ncalculable
distance between the Reverend Mr. Beecham of the Crescent Chapel, and
the young man who began life as minister of Salem in Carlingford. And
the development outside was not less remarkable than the development
within.

It is astonishing how our prejudices change from youth to middle age,
even without any remarkable interposition of fortune; I do not say
dissipate, or even dispel, which is much more doubtful--but they
change. When Mr. and Mrs. Beecham commenced life, they had both the
warmest feeling of opposition to the Church and everything churchy. All
the circumstances of their lives had encouraged this feeling. The
dislike of the little for the great, the instinctive opposition of a
lower class towards the higher, intensified that natural essence of
separatism, that determination to be wiser than one's neighbour, which
in the common mind lies at the bottom of all dissent. In saying this we
no more accuse Dissenters in religion than Dissenters in politics, or in
art, or in criticism. The first dissenter in most cases is an original
thinker, to whom his enforced departure from the ways of his fathers is
misery and pain. Generally he has a hard struggle with himself before he
can give up, for the superlative truth which has taken possession of
him, all the habits, the pious traditions of his life. He is the real
Nonconformist--half martyr, half victim, of his convictions. But that
Nonconformity which has come to be the faith in which a large number of
people are trained is a totally different business, and affects a very
different kind of sentiments. Personal and independent conviction has no
more to do with it than it has to do with the ardour of a Breton peasant
trained in deepest zeal of Romanism, or the unbounded certainty of any
other traditionary believer. For this reason we may be allowed to
discuss the changes of feeling which manifested themselves in Mr. and
Mrs. Beecham without anything disrespectful to Nonconformity. Not being
persons of original mind, they were what their training and
circumstances, and a flood of natural influences, made them. They began
life, feeling themselves to be of a hopelessly low social caste, and
believing themselves to be superior to their superiors in that
enlightenment which they had been brought up to believe distinguished
the connection. The first thing which opened their minds to a dawning
doubt whether their enlightenment was, in reality, so much greater than
th