".... You are endeavouring to make up for past deficiencies, or to atone for past errors, by renewed activity or rather extraordinary efforts. This you do in perfect sincerity; and, I believe, heartily. In consequence, instead of one sermon on a Sunday there are two; instead of a quarterly there is a monthly sacrament; and, in addition, an evening lecture, with prayers, is pronounced every Wednesday evening. Now, supposing you had not taken this unfavourable opinion of your past feelings and views, would you have adopted such regulations? I think you would not; and yet, be it observed, the necessity for them was and is a matter totally irrelevant to your own private feelings."
The rest of this letter, the doctor's second, is to sober down Mr. Spencer's fervour, and make him go on quietly, hoping thus to slacken his enthusiasm and bring him to his former frame of mind.
It is sad to see a clergyman called to task for not being more worldly and less zealous. He is, in fact, too much like a Catholic Saint to be endured in the Establishment. He must eventually abandon it, or be stoned to death with hard words in it. We see the chink now through which the first alternative gleamed on the Bishop; and we see the disposition of Providence in moving him to confine himself to the Bible, when some plausible Anglican work might have burnished up what he had of Catholic instinct, and made it seem gold.
CHAPTER VII.
Progress Of His Religious Views.
It must not be supposed that Mr. Spencer broke away from the Establishment by the religious notions he took up at this time; on the contrary, his great hope is that he shall unite all the sects to her, and he fancies they are being realized now among the Methodists in his own parish. His cardinal point of opinion at this time was, that the articles and formularies of the Anglican Church required some kind of soul to put life into them and make them touch the heart; that this life had been allowed to eke out of the Church in the days bygone, and that it was high time to bring it back; the wording of the Church's text-books gave room for his interpretation, and his whole line of procedure was but acting upon it. Others interpreted differently, some did not interpret at all; with both classes of opponents he maintained an opposition so satisfactory to himself that his notions only gained a stronger hold of his mind every day. We shall give some specimens of the arguments urged against him by the second class of opponents, who were chiefly influential members of his own family. One writes,—his father:—
"I will commission Appleyard to get the Hebrew grammar you mention and send it down, and I am very glad to hear that you intend to revive that study, which must be so useful to a clergyman, and which will I hope be an advantage to your mind by varying the objects to which you apply it, and by that means tend to relieve it from the effects of too intense an application to the more difficult and abstruse points of religious study; which, if not under the corrective guidance of greater learning and experience than it is possible for you yet to have, might lead into the wildness of enthusiasm, instead of the sensible and sound doctrine which it becomes an orthodox minister of an Established Church to hold for himself and to preach to others."
Another,—his mother:—
"Infinite peril attends the setting our duties and religious notions in too austere a point of view, and seeming mystic and obscure modes of speech when describing religious sentiments; and disparaging every effort to do right except it tallies exactly with some indescribable rule of faith which cannot be comprehended by simple-minded and quiet-tempered piety, is of all things the most dangerous, since the risk is dreadful either of disgusting, or repelling, or alarming into despair. Nothing proves the perfect ignorance of human character and the art of persuasion than this process. It never can do to terrify into doing right,—stubbornness and hopelessness must ever be the consequence of such ill-judged zeal; and to the preacher uncharitableness and spiritual pride. Milton's beautiful meditation of our Saviour, in 'Paradise Regained,' has two lines which exactly fill my idea of what ought to be the mode of doing good by precept:—
"By winning words to conquer willing hearts,
And make persuasion do the work of fear."