The county was a great one for racing, and at Abingdon Church every Sunday, the affairs of the Jockey Club were so thoroughly discussed by gentlemen sitting around on the flat tombstones during sermon-time, that the formal meetings were merely perfunctory. This way of turning church into a club meeting sincerely distressed the clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Conyers. CHAPTER V. Mr. Conyers was one of the county gentry by birth, but it seemed as if the whole theory of heredity, as well as tradition, fell through in his case. The people had been used to jolly parsons, who rode to hounds and could stand up to their bottles of port quite as well as the laity. Indeed, it was reported that Mr. Conyer’s predecessor upon occasions only got to church in time to hustle his cassock on over his hunting jacket and breeches. But Conyers was more soul and spirit than body. He grew up tall, pale, slender, with but one wish on earth--to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. He was an ascetic by nature--an ascetic among people whose temperaments were sybaritic, and to whom nature and circumstance cried perpetually, “Eat, drink, and be merry.” They were a very honest and chivalrous people, but their spiritual part had been feebly developed. Religion to them meant morality. To Conyers it meant morality and the whole question of man’s relations to his Maker besides. Conyers fancied that when he had begun his scholastic training for the ministry he would enter upon that course of enlightenment of the soul for which he longed. He was cruelly disappointed. He got a great deal of morality still, a little weak theology, and a general recommendation from his ecclesiastical superiors not to be too curious. He was astute enough to see that morality was one thing and religion another, but that as long as he maintained a high standard of personal behaviour he would be allowed a fearful liberty in his beliefs. It was not an age or a place of religious enquiry, and Conyers found that all the excellent young men prepared with him for the ministry, were perfectly well satisfied with historical and biblical explanations which, to him, appeared grotesquely insufficient. When his soul craved a knowledge of the Christian religion from its beginning, and when he would have studied it from the point of sincere belief in regard to its scope, design, and its effect on man, he was expected to confine his investigations within an inconceivably narrow range. Although knowing instinctively the difference between moral practices and religious beliefs, Conyers was too earnest a lover of moral beauty to put faith in any except a good man, and he early found that some very bad men were the fountain head of certain of his beliefs. He did not lack either courage or good parts, but he lacked knowledge dreadfully, and there was no fountain open to him. But the seal of the Levite was put upon him at his birth; tormented with doubts, longings, and terrible questionings, he must still preach the Word.