“Eh, Robin, man! ‘Live peaceably with all men.’”
“‘As much as lieth in you.’ Paul was wiser than you, saving your presence.”
“But, Robin, my son,” said Mrs Rose, “I would not say only, for such matters as men may differ in good reason. They cannot agree on the greater things, mon chéri,—nay, nor on the little, littles no more.—Look you, Mr Underhill, we have in this parish a man that call himself a Brownist—I count he think the brown the only colour that is right; if he had made the world, all the flowers should be brown, and the leaves black: eh, ma foi! what of a beautiful world to live in!—Bien! this last May Day, Sir Thomas Enville set up the maypole on the green. ‘Come, Master,’ he said to the Brownist, ‘you dance round the maypole?’—‘Nay, nay,’ saith he, ‘it savoureth of Popery.’ ‘Well,’ quoth he, ‘then you come to prayer in the church! There is nothing against that, I trow?’—‘Good lack, nay!’ saith he, ‘’tis an idle form. I cannot pray without the Spirit aid me; and the Spirit will not be bounden down unto dead forms.’ And so, Mr Underhill, they fall to wrangling. Now, is it not sad? Not only they will not take their pleasure together, but they will not say their prayers together no more. Yet they all look to meet in Heaven. They will not wrangle and quarrel there, I trow? Then why can they not be at peace these few days the sooner?”
This was a long speech for Mrs Rose.
“Well, to speak truth,” said Mr Underhill, “I could find in mine heart to cry ‘Hail, fellow!’ to your Brownist over the maypole: though I see not wherein it savoureth of Popery, but rather of Paganism. Howbeit, as I well know, Popery and Paganism be sisters, and dwell but over the way the one from the other. But as to the Common Prayer being but a form, and that dead,—why, I pray you, what maketh it a dead form save the dead heart of him that useth the same? The very Word of God is but a dead thing, if the soul of him that readeth it be dead.”
A certain section of the laity are earnestly petitioning the clergy for “a hearty service.” Could they make a more absurd request? The heart is in the worshipper, not in the service. And who can bring his heart to it but himself?
“Ma foi!” said Mrs Rose, with a comical little grimace, “but indeed I did think, when we were set at rest from the Queen Mary and her burnings, that we could have lived at peace the ones with the others.”
“Then which counted you to be rid of, Mistress Rose—the childre of God or the childre of the devil?. So long as both be in the world, I reckon there’ll not be o’er much peace,” bluntly replied Underhill.
“Mind you what my dear father was used to say,” asked Mr Tremayne,—“‘Afore the kingdom must come the King’? Ah, dear friends, we have all too little of Christ. ‘We shall be satisfied,’ and we shall be of one mind in all things, only when we wake up ‘after His likeness.’”