But to return to our country parson, who had the jargonelles. His church was always well attended. Quite as large a congregation was to be found in it as in other parish churches, where all the modern appliances of music, popular preaching, parish visitations, clubs and bible-classes were in force. Perhaps the reason was that he was not too spiritually exacting. Many of our enthusiastic modern parsons attempt to screw up their people into a condition of spiritual exaltation which they are quite unable to maintain permanently, and then they become discouraged at the inevitable, invariable relapse. We suppose that one main cause of dissent is the deadness and dulness of the Church service before the revival of late days; and we attribute this deadness and dulness to the indifference of these _bêtes noirs_, the clergy of last century. I doubt it. At the time of the Commonwealth our churches had been gutted of everything ornamental and beautiful, and the services reduced to the most dreary performance of sermon and extempore prayer. At the Restoration, a very large number indeed of the Presbyterian ministers conformed, were ordained, and retained the benefices. Naturally they conducted the Common Prayer as nearly as they could on the lines of the service they were accustomed to. They had no tradition of what the Anglican liturgy was; they did not understand it, and they served it up cold or lukewarm, as unpalatable as possible. They did not like it themselves, and they did not want their congregations to become partial to it. The old clergy who were restored were obliged to content themselves with the merest essentials of Divine worship; their congregations had grown up without acquaintance with the liturgy--at all events for some nineteen years they had not heard it, and they did not want to shock their weak consciences by too sudden a transformation. When Pepys went to church on November 4, 1660, he entered in his _Diary_, "Mr. Mills did begin to nibble at the Common Prayer, by saying Glory be to the Father, &c., after he had read the two psalms; but the people had been so little used to it, that they could not tell what to answer." The same afternoon he went to Westminster Abbey, "where the first time that ever I heard the organs in a cathedral." Evelyn enters, on March 22, 1678, "now was our Communion-table placed altar-wise," that is to say, not till eighteen years after the Restoration! so slowly were alterations made in the churches to bring them back to their former conditions of decency and order. Whatever has been done since has been done cautiously and with hesitation, lest offence should be given. It was not practicable in our village churches to have the hearty congregational singing that now prevails, for only a very few could read, and only such could join in the psalmody.