But in the evening later on I saw three very old men come
chuckling out of a dissenting chapel, and surely enough they were my
old friends the blacksmith, the carpenter, and the shepherd. There was
a look of content upon their faces which made me feel certain they had
been singing; not doubtless with the old glory of the violoncello, the
clarinet, and the trombone, but still songs of Sion and no new fangled
papistry.
CHAPTER XV
THE hymn had engaged my attention; when it was over I had time to
take stock of the congregation. They were chiefly farmers- fat, very
well-to-do folk, who had come some of them with their wives and
children from outlying farms two and three miles away; haters of
popery and of anything which anyone might choose to say was popish;
good, sensible fellows who detested theory of any kind, whose ideal
was the maintenance of the status quo with perhaps a loving
reminiscence of old war times, and a sense of wrong that the weather
was not more completely under their control, who desired higher prices
and cheaper wages, but otherwise were most contented when things
were changing least; tolerators, if not lovers, of all that was
familiar, haters of all that was unfamiliar; they would have been
equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at
seeing it practised.
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