Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/273

 to run riot among those allurements of this life which formerly it had been their business to denounce. That in many cases the fence broke down, and some singular results followed its breaking, is no matter for surprise, but the contrary; in a subsequent chapter we shall instance the most important of these cases.

Yet, after all, it would have been a pity had the change come quietly, instead of being precipitated by the Revolution; two considerations will show this. In the first place, as things were now, a meteoric display of talent which had been buried under the mounds of uniformity and routine—talent as various as the variety of faces—shot forth from thousands of rustic retreats, where its existence had been unsuspected. Incumbents whom their neighbours had never imagined to be anything beyond hum-drum country parsons proved to be artists, mechanicians, agriculturists, economists, financiers, lawyers, first-rate men of business, the real character could now come out from under the parson’s cloth, because, the etiquette and prejudices having been swept away, every clergyman felt that he could put off his clerical profession at pleasure, or make it merely auxiliary to the occupation which his heart really was in. No doubt there were those to be found whose heart was really in a religious life, but they were not plentiful; the iron mask undone revealed a class of men the far greater part of whom had adopted the profession from motives more or less worldly.

But in the second place, the Revolution had promulgated a law which gave the married clergy a direct interest in disestablishment. Every clergyman’s widow could now enjoy for her life-time the income and residence of her deceased husband, on condition of succeeding him in his clerical office and undertaking, either in her own person or in that of a sister or daughter, the whole offices of the ministry without exception. This could be in no case difficult,