Several vain attempts followed, before a new subject was started, sufficiently uninteresting to cause, neither from warmth nor stupidity, any danger of dissension, and quite worthy of being here omitted.

Dinner over, and the ceremony of tea —­ in Lady Emily’s case, milk and water —­ having been observed, the visitors withdrew.

The next day was Sunday.  Lady Emily came down stairs in black, which suited her better.  She was a pretty, gentle creature, interesting from her illness, and good, because she knew no evil, except what she heard of from the pulpit.  They walked to church, which was at no great distance, along a meadow-path paved with flags, some of them worn through by the heavy shoes of country generations.  The church was one of those which are, in some measure, typical of the Church itself; for it was very old, and would have been very beautiful, had it not been all plastered over, and whitened to a smooth uniformity of ugliness —­ the attempt having been more successful in the case of the type.  The open roof had had a French heaven added to it —­ I mean a ceiling; and the pillars, which, even if they were not carved —­ though it was impossible to come to a conclusion on that point —­ must yet have been worn into the beauty of age, had been filled up, and stained with yellow ochre.  Even the remnants of stained glass in some of the windows, were half concealed by modern appliances for the partial exclusion of the light.  The church had fared as Chaucer in the hands of Dryden.  So had the truth, that flickered through the sermon, fared in the hands of the clergyman, or of the sermon-wright whose manuscript he had bought for eighteen pence —­ I am told that sermons are to be procured at that price —­ on his last visit to London.  Having, although a Scotchman, had an episcopalian education, Hugh could not help rejoicing that not merely the Bible, but the Church-service as well, had been fixed beyond the reach of such degenerating influences as those which had operated on the more material embodiments of religion; for otherwise such would certainly have been the first to operate, and would have found the greatest scope in any alteration.  We may hope that nothing but a true growth in such religion as needs and seeks new expression for new depth and breadth of feeling, will ever be permitted to lay the hand of change upon it —­ a hand, otherwise, of desecration and ruin.

The sermon was chiefly occupied with proving that God is no respecter of persons; a mark of indubitable condescension in the clergyman, the rank in society which he could claim for himself duly considered.  But, unfortunately, the church was so constructed, that its area contained three platforms of position, actually of differing level; the loftiest, in the chancel, on the right hand of the pulpit, occupied by the gentry; the middle, opposite the pulpit, occupied by the tulip-beds of their servants; and the third, on the left of the pulpit, occupied by the common