Two Years Ago Volume I Part 41

I'll tell you what, sir,"--and Mr. Trebooze attempted a dignified and dogmatic tone--"I never told it you before, because you were my very good friend, sir: but my opinion is, sir, that by what you're doing up at Pentremochyn, you're just spreading chartism--chartism, sir! Of course I know nothing. Of course I'm n.o.body, in these days: but that's my opinion, sir, and you've got it!"

By which motion Tom took little. Mighty is envy always, and mighty ignorance: but you become aware of their truly t.i.tanic grandeur only when you attempt to touch their owner's pocket.

Tom tried old Heale: but took as little in that quarter. Heale had heard of sanitary reform, of course; but he knew nothing about it, and gave a general a.s.sent to Tom's doctrines, for fear of exposing his own ignorance: acting on them was a very different matter. It is always hard for an old medical man to confess that anything has been discovered since the days of his youth; and beside, there were other reasons behind, which Heale tried to avoid giving; and therefore fenced off, and fenced off, till, pressed hard by Tom, wrath came forth, and truth with it.

"And what be you thinking of, sir, to expect me to offend all my best patients? and not one of 'em but rents some two cottages, some a dozen. And what'll they say to me if I go a routing and rookling in their drains, like an old sow by the wayside, beside putting 'em to all manner of expense? And all on the chance of this cholera coming, which I have no faith in, nor in this new-fangled sanitary reform neither, which is all a dodge for a lot of young Government puppies to fill their pockets, and rule and ride over us: and my opinion always was with the Bible, that 'tis jidgment, sir, a jidgment of G.o.d, and we can't escape His holy will, and that's the plain truth of it."

Tom made no answer to that latter argument. He had heard that "'tis jidgment" from every mouth during the last few days; and had mortally offended the Brianite preacher that very morning, by answering his "'tis jidgment" with--

"But, my good sir! the Bible, I thought, says that Aaron stayed the plague among the Israelites, and David the one at Jerusalem."

"Sir, those was miracles, sir! and they was under the Law, sir, and we'm under the Gospel, you'll be pleased to remember."

"Humph!" said Tom, "then, by your showing, they were better off under the Law than we are now, if they could have their plagues stopped by miracles; and we cannot have ours stopped at all."

"Sir, be you an infidel?"

To which there was no answer to be made.

In this case, Tom answered Heale with--

"But, my dear sir, if you don't like (as is reasonable enough) to take the responsibility on yourself, why not go to the Board of Guardians, and get them to put the Act in force?"

"Boord, sir? and do you know so little of Boords as that? Why, there ain't one of them but owns cottages themselves, and it's as much as my place is worth--"

"Your place as medical officer is just worth nothing, as you know; you'll have been out of pocket by it seven or eight pounds this year, even if no cholera comes."

Tom knew the whole state of the case; but he liked tormenting Heale now and then.

"Well, sir! but if I get turned out next year, in steps that Drew over at Carcarrow Churchtown into my district, and into the best of my practice, too. I wonder what sort of a Poor Law district you were medical officer of, if you don't know yet that that's why we take to the poor."

"My dear sir, I know it, and a good deal more beside."

"Then why go bothering me this way?"

"Why," said Tom, "it's pleasant to have old notions confirmed as often as possible--

"'Life is a jest, and all things show it; I thought so once, but now I know it.'

What an a.s.s the fellow must have been who had that put on his tombstone, not to have found it out many a year before he died!"

He went next to Headley the curate, and took little by that move; though more than by any other.

For Frank already believed his doctrines, as an educated London parson of course would; was shocked to hear that they were likely to become fact so soon and so fearfully; offered to do all he could: but confessed that he could do nothing.

"I have been hinting to them, ever since I came, improvements in cleanliness, in ventilation, and so forth: but I have been utterly unheeded: and bully me as you will, Doctor, about my cramming doctrines down their throats, and roaring like a Pope's bull, I a.s.sure you that, on sanitary reform, my roaring was as of a sucking dove, and ought to have prevailed, if soft persuasion can."

