Scenes of Clerical Life: Chapter 10

Chapter 10

History, we know, is apt to repeat herself, and to foist very old
incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume. From the time of
Xerxes downwards, we have seen generals playing the braggadocio at the
outset of their campaigns, and conquering the enemy with the greatest
ease in after-dinner speeches. But events are apt to be in disgusting
discrepancy with the anticipations of the most ingenious tacticians; the
difficulties of the expedition are ridiculously at variance with able
calculations; the enemy has the impudence not to fall into confusion as
had been reasonably expected of him; the mind of the gallant general
begins to be distracted by news of intrigues against him at home, and,
notwithstanding the handsome compliments he paid to Providence as his
undoubted patron before setting out, there seems every probability that
the _Te Deums_ will be all on the other side.

So it fell out with Mr. Dempster in his memorable campaign against the
Tryanites. After all the premature triumph of the return from Elmstoke,
the battle of the Evening Lecture had been lost; the enemy was in
possession of the field; and the utmost hope remaining was, that by a

harassing guerilla warfare he might be driven to evacuate the country.

For some time this sort of warfare was kept up with considerable spirit.
The shafts of Milby ridicule were made more formidable by being poisoned
with calumny; and very ugly stories, narrated with circumstantial
minuteness, were soon in circulation concerning Mr. Tryan and his
hearers, from which stories it was plainly deducible that Evangelicalism
led by a necessary consequence to hypocritical indulgence in vice. Some
old friendships were broken asunder, and there were near relations who
felt that religious differences, unmitigated by any prospect of a legacy,
were a sufficient ground for exhibiting their family antipathy. Mr. Budd
harangued his workmen, and threatened them with dismissal if they or
their families were known to attend the evening lecture; and Mr.
Tomlinson, on discovering that his foreman was a rank Tryanite, blustered
to a great extent, and would have cashiered that valuable functionary on
the spot, if such a retributive procedure had not been inconvenient.

On the whole, however, at the end of a few months, the balance of
substantial loss was on the side of the Anti-Tryanites. Mr. Pratt,
indeed, had lost a patient or two besides Mr. Dempster's family; but as
it was evident that Evangelicalism had not dried up the stream of his
anecdote, or in the least altered his view of 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 furnace. 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
tooth 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 thumb'. 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 to 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 sorry 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. Good-bye.'

Janet made the interview as short 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 audiences 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 lollypop, 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 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, distributed
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
Christ-like 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
peony-days, when she had no other model than 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 daresay, 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
heart-pulses 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.

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