All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story

by Walter Besant

The chapel of the Seventh Day Independents stands at Redman's Lane, close to the Advanced Club House. It is a structure extremely plain and modest in design. It was built by an architect who entertained humble views—perhaps he was a Churchman—concerning the possible extension of the Connection, because the whole chapel if quite filled would not hold more than two hundred people. The front, or façade, is flat, consisting of a surface of gray brick wall, with a door in the middle and two circular windows, one on each side. Over the door there are two dates—one of erection, the other of restoration. The chapel within is a well-proportioned room, with a neat gallery running round three sides, resting on low pillars, and painted a warm and cheerful drab; the pews are painted of the same color. At the back are two windows with semi-circular arches, and between the windows stands a small railed platform with a reading-desk upon it for the minister. Beside it are high seats with cushions for elders, or other ministers if there should be any. But these seats have never been occupied in the memory of man. The pews are ranged in front of the platform, and they are of the old and high-backed kind. It is a wonderful—a truly wonderful—thing that clergymen, priests, ministers, padres, rabbis, and church architects, with church-wardens, sidesmen, vergers, bishops, and chapel-keepers of all persuasions, are agreed, whatever their other differences, in the unalterable conviction that it is impossible to be religious, that is, to attend services in a proper frame of mind, unless one is uncomfortable. Therefore we are offered a choice. We may sit in high-backed, narrow-seated pews, or we may sit on low-backed, narrow-seated benches: but sit in comfort we may not. The Seventh Day people have got the high-backed pew (which catches you on the shoulder-blade and tries the backbone, and affects the brain, causing softening in the long run) and the narrow seat (which drags the muscles and brings on premature paralysis of the lower limbs). The equally narrow, low-backed bench produces injurious effects of a different kind, but similarly pernicious. How would it be to furnish one aisle, at least, of a church with broad, low, and comfortable chairs having arms? They should be reserved for the poor who have so few easy-chairs of their own. Rightly managed and properly advertised, they might help toward a revival of religion among the working classes.

Above the reading platform in the little chapel they have caused to be painted on the wall the Ten Commandments—the fourth emphasized in red—with a text or two, bearing on their distinctive doctrine; and in the corner is a little door leading to a little vestry; but, as there are no vestments, its use is not apparent.

As for the position taken by these people it is perfectly logical, and, in fact, impregnable. There is no answer to it. They say, "Here is the Fourth Commandment. All the rest you continue to observe. Why not this? When was it repealed? And by whom?" If you put these questions to Bishop or Presbyter, he has no reply. Because that law has never been repealed. Yet as the people of the Connection complain, though they have reason and logic on their side, the outside world will not listen, and go on breaking the commandment with a light and unthinking heart. It is a dreadful responsibility—albeit a grand thing—to be in possession of so simple a truth of such vast importance; and yet to get nobody ever to listen. The case is worse even than that of Daniel Fagg.

Angela noted all these things as she entered the little chapel a short time after the service had commenced. It was bewildering to step out of the noisy streets, where the current of Saturday morning was at flood, into this quiet room with its strange service and its strange flock of Nonconformists. The thing, at first, felt like a dream: the people seemed like the ghosts of an unquiet mind.

There were very few worshippers; she counted them all: four elderly men, two elderly women, three young men, two girls, one of whom was Rebekah, and five boys. Sixteen in all. And standing on the platform was their leader.

