That the young man should despise himself for this outbreak of injured feeling, as soon as he had cooled down, was inevitable; but it took some considerable time to cool down; and in the meantime his resolution rose and swelled into that heroic region which youth always attains so easily. He thought himself disenchanted forever. That night, in bitter earnest, he burned the midnight oil—that night his pen flew over the paper with outbreaks, sometimes indignant, sometimes pathetic, on subjects as remote as possible from Lady Western’s breakfast-party; and with a sudden revulsion he bethought himself of Salem and its oligarchy, which just now prophesied so much good of their new minister. He accepted Salem with all the heat of passion at that moment. His be the task to raise it and its pastor into a common fame!
VIII
The events above narrated were all prefatory of the great success accomplished by Mr. Vincent in Carlingford. Indeed, the date of the young minister’s fame—fame which, as everybody acquainted with that town must be aware, was widely diffused beyond Carlingford itself, and even reached the metropolis, and gladdened his Alma Mater at Homerton—might almost be fixed by a reference to Lady Western’s housekeeping book, if she kept any, and the date of her last summer-party. That event threw the young Nonconformist into just the state of mind which was wanted to quicken all the prejudices of his education, and give individual force to all the hereditary limits of thought in which he had been born. An attempt on the part of the Government to repeal the Toleration Act, or reinstate the Test, could scarcely have produced a more permanent and rapid effect than Lady Western’s neglect, and the total ignorance of Mr. Vincent displayed by polite society in Carlingford. No shame to him. It was precisely the same thing in private life which the other would have been in public. Repeal of the Toleration Act, or reenactment of the Test, are things totally impossible; and when persecution is not to be apprehended or hoped for, where but in the wrongs of a privileged class can the true zest of dissidence be found? Mr. Vincent, who had received his dissenting principles as matters of doctrine, took up the familiar instruments now with a rush of private feeling. He was not conscious of the power of that sentiment of injury and indignation which possessed him. He believed in his heart that he was but returning, after a temporary hallucination, to the true duties of his post; but the fact was, that this wound in the tenderest point—this general slight and indifference—pricked him forward in all that force of personal complaint which gives warmth and piquancy to a public grievance. The young man said nothing of Lady Western even to his dearest friend—tried not to think of her except by way of imagining how she should one day hear of him, and know his name when it possessed a distinction which neither the perpetual curate of St. Roque’s, nor any other figure in that local world, dared hope for. But with fiery zeal he flew to the question of Church and State, and set forth the wrongs which Christianity sustained from endowment, and the heinous evils of rich livings, episcopal palaces, and spiritual lords. It was no mean or ungenerous argument which the young Nonconformist pursued in his fervour of youth and wounded self-regard. It was the natural cry of a man who had entered life at disadvantage, and chafed, without knowing it, at all the phalanx of orders and classes above him, standing close in order to prevent his entrance. With eloquent fervour he expatiated upon the kingdom that was not of this world. If these words were true, what had the Church to do with worldly possessions, rank, dignities, power? Was his Grace of Lambeth more like Paul the tentmaker than his Holiness of Rome? Mr. Vincent went into the whole matter with genuine conviction, and confidence in his own statements. He believed and had been trained in it. In his heart he was persuaded that he himself, oft disgusted and much misunderstood in his elected place at Salem Chapel, ministered the gospel more closely to his Master’s appointment than the rector of Carlingford, who was nominated by a college; or the curate of St. Roque’s, who had his forty pounds a-year from a tiny ancient endowment, and was spending his own little fortune on his church and district. These men had joined God and mammon—they were in the pay of the State. Mr. Vincent thundered forth the lofty censures of an evangelist whom the State did not recognise, and with whom mammon had little enough to do. He brought forth all the weapons out of the Homerton armoury, new, bright, and dazzling; and he did not know any more than his audience that he never would have wielded them so heartily—perhaps would scarcely have taken them off the wall—but for the sudden sting with which his own inferior place, and the existence of a privileged class doubly shut against his entrance, had quickened his personal consciousness. Such, however, was the stimulus which woke the minister of Salem Chapel into action, and produced that series of lectures on Church and State which, as everybody knows, shook society in Carlingford to its very foundation.
“Now we’ve got a young man as is a credit to us,” said Tozer; “and now he’s warming to his work, as I was a little afraid of at first; for somehow I can’t say as I could see to my satisfaction, when he first come, that his heart
