The Mildmay religion was necessarily of a well-bred and repressive type; but Priscilla was given to getting up early and walking long distances to a church in East Harrowby, where not one single person could be found who might be called "in society" except Priscilla herself. The clergyman, it is true, was a gentleman, but he was said to be so cold, so stern, so unsocial, that he strongly repelled his own class. There was, however, a reason for the Rev. Mr. Thorburn's indifference to general society. He had met with the most awful of domestic calamities. The wife whom he loved had lost her mind, and was then in a private asylum. The only shifting of his burden that the stern Mr. Thorburn showed was, he had given up the charge which he had held for ten years, and where his happy married life had been spent, and had taken a very small and pitifully poor church in East Harrowby. His congregation was made up entirely of working people, to Mr. Thorburn's intense satisfaction. He had the spirit of an apostle, but he was handicapped by his temperament and by the traditions of his class. He could not be persistent, or aggressive, or personally solicitous about the highly educated, moral, and well-bred persons who made up his first congregation. He desired earnestly and even fiercely to wake them up to a spiritual life, but all of them, pastor as well as people, were too well bred for that sort of intimate discussion to be forced between them. He found, after some years' experience, that they were willing to let him look after their morals, but they proposed to look after their spiritual affairs themselves--which is one of the commonest and queerest developments of modern religious thought. In the course of time, Thorburn grew weary of trying to spiritualize a congregation of people who were so well off in this world that they regarded their probable transposition to heaven with great distaste. He sickened of being restricted in his spiritual efforts to emotional women and priggish boys and girls. Religion, he felt, was an affair for men--but of the few men communicants in the church, every one of them would have instantly withdrawn his subscription and quitted the church had the clergyman showed any undue solicitude about his soul. And if he had ventured to speak of their sins, in any except the most general way, the bishop would have come down upon him. So this zealous man, so cruelly misplaced, found his fashionable congregation and handsome salary utterly unendurable after that frightful and heart-breaking tragedy in his life. He was glad enough for the chance to preach to a congregation of decent brick makers, such as made up most of the population of East Harrowby, and who did not find this world so pleasant that they could not grasp the idea of a better one.