"Well, he is a capable man, isn't he?" said Mr. Robartes, the other clergyman.
"Capable, if you like," replied the Vicar.
"And public-spirited too, isn't he?"
"Only in a way. The fellow isn't a sportsman, and, in the true sense of the word, isn't an Englishman. That is why I dislike him. As you know, too, he opposes the Church at every corner. I suppose it is natural in a rabid dissenter, but it is hard to bear."
"Still, he is a great employer of labor," said Prideaux. "And as for young Lethbridge, he is quite a decent fellow."
"I suppose Mr. Lethbridge still goes to the Chapel, doesn't he?" asked Mr. Robartes.
"Oh yes, I suppose so," was the Vicar's reply. "I believe, if he hadn't been a dissenter, things might have been all right."
"How? What do you mean?"
"Oh, at bottom a dissenter is never really an Englishman. Did you see that speech he made some little time ago up at Polzeath? He was crying down the Army and saying that our nation was being bled to death to keep up a useless institution. That is what I cannot stand."
They went on talking in this way for a considerable time until I began to get rather bored. It seemed to me that they discussed the Church and Dissent as two rival institutions. They regarded the Church as something which should be supported because it was a State affair. As for anything deeper, it did not appear in their conversation. Churchgoing was regarded as something that ought to be a national institution, and as such should be kept up. A few months before I dare say I might have taken an academic interest in the conversation, but as I reflected upon Dr. Rhomboid's verdict upon me it all seemed paltry and foolish. Church and Chapel, as institutions, did not matter a straw to me.