Crabbe undoubtedly hit the old country parsons on their weak point when he said of his vicar, that his main characteristic was timidity. He was infinitely blameless, but also immeasurably afraid.
"Thus he his race began, and to the end
His constant care was, no man to offend;
No haughty virtues stirr'd his peaceful mind;
Nor urged the Priest to leave the Flock behind;
He was his Master's soldier, but not one
To lead an army of His martyrs on:
Fear was his ruling passion."
Courage is born of conviction, and our old English country parsons had no definite convictions, a sort of vague, nebulous, inchoate notion that Christianity was all right, and that the Church of England was a via media, and they deprecated anything like giving precision and outline to faith, and assuming a direct walk which was not a perpetual dodging between opposed errors. I ventured in one of my novels, Red-Spider, to sketch this sort of parson, who never in the pulpit insisted on a doctrine lest he should offend a Dissenter, nor on a duty lest he should make a Churchman uneasy. And it was characteristic of the race. In the Faroes there are sixteen different names for fogs, and the articles of the Christian faith were only varieties in fogs to these spiritual pastors. The nebulous theory prevailed in astronomy, and in divinity as well. Some old-fashioned people resented the resolution of the nebulæ into fixed stars; and so also in that other province do they look on it as next to sacrilege to give to faith definition.
It is, however, only since parsons have begun to see definite ends that they have assumed any steadfastness in their walk and directness in their course. In Fielding's time the country parsons wore their cassocks as a usual dress. "Adams stood up," he relates, "and presented a figure to the gentleman which would have moved laughter in many, for his cassock had just fallen down below his great-coat, that is to say, it reached his knees, whereas the skirts of his great-coat descended no lower than half-way down his thighs."