I am sure that in our village we had too much religion. I write this seriously and after thinking deeply on the matter. A man has a body to be cared for, as well as a soul to be saved or damned. Charles Kingsley was the first to tell us that it was vain to preach to people with empty stomachs. But when I was a lad preaching was the cure for every ill, and the more wretched the villagers became the more they were preached to. There was little hope of any one who did not go to some chapel or other. There was little help for any one who preferred to talk of his wrongs or to claim his rights. I must own that the rustic worshipper was a better man in all the relationships of life—as servant, as husband, as father, as friend—than the rustic unbeliever. It astonished me not a little to talk with the former, and to witness his copiousness of Scripture phraseology and the fluency of his religious talk. He was on a higher platform. He had felt what Burke wrote when he tells us that religion was for the man in humble life, to raise his nature and to put him in mind of a State in which the privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature and more than equal by virtue. Alas! we had soon Lord Brougham’s beershops, and there was a sad falling away. Poachers and drunkards increased on every side. All around there seemed to be nothing but poverty, with the exception of the farmers—then, as now, always grumbling, but apparently living well and enjoying life. As one thinks of the old country years ago one can realise the truth of the story told by the late Mr. Fitzgerald of a Suffolk village church one winter’s evening:— Congregation, with the Old Hundredth ready for the parson’s dismissal words. _Good Old Parson_ (not at all meaning rhymes): The light has grown so very dim I scarce can see to read the hymn. _Congregation_ (taking it up to the first half of the Old Hundredth): The light has grown so very dim, I scarce can see to read the hymn. (Pause as usual.) _Parson_ (mildly impatient): I did not mean to sing a hymn, I only meant my eyes were dim. _Congregation_ (to second part of the Old Hundredth): I did not mean to read a hymn, I only meant my eyes were dim. _Parson_ (out of patience): I did not mean a hymn at all, I think the devil’s in you all. Curious were the ways of the East Anglian clergy. One of our neighbouring parsons had his clerk give out notice that on the next Sunday there would be no service “because master was going to Newmarket.” No one cared for the people, unless it was the woman preacher or Methodist parson, and the people were ignorant beyond belief. Few could either read or write. It was rather amusing to hear them talk. A boy was called bow, a girl was termed a mawther, and if milk or beer was wanted it was generally fetched in a gotch.