He has a great
many services on Sunday, somewhat sparsely attended. He reads matins
and vespers every day in his church, and gives an address on saints'
days. But he seems to have no idea what his parishioners are doing or
thinking about, and no particular desire to know. He is assiduous in
visiting, in holding classes, in teaching; he has no sense of humour
whatever; and the system of religion which he administers is so
perfectly obvious and unquestioned a thing to him, that it never occurs
to him to wonder if other people are not built on different lines. I
have often, attended his church and heard him preach; but the sermons
which I have heard are either expositions of high doctrine, or else
discourses of what I can only call a very feminine and even finicking
kind of morality; he preaches on the duty of church-going, on the
profane use of scriptural language, on the sanctification of joy, on
the advisability of family prayer, on religious meditation, on the
examples of saints, on the privilege of devotional exercises, on the
consecration of life, on the communion of saints, on the ministry of
angels. But it seems all remote from daily life, and to be a species of
religion that can only be successfully cultivated by people of abundant
leisure. I do not mean to say that many of these things do not possess
a certain refined beauty of their own; but I do feel that farmers and
labourers are not, as a rule, in the stage in which such ideas are
possible or even desirable.
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