Part 15

Nor does it seem of grave concern to some of us--but here again we may only be displaying our own ignorance of ecclesiastical subtleties--how a minister of religion is set apart to his office, if so be that he is an educated man and does the work put to his hand faithfully. Jinks was priested--I think that was what he called it, but he is not responsible for my mistakes--in a cathedral by a Right Rev. Father in God, and he used often to insist that only through such a channel could the grace of Orders come; but when the successor of the apostles advised Jinks in a most kindly, fatherly spirit to cease from some of his amiable extravagances--he had added a bran-new chasuble to his other bravery, which greatly pleased his female devotees--“the dear Father do look so pretty in his new chalice,” one of his admirers said--Jinks repaid the Episcopal counsel with thinly-veiled scorn, and preached a sermon which ran to the unwonted length of twenty minutes to show that the bishop was himself a law-breaker and little better than a Protestant My friend Carmichael, again, was ordained in the little Free Kirk of Drumtochty by the Presbytery of Muirtown,--that heavy body of Church Law and Divinity, Dr. Dowbiggin, being Moderator,--and I cannot recollect Carmichael once referring to his Orders but he regarded his spiritual superiors with profound respect, and was very much relieved when his heresy case was dismissed--knowing very well that if they took it into their heads he would be turned out of his Church without delay and deposed from the ministry beyond human remedy. Carmichael was in the custom of denouncing priestcraft, and explaining that he had no claim to be a priest; but he administered a ghostly discipline so minute and elaborate, with sins which could be loosed by him, and reserved sins which could only be loosed by a higher authority, that the Father would have regarded it with envy. And Carmichael exercised an unquestioned authority among the hard-headed and strong-willed people of Drumtochty which Jinks would have cheerfully given ten years of his life to possess in the parish of St Agatha's. Between the two there was this difference, that the vicar of St Agatha's had the form of authority without the power, and the minister of Drumtochty had the power of authority without the form; and, as no man could be personally more humble or in heart more sincere than Jinks, this was the weary pity of the situation for my little Father.

Had St. Agatha's been in the West End, where his ritualism would have been accepted with graceful enthusiasm because it was fashionable--which would, however, have caused him much searching of heart: or in the East End, where it would have been condoned with a wink on account of his almsgiving, which would have wounded him deeply--Father Jinks had not been a subject of mockery and reproach. As it was Providence had dealt severely with the good man in sending him to the obdurate and stiff-necked parish of St Agatha's, where the people were anything but open soil for his teaching. The houses ranged from twenty pounds of rent up to forty, and were inhabited by foremen artisans, clerks, shopkeepers, single women letting lodgings, and a few people retired on a modest competence. The district had not one rich man, although it was wonderful what some of the shopkeepers gave to special efforts at their chapels, nor any person in the remotest contact with society, but neither were there any evil livers or wastrels. Every one worked hard, lived frugally--with a special Sunday dinner--paid his taxes promptly, as well as his other debts, and lived on fairly good terms with his neighbours. The parish had certainly no enthusiasms, and would not have known what an ideal was, but it had a considerable stock of common sense, and most people possessed a traditional creed which they were prepared to defend with much obstinacy. St. Agatha's parish was a very home of Philistinism, and, as everybody knows, the Philistines have always had an instinctive dislike to Catholic usages and teachings.

