Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood

“I do not quite understand you, Miss Hester,” I returned.

“Why, Mr Walton—I hope you will not think me rude, but it always seems to me—and it has given me much pain, when I consider that your congregation is chiefly composed of the lower classes, who may be greatly injured by such a style of preaching. I must say I think so, Mr Walton. Only perhaps you are one of those who think a lady’s opinion on such matters is worth nothing.”

“On the contrary, I respect an opinion just as far as the lady or gentleman who holds it seems to me qualified to have formed it first. But you have not yet told me what you think so objectionable in my preaching.”

“You always speak as if faith in Christ was something greater than duty. Now I think duty the first thing.”

“I quite agree with you, Miss Crowther. For how can I, or any clergyman, urge a man to that which is not his duty? But tell me, is not faith in Christ a duty? Where you have mistaken me is, that you think I speak of faith as higher than duty, when indeed I speak of faith as higher than any OTHER duty. It is the highest duty of man. I do not say the duty he always sees clearest, or even sees at all. But the fact is, that when that which is a duty becomes the highest delight of a man, the joy of his very being, he no more thinks or needs to think about it as a duty. What would you think of the love of a son who, when an appeal was made to his affections, should say, ‘Oh yes, I love my mother dearly: it is my duty, of course?’”

“That sounds very plausible, Mr Walton; but still I cannot help feeling that you preach faith and not works. I do not say that you are not to preach faith, of course; but you know faith without works is dead.”

“Now, really, Hester,” interposed Miss Jemima, “I cannot think how it is, but, for my part, I should have said that Mr Walton was constantly preaching works. He’s always telling you to do something or other. I know I always come out of the church with something on my mind; and I’ve got to work it off somehow before I’m comfortable.”

And here Miss Jemima got up on the chair again, and began to flirt with the cockatoo once more, but only in silent signs.

I cannot quite recall how this part of the conversation drew to a close. But I will tell a fact or two about the sisters which may possibly explain how it was that they took up such different notions of my preaching. The elder scarce left the house, but spent almost the whole of her time in reading small dingy books of eighteenth century literature. She believed in no other; thought Shakespeare sentimental where he was not low, and Bacon pompous; Addison thoroughly respectable and gentlemanly. Pope was the great English poet, incomparably before Milton. The “Essay on Man” contained the deepest wisdom; the “Rape of the Lock” the most graceful imagination to be found in the language. The “Vicar of Wakefield” was pretty, but foolish; while in philosophy, Paley was perfect, especially in his notion of happiness, which she had heard objected to, and therefore warmly defended. Somehow or other, respectability—in position, in morals, in religion, in conduct—was everything. The consequence was that her very nature was old-fashioned, and had nothing in it of that lasting youth which is the birthright—so often despised—of every immortal being. But I have already said more about her than her place in my story justifies.

Miss Crowther, on the contrary, whose eccentricities did not lie on the side of respectability, had gone on shocking the stiff proprieties of her younger sister till she could be shocked no more, and gave in as to the hopelessness of fate. She had had a severe disappointment in youth, had not only survived it, but saved her heart alive out of it, losing only, as far as appeared to the eyes of her neighbours at least, any remnant of selfish care about herself; and she now spent the love which had before been concentrated upon one object, upon every living thing that came near her, even to her sister’s sole favourite, the wheezing poodle. She was very odd, it must be confessed, with her gray hair, her clear gray eye with wrinkled eyelids, her light step, her laugh at once girlish and cracked; darting in and out of the cottages, scolding this matron with a lurking smile in every tone, hugging that baby, boxing the ears of the other little tyrant, passing this one’s rent, and threatening that other with awful vengeances, but it was a very lovely oddity. Their property was not large, and she knew every living thing on the place down to the dogs and pigs. And Miss Jemima, as the people always called her, transferring the MISS CROWTHER of primogeniture to the younger, who kept, like King Henry IV.,—

“Her presence, like a robe pontifical,
Ne’er seen but wonder’d at,”

was the actual queen of the neighbourhood; for, though she was the very soul of kindness, she was determined to have her own way, and had it.

Although I did not know all this at the time, such were the two ladies who held these different opinions about my preaching; the one who did nothing but read Messrs Addison, Pope, Paley, and Co., considering that I neglected the doctrine of works as the seal of faith, and the one who was busy helping her neighbours from morning to night, finding little in my preaching, except incentive to benevolence.

The next point where my recollection can take up the conversation, is where Miss Hester made the following further criticism on my pulpit labours.

“You are too anxious to explain everything, Mr Walton.”

I pause in my recording, to do my critic the justice of remarking that what she said looks worse on paper than it sounded from her lips; for she was a gentlewoman, and the tone has much to do with the impression made by the intellectual contents of all speech.

“Where can be the use of trying to make uneducated people see the grounds of everything?” she said. “It is enough that this or that is in the Bible.”

“Yes; but there is just the point. What is in the Bible? Is it this or that?”

“You are their spiritual instructor: tell them what is in the Bible.”

“But you have just been objecting to my mode of representing what is in the Bible.”

“It will be so much the worse, if you add argument to convince them of what is incorrect.”

“I doubt that. Falsehood will expose itself the sooner that honest argument is used to support it.”

“You cannot expect them to judge of what you tell them.”

“The Bible urges upon us to search and understand.”

“I grant that for those whose business it is, like yourself.”

“Do you think, then, that the Church consists of a few privileged to understand, and a great many who cannot understand, and therefore need not be taught?”

“I said you had to teach them.”

“But to teach is to make people understand.”

“I don’t think so. If you come to that, how much can the wisest of us understand? You remember what Pope says,—

‘Superior beings, when of late they saw
A mortal man unfold all Nature’s law,
Admired such wisdom in an earthly shape,
And show’d a Newton as we show an ape’?”

“I do not know the passage. Pope is not my Bible. I should call such superior beings very inferior beings indeed.”

“Do you call the angels inferior beings?”

“Such angels, certainly.”

“He means the good angels, of course.”

“And I say the good angels could never behave like that, for contempt is one of the lowest spiritual conditions in which any being can place himself. Our Lord says, ‘Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones, for their angels do always behold the face of my Father, who is in heaven.’”

“Now will you even say that you understand that passage?”

“Practically, well enough; just as the poorest man of my congregation may understand it. I am not to despise one of the little ones. Pope represents the angels as despising a Newton even.”

“And you despise Pope.”

“I hope not. I say he was full of despising, and therefore, if for no other reason, a small man.”

“Surely you do not jest at his bodily infirmities?”

“I had forgotten them quite.”

“In every other sense he was a great man.”

“I cannot allow it. He was intellectually a great man, but morally a small man.”

“Such refinements are not easily followed.”

“I will undertake to make the poorest woman in my congregation understand that.”

“Why don’t you try your friend Mrs Oldcastle, then? It might do her a little good,” said Miss Hester, now becoming, I thought, a little spiteful at hearing her favourite treated so unceremoniously. I found afterwards that there was some kindness in it, however.

“I should have very little influence with Mrs Oldcastle if I were to make the attempt. But I am not called upon to address my flock individually upon every point of character.”

“I thought she was an intimate friend of yours.”