Does not this manner of life among the lower orders, five hundred years ago, account for much of the power obtained by the priesthood, and the blind obedience with which the people followed the clergy? The priest was something more to the masses than he was to the aristocracy. To the latter, he was the man who stood between them and God: to the former, he was also the mediator between man and man. He was the only person among the upper ranks who treated these poor down-trodden creatures, not as machines out of which so much profit was to be ground, but as men and women with human sins and sorrows. The children saw very little of their father. He went to work as soon as it was light, and often did not return before they were fast asleep on the leaves. They saw only too much of their mother, whose tongue was never still when awake, and was governed by a cross temper and a discontented mind. The grandmother was an old woman bent by rheumatism, and enfeebled by years of hard work and hard usage. The girls, Mariot, Emmot, and Joan, had nothing to look forward to but similar lives, and after them—they hardly knew what. They had a dim notion that there was a pleasant place where some people went at death, and where nobody did any work: this was derived from the priests. They had also a notion, dug up out of the natural soil of the human heart, that having met with very little comfort in this life, it was sure to be waiting for them in the next. Of God their principal idea was that He was a very great and rich man, above even my Lord, and was in some mysterious manner connected with hearing mass. The boys might expect the serf’s usual life—hard work and many blows, with such intervals of pleasure as an animal would be capable of appreciating, chiefly connected with eating and drinking, an occasional dance or game on the village green on saints’ days, and any rough horse-play among themselves. They were not badly off in respect of food, for their master fed them, and it was to his profit that they should be in good bodily condition. They had therefore, plenty of food of the coarsest kind, and sufficient clothing of the same quality, which they had about as much notion of keeping clean as a monkey has of writing letters. Wages, of course, were never heard of between master and serf. Whatever they needed had to be reported to their superior in office, and they received it if and when he found it convenient. Is it not a singular fact that the less a man has, the more contented he is often found to be? The majority of these serfs, thus comfortlessly situated, were more contented men than their descendants, who have privileges and possessions of which they never dreamed, and many of whom are never satisfied with them. These were the circumstances in which Lawrence was placed, and such were the persons whom he astonished when his time came to do so.