“How do you mean that, sir?”
“You try to work upon people’s feelings without reference to their judgment. Anyone who can preach what you call rousing sermons is considered a grand preacher amongst you, and there is a great danger of his being led thereby to talk more nonsense than sense. And then when the excitement goes off, there is no seed left in the soil to grow in peace, and they are always craving after more excitement.”
“Well, there is the preacher to rouse them up again.”
“And the consequence is that they continue like children—the good ones, I mean—and have hardly a chance of making a calm, deliberate choice of that which is good; while those who have been only excited and nothing more, are hardened and seared by the recurrence of such feeling as is neither aroused by truth nor followed by action.”
“You daren’t talk like that if you knew the kind of people in this country that the Methodists, as you call them, have got a hold of. They tell me it was like hell itself down in those mines before Wesley come among them.”
“I should be a fool or a bigot to doubt that the Wesleyans have done incalculable good in the country. And that not alone to the people who never went to church. The whole Church of England is under obligations to Methodism such as no words can overstate.”
“I wonder you can say such things against them, then.”
“Now there you show the evil of thinking too much about the party you belong to. It makes a man touchy; and then he fancies when another is merely, it may be, analysing a difference, or insisting strongly on some great truth, that he is talking against his party.”
“But you said, sir, that our clergy don’t care about moving our judgments, only our feelings. Now I know preachers amongst us of whom that would be anything but true.”
“Of course there must be. But there is what I say—your party-feeling makes you touchy. A man can’t always be saying in the press of utterance, ‘Of course there are exceptions.’ That is understood. I confess I do not know much about your clergy, for I have not had the opportunity. But I do know this, that some of the best and most liberal people I have ever known have belonged to your community.”