“They suspect them to be mere tubs to the whale--mere substitutes for education, slowly and late adopted, in order to stop the mouths of the importunate. They may misjudge the clergy; but whose fault is it if they do? * * * Every spiritual reform since the time of John Wesley, has had to establish itself in the teeth of insult, calumny, and persecution. Every ecclesiastical reform comes not from within, but from without your body. Everywhere we see the clergy, * * * proclaiming themselves the advocates of Toryism, * * * chosen exclusively from the classes which crush us down; * * * commanding us to swallow down, with faith as passive and implicit as that of a Papist, the very creeds from which their own bad example, and their scandalous neglect, have * * * alienated us; * * * betraying in every tract, in every sermon, an ignorance of the doubts, the feelings, the very language of the masses, which would be ludicrous, were it not accursed before God and man.” Meredith expresses the same idea, with the difference that he does not speak apologetically from within, but with the unqualified disapproval of the outsider. Jenny Denham, an incisive and thoughtful woman, says,[331] “My experience of the priest in our country is, that he has abandoned--he’s dead against the only cause that can justify and keep up a Church; the cause of the poor--the people. He is a creature of the moneyed class. I look on him as a pretender.” In his subtle way Meredith satirizes the Catholic Church by having the Countess de Saldar take refuge in and approve of it. Its great asset is that its democracy includes even tailors. That it is the only true spiritual home for a true gentleman she proves by citing an example. A noble knight does not hesitate at telling a flat falsehood to save a lady, being safe in morality because “his priest was handy.” Her nature is defined as the truly religious, that is, one with need of vicarious strength and a sense of renewed absolution. Another exponent is Constance Asper, in _Diana of the Crossways_, whose boudoir was filled with expensive Catholic equipments, affording “every invitation to meditate in luxury on an ascetic religiousness.”