STRANGERS AT CHURCH.

If nothing is sacred to a sapper, neither is anything sacred to temper, ostentation, vanity; and church as little as any place else. In those thronged show-places which have what is called a summer season, church is the great Sunday entertainment; and when the service is of an ornate kind, and the strangers' seats are chairs placed at the west end, where in old times the village choir or the village schoolboys used to be, a great deal of human life goes on among the occupants; and there are certain displays of temper and feeling which make you ask yourself whether these strangers think it a religious service, or an operatic, at which they have come to assist, and whether what you see about you is quite in consonance with the spirit of the place or not. If the church is one that presents scenic attractions in the manner in which the service is conducted, there is a run on the front middle seats, as if the ceremonies to be performed were so much legerdemain or theatrical spectacle, of which you must have a good view if you are to have your money's worth; and the more knowing of the strangers take care to be early in the field, and to establish themselves comfortably before the laggards come up. And when the best places are all filled, and the laggards do come up, then the human comedy begins.

Here trip in a couple of giggling girls, greatly conscious of their youth and good looks, but still more conscious of their bonnets. They look with tittering dismay at the crowded seats all along the middle, and when the verger makes them understand that they must go to the back of the side aisle, where they can be seen by no one but will only be able to hear the service and say their prayers, they hesitate and whisper to each other before they finally go up, feeling that the great object for which they came to church has failed them, and they had better have stayed away and taken their chance on the parade. When they speak of it afterwards, they say it was 'awfully slow sitting there;' and they determine to be earlier another time.

There sweep in a triad of superbly dressed women with fans and scent-bottles, who disdainfully decline the back places which the same verger, with a fine sense of justice and beginning to fail a little in temper, inexorably assigns them. They too confer together, but by no means in whispers; and finally elect to stand in the middle aisle, trusting to their magnificence and quiet determination to get 'nice places' in the pewed sittings. They are fine ladies who look as if they were performing an act of condescension by coming at all without special privileges and separation from the vulgar; as if they had an inherent right to worship God in a superior and aristocratic manner, and were not to be confounded with the rest of the miserable sinners who ask for mercy and forgiveness. They are accustomed to the front seats everywhere; so why not in the place where they say sweetly they are 'nothing of themselves,' and pray to be delivered 'from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy'? That old lady, rouged and dyed and dressed to represent the heyday of youth, who also is supposed to come to church to say her prayers and confess her sins, looks as if she would be more at home at the green tables at Homburg than in an unpretending chair of the strangers' quarter in the parish church. But she finds her places in her Prayer-book, if after a time and with much seeking; and when she nods during the sermon, she has the good-breeding not to snore. She too, has the odd trick of looking like condescension when she comes in, trailing her costly silks and laces behind her; and by her manner she leaves on you the impression that she was a beauty in her youth; has been always used to the deference and admiration of men; to servants and a carriage and purple and fine linen; that all of you, whom she has the pleasure of surveying through her double eyeglass, are nobodies in comparison with her august self; and that she is out of place among you. She makes her demonstration, like the rest, when she finds that the best seats are already filled and that no one offers to stir that she may be well placed; and if she is ruthlessly relegated to the back, and stays there, as she does sometimes, your devotions are rendered uncomfortable by the unmistakable protest conveyed in her own. Only a few humble Christians in fashionable attire take those back places contentedly, and find they can say their prayers and sing their hymns with spiritual comfort to themselves, whether they are shut out from a sight of the decorations on the altar and the copes and stoles of the officiating ministers, or are in full view of the same. But then humble Christians in fashionable attire are rare; and the old difficulty about the camel and the needle's eye, remains.

Again, in the manner of following the services you see the oddest diversity among the strangers at church. The regular congregation has by this time got pretty well in step together, and stands up or sits down, speaks or keeps silence, with some kind of uniformity; even the older men having come to tolerate innovations which at first split the parish into factions. But the strangers, who have come from the north and from the south, from the east and from the west, have brought their own views and habits, and take a pride in making them manifest. Say that the service is only moderately High—that is, conducted with decency and solemnity but not going into extremes; your left-hand neighbour evidently belongs to one of the ultra-Ritualistic congregations, and disdains to conceal her affiliation. If she be a tall woman, and therefore conspicuous, her genuflexions are more profound than any other person's; and her sudden and automatic way of dropping on her knees, and then getting up again as if she were worked by wires, attracts the attention of all about her. She crosses herself at various times; and ostentatiously forbears to use her book save at certain congregational passages. She regards the service as an act of priestly sacrifice and mediation, and her own attitude therefore is one of acceptance, not participation.