"You were a dove where you ought to have been a bull, and a bull where you ought to have been a dove. But roar now, if ever you roared, in the pulpit and out. Why not preach to them on it next Sunday?"

"Well, I'd give a lecture gladly, if I could get any one to come and hear it; but that you could do better than me."

"I'll lecture them myself, and show them bogies, if my quarter-inch will do its work. If they want seeing to believe, see they shall; I have half-a-dozen specimens of water already which will astonish them.

Let me lecture, you must preach."

"You must know, that there is a feeling,--you would call it a prejudice,--against introducing such purely secular subjects into the pulpit."

Tom gave a long whistle.

"Pardon me, Mr. Headley; you are a man of sense; and I can speak to you as one human being to another, which I have seldom been able to do with your respected cloth."

"Say on; I shall not be frightened."

"Well, don't you put up the Ten Commandments in your Church?"

"Yes."

"And don't one of them run: 'Thou shalt not kill.'"

"Well?"

"And is not murder a moral offence--what you call a sin?"

"_Sans doute_."

"If you saw your parishioners in the habit of cutting each other's throats, or their own, shouldn't you think that a matter spiritual enough to be a fit subject for a little of the drum ecclesiastic?"

"Well?"

"Well? Ill! There are your parishioners about to commit wholesale murder and suicide, and is that a secular question? If they don't know the fact, is not that all the more reason for your telling them of it?

You pound away, as I warned you once, at the sins of which they are just as well aware as you; why on earth do you hold your tongue about the sins of which they are not aware? You tell us every Sunday that we do Heaven only knows how many more wrong things than we dream of.

Tell it us again now. Don't strain at gnats like want of faith and resignation, and swallow such a camel as twenty or thirty deaths.

It's no concern of mine; I've seen plenty of people murdered, and may again: I am accustomed to it; but if it's not your concern, what on earth you are here for is more than I can tell."

"You are right--you are right; but how to put it on religious grounds--"

Tom whistled again.

"If your doctrines cannot be made to fit such plain matters as twenty deaths, _tant pis pour eux_. If they have nothing to say on such scientific facts, why the facts must take care of themselves, and the doctrines may, for aught I care, go and--. But I won't be really rude.

Only think over the matter. If you are G.o.d's minister, you ought to have something to say about G.o.d's view of a fact which certainly involves the lives of his creatures, not by twos and threes, but by tens of thousands."

So Frank went home, and thought it through; and went once and again to Thurnall, and condescended to ask his opinion of what he had said, and whether he said ill or well. What Thurnall answered was--"Whether that's sound Church doctrine is your business; but if it be, I'll say with the man there in the Acts--what was his name?--'Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.'"

"Would G.o.d that you were one! for you would make a right good one."

"Humph! at least you see what you can do, if you'll only face fact as it stands, and talk about the realities of life. I'll puff your sermon beforehand, I a.s.sure you, and bring all I can to hear it."

So Frank preached a n.o.ble sermon, most rational, and most spiritual withal; but he, too, like his tutor, took little by his motion.

All the present fruit upon which he had to congratulate himself was, that the Brianite preacher denounced him in chapel next Sunday as a German Rationalist, who impiously pretended to explain away the Lord's visitation into a carnal matter of drains, and pipes, and gases, and such like; and that his rival of another denomination, who was a fanatic on the teetotal question, denounced him as bitterly for supporting the cause of drunkenness, by attributing cholera to want of cleanliness, while all rational people knew that its true source was intemperance. Poor Frank! he had preached against drunkenness many a time and oft: but because he would not add a Mohammedan eleventh commandment to those ten which men already find difficulty enough in keeping, he was set upon at once by a fanatic whose game it was--as it is that of too many--to snub sanitary reform, and hinder the spread of plain scientific truth, for the sake of pushing their own nostrum for all human ills.