II

The congregation of St Agatha's were a prejudiced people, and had long been established in their own ways. The previous vicar, who had a certain fame as an orator of the florid order and rose to be an honorary canon, was a churchman of the lowest depths, and did things which Father Jinks used to mention with a shudder. He preached in a black gown, and delighted to address religious meetings in unlicensed places without any gown at all; he administered the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper once a month, and preferred to do so at evening service; he delighted to offer an extempore prayer before sermon, and never concluded a discourse without witnessing against the errors of the Church of Rome; he delighted in a three-decker pulpit, and would occasionally, in visiting the church for a baptism, leave his hat on the communion table where there was no other ornament. In his early days the music was led by a barrel organ, which was turned by the clerk, and later, when a large harmonium was introduced, the Psalms were read--the clerk leading the congregation with a stentorian voice--and Moody and Sankey's hymns were freely used. It was understood that the Canon had received a sudden call to the ministry while engaged in commercial pursuits, and had not found time for a University education--the hood which he wore at marriages was an invention of his wife's--and he was therefore very careful to correct the inaccuracies of the accepted versions, saying, with much impressiveness, “In the original Hebrew of this Gospel,” or, “The Greek of Isaiah has it,” although, in order to prevent monotony he would next Sunday reverse the order of languages and again conform to traditional belief. Critical persons, connected by blood with the families of St Agatha's and attending services there on occasion, declared openly that the Canon was a preposterous personage and a wind-bag; but he had without doubt a certain vein of genuine piety, which unsympathising people were apt to call unctuous, but which was, at any rate, warm; and a turn for rhetoric--he was of Irish birth--which might not be heavily charged with thought, but was very appetizing to the somewhat heavy minds of St Agatha's parish. While he did not allow excessive charity to interfere with comfortable living, and while he did not consider it his duty to risk a valuable life by reckless visitation of persons with contagious diseases, the Canon, by his popular religious manner--his funeral addresses which he delivered at the grave, wearing a tall hat and swaying an umbrella, moved all to open grief,--and by his sermons,--an hour long and rich in anecdotes--held the parish in his hand and kept St Agatha's full. People still speak of a course of lectures on “The Antichrists of the Bible,” in which Rome was compared to Egypt, Samaria, Nineveh, and Babylon, and the strangers sat in the aisles; and there can be no doubt that the Canon convinced the parish that a High Churchman was a Jesuit in disguise, and that a priest was (probably) an immoral person. So far as I could gather, the worthy man believed everything he said--although his way of saying it might savour of cant--and he was greatly impressed by an anonymous letter threatening his life and telling him that the eye of Rome was on him. He had been guided to marry three times--possibly as a protest against celibacy--with cumulative financial results of a fairly successful character, and his last wife mourns her loss at Cheltenham, where she subscribes freely to “escaped nuns,” and greedily anticipates the field of Armageddon.

When the new patron, who had bought his position for missionary purposes, appointed the Rev. John James Jinks to be vicar of St Agatha's, there was a rebellion in the parish, which, of course, came to nothing, and an appeal to the Bishop, which called forth a letter exhorting every person to peace and charity. Various charges were made against the new vicar, ranging from the fact that he had been curate in a church where the confessional was in full swing, and that the morals of the matrons of St Agatha's would be in danger, to the wicked calumny that he was an ex-Primitive Methodist, and was therefore, as is natural in such circumstances, very strong on the doctrine of apostolical succession. As the last insinuation cut Jinks to the quick, and was, indeed, almost the only attack he really felt, it is due to his memory to state that he was the son (and only child) of a country rector, whose living was worth £129, and who brought up his lad in the respectable, if somewhat arid, principles of the historical High Church school, which in the son blossomed rapidly into the luxuriance of Ritualism. It was only by the severest economy at the Rectory that Jinks could be sent to one of the cheaper Halls at Oxford, and it was the lasting sorrow of his blameless life that the Rector and his wife both died before he secured his modest pass degree. His mother used to call him John James, and had dreams that he would be raised to the Episcopate long after she had been laid to rest; but he knew very well from the beginning that his intellectual gifts were limited, and that his career would not be distinguished. While he magnified his priestly office beyond bounds, and was as bold as a lion for the Church in all her rights and privileges, he had no ambition for himself and was the most modest of men. Because he was only five feet four in height, and measured thirty-two inches round the chest, and had a pink and white boyish face, and divided his hair down the middle, and blushed when he was spoken to by women and dons, and stammered slightly in any excitement, they called him Jinksy at Tommy's Hall, and he answered cheerfully; and when our big Scots doctor availed himself on occasion of the same familiar form of address he showed no resentment No one, however, could say, when he was with us in St Agatha's, that he forgot his position, not only as a priest with power to bind and loose, but also as the disciple of his Lord; for if any clergyman ever did, our little Father adorned the doctrine of Christ by his meekness and lowliness of character, and by a self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness which knew no limits. He wore a low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat, and in winter a garment resembling a Highland cloak, which gave him as he imagined a certain resemblance to a continental abbé; and as he skimmed at all hours along our sombre, monotonous streets on errands which were often very poorly requited, and in many cases may have been quite uncalled for, he was, if you pleased to see him from a certain angle, a rather absurd figure; but as his simple, boyish face grew thinner and paler every month, and his eyes grew brighter and more spiritual, one's smile rather passed into the tears of the heart And now that he is gone, and no one in St Agatha's is vexed either by his chasuble or his kindness, it comes to us that Father Jinks followed the light given to him without flinching, and has rendered in a good account.

