Under this impression, Oliver held it disloyal to abandon the chapel, any more than the class to which he belonged. At the same time he had his doubts and scruples. But just as he was a man of much stronger imagination and capacity for idealisation than John Hartley was, Oliver did not feel offended by the bareness and ruggedness of the ecclesiastical ways he trod. He saw beyond them, even as he saw beyond the modern smoothness and smartness of the chapel building, back into what struck him as the less objectionable gauntness and grimness of its predecessor in which earnest and fervent men had worshipped, often to the peril and loss of their earthly joys and worldly goods. There were records in existence which proved that the chapel had been among the earliest of its kind in England. When Oliver thought that contemporaries and allies of John Milton and John Bunyan, Oliver Cromwell, Blake and Daniel Defoe—who, it seems, has been convicted of time-serving and double-dealing, but who was so stout and unflinching a patriot withal, that one may be tempted to prefer Defoe’s shuffling to some later men’s consistency—Oliver Constable laughed at the idea of men of narrow and uncultured intellect and vulgar bumptiousness being the sole figures that peopled the region in which he had come to sit apart, conscious that he was looked upon as an interloper and false friend, unworthy of the right hand of fellowship, or of the confidence of his companions. John Hartley won the election mainly by the support of the dissenters—whom, however, success did not at once soften to the renegade. CHAPTER XXI. MUTINY IN THE MILL AND THE BAKEHOUSE. Oliver was a little liable to look over the heads of his subordinates as well as his equals, to be possessed by his purpose instead of possessing it, and to follow it out—having no attention to spare for the signs of the times, though he was particularly calculated to call them forth in hostile array, and they were certain to count largely in the result. It took Oliver by surprise when he was met by the ‘poser’ which he might reasonably have expected, of resistance and anarchy in his own dominions, where he had been seeking to enact transcendental laws and attempting to carry out, not political or social, but moral economy—not every man for himself alone, but every man for his neighbour still more, ‘in honour preferring one another,’ which Oliver persisted in regarding as the only worthy and enduring trade principles.