their dinner-hour. It is a
peculiar cast of mind that I am trying to describe - a natural frame of
mind; these are 'chapel people' - perhaps a phrase will convey the meaning
better than explanation. This is - their - church, and whatever the
theology may be there is undoubtedly a very strong bond of union among
them.
Not only the old women with their Sunday pennies, but great numbers
beside, young and old of both sexes, take their cup of tea, for these
people take tea with every meal, dinner and supper as well as breakfast
and five o'clock, and if they don't feel well they will rise at two in
the morning to get a cup of tea. They are as Russian as the Russians in
this particular; they have cheese on the table, too, at every meal. The
pastor has, meantime, been entertained with a good dinner at some house
adjacent, where he goes every Sunday; by-and-by the flute begins to tune
again, the hymns resound, and the labour of the day is resumed. Somewhere
about four o'clock the summer-dusty roads are full again of the returning
pilgrims, and the crowd gradually sinks away by footpath and stile. The
black albatross is still wheeling in the upper atmosphere, the
white-barred swallow rushes along the road and dives upwards, the
unwearied roses are still opened to the sun's rays, and calm, indifferent
Nature has pursued her quiet course without heed of pitch-pipe or organ,
or bell or chalice. Perhaps if you chance to be resting by a gate you may
hear one of the cottage women telling her children to let the ants alone
and not tease them, for 'thaay be God's creeturs.' Or possibly the pastor
himself may be overheard discoursing to a bullet-headed woman, with one
finger on the palm of his other hand, 'That's their serpentine way;
that's their subtlety; that's their casuistry; which arguments you may
imagine to refer, as your fancy pleases, to the village curate, or the
tonsured priest of the monastery over the hill. For the tonsured priest,
and the monastery, and the nunnery, and the mass, and the Virgin Mary,
have grown to be a very great power indeed in English lanes. Between the
Roman missal and the chapel hymn-book, the country curate with his good
old-fashioned litany is ground very small indeed, and grows less and less
between these millstones till he approaches the vanishing-point. The
Roman has the broad acres, his patrons have given him the land; the
chapel has the common people, and the farmers are banding together not to
pay tithes. So that his whole soul may well go forth in the apostrophe,
'Good Lord, deliver us!'
There is no man so feasted as the chapel pastor.
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