III

When Father Jinks read himself into St Agatha's, the church seemed to him little better than a conventicle, a mere preaching-house, and it was his business to change it into a place fit for Catholic worship. His success in this direction was marvellous. Before his death there was a chancel with screen and choir stalls, a side pulpit of carved stone with scenes from the Gospels thereon, a reredos, and an altar with cross and candlesticks, besides other pieces of ecclesiastical furniture of lesser importance and beyond the lay intelligence. There was also an organ, for which so many pews were removed, and a font near the door, for which other pews were removed, and an east window, containing the life and death of our patron saint, about whom nobody knew anything before, and for which a magnificent geometrical design in red and blue, greatly admired by the parish, had to be removed. The very plaster, with ornate pattern of roses, he had stripped from the roof, and had the oak laid bare; and although the walls had been tastefully decorated by a local firm with a mixed border on a ground of green, so fierce and unrelenting was the Vicar's iconoclastic passion that this also was sacrificed, and nothing was to be seen in St Agatha's save stone and wood. “It was the 'omeliest church you ever see,” that excellent woman Mrs. Judkin remarked to me, “in the old Canon's time, with the bits of colour, and 'im a looking down at you in 'is black gown; and now it chills your 'art to sit there, let alone that you're hexpected to bow 'alf the time;” and so Mrs. Judkin, with many of like mind, went off to Ebenezer, where the firmament was represented on the roof and the service was decidedly warm. The structural reformation (or deformation, as it was generally considered) was a very achievement of persevering and ingenious begging, in which he taxed the patron and all the patron's friends, as well as every old lady or ecclesiastical layman with the reputation of highness, obtaining a pulpit from one and a font from another, picking up crosses, candlesticks, stools, altar-cloths in all quarters, and being mightily cheered by every addition to the full equipment of this neglected edifice. Nor did Father Jinks ask from other people what he would not give himself, for he dispensed with a curate that he might repair the chancel, and, as appeared afterwards, he expended all his little patrimony on the apocryphal life of St Agatha, whose doings and appearance as represented on that window were a subject of derision to the wits of the parish. When Jinks held his first festival in her honour, and preached a discourse eleven minutes in length on St Agatha's example and miracles, an interesting correspondence followed in the local paper, in which it was asserted that the church, then in the country and a chapel of ease to the famous church of St Paul's-in-the-Fields, was named in the evil Laudian times, and ought to have been rechristened by the name of Wycliffe or Latimer in the days of the late lamented Canon; that St. Agatha never existed; that if she did, she was a Papist; that if we knew enough, we should likely find that her antecedents were very doubtful.

This correspondence, in which my friend himself was freely handled, did not in the least disturb him, for the Festival of St Agatha was a height to which he had been working for the three years, and it was the last function of his public ministry. When the procession came out of the vestry, with a cross-bearer--Jack Storgiss, the grocer, to whose deformed little boy Jinks had been very kind--the banners of the Guild of St Agatha, a choir of six men and twelve boys in varied garments, Father Jinks himself with everything on he knew, attended by acolytes--two little monkeys on whose ingenuous countenances self-importance struggled with mischief--and, having marched round the church singing “Onward, Christian soldiers,” re-entered the chancel, so far as outward things went, the Father's heart was almost satisfied; and as, in his stall, he thought of the desolation of the past he was as one that dreamed.

If Jinks allowed himself to be proud of anything, it was of his choir; and when people spoke of my friend as a weakling because he was insignificant in appearance and a feeble preacher--he himself thanked God daily that he was a priest, to whom Pastor Jumps' oratorical gifts were unnecessary--one could always point to the choir, for the qualities which created and held together that remarkable body were peculiar to Jinks and were quite wanting in the Pastor. Three years before this advertisement had appeared in the _Anglo-Catholic_:--

“Wanted, an organist and choirmaster, who will be prepared, for the glory of God and the love of sacred music, to assist a priest in affording Catholic worship to a neglected parish.”

