in this country any man worth his salt, who had a message to give, need not be uneasy about the forthcoming of the salt. He could go back to Yorkshire, he reflected sardonically, and find a score of half-educated weavers who had borne hunger and thirst, imprisonment, and stripes for conscience sake, and were ready to do it again and glory in the doing. But, then, hunger and thirst and imprisonment and stripes are one thing to a man to whom hunger and thirst and oppression are the daily lot, and quite another to a sleek, soft man who basks in the sunshine all his days and counts himself piteously poor and an object of commiseration on five hundred a year. “Why, don’t you all turn dissenters?” he asked of a clerical party one evening, as they lingered over the desert. “You all find fault with your Bishop. The poor man can apparently do nothing right. If you were dissenting ministers you would be your own bishops.” “I fancy, my dear Beaumont, the dissenters have their Trust deeds.” “Oh, Trust deeds—a fico for your Trust deeds. They talk about driving a coach and six through an Act of Parliament—why, a regiment of soldiers could walk through a Trust deed. ’Tis an instrument as little resorted to for the purpose of torture in a Nonconformist church as the thumbscrew in the Tower of London. Besides a man isn’t a fixture in a Dissenting Church. When he has talked himself dry, or made more enemies than friends, he can always change pulpits with another fellow who has talked himself dry or made more enemies than friends.” “There are our social status and influence to be considered,” said a sucking young curate just emerged from the Bishop’s Hostel. “Our mere position invests us with a sacred authority never wielded by a mere dissenter.” “Your social position is largely the result of social factors. The Established Church draws its ministers mainly from families socially established, and they receive not only the education and culture, but also the social stamp of Oxford or Cambridge. The dissenting parson is often the son of a grocer or a shoemaker, and receives a surface polish and a surfeit of theology at a training college, but seldom loses the smell of the ancestral shop. Your clergyman is a gentleman first, a clergyman afterwards. Turn all your well-born scholars into Methodists, and your half-educated social inferiors into the Church, and you would reverse the present social positions of the established and the nonconforming divines.” “Then you think our present social superiority, and therefore our greater influence for good, for, of course, it is only to be valued for that, is a matter of birth and education.”