"Romantic nonsense! A mere matter of modest scruples! You underrate yourself, Everett. You are the very man for a clergyman, trust me."
But Everett went on to explain, that it was no question of under-estimation of himself.
"You do not know, perhaps," he proceeded, while Lady Beauchamp, sorely tried, tapped her fingers on the table, and her foot upon the floor,—"you do not know, that, when I was a boy, and until two or three years ago, my desire and ambition were to be a minister of the Church of England."
"Well, Sir,—what has made you so much better, or so much worse, since then, as to alter your opinion of the calling?"
"The reasons which made me abandon the idea three years since, and which render it impossible for me to consider it now, have nothing to do with my mental and moral worthiness or unworthiness. The fact is simply, I cannot become a minister of a Church with many of whose doctrines I cannot agree, and to which, indeed, I can no longer say I belong. In your sense of the word, I am far from being a Churchman."
"Do you mean to say you have become a Dissenter?" cried Lady Beauchamp; and, as if arrived at the climax of endurance, she stood transfixed, regarding the young man with a species of sublime horror.
"Again, not in your sense of the term," Everett said, smiling; "for I have joined no sect, attached myself to no recognized body of believers."
"You belong to nothing, then? You believe in nothing, I suppose?" she said, with the instinctive logic of her class. "Oh, Everett!" real distress for the moment overpowering her indignation, "it is those visionary notions of yours that have brought you to this. It was to be expected. You poets and dreamers go on refining your ideas, forsooth, till even the religion of the ordinary world isn't good enough for you."
Everett waited patiently till this first gust had passed by. Then, with that steady, calm lucidity which, strange to say, was characteristic of this Visionary's mind and intellect, he explained, so far as he could, his views and his reasons. It could not be expected that his listener should comprehend or enter into what he said. At first, indeed, she appeared to derive some small consolation from the fact that at least Everett had not "turned Dissenter." She hated Methodists, she declared,—intending thus to include with sweeping liberality all denominations in the ban of her disapproval. She would have deemed it an unpardonable crime, had the young man deserted the Church of his fathers in order to join the Congregation, some ranting conventicle. But if her respectability was shocked at the idea of his becoming a Methodist, her better feelings were outraged when she found, as she said, that he "belonged to nothing." She viewed with dislike and distrust all forms of religion that differed from her own; but she could not believe in the possibility of a religion that had no external form at all. She was dismayed and perplexed, poor lady! and even paused midway in her wrathful remonstrance to the misguided young man, to lament anew over his fatal errors. She could not understand, she said, truly enough, what in the world he meant. His notions were perfectly extraordinary and incomprehensible. She was deeply, deeply shocked, and grieved for him, and for every one connected with him.
In fact, the very earnestness and sincerity in their own opinions of a certain calibre of minds make them incapable of understanding such a state of things. That a man should believe differently from all they have been taught to believe appears to them as simply preposterous as that he should breathe differently. And so it is that only the highest order of belief can afford to be tolerant; and, as extremes meet, it requires a very perfect Faith to be able to sympathize and bear patiently with Doubt.