Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/235

 Moreover, because he sees in the church a possible vanguard to civilization, he rebels against its retrogressive and obstructive policy. He laments that the working men do not trust the clergy:

"They suspect them to be mere tubs to the whale—mere substitutes for education, slowly and late adopted, in order to stop the mouths of the importunate. They may misjudge the clergy; but whose fault is it if they do? * * * Every spiritual reform since the time of John Wesley, has had to establish itself in the teeth of insult, calumny, and persecution. Every ecclesiastical reform comes not from within, but from without your body. Everywhere we see the clergy, * * * proclaiming themselves the advocates of Toryism, * * * chosen exclusively from the classes which crush us down; * * * commanding us to swallow down, with faith as passive and implicit as that of a Papist, the very creeds from which their own bad example, and their scandalous neglect, have * * * alienated us; * * * betraying in every tract, in every sermon, an ignorance of the doubts, the feelings, the very language of the masses, which would be ludicrous, were it not accursed before God and man."

Meredith expresses the same idea, with the difference that he does not speak apologetically from within, but with the unqualified disapproval of the outsider. Jenny Denham, an incisive and thoughtful woman, says,