Page:Hannah More (1887 Charlotte Mary Yonge British).djvu/137

Rh intended the poor to be servants and slaves, it was ordained that they should be ignorant and wicked, and we could not alter what was decreed.

On the Sunday before the school was to be opened there was a curious scene. The clerk read out a paper signed John Barrow, summoning all opposed to the school to meet on Friday at the church, and the clergyman read another calling on parents and children to meet for the opening of the school on Sunday. Not a creature would sign the paper prepared against the school. A person on whose estate the despot had a mortgage answered, "Mr. Barrow, though I am much in your power, I am still a man!" To all his commands he received the same answer, and, after furiously abusing the curate, he declared that the opening of the school would be the beginning of a revolution like the French. "It is all over with property," he cried in the spirit of Tennyson's farmer. "If property is not to rule, what is to become of us?"

There was no place in which to keep Sunday-school except the church, and as Barrow prevented that from being used the school had to meet under an apple tree; but there a new difficulty arose, for while the children were being taught to sing Watts's hymns, a farmer ran down to the clergyman who was assisting, crying, "Oh, Sir, I am afraid this must be Methody."

It appears that the Methodists had once preached