CHAPTER XV.
The friendly rector frequently visited at Stanley Grove, and, for my father's sake, honored me with his particular kindness. Dr. Barlow filled up all my ideas of a country clergyman of the higher class. There is a uniform consistency runs through his whole life and character, which often brings to my mind, allowing for the revolution in habits that almost two hundred years have necessarily produced, the incomparable country parson of the ingenious Mr. George Herbert.[1]
"I never saw Zeal without Innovation," said Mr. Stanley, "more exemplified than in Dr. Barlow. His piety is as enlightened as it is sincere. No errors in religion escape him, through ignorance of their existence, or through carelessness in their detection, or through inactivity in opposing them. He is too honest not to attack the prevailing evil, whatever shape it may assume; too correct to excite in the wise any fears that his zeal may mislead his judgment, and too upright to be afraid of the censures which active piety must ever have to encounter from the worldly and the indifferent, from cold hearts and unfurnished heads.
"From his affectionate warmth, however, and his unremitting application, arising from the vast importance he attaches to the worth of souls, the man of the world might honor him with the title of enthusiast; while his prudence, sober-mindedness, and regularity, would draw on him from the fanatic, the appellation of formalist. Though he is far from being 'content to dwell in decencies,' he is careful never to neglect them. He is a clergyman all the week as well as on Sunday; for he says, if he did not spend much of the intermediate time in pastoral visits, there could not be kept up that mutual intercourse of kindness which so much facilitates his own labors, and his people's improvement. They listen to him because they love him, and they understand him, because he has familiarized them by private discourse to the great truths which he delivers from the pulpit.
"Dr. Barlow has greatly diminished the growth of innovation in his parishes, by attacking the innovator with his own weapons. Not indeed by stooping to the same disorderly practices, but by opposing an enlightened earnestness to an eccentric earnestness; a zeal with knowledge to a zeal without it. He is of opinion that activity does more good than invective, and that the latter is too often resorted to, because it is the cheaper substitute.
"His charity, however, is large, and his spirit truly catholic. He honors all his truly pious brethren, who are earnest in doing good, though they may differ from him as to the manner of doing it. Yet his candor never intrenches on his firmness; and while he will not dispute with others about shades of difference, he maintains his own opinions with the steadiness of one who embraced them on the fullest conviction.
"He is a 'scholar, and being a good and a ripe one,' it sets him above aiming at the paltry reputation to be acquired by those false embellishments of style, those difficult and uncommon words, and that labored inversion of sentences, by which some injudicious clergymen make themselves unacceptable to the higher, and unintelligible to the lower, and of course, the larger part of their audience. He always bears in mind that the common people are not foolish, they are only ignorant. To meet the one he preaches good sense, to suit the other, plain language. But while he seldom shoots over the heads of the uninformed, he never offends the judicious. He considers the advice of Polonius to his son to be as applicable to preachers as to travelers—
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
"In his pulpit he is no wrangling polemic, but a genuine Bible Christian, deeply impressed himself with the momentous truths he so earnestly presses upon others. His mind is so imbued, so saturated, if I may hazard the expression, with scriptural knowledge, that from that rich store-house, he is ever ready to bring forth treasures, new and old, and to apply them wisely, temperately, and seasonably.