Your neighbour on your right is a sturdy Low Churchman, who sticks to the ways of his father and flings hard names at the new system. He makes his protest against what he calls 'all this mummery' visibly, if not audibly. He sits like a rock during the occasional intervals when modern congregations rise; and he reads his Prayer-book with unshaken fidelity from first to last, making the responses, which are intoned by the choir and the bulk of the congregation, in a loud and level voice, and even muttering sotto voce the clergyman's part after him. In the creed, when the Ritualistic lady bends both her knees and almost touches the ground, he simply bobs his head, as if saluting Robinson or Jones; and during the doxology, where she repeats the obeisance, and looks as if she were speaking confidentially to the matting, he holds up his chin and stares about him. She, the pronounced Ritualist, knows all the hymns by heart and joins in them like one well accustomed; but he, the Evangelist, stumbles over the lines, with his pince-nez slipping off his nose, satisfied if he catches a word here and there so as to know something of his whereabouts. She sings correctly all through; but he can do no more than put in a fancy note on occasions, and perhaps come in with a flourish at the end. There are many such songsters at church who think they have done all that can be demanded of them in the way of congregational harmony if they hit the last two notes fairly, and join the pack at the Amen.

Sometimes the old-fashioned worshippers get put into the front row, and there, without prayer-stool or chair-back against which to steady themselves, find kneeling an impossibility; so they either sit with their elbows on their knees, or betray associations with square pews and comfortable corners at home, by turning their backs to the altar, and burying their faces in their rush-bottomed seats. The Ritualist would have knelt as straight as an arrow and without quivering once all through.

People are generally supposed to go to church for devotion, but, if they do, devotion and vanity are twin sisters. Look at the number of pretty hands which find it absolutely necessary to take off their gloves, and which are always wandering up to the face in becoming gestures and with the right curve. Or, if the hands are only mediocre, the rings are handsome; and diamonds sparkle as well in a church as anywhere else. And though one vows to renounce the lusts of the world as well as of the flesh, there is no use in having diamonds if one's neighbours don't see them. Look too, at the pretty faces which know so well the effect produced by a little paint and powder beneath a softening mask of thin white lace. Is this their best confession of sin? And again, those elaborate toilets in which women come to pray for forgiveness and humility; are they for the honour of God? It strikes us that the honour of God has very little to do with that formidable, and may be unpaid, milliner's bill, but the admiration of men and the envy of other women a great deal. The Pope is wise to make all ladies go to his religious festivals without bonnets and in rigid black. It narrows the margin of coquetry somewhat, if it does not altogether remove it. But dress ever was, and ever will be, as webs spread in the way of woman's righteousness; and we have no doubt that Eve frilled her apron of fig-leaves before she had worn it a day.

All sorts of characters throng these strangers' seats; and some are typical. There are the men of low stature and awkward bearing, with stubbly chins, who stand in constrained positions and wear no gloves. They look like grooms; they may be clerks; but they are the men on whom Punch has had his eye for many years now, when he portrays the British snob and diversifies him with the more modern cad. Then there are the well-dressed, well set-up gentlemen of military appearance, who carry their umbrellas under their arms as if they were swords, and are evidently accustomed to have their own will and command other people's; and the men who look like portraits of Montague Tigg, in cheap kid gloves and suspicious jewelry, who pray into their hats, or make believe to pray, while their bold eyes rove all about, fixing themselves most pertinaciously on the old lady with the diamonds and the giggling young ones with the paint. There is the bride in a white bonnet and light silk dress, who carries an ivory-backed Church Service with the most transparent attempts at unconsciousness, and the bridegroom who lounges after her and looks sheepish; sometimes it is the bride who straggles bashfully, and the groom who boldly leads the way. There is the young widow with new weeds; the sedate mother of many daughters; paterfamilias, with his numerous olive-branches, leading on his arm the exuberant wife of his bosom flushed with coming up the hill; the walking tourist, whose respect for Sunday goes to the length of a clean collar and a clothes-brush; and the female traveller, economical of luggage, who wears her waterproof and sea-side hat, and is independent and not ashamed. There are the people who come for simple distraction, because Sunday is such a dull day in a strange place, and there is nothing else to do; and those who come because it is respectable and the right thing, and they are accustomed to it; those who come to see and be seen; and those—the select few, the simple yearning souls—who come because they do honestly feel the church to be the very House of God, and that prayer with its confession of sin helps them to live better lives. But, good or bad, vain or simple, arrogant or humble, they all sweep out when the last word is said, and the cottagers and small townsfolk stand at their doors to see them pass—'the quality coming out of church' counting as their Sunday sight. The women get ideas in millinery from the show, and discuss with each other what is worn this year, and how ever can they turn their old gowns into garments that shall imitate the last effort of a Court milliner's genius—the result of many sleepless nights? Fine ladies ridicule these clumsy apings of their humble sisters, and long for the old sumptuary laws to be in force on all below them; but if Sunday is the field-day and church the parade-ground of the strangers, we cannot wonder if the natives try to participate in the amusement. If Lady Jane likes to confess her shame and humiliation on a velvet cushion and in silk attire, can we reasonably blame Joan that her soul hankers after a hassock of felt, and a penance-sheet of homespun cut according to my lady's pattern?