Sally Bishop: A Romance

by E. Temple Thurston

For two years Sally Bishop had been one amongst them. For two years she had caught her tram at Kew Bridge in the morning and her tram again at Hammersmith at night. Only her Sundays and her Saturday afternoons were free, except for those two wonderful weeks in the summer and the yawning gaps in the side of the year which are known as National holidays.

When—where did the bugle sound that called Sally to her conscription? What press-gang of circumstances waylaid her, in what peaceful wandering of life, and bore her off to the service of her sex?

There is a little story attached to it—one of those slight, slender threads of incident that go to form a shadow here or a light there in the broad tapestry of the whole.

The Rev. Samuel Bishop was rector of the parish church in the little town of Cailsham, in Kent. This was Sally's father. There never was a meeker man; there never was a man more truly fitted with those characteristics of piety which are essentially and only Christian. With charity he was filled, though he had but little to bestow—his whole intellect was subordinated to his faith—and with the light of hope his little eyes glittered so long as one straw lay floating on the tide.

This is the man whom Christianity demands, and this the very man whom Christianity crushes like a slug under the heel. He is bound to be a failure—bound to hope too much, be blind with faith, and give, out of charity, with the witless hand that knows not where to bestow.

For ten years he had held the parish of Cailsham, fulfilling all his duties by that rule of thumb which is the refuge to all those lacking in initiative. Not one of the parishioners could find any fault with him, yet none bore him respect. They blinked through his services. During his deliberate intoning of the lessons, they thought of all their worldly affairs, and while he preached, they slept.

Hundreds of parishes are served with men like the Rev. Samuel Bishop. It is half the decay of Christianity that the prospect of a fat living will induce men to adopt the profession of the Church. This is the irony of life in all religions, that to be kept going, to increase and multiply, they must be financially sound; yet as soon as that financial security is reached, you have men pouring into their offices who seek no more than a comfortable living.

There is only one true religion, the ministry of the head to the devotion of the heart. You need no priesthood here, but the priesthood of conscience; you need no costly erection of churches, but the open world of God's house of worship. There is no necessity for the training of voices, when the choir of Nature can sing in harmony as no voice ever sang. There is no call now for the two or three to gather together. The group system has had its day, has done its work. The two or three who gather together now, do so, not in a communion of mind, but in criticism and fear. Each knows quite well what the other is thinking of. Where is the necessity for one common prayer to bring their souls together? Their souls are already tearing at each other's throats.

You would not have found the Rev. Samuel Bishop agreeing to this. How could any man consent to give up his livelihood, even for the truth? This gentleman would have stayed on in his parish, happy in his hopeless incompetence, until his parishioners might have sent in a third request for his retirement, had not the irony of circumstance broken him upon its unyielding anvil.

For ten years, as has been said, he had held the rectorship of the parish of Cailsham. Sally was then fourteen years of age. Her mother, one of those hard yet well-featured women upon whom the struggle of life wears with but little ill-effect, had endeavoured to bring her up in the first belief of social importance consistent, to an illogical mind, with the teachings of her husband's calling. But she had failed. It was grained in the nature of Sally to let the morrow take thought for the things of itself. The other three children, the boy up at Oxford, the two girls, one older, the other younger than Sally, were different. With them she succeeded. Into their minds she instilled the knowledge that, of all professions, the Church takes the highest rank in the social scale, and though in the world itself they might have found that hard to believe, yet in the little town of Cailsham Mrs. Bishop had discovered her capacity for draining from her husband's parishioners a certain social deference and respect.