They rose as one man, bade him an embarrassed good morning, and walked from the room, some with their heads thrown back, other hanging them forward in worshipful shame. The former spread the rumor that the old minister had gone crazy, the latter began to go now and then to church.
I may here mention, as I shall have no other opportunity, that a new chapel was not built; that the young pastor soon left the old one; that the deacons declared themselves unable to pay the rent; that Mr. Drake took the place into his own hands, and preached there every Sunday evening, but went always in the morning to hear Mr. Wingfold. There was kindly human work of many sorts done by them in concert, and each felt the other a true support. When the pastor and the parson chanced to meet in some lowly cottage, it was never with embarrassment or apology, as if they served two masters, but always with hearty and glad greeting, and they always went away together. I doubt if wickedness does half as much harm as sectarianism, whether it be the sectarianism of the church or of dissent, the sectarianism whose virtue is condescension, or the sectarianism whose vice is pride. Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men, than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken. It is the half-Christian clergy of every denomination that are the main cause of the so-called failure of the Church of Christ. Thank God, it has not failed so miserably as to succeed in the estimation or to the satisfaction of any party in it.
But it was not merely in relation to forms of church government that the heart of the pastor now in his old age began to widen. It is foolish to say that after a certain age a man can not alter. That some men can not--or will not, (God only can draw the line between those two _nots_) I allow; but the cause is not age, and it is not universal. The man who does not care and ceases to grow, becomes torpid, stiffens, is in a sense dead; but he who has been growing all the time need never stop; and where growth is, there is always capability of change: growth itself is a succession of slow, melodious, ascending changes.
The very next Sunday after the visit of their deputation to him, the church in Cow-lane asked their old minister to preach to them. Dorothy, as a matter of course, went with her father, although, dearly as she loved him, she would have much preferred hearing what the curate had to say. The pastor's text was, _Ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law--judgment, mercy, and faith_. In his sermon he enforced certain of the dogmas of a theology which once expressed more truth "than falsehood, but now at least _conveys_ more falsehood than truth, because of the changed conditions of those who teach and those who hear it; for, even where his faith had been vital enough to burst the verbally rigid, formal, and indeed spiritually vulgar theology he had been taught, his intellect had not been strong enough to cast off the husks. His expressions, assertions, and arguments, tying up a bundle of mighty truth with cords taken from the lumber-room and the ash-pit, grazed severely the tenderer nature of his daughter. When they reached the house, and she found herself alone with her father in his study, she broke suddenly into passionate complaint--not that he should so represent God, seeing, for what she knew, He might indeed be such, but that, so representing God, he should expect men to love Him. It was not often that her sea, however troubled in its depths, rose into such visible storm. She threw herself upon the floor with a loud cry, and lay sobbing and weeping. Her father was terribly startled, and stood for a moment as if stunned; then a faint slow light began to break in upon him, and he stood silent, sad, and thoughtful. He knew that he loved God, yet in what he said concerning Him, in the impression he gave of Him, there was that which prevented the best daughter in the world from loving her Father in Heaven! He began to see that he had never really thought about these things; he had been taught them but had never turned them over in the light, never perceived the fact, that, however much truth might be there, there also was what at least looked like a fearful lie against God. For a moment he gazed with keen compassion on his daughter as she lay, actually writhing in her agony, then kneeled beside her, and laying his hand upon her, said gently: