is fairly endowed; and having some small means of his own, he lives comfortably.  I will add that he is a thoroughly kindly man, and very conscientious in the discharge of what he conceives to be his duty.  He has a great many services on Sunday, somewhat sparsely attended.  He reads matins and vespers every day in his church, and gives an address on saints’ days.  But he seems to have no idea what his parishioners are doing or thinking about, and no particular desire to know.  He is assiduous in visiting, in holding classes, in teaching; he has no sense of humour whatever; and the system of religion which he administers is so perfectly obvious and unquestioned a thing to him, that it never occurs to him to wonder if other people are not built on different lines.  I have often, attended his church and heard him preach; but the sermons which I have heard are either expositions of high doctrine, or else discourses of what I can only call a very feminine and even finicking kind of morality; he preaches on the duty of church-going, on the profane use of scriptural language, on the sanctification of joy, on the advisability of family prayer, on religious meditation, on the examples of saints, on the privilege of devotional exercises, on the consecration of life, on the communion of saints, on the ministry of angels.  But it seems all remote from daily life, and to be a species of religion that can only be successfully cultivated by people of abundant leisure.  I do not mean to say that many of these things do not possess a certain refined beauty of their own; but I do feel that farmers and labourers are not, as a rule, in the stage in which such ideas are possible or even desirable.  I have seen him conduct a children’s service, and then he is in high content, surrounded by clean and well-brushed infants, and smiling girls.  He sits in a chair on the chancel steps, in a paternal attitude, and leads them in a little meditation on the childhood of the Mother of Christ.  Whenever he describes a scene out of the Bible, and he is fond of doing this, it always sounds as if he were describing a stained-glass window; his favourite qualities are meekness, submissiveness, devotion, holiness; and he is apt to illustrate his teaching by the example of the Apostles, whom we are to believe were men of singular modesty because we hear so very little about them.  The modern world has no existence for him whatever; and yet one cannot say that he lives in the Middle Ages, because he knows so little about them; he moves in a paradise of cloistered virgins and mild saints; and the virtue that he chiefly extols is the virtue of faith; the more that reason revolts at a statement, the greater is the triumph of godly faith involved in accepting it unquestioned.

The result is that the little girls love him, the boys laugh at him, the women admire him, the men regard him as not quite a man.  The only objects for which he raises money diligently are additions to the furniture of the church; he takes a languid interest in foreign missions, he mistrusts science, and social questions he frankly dislikes.  I have heard him say, with an air of deep conviction, when the question of the unemployed is raised, “After all, we must remember that the only possible solution of these sad difficulties is a spiritual one.”