This evening I have been to the Methodist Meeting-house. I was attracted, fairly drawn all down the street, by the singing. When I came to the place the parson was got into prayer. His hands were clenched together and held up, his face turned up and back so as to be nearly parallel with the ceiling, and he was bawling away, with his “do thou,” and “mayest thou,” and “may we,” enough to stun one. Noisy, however, as he was, he was unable to fix the attention of a parcel of girls in the gallery, whose eyes were all over the place, while his eyes were so devoutly shut up. After a deal of this rigmarole called prayer, came the preachy, as the negroes call it; and a preachy it really was. Such a mixture of whining cant and of foppish affectation I scarcely ever heard in my life. The text was (I speak from memory) one of Saint Peter’s epistles (if he have more than one) the 4th Chapter and 18th Verse. The words were to this amount: that, as the righteous would be saved with difficulty, what must become of the ungodly and the sinner! After as neat a dish of nonsense and of impertinences as one could wish to have served up, came the distinction between the ungodly and the sinner. The sinner was one who did moral wrong; the ungodly, one who did no moral wrong, but who was not regenerated. Both, he positively told us, were to be damned. One was just as bad as the other. Moral rectitude was to do nothing in saving the man. He was to be damned unless born again, and how was he to be born again unless he came to the regeneration-shop and gave the fellows money? He distinctly told us that a man perfectly moral might be damned; and that “the vilest of the vile and the basest of the base” (I quote his very words) “would be saved if they became regenerate; and that colliers, whose souls had been as black as their coals, had by regeneration become bright as the saints that sing before God and the Lamb.” And will the Edinburgh Reviewers again find fault with me for cutting at this bawling, canting crew? Monstrous it is to think that the Clergy of the Church really encourage these roving fanatics. The Church seems aware of its loss of credit and of power. It seems willing to lean even upon these men; who, be it observed, seem, on their part, to have taken the Church under their protection. They always pray for the Ministry; I mean the ministry at Whitehall. They are most “loyal” souls. The THING protects them; and they lend their aid in upholding the THING. What silly; nay, what base creatures those must be who really give their money, give their pennies, which ought to buy bread for their own children; who thus give their money to these lazy and impudent fellows, who call themselves ministers of God, who prowl about the country living easy and jovial lives upon the fruit of the labour of other people. However, it is, in some measure, these people’s fault. If they did not give, the others could not receive. I wish to see every labouring man well fed and well clad; but, really, the man who gives any portion of his earnings to these fellows deserves to want: he deserves to be pinched with hunger: misery is the just reward of this worst species of prodigality.
The singing makes a great part of what passes in these meeting-houses. A number of women and girls singing together make very sweet sounds. Few men there are who have not felt the power of sounds of this sort. Men are sometimes pretty nearly bewitched without knowing how. Eyes do a good deal, but tongues do more. We may talk of sparkling eyes and snowy bosoms as long as we please; but what are these with a croaking, masculine voice? The parson seemed to be fully aware of the importance of this part of the “service.” The subject of his hymn was something about love: Christian love; love of Jesus; but still it was about love; and the parson read, or gave out, the verses in a singularly soft and sighing voice, with his head on one side, and giving it rather a swing. I am satisfied that the singing forms great part of the attraction. Young girls like to sing; and young men like to hear them. Nay, old ones too; and, as I have just said, it was the singing that drew me three hundred yards down the street at Tenterden, to enter this meeting-house. By-the-by, I wrote some Hymns myself, and published them in “Twopenny Trash.” I will give any Methodist parson leave to put them into his hymn-book.
Folkestone (Kent),
Monday (Noon), 1 Sept.
I have had a fine ride, and, I suppose, the Quakers have had a fine time of it at Mark Lane.
