The deacons were rather hard on the young parson, assuredly, and yet they were very good Christians in their way—ready to pay for an improvement in the chapel, for books for the Sunday-school, or to subscribe money to circulate the Bible or to send forth the missionary. What they lacked was the rarest of Christian virtues—charity; that charity which ‘suffereth long, and is kind; which envieth not; which vaunteth not itself; which is not puffed up; which beareth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.’ As our young friend set people thinking, refused to repeat old sentences and phrases like a parrot, and avoided religious clap-trap, he was regarded by the deacons with alarm and suspicion. Just then the shop-bell rang, and the senior deacon left the company of his brother deacons to look after business. In a few minutes he returned, looking a little annoyed. ‘What’s the matter, brother?’ said they all. ‘Who do you think,’ said he, ‘was in the shop just now?’ ‘We can’t guess. Pray tell us. The new parson?’ ‘Oh no! Rose Wilcox—that poor silly girl the young men here make a fuss about.’ ‘What, the girl that used to teach in the Sunday-school, and would have upset us all, had she not taken herself off? A girl who’ll come to no good end,’ said the chemist and druggist, shaking his head. Perhaps the deacon is right. It is a terrible world, this of ours, for a girl in lowly life who has more than her fair share of feminine beauty. A thousand dangers lurk on every side of her—from the enmity of woman, from the selfish cruelty of man. It is rarely that she does come to a good end. ‘What do you think she said?’ continued the senior deacon. ‘Why, that she came to hear Mr. Wentworth, and that she hopes we are going to have him for the new parson.’ Poor Rose had unwittingly filled up the measure of the new preacher’s guilt. She was the prettiest girl in the town, and, consequently, was supposed to be far, very far from the kingdom. If Mr. Wentworth had preached so as to gain the attention and excite the admiration of a young giddy girl like that, he was not the man for Bethesda; and it must be owned, I frankly admit, that he was not. He lacked what the deacons called unction in the pulpit. To be popular, to be attractive, to retain a hold on the light and careless and the worldly, was the surest way to alarm the deacons, who guarded jealously the sanctity of the pulpit—a sanctity which had repelled from the chapel the very people whom, now-a-days, the religious world wish to get there. They were not of the world. That was their boast and privilege. They were a chosen people—a peculiar generation.