Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/207

Rh, take with them "no companion but a Bible"; and the lowest reach of worldliness is laid bare when an unconverted mother asks her daughter if she can sing something more cheerful than a hymn. Conformity to the Church of England is denounced with unsparing warmth; and the Church of Rome is honoured by having a whole novel, the once famous "Father Clement," devoted to its permanent downfall.

Dr. Greenhill, who has written a sympathetic of Miss Kennedy in the "Dictionary of National Biography," considers that "Father Clement" was composed "with an evident wish to state fairly the doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, even while the authoress strongly disapproves of them";—a point of view which compels us to believe that the biographer spared himself (and who shall blame him?) the reading of this melancholy tale. That George Eliot, who spared herself nothing, was well acquainted with its context, is evidenced by the conversation of the ladies who, in "Janet's Repentance," meet to cover and label the books of the Paddiford