From Tenterden I set off at five o’clock, and got to Appledore after a most delightful ride, the high land upon my right, and the low land on my left. The fog was so thick and white along some of the low land, that I should have taken it for water, if little hills and trees had not risen up through it here and there. Indeed, the view was very much like those which are presented in the deep valleys, near the great rivers in New Brunswick (North America) at the time when the snows melt in the spring, and when, in sailing over those valleys, you look down from the side of your canoe and see the lofty woods beneath you! I once went in a log-canoe across a sylvan sea of this description, the canoe being paddled by two Yankees. We started in a stream; the stream became a wide water, and that water got deeper and deeper, as I could see by the trees (all was woods), till we got to sail amongst the top branches of the trees. By-and-by we got into a large open space; a piece of water a mile or two, or three or four wide, with the woods under us! A fog, with the tops of trees rising through it, is very much like this; and such was the fog that I saw this morning in my ride to Appledore. The church at Appledore is very large. Big enough to hold 3,000 people; and the place does not seem to contain half a thousand old enough to go to church.
In coming along I saw a wheat-rick making, though I hardly think the wheat can be dry under the bands. The corn is all good here; and I am told they give twelve shillings an acre for reaping wheat.
In quitting this Appledore I crossed a canal and entered on Romney Marsh. This was grass-land on both sides of me to a great distance. The flocks and herds immense. The sheep are of a breed that takes its name from the marsh. They are called Romney Marsh sheep. Very pretty and large. The wethers, when fat, weigh about twelve stone; or, one hundred pounds. The faces of these sheep are white; and, indeed, the whole sheep is as white as a piece of writing-paper. The wool does not look dirty and oily like that of other sheep. The cattle appear to be all of the Sussex breed. Red, loosed-limbed, and, they say, a great deal better than the Devonshire. How curious is the natural economy of a country! The forests of Sussex; those miserable tracts of heath and fern and bushes and sand, called Ashdown Forest and Saint Leonard’s Forest, to which latter Lord Erskine’s estate belongs; these wretched tracts and the not much less wretched farms in their neighbourhood, breed the cattle, which we see fatting in Romney Marsh! They are calved in the spring; they are weaned in a little bit of grass-land; they are then put into stubbles and about in the fallows for the first summer; they are brought into the yard to winter on rough hay, peas-haulm, or barley-straw; the next two summers they spend in the rough woods or in the forest; the two winters they live on straw; they then pass another summer on the forest or at work; and then they come here or go elsewhere to be fatted. With cattle of this kind and with sheep such as I have spoken of before, this Marsh abounds in every part of it; and the sight is most beautiful.
At three miles from Appledore I came through Snargate, a village with five houses, and with a church capable of containing two thousand people! The vagabonds tell us, however, that we have a wonderful increase of population! These vagabonds will be hanged by-and-by, or else justice will have fled from the face of the earth.
At Brenzett (a mile further on) I with great difficulty got a rasher of bacon for breakfast. The few houses that there are are miserable in the extreme. The church here (only a mile from the last) nearly as large; and nobody to go to it. What! will the vagabonds attempt to make us believe that these churches were built for nothing! “Dark ages” indeed those must have been, if these churches were erected without there being any more people than there are now. But who built them? Where did the means, where did the hands come from? This place presents another proof of the truth of my old observation: rich land and poor labourers. From the window of the house, in which I could scarcely get a rasher of bacon, and not an egg, I saw numberless flocks and herds fatting, and the fields loaded with corn!
The next village, which was two miles further on, was Old Romney, and along here I had, for great part of the way, corn-fields on one side of me and grass-land on the other. I asked what the amount of the crop of wheat would be. They told me better than five quarters to the acre. I thought so myself. I have a sample of the red wheat and another of the white. They are both very fine. They reap the wheat here nearly two feet from the ground; and even then they cut it three feet long! I never saw corn like this before. It very far exceeds the corn under Portsdown Hill, that at Gosport and Tichfield. They have here about eight hundred large, very large, sheaves to an acre. I wonder how long it will be after the end of the world before Mr. Birbeck will see the American “Prairies” half so good as this Marsh. In a garden here I saw some very fine onions, and a prodigious crop; sure sign of most excellent land. At this Old Romney there is a church (two miles only from the last, mind!) fit to contain one thousand five hundred people, and there are, for the people of the parish to live in, twenty-two, or twenty-three, houses! And yet the vagabonds have the impudence to tell us that the population of England has vastly increased! Curious system that depopulates Romney Marsh and peoples Bagshot Heath! It is an unnatural system. It is the vagabond’s system. It is a system that must be destroyed, or that will destroy the country.