The schoolmaster spent a few days in the house. His friend was
generally in town, and his wife, regarding him as very primitive
and hardly fit for what she counted society--the class, namely,
that she herself represented, was patronising and condescending;
but the young fellow, finding, to his surprise, that he knew a
great deal more about his studies than he did himself, was first
somewhat attracted and then somewhat influenced by him, so that at
length an intimacy tending to friendship arose between them.
Mr Graham was not a little shocked to discover that his ideas
in respect of the preacher's calling were of a very worldly kind.
The notions of this fledgling of dissent differed from those of
a clergyman of the same stamp in this:--the latter regards the
church as a society with accumulated property for the use of its
officers; the former regarded it as a community of communities, each
possessing a preaching house which ought to be made commercially
successful. Saving influences must emanate from it of course--
but dissenting saving influences.
His mother was a partisan to a hideous extent. To hear her talk you
would have thought she imagined the apostles the first dissenters,
and that the main duty of every Christian soul was to battle for
the victory of Congregationalism over Episcopacy, and Voluntaryism
over State Endowment.
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