"Nothing," said I, "corrects this bustling bounty so completely, as when it is mixed up with religion, I should rather say, as when it flows from religion. This motive, so far from diminishing the energy, augments it; but it cures the display, and converts the irritation into a principle. It transfers the activity from the tongue to the heart. It is the only sort of charity which 'blesses twice.' All charity, indeed, blesses the receiver; but the blessing promised to the giver, I have sometimes trembled to think, may be forfeited even by a generous mind, from ostentation and parade in the manner, and want of purity in the motive."
"In Stanley's family," replied he, in a more serious tone, "I have met with a complete refutation of that favorite maxim in the world, that religion is a dull thing itself, and makes its professors gloomy and morose. Charles! I have often frequented houses where pleasure was the avowed object of idolatry. But to see the votaries of the 'reeling goddess,' after successive nights passed in her temples! to see the languor, the listlessness, the discontent—you would rather have taken them for her victims than her worshipers. So little mental vivacity, so little gayety of heart! In short, after no careless observations, I am compelled to declare, that I never saw two forms less alike than those of Pleasure and Happiness."
"Your testimony, Sir John," said I, "is of great weight in a case of which you are so experienced a judge. What a different scene do we now contemplate! Mr. Stanley seems to have diffused his own spirit through the whole family. What makes his example of such efficacy is, that he considers the Christian temper as so considerable a part of Christianity. This temper seems to imbue his whole soul, pervade his whole conduct, and influence his whole conversation. I see every day some fresh occasion to admire his candor, his humility, his constant reference, not as a topic of discourse, but as a principle of conduct, to the gospel as the standard by which actions are to be weighed. His conscientious strictness of speech, his serious reproof of calumnies, his charitable construction of every case which has two sides; 'his simplicity and godly sincerity;' his rule of referring all events to providential direction, and his invariable habit of vindicating the divine goodness under dispensations apparently the most unfavorable."
Here Sir John left me, and I could not forbear pursuing the subject in soliloquy as I proceeded in my walk. I reflected with admiration that Mr. Stanley, in his religious conversation, rendered himself so useful, because instead of the uniform nostrum of the drop and the pill, he applied a different class of arguments, as the case required, to objectors to the different parts of Christianity; to ill informed persons who adopted a partial gospel without understanding it as a scheme, or embracing it as a whole; to those who allow its truth merely on the same ground of evidence that establishes the truth of any other well authenticated history, and who, satisfied with this external evidence, not only do not feel its power on their own heart, but deny that it has any such influence on the hearts of others; to those who believe the gospel to be a mere code of ethics; to their antipodes, who assert that Christ has lowered the requisitions of the law; to Lady Belfield, who rests on her charities—Sir John, on his correctness—Lady Aston, on her austerities; to this man, who values himself solely on the stoutness of his orthodoxy; to another, on the firmness of his integrity; to a third, on the peculiarities of his party, he addresses himself with a particular view to their individual errors. This he does with such a discriminating application to the case as might lead the ill-informed to suspect that he was not equally earnest in those other points, which, not being attacked, he does not feel himself called on to defend, but which, had they been attacked, he would then have defended with equal zeal as relative to the discussion. To crown all, I contemplated that affectionate warmth of heart, that sympathizing kindness, that tenderness of feeling, of which the gay and the thoughtless fancy that they themselves possess the monopoly, while they make over harshness, austerity, and want of charity to religious men, as their inseparable characteristics.
These qualities excite in my heart a feeling compounded of veneration, and of love. And oh! how impossible it is, even in religion itself, to be disinterested! All these excellences I contemplate with a more heartfelt delight from the presumptuous hope that I may one day have the felicity of connecting myself still more intimately with them.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Some days after, while we were conversing over our tea, we heard the noise of a carriage; and Mr. Stanley, looking out from a bow window in which he and I were sitting, said it was Lady and Miss Rattle driving up the avenue. He had just time to add, "These are our fine neighbors. They always make us a visit as soon as they come down, while all the gloss and lustre of London is fresh upon them. We have always our regular routine of conversation. While her Ladyship is pouring the fashions into Mrs. Stanley's ear, Miss Rattle, who is about Ph[oe]be's age, entertains my daughters and me with the history of her own talents and acquirements."
Here they entered. After a few compliments, Lady Rattle seated herself between Lady Belfield and Mrs. Stanley at the upper end of the room; while the fine, sprightly, boisterous girl of fifteen or sixteen threw herself back on the sofa at nearly her full length between Mr. Stanley and me, the Miss Stanleys and Sir John sitting near us, within hearing of her lively loquacity.
"Well, Miss Amelia," said Mr. Stanley, "I dare say you have made good use of your time this winter; I suppose you have ere now completed the whole circle of the arts. Now let me hear what you have been doing, and tell me your whole achievements as frankly as you used to do when you were a little girl." "Indeed," replied she, "I have not been idle, if I must speak the truth. One has so many things to learn, you know. I have gone on with my French and Italian of course, and I am beginning German. Then comes my drawing-master; he teaches me to paint flowers and shells, and to draw ruins and buildings, and to take views. He is a good soul, and is finishing a set of pictures, and half a dozen fire-screens, which I began for mamma. He does help me to be sure, but indeed I do some of it myself, don't I, mamma?" calling out to her mother, who was too much absorbed in her own narratives to attend to her daughter.