He was shown into the library—in which were two mahogany cases with plate-glass doors, full of books, well cared for as to clothing and condition, and perfectly placid, as if never disturbed from one week’s end to another. In a minute Mr Marshal entered—so changed that he could never have recognized him—still, however, a kind-hearted, genial man. He received his classfellow cordially and respectfully—referred merrily to old times, and begged to know how he was getting on, asked whether he had come to London with any special object, and invited him to dine with them on Sunday. He accepted the invitation, met him, according to agreement, at a certain chapel in Kentish Town, of which he was a deacon, and walked home with him and his wife.
They had but one of their family at home—the youngest son, whom his father was having educated for the dissenting ministry, in the full conviction that he was doing not a little for the truth, and justifying its cause before men, by devoting to its service the son of a man of standing and worldly means, whom he might have easily placed in a position to make money. The youth was of simple character and good inclination—ready to do what he saw to be right, but slow in putting to the question anything that interfered with his notions of laudable ambition, or justifiable self-interest. He was attending lectures at a dissenting college in the neighbourhood, for his father feared Oxford or Cambridge, not for his morals, but his opinions in regard to church and state.
The schoolmaster spent a few days in the house. His friend was generally in town, and his wife, regarding him as very primitive and hardly fit for what she counted society—the class, namely, that she herself represented, was patronising and condescending; but the young fellow, finding, to his surprise, that he knew a great deal more about his studies than he did himself, was first somewhat attracted and then somewhat influenced by him, so that at length an intimacy tending to friendship arose between them.
Mr Graham was not a little shocked to discover that his ideas in respect of the preacher’s calling were of a very worldly kind. The notions of this fledgling of dissent differed from those of a clergyman of the same stamp in this:—the latter regards the church as a society with accumulated property for the use of its officers; the former regarded it as a community of communities, each possessing a preaching house which ought to be made commercially successful. Saving influences must emanate from it of course— but dissenting saving influences.
His mother was a partisan to a hideous extent. To hear her talk you would have thought she imagined the apostles the first dissenters, and that the main duty of every Christian soul was to battle for the victory of Congregationalism over Episcopacy, and Voluntaryism over State Endowment. Her every mode of thinking and acting was of a levelling common-place. With her, love was liking, duty something unpleasant—generally to other people, and kindness patronage. But she was just in money-matters, and her son too had every intention of being worthy of his hire, though wherein lay the value of the labour with which he thought to counterpoise that hire, it were hard to say.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE PREACHER.
The sermon Mr Graham heard at the chapel that Sunday morning in Kentish Town was not of an elevating, therefore not of a strengthening description. The pulpit was at that time in offer to the highest bidder—in orthodoxy, that is, combined with popular talent. The first object of the chapel’s existence—I do not say in the minds of those who built it, for it was an old place, but certainly in the minds of those who now directed its affairs—was not to save its present congregation, but to gather a larger—ultimately that they might be saved, let us hope, but primarily that the drain upon the purses of those who were responsible for its rent and other outlays, might be lessened. Mr Masquar, therefore, to whom the post was a desirable one, had been mainly anxious that morning to prove his orthodoxy, and so commend his services. Not that in those days one heard so much of the dangers of heterodoxy: that monster was as yet but growling far off in the jungles of Germany; but certain whispers had been abroad concerning the preacher which he thought desirable to hush, especially as they were founded in truth. He had tested the power of heterodoxy to attract attention, but having found that the attention it did attract was not of a kind favourable to his wishes, had so skilfully remodelled his theories that, although to his former friends he declared them in substance unaltered, it was impossible any longer to distinguish them from the most uncompromising orthodoxy; and his sermon of that morning had tended neither to the love of God, the love of man, nor a hungering after righteousness—its aim being to disprove the reported heterodoxy of Jacob Masquar.
As they walked home, Mrs Marshal, addressing her husband in a tone of conjugal disapproval, said, with more force than delicacy,
“The pulpit is not the place to give a man to wash his dirty linen in.”
“Well, you see, my love,” answered her husband in a tone of apology, “people won’t submit to be told their duty by mere students, and just at present there seems nobody else to be had. There’s none in the market but old stagers and young colts—eh, Fred? But Mr Masquar is at least a man of experience.”