This unworldly invitation caught the eye (and fancy) of Harold de Petre--his original name was Henry Peter--about whom his friends were much concerned because he had a small competency and would do nothing except work at music; because he wore a brown velvet coat and a loose red bow, and three ancient gems on his left hand, and his hair falling over his ears; and because he practised a certain luxurious softness of life which might pass any day into positive vice. Two more different men could not have been found in a day's journey, but they became friends at once. The priestly instinct detected at-once in Petre a gift whose consecration would be the salvation of a soul and an assistance to the Church of God; and the humility and sincerity of the little priest were very attractive to the aesthete. From that time the curiously assorted pair worked together in perfect harmony and ever-growing affection, with one common desire to beautify the worship and edifice of St Agatha's.

In order to secure an organ Petre sacrificed one-third of his means, and was daily designing some improvement in his loved instrument; for her help he had even learned some organ handicraft, and could be seen almost any day toiling in his shirt-sleeves. As he watched the life of the Vicar, Petre began also to make many personal sacrifices, giving up his wine--used to spend a good deal on Chateau Lafitte--to defray choir expenses; teaching the piano in the more ambitious homes of the parish, and with the proceeds providing two tenors and two basses of distinction for the choir. One year he took no holiday that the altar might be becomingly dressed according to the season of the Church year, whether of joy or sorrow. Working with Jinks, a certain change even came over Petre's outer man; with every year he shed a gem; black velvet replaced the brown, and his hair became almost decorous; and one evening, when the two were having a lemon squash after hard work at the Easter decorations, Petre made a confession to his friend.

“There is something I wanted to tell you Jinks,” lighting his pipe slowly. “My name is not really Harold de Petre: it's... just Henry Peter. Didn't sound very artistic, you know, and I just... improved it in fact. Rather think that I should go back to old signature.”

“My own name,” said the Vicar with much simplicity, “isn't a high-class name, and I was once tempted to change it--it lends itself too easily to abbreviations--but it seemed unreal to do that kind of thing.”

“Do you know, Father, I expect that anthem to go well to-morrow; that little rascal Bags took the high notes magnificently to-night I told him so, and he was awfully pleased: he's as keen as mustard at practice.”

Nothing further was said about fancy pseudonyms, but next time the Father saw the organist's signature it was Henry Peter.

The boys in St. Agatha's choir were not angels, but they were Jinks' particular friends, and would do more for him than for their own parents. He had picked them up one by one in the parish as he visited--for he had no school--upon the two qualifications that each one had an ear, and each was an out-and-out boy. Because he was so good himself Jinks would have nothing to do with prigs and smugs; and because he did nothing wrong himself he delighted in the scrapes of his boys. It was to him they went in trouble, and he somehow found a way of escape. Every one knew who paid for the broken glass in the snowball fight between Thackeray and Dickens Streets, in which Bags and another chorister, much admired for his angelic appearance, led their neighbourhood; and it was asserted by the Protestant party that the Papist Vicar was seen watching the fray from the corner. When an assistant School Board master bullied his boys beyond endurance and they brought him to his senses with pain of body, it was the Vicar of St Agatha's who pled the case of the rebels before the Board, and saved them from public disgrace and the Police Court The Vicarage and all its premises were at the disposal of the boys, and they availed themselves freely of their privileges. Bags kept his rabbits in the yard--his parents allowed no such tenants at home--and his fellow-warrior of the snowball fight had a promising family of white mice in one of the empty rooms, where another chorister had a squirrel, and _his_ friend housed four dormice. There was a fairly complete collection of pigeons--tumblers, pouters, fantails; you could usually have your choice in pigeons at the Vicarage of St Agatha's. The choir did elementary gymnastics in what was the Canoness's drawing-room, and learned their lessons, if they were moved that way, in the dining-room. Every Friday evening, after practice, there was a toothsome supper of sausages and mashed potatoes, with stone ginger. Ye gods, could any boy or man feed higher than that? On Saturdays in summer the Vicar took the whole gang to the nearest Park, where, with some invited friends, they made two elevens and played matches, with Jinks, who was too short-sighted to play himself, but was the keenest of sportsmen, as consulting umpire; and on chief holidays they all made excursions into the country, when Harold de Petre became Henry Peter with a vengeance. And this was how there was no difficulty in getting boys for the choir, and people began to come to hear the music at St Agatha's.

IV