There were meetings official and unofficial in the chapel vestry and in members’ houses, that the congregation might discuss among themselves the question of Oliver Constable’s delinquency. There were loud and long whisperings about him as not only disaffected, but as a young fellow of dangerous license of opinion, who would in all likelihood end in rationalism and free-thinking. ’Liza Polley regarded him, in horrified fascination, as a dreadful young genius, who, in his pride of unsanctified intellect, dared to defy Mr. Holland and Mr. Dadd. Yet she had never heard such naughty words as Jack Dadd would let fall sometimes, drop from Oliver’s mouth. He was a regular and reverent worshipper at the chapel. Nobody had ever seen him ‘screwed’ or so much as half screwed, though he kept company on occasions with the young shopkeepers of the town. He was understood to be domestic in his habits. He was known to consider the poor with even an excess of liberality, while he sought to do it without observation. ’Liza had heard him laughed at for the absurd rigidity of his scruples in the conduct of his business. But she feared it would be all the worse for Oliver, if he turned out, after all, to be little better than an atheist, and a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Surely nobody would think him ‘a great catch’ now. The fact that his suit to her had come to nothing, was like one of those deliverances—of which one reads in good books. Oliver was not left in partial ignorance of the ordeal through which he was passing. Notably the minister, and next to him one qualified member after another, were appointed to deal with the offender. Oliver found the minister the least arrogant and intolerant of his inquisitors. But even Mr. Holland could not see what Oliver thought he saw of the comparative insignificance of the burial of the dead to the welfare of the living. Mr. Holland looked as if he too considered Oliver’s citation of the injunction, ‘let the dead bury their dead,’ misapplied, as Fan had judged his quotation of other maxims which she did not propose to treat as of no weight in themselves. Mr. Holland talked of institutions and organisations, signs and precedents, of the urgent necessity for unity among brethren, of preserving the peace of the congregation, of making everything give place to the great interests of nonconformity in England, of the compulsion laid upon men that they should work with the tools which Providence had put into their hands. But here Oliver was as obdurate and slow of comprehension as his pastor could be on the respective claims of the dead and the living. ‘Right and wrong can never undergo change or modification,’ protested Oliver hotly. ‘I was a man before I was a Christian. I am a Christian just because I am convinced Christianity is the one sheet anchor and lever for humanity. I was and am a Christian before I ever will be a Nonconformist.’