“I find it hard,” said the schoolmaster, “not to be solemn in such scenery as this on such a morning.  All nature seems to worship, giving forth in scent and song its tribute of adoration to the Creator, to whose habitation made with hands we are on our way as worshippers.”

“’Fraid I shan’t do much worshipping, church or no church.  You see, Mr. Wilkinson, my business is a very absorbing one.  I’ll be looking for notes, and spotting my men, and working up my clues all the time the parson’s bumming away.”

“Ah, you have read Tennyson’s ’Northern Farmer’?”

“Never heard tell of it; but I’ve got my eyes on some northern farmers, and they’ll have my attention soon.”

“Your expression, ‘bumming away,’ occurs in it, so I thought you had found it there.  It is rather a severe way in which to characterize the modern preacher, who, take him on the whole, deserves credit for what I regard as a difficult task, the presentation of some fresh subject of religious thought every Sunday all the year round.”

“My mind works too fast for most of them.  I can see where the conclusion is before they have half got started.  There’s no fun in that, you know.”

“Do you not sometimes meet with clergymen that interest you?”

“Now and then.  The learned bloke who cuts his text into three, and expounds them in detail, I can’t stand; nor the wooden logical machine that makes a proposition and proceeds to prove it; nor the unctuous fellow that rambles about, and says, ‘dear friends,’ and makes you wish he had studied his sermon.  But, now and then, I fall in with a man who won’t let me do any private thinking till he’s done.  You hear his text and his introduction, and wonder, how the dickens he is going to reconcile the two.  He carries you on and on and on, till he does it in a grand whirl at the end, that lifts you up and away with it, like the culminating arguments of the counsel for the prosecution, or the peeler’s joyful run in of a long-sought gaol-bird.  I like that sort of a parson; the rest are jackdaws.”

“Perhaps they suit the average mind?”

“If they did, we ought to have graded churches as well as graded schools.  But they don’t, except, in this way, that people have got accustomed to the bumming.  The preachers I like would keep up the interest of a child.  There was one I heard on the text, ’I form the light and create darkness.’  His introduction was, ’God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.’  He jerked us up into the light and banged us down into the darkness, almost laughing one minute and crying the next.  Then he went to hunt up his man, and found him in the devil and the devil’s own, all fallen creations of God.  Any schoolboy could follow that sermon and take its lessons home with him.  There was a logical bloke, at least he thought himself logical, who took for his text Joseph’s coat of many colours, a sort of plaid kilt I should think; and said, ’I shall now proceed to prove that this