hanging them
forward in worshipful shame. The former spread the rumor that the old
minister had gone crazy, the latter began to go now and then to church.

I may here mention, as I shall have no other opportunity, that a new
chapel was not built; that the young pastor soon left the old one; that
the deacons declared themselves unable to pay the rent; that Mr. Drake
took the place into his own hands, and preached there every Sunday
evening, but went always in the morning to hear Mr. Wingfold. There was
kindly human work of many sorts done by them in concert, and each felt
the other a true support. When the pastor and the parson chanced to meet
in some lowly cottage, it was never with embarrassment or apology, as if
they served two masters, but always with hearty and glad greeting, and
they always went away together. I doubt if wickedness does half as much
harm as sectarianism, whether it be the sectarianism of the church or of
dissent, the sectarianism whose virtue is condescension, or the
sectarianism whose vice is pride. Division has done more to hide Christ
from the view of men, than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken.
It is the half-Christian clergy of every denomination that are the main
cause of the so-called failure of the Church of Christ. Thank God, it
has not failed so miserably as to succeed in the estimation or to the
satisfaction of any party in it.

But it was not merely in relation to forms of church government that the
heart of the pastor now in his old age began to widen. It is foolish to
say that after a certain age a man can not alter. That some men can
not--or will not, (God only can draw the line between those two _nots_)
I allow; but the cause is not age, and it is not universal. The man who
does not care and ceases to grow, becomes torpid, stiffens, is in a
sense dead; but he who has been growing all the time need never stop;
and where growth is, there is always capability of change: growth itself
is a succession of slow, melodious, ascending changes.

The very next Sunday after the visit of their deputation to him, the
church in Cow-lane asked their old minister to preach to them. Dorothy,
as a matter of course, went with her father, although, dearly as she
loved him, she would have much preferred hearing what the curate had to
say. The pastor's text was, _Ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin,
and have omitted the weightier matters of the law--judgment, mercy, and
faith_. In his s