End of “Blanche.”
Chapter Twenty Five.
One Sunday Morning.
The Rector of a large West-end church was ill. His illness was not very serious, nor did it threaten to be protracted, but it fell at a bad moment. It was the middle of the season, the time at which his church was more crowded than at any other of the year. He was an earnest and thoughtful man, and one who, despite much discouragement, laboured energetically to do his best; but on the Friday evening, preceding the second Sunday in June, he was obliged to acknowledge that for some days he would be unfit to officiate in his usual place.
“What shall I do?” he said in distress. “What shall I do about the sermon on Sunday morning? The curates can manage the rest, but it will be as much as they can do. I cannot ask either of them to prepare another sermon so hurriedly. And the one I had ready has cost me much time and thought—I had even built some hopes upon it. One never knows—”
“Your sermon will keep till another Sunday. That is not the question,” said his wife.
“No, truly,” he agreed, with some bitterness; “my sermon, as you say, will keep. Nor can I flatter myself that any one will be the loser if it never be preached at all. Do sermons ever do good, I sometimes ask myself? Yet many of us—I could almost say most of us—do our best. We spare neither time nor trouble nor prayer; but all falls on stony ground, it seems to me. And we are but human—liable to error and mistake, and but few among us have great gift of eloquence. It is easy, I know, to pick holes and criticise; but is the fault all on the side of the sermons, I wonder?”
“You misunderstood me, Reginald,” said his wife gently. “No, truly; the fault must lie in great part with the hearers. All other efforts to instruct or do good are received with some amount of respect and appreciation. No popular lecturers, for instance, are listened to with such indifference or criticised so captiously as the mass of English clergy. It is the tone of the day, the fashion of the age. Though one rose from the dead—nay, if an angel from heaven came down to preach one Sunday morning,” she went on with sad impressiveness, “he would be found fault with, or sneered at, or criticised, and accused of having nothing to say, or not knowing how to say it; yes, I verily believe it would be so.”