 men by receiving money for discharging the pastoral office in
parishes where they did not so much as look on the faces of the people more than
once a-year. The ecclesiastical historian, too, looking into parliamentary
reports of that period, finds honourable members zealous for the Church, and
untainted with any sympathy for the »tribe of canting Methodists,« making
statements scarcely less melancholy than that of Mr. Roe. And it is impossible
for me to say that Mr. Irwine was altogether belied by the generic
classification assigned him. He really had no very lofty aims, no theological
enthusiasm: if I were closely questioned, I should be obliged to confess that he
felt no serious alarms about the souls of his parishioners, and would have
thought it a mere loss of time to talk in a doctrinal and awakening manner to
old »Feyther Taft,« or even to Chad Cranage the blacksmith. If he had been in
the habit of speaking theoretically, he would perhaps have said that the only
healthy form religion could take in such minds was that of certain dim but
strong emotions, suffusing themselves as a hallowing influence over the family
affections and neighbourly duties. He thought the custom of baptism more
important than its doctrine, and that the religious benefits the peasant drew
from the church where his fathers worshipped and the sacred piece of turf where
they lay buried, were but slightly dependent on a clear understanding of the
Liturgy or the sermon. Clearly the Rector was not what is called in these days
an »earnest« man: he was fonder of church history than of divinity, and had much
more insight into men's characters than interest in their opinions; he was
neither laborious, nor obviously self-denying, nor very copious in almsgiving,
and his theology, you perceive, was lax. His mental palate, indeed, was rather
pagan, and found a savouriness in a quotation from Sophocles or Theocritus that
was quite absent from any text in Isaiah or Amos. But if you feed your young
setter on raw flesh, how can you wonder at its retaining a relish for uncooked
partridge in after-life? and Mr. Irwine's recollections of young enthusiasm and
ambition were all associated with poetry and ethics that lay aloof from the
Bible.
    On the other hand, I must plead, for I have an affectionate partiality
towards the Rector's memory, that he was not vindictive - and some
philanthropists have been so; that he was not intolerant - and there is a rumour
that some zealous theologians have not been altogether free from that blemish;
that although he would probably have declined to give
