Moreover, because he sees in the church a possible vanguard to civilization, he rebels against its retrogressive and obstructive policy. He laments that the working men do not trust the clergy:[1]
"They suspect them to be mere tubs to the whale—mere substitutes
for education, slowly and late adopted, in order to stop
the mouths of the importunate. They may misjudge the clergy;
but whose fault is it if they do? * * * Every spiritual reform
since the time of John Wesley, has had to establish itself
in the teeth of insult, calumny, and persecution. Every ecclesiastical
reform comes not from within, but from without your
body. Everywhere we see the clergy, * * * proclaiming
themselves the advocates of Toryism, * * * chosen exclusively
from the classes which crush us down; * * * commanding
us to swallow down, with faith as passive and implicit
as that of a Papist, the very creeds from which their own bad
example, and their scandalous neglect, have * * * alienated
us; * * * betraying in every tract, in every sermon,
an ignorance of the doubts, the feelings, the very language of the
masses, which would be ludicrous, were it not accursed before
God and man."
Meredith expresses the same idea, with the difference
that he does not speak apologetically from within, but with
the unqualified disapproval of the outsider. Jenny Denham,
an incisive and thoughtful woman, says,[2]
- ↑ Alton Locke, 229-30. Cf. 205ff. for an equally forceful presentation of the other side through the eloquent rebuke to illogical complaints, given by Eleanor Staunton. It is in Yeast that Papacy is satirized, a typical hit being the unconscious irony of Vieuxbois' assertion,—"'I do not think that we have any right in the nineteenth century to contest an opinion which the fathers of the Church gave in the fourth." 114. Alton Locke also says,—"A man-servant, a soldier and a Jesuit, are to me the three great wonders of humanity—three forms of moral suicide, for which I never had the slightest gleam of sympathy, or even comprehension." 187.
- ↑ Beauchamp's Career, 622.
