long the black-berried lanes, and down the long
green rides cut in the yellowing bracken of the park.

"And so you are going to winter in Rome?" said Charles, who had the
previous day, contrary to his wont, accepted an invitation to
Slumberleigh Hall for the middle of October. "I sometimes go to Rome
for a few weeks when the shooting is over. And are you glad or sorry at
the prospect of leaving your Cranford?"

"Very sorry."

"Why?"

"I have seen an entirely new phase of life at Slumberleigh."

"I think I can guess what you mean," said Charles, gravely. "One does
not often meet any one like Mr. Alwynn."

"No. I was thinking of him. Until I came to Slumberleigh the lines had
not fallen to me in very clerical places, so my experience is limited;
but he seems to me to be the only clergyman I have known who does not
force on one a form of religion that has been dead and buried for
years."

"The clergy have much to answer for on that head," said Charles with
bitterness. "I sometimes like and respect them as individuals, but I do
not love them as a class. One ought to make allowance for the fact that
they are tied and bound by the chain of their Thirty-nine Articles; that
at three-and-twenty they shut the doors deliberately on any new and
possibly unorthodox idea; and it is consequently unreasonable to expect
from them any genuine freedom or originality of thought. I can forgive
them their assumption of superiority, their inability to meet honest
scepticism with anything like fairness, their continual bickering among
themselves; but I cannot forgive them the harm they are doing to
religion, the discredit they are bringing upon it by their bigoted views
and obsolete ideas. They busy themselves doing good--that is the worst
of it; they mean well, but they do not see that, in the mean while,
their Church is being left unto them desolate; though perhaps, after
all, the Church having come to be what it is, that is the best thing
that can happen."

"There are men among the clergy who will not come under that sweeping
accusation," said Ruth. "Look at some of the London churches. Are they
desolate? Goodness and earnestness will be a power to the end of time,
however narrow the accompanying creed may be."

"That is true, but we have heads as well as hearts. Goodness and
earnestness appeal to the heart alone. The intellect is left out in the
cold. However good and earnest, and eloquent one of these great
preachers may be, t