Is like to that above.”
These and other Pietistic platitudes, whether tame or tuneful, are technical, and so nearly meaningless as not to provoke debate. Every reasonable man and woman knows and does not affect to conceal his or her consciousness of the truth that social distinctions are not effaced by the enrolment of rich and poor, educated and illiterate, refined and boorish, in impartial order upon the “church books.” True religion does refine feeling and engender benevolence and charitable judgment of our fellows. In doing this, it creates a common ground of sympathy, as of belief. It elevates the moral and spiritual nature. Of itself, it does not enrich the intellect, or polish manners. One may have a clean heart and dirty flesh-and-blood hands; may be a sincere and earnest Christian, yet double his negatives, shove his food into his mouth with his knife, prefer the corner of a table-cloth to a napkin, and be an alien in the matter of finger-bowls.
It is possible that two women may work together harmoniously in church and parish associations, each esteeming the other’s excellent qualities of heart and enjoying the fellowship of her “kindred mind,” and yet that both should be intensely uncomfortable if forced into reciprocal social relations that have nothing to do with church or charity.
THE REASONABLE VIEW
These are plain facts no reasonable person will dispute. In view of them the fact, equally patent, that the Newlyrich clan sometimes resort to church connection as a lever to raise them to a higher social plane, is one of the anomalies of human intercourse that may well stir the satirist to bitter ridicule and move compassionate beholders to wonder.
“When they begin to feel their oats they go off to you!” laughed the keen-witted, sweet-natured pastor of a down-town church to a brother clergyman whose flock worshiped in a finer building and a fashionable neighborhood. “The sheep with the golden fleece always finds a breach in our church-wall.”
It takes him, his ewe and his lambs, a long time to learn that pew proximity does not bring about social sympathy. It is not a week since I saw a girl, a thoroughbred from crown to toe, flush in surprise and draw herself up in unconscious hauteur, when a flashily-dressed young person greeted her across the vestibule of a concert-room with “Hello, Nellie! didn’t we have a bully time last night?”
They had attended a Sunday-school anniversary, and, as their classes were side by side, had exchanged remarks in the intervals of recitations, songs and addresses. The parvenu’s clothes were more costly than “Nellie’s;” her father was richer; they were members of the same church! To her vulgar mind these circumstances gave her the right to take a liberty with a slight acquaintance such as no well-bred person would have dreamed of assuming.
YOUR PEW NEIGHBOR