The pity of it all is that he is so entirely complacent, so absolutely unaware that there is anything amiss.  He does not see that people have to be tenderly and simply wooed to religion, and that they have to be led to take an interest in their own characters and lives.  His idea is that the Church is there, a holy and venerable institution, with undeniable claims on the allegiance and loyalty of all.  Worship is to him a man’s first duty and privilege; and if he finds that one of his parishioners thinks the services tedious, tiresome, or unintelligible, he looks upon him as a child of wrath, perverse and ungodly.  The one chance a clergyman has to gain the confidence of the men of his congregation is when he prepares the boys for confirmation; but the vicar sees them, each alone, week after week, and initiates them into the theory of the Visible Church and the advisability of regular confession.  I confess sadly that it does not seem to me to resemble Christianity at all; in the place of the shrewd, simple, tender, and wise teaching of Christ about daily life and effort, the duties of kindness, purity, unselfishness, he gives an elaborate picture of rites and ceremonies, of mystical and spiritual agencies, which play little part in the life of a day-labourer’s son.  If he would learn something about the points of a horse instead of about the points of an angel, if he would study the rotation of the crops instead of the rotation of Easter-tide, he would find himself far more in line with his flock:  if he would busy himself with getting the boys and girls good places, he would soon have a niche in the hearts of his parishioners; all that he does is to give a ploughboy, who is going off to a neighbouring farm, a little manual of devotion, with ugly and sentimental chromo-lithographs, and beg him to use it night and morning.

His wife is of the same type, a prim and colourless woman, who believes intensely in her husband, and devotes herself to furthering his work.  They have three rather priggish children, whose greatest punishment is not to be allowed to teach in the Sunday-school.

One does not like to laugh at a man whose whole life is spent in doing what he believes to be right; but he seems to have no hold on realities, and to be quite unable to throw himself, by imagination or sympathy, into what his people want or need.  He has no belief in secular education, and thinks it makes people discontented and faithless.  He is generous with his money, spending lavishly on the Church, but he does not believe in what he calls indiscriminate charity.  The incident which has touched him more than any other in the course of his ministry, he will tell you, is when a poor old woman on her death-bed confided to him a few shillings to be spent on providing an altar-frontal.  He gives a Sunday-school feast every year, which begins with a versicle and a response.  “Thou openest Thine Hand,” he says in a rich voice and the children pipe in chorus, “And fillest all things living with plenteousness.”  The day ends with a little service, which he thoroughly enjoys.