Mr. Parry, although agreeing with Mr. Tryan in opinion, is represented as no less unpopular and inefficient than Mr. Tryan was the reverse; and the Reverend Amos Barton is a hopeless specimen of that variety of “evangelical” clergymen to which the late Mr. Conybeare gave the name of “low and slow,”—­a variety which, we believe, flourishes chiefly in the midland counties.  On the other hand, Mr. Gilfil and Mr. Irwine, clergymen of the “old school,” are held up as objects for our respect and love; and Mr. Irwine is not only vindicated by Adam Bede in his old age, in comparison with his evangelical successor Mr. Ryde, but the question between high and low church, as represented by these two, is triumphantly settled by a quotation which Adam brings from our old friend Mrs. Poyser:—­

Mrs. Poyser used to say—­you know she would have her word about everything—­she said Mr. Irwine was like a good meal o’ victual, you were the better for him without thinking on it; and Mr. Ryde was like a dose o’ physic, he griped and worrited you, and after all he left you much the same.[1]

[1] “Adam Bede,” i. 269.

In “The Mill on the Floss,” too, the “brazen” Mr. Stelling is represented as “evangelical,” in so far as he is anything; while Dr. Kenn, a very high Anglican, is spoken of with all veneration; although, perhaps, “George Eliot’s” opinion as to the efficiency of the high Anglican clergy may be gathered from the circumstance that when the Doctor interferes for the benefit of Maggie Tulliver, he not only fails to be of any use, but exposes himself to something like the same kind of gossip which had arisen from Mr. Amos Barton’s hospitality to Madame Czerlaski.  As to Methodism, again, the reader need hardly be reminded of the sayings which we have quoted from Mrs. Poyser.  And while the feeble and “wool-gathering” Seth Bede becomes a convert, the strong-minded Adam holds out, even although he is so tolerant as to marry a female Methodist preacher, and to let her enjoy her “liberty of prophesying” until stopped by a general order of the Wesleyan Conference.

From all these things the natural inference would seem to be that the authoress is neither High-Church nor Low-Church nor Dissenter, but a tolerant member of what is styled the Broad-Church party—­a party in which we are obliged to say that breadth and toleration are by no means universal.  It would seem that, instead of being exclusively devoted to any one of the religious types which she has embodied in the persons of her tales (for as yet she has not presented us with a clergyman of any liberal school), she regards each of them as containing an element of pure Christianity, which, although in any one of them it may be alloyed by its adjuncts and by the faults of individuals, is in itself of inestimable value, and may be held alike by persons who differ widely from each other as to the forms of religious polity and as to details of Christian doctrine.