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Updated: August 3, 2024
The citizens are, for the most part, of a distinctly religious turn of mind. They may not be, and except in Adelaide are not, such good church-goers as at home; but they have not drunk of the poison of infidelity, nor eaten of the sweets of indifference.
The birds sang merrily, and nothing else sounded at all; it was very Sabbath stillness. So Nettie lay till she heard the steps of the church-goers returning; and presently, after her mother had been there and gone, her father came into her room to see her. He kissed her, and said a few words, and then went to the window and stood there looking out.
Think: he was absolutely friendly with them! was not shocked at them! held up no hands of dismay! Only they must do so no more. "If he were to come again, visibly, now, which do you think would come crowding around him in greater numbers the respectable church-goers, or the people from the slums? I do not know. I dare not judge.
The number of arriving church-goers increased; men, women, and children, old and young, even infants; for at the Midsummer festival no one stays at home to take care of them, and so of course they must come too all must go to church. What a dazzling army of colours! Fiery red and grass green aprons meet our gaze.
There were inscriptions on the panels of the singing-gallery, telling of benefactions to the poor of Shepperton, with an involuted elegance of capitals and final flourishes, which my alphabetic erudition traced with ever-new delight. No benches in those days; but huge roomy pews, round which devout church-goers sat during 'lessons', trying to look anywhere else than into each other's eyes.
Already the braying of a trombone out of tune, and the barbarous jingle of a tambourine, had absorbed some hundred thousand of possible church-goers; and though, of course, it was impossible for sensible men and women the people whom the Church should endeavor to grapple to its soul with hooks of steel to look, except with amused sadness, at the ludicrous methods and vulgar ineptitude of the Salvation Army, still the Church was making no effort to provide the sensible, thinking, educated people of England with an equivalent as suitable to their requirements as the Salvation Army was to the requirements of the foolish, the hysterical, the unthinking people who played the tambourines and brayed on the tuneless trombones.
He saw in fancy the robber-Greek prowling about Wilson's farm, setting snares for the marvellous night-bird, and it was with more than his customary inattention to his sisters' refined conversation that he formed part of their male escort to the place of worship. Mr. Pericles met the church-goers on their return in one of the green bowery lanes leading up to Brookfield.
On a matter of yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak for him, but I think that as he grew older, his hold upon anything like a creed weakened, though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerning Christ. He did not latterly go to church, I believe; but then, very few of his circle were church-goers.
They had been staunch Generals, Chairmen of Quarter-Sessions, riders to hounds, subscribers to charities, rigid church-goers, disciplined, orthodox, worthy members of society. Underdown was their name, and Underwood their home.
On he strode through the steep, empty streets, lines of black freestone houses, built by regular church-goers and unbreathed upon by scandal ever since, frowning upon him perpetually; and the wind, which had risen greatly, wailing and booming all sorts of morals. And now a fresh trouble agitated him. He was growing less contrite!
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