“There are some who think that their religious exercises should be confined to Sunday. There are various things that we shouldn’t do on Sunday; it’s quite right we shouldn’t read newspapers on Sunday. But religion has thus been defined: it is the art of being and doing good.”
As we left the church, I asked its age, and the rector said that it was of the time of Henry VII. (who died in 1509). What is old has a great attraction to the people of our new country, and I looked in the churchyard for interesting monumental stones. The oldest that could be deciphered bore date 1672, and seemed to be that of a great pugilist. The gravestones were not numerous and showy. Some one told me afterwards that those who attend the church are the poorest of the poor, and are generally buried without tombstones.
Concerning the rector, I ventured to draw some conclusions as follows: Mr. Rounce is a strict Sabbatarian, between two fires,—Dissent on the one hand and High-Churchdom and Papacy on the other. In the eyes of a zealous incumbent of the English Church, even of a zealous low-churchman, all the people living in the parish are his people. But many, very many of them, are like lost sheep wandering on the barren mountains of Dissent, and so long have they refused to hear even the church that they have become to him like heathen men and publicans, and with them he does not wish to hold intercourse. He employs members of his own church, however, to distribute tracts among them as regularly as among his chosen people, even although these dissenters are full communicants in their own “chapels.”
I was allowed to visit the rectory grounds and afterward to see the house itself, through the courtesy of an assistant in the National school, who was also a servant in the rector’s family. The house was not so much distinguished by the elegance of its carpets and other furniture as by the number and variety of its cabinets (among them I may reckon a great carved chest), by the quantity of china displayed, and to some extent by paintings and natural history collections. The ladies were absent, but I met the rector for a moment or two, and it seemed to me that he considered me to need pruning or cutting down. But he was kind enough to allow the lady’s-maid who conducted me to find for me in the library one or two works which I wished to consult, and she was sufficiently intelligent to aid me, and obliging enough to do so.
When we walked through the garden I observed that a net was spread to protect cherries from the birds, and that currants were trained to the top of the wall, about eight feet.
Mrs. Benton, the farmer’s wife, received a letter from the former rector. She said that he had removed to the “’op” country, to Kent. She described him as a tiny little man, over eighty, a very stanch liberal in politics; a clever, very learned man.
While I was still in the village, Mr. Rounce’s two daughters had a lawn-tennis party on their grounds, and the guests could be seen from the road. Three of the men appeared to be “in their shirt-sleeves.” I learned at Mr. Benton’s that the guests would be about fifty in number, the farmer’s young daughters being permitted to look on. It was thought that the refreshments would be tea, coffee, and cakes, handed round,—Miss Rounce being a teetotaller.
DISSENTERS.
A rector of the Established Church, whom I met upon a railroad train, spoke to me of there being here one hundred and fifty different religious sects, but the number seemed incredible. Afterwards, however, an acquaintance pointed out to me the list in Whitaker’s Almanac for 1881. This list is headed
“Religious sects. Places of Worship.