Rebekah's father, the Rev. Percival Hermitage, was a shepherd who from choice led his flock gently, along peaceful meadows and in shady, quiet places; he had no prophetic fire; he had evidently long since acquiesced in a certain fact that under him, at least, whatever it might do under others, the Connection would not greatly increase. Perhaps he did not himself desire an increase, which would give him more work. Perhaps he never had much enthusiasm. By the simple accident of birth he was a Seventh Day Christian; being of a bookish and unambitious turn, and of an indolent habit of body, mentally and physically unfitted for the life of a shop, he entered the ministry; in course of time he got this chapel, where he remained, tolerably satisfied with his lot in life, a simple, self-educated, mildly pious person, equipped with the phrases of his craft, and comforted with the consciousness of superiority and separation. He looked up from his book in gentle surprise when Angela entered the chapel. It was seldom that a stranger was seen there—once, not long ago, there was a boy who had put his head in at the door and shouted "Hoo!" and ran away again; once there was a drunken sailor who thought it was a public-house, and sat down and began to sing and wouldn't go, and had to be shoved out by the united efforts of the whole small congregation. When he was gone they sang an extra hymn to restore a religious calm—but never a young lady before. Angela took her seat amid the wondering looks of the people, and the minister went on in a perfunctory way with his prayers and his hymns and his exposition. There certainly did seem to an outsider a want of heart about the service, but that might have been due to the emptiness of the pews. When it came to the sermon, Angela thought the preacher spoke and looked as if the limit of endurance had at last almost arrived, and he would not much longer endure the inexpressible dreariness of the conventicle. It was not so; he was always mildly sad; he seemed always a little bored; it was no use pretending to be eloquent any more; fireworks were thrown away; and as for what he had to say, the congregation always had the same thing, looked for the same thing, and would have risen in revolt at the suggestion of a new thing. His sermon was neither better nor worse than may be heard any day in church or chapel; nor was there anything in it to distinguish it from the sermons of any other body of Christians. The outsider left off listening and began to think of the congregation. In the pew with her was a man of sixty or so, with long black hair streaked with gray, brushed back behind his ears. He was devout and followed the prayers audibly, and sang the hymns out of a manuscript music-book, and read the text critically. His face was the face of a bulldog for resolution. The man, she thought, would enjoy going to the stake for his opinions, and if the Seventh Day Independents were to be made the National Established Church he would secede the week after and make a new sect, if only by himself. Such men are not happy under authority; their freedom of thought is as the breath of their nostrils, and they cannot think like other people. He was not well dressed, and was probably a shoemaker or some such craftsman. In front of her sat a family of three. The wife was attired in a sealskin rich and valuable, and the son, a young man of one or two and twenty, had the dress and appearance of a gentleman—that is to say, of what passes for such in common city parlance. What did these people do in such a place? Yet they were evidently of the religion. Then she noticed a widow and her boy. The widow was not young; probably, Angela thought, she had married late in life. Her lips were thin and her face was stern. "The boy," thought Angela, "will have the doctrine administered with faithfulness." Only sixteen altogether; yet all, except the pastor, seemed to be grimly in earnest and inordinately proud of their sect. It was as if the emptiness of their benches and their forsaken condition called upon them to put on a greater show of zeal and to persuade themselves that the cause was worth fighting for. The preacher alone seemed to have lost heart. But his people, who were accustomed to him, did not notice this despondency.

Then Angela, while the sermon went slowly on, began to speculate on the conditions belonging to such a sect. First of all, with the apparent exception of the lady in sealskin and her husband and son, the whole sixteen—perhaps another two or three were prevented from attending—were of quite the lower middle class; they belonged to the great stratum of society whose ignorance is as profound as their arguments are loud. But the uncomfortableness of it! They can do no work on the Saturday—"neither their man-servant nor their maid-servant"—their shops are closed and their tools put aside. They lose a sixth part of the working time. The followers of this creed are as much separated from their fellows as the Jews. On the Sunday they may work if they please, but on that day all the world is at church or at play. Angela looked round again. Yes; the whole sixteen had upon their faces the look of pride; they were proud of being separated; it was a distinction, just as it is to be a Samaritan. Who would not be one of the recipients, however few they be in number, of Truth? And what a grand thing, what an inspiriting thing, it is to feel that some day or other, perhaps not to-day nor to-morrow, nor in one's lifetime at all, the whole world will rally round the poor little obscure banner, and shout all together, with voice of thunder, the battle-cry which now sounds no louder than a puny whistle-pipe! Yet, on the whole, Angela felt it must be an uncomfortable creed; better be one of the undistinguished crowd which flocks to the parish church and yearns not for any distinction at all. Then the sermon ended and they sang another hymn—the collection in use was a volume printed in New York, and compiled by the committee of the Connection, so that there were manifestly congregations on the other side of the Atlantic living in the same discomfort of separation.

At the departure of the people Rebekah hurried out first, and waited in the doorway to greet Angela.

"I knew you would come some day," she said, "but oh! I wish you had told me when you were coming, so that father might have given one of his doctrine sermons. What we had to-day was one of the comfortable discourses to the professed members of the church which we all love so much. I am so sorry. Oh, he would convince you in ten minutes!"

"But, Rebekah," said Angela, "I should be sorry to have seen your service otherwise than usual. Tell me, does the congregation to-day represent all your strength?"