It must be confessed that, when there were pretty ladies present and when his wife was absent, the sermons had but little chance.  “To Westminster to the parish church, and there did entertain myself with my perspective glass up and down the church, by which I had the great pleasure of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women; and what with that, and sleeping, I passed away the time till sermon was done.”  Sometimes he goes further, as at St. Dunstan’s, where “I heard an able sermon of the minister of the place; and stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand; but she would not, but got further and further from me; and, at last, I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again—­which, seeing, I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design.”

He visits cathedrals, and tries to be impressed by them, but more interesting things are again at hand.  At Rochester, “had no mind to stay there, but rather to our inne, the White Hart, where we drank.”  At Canterbury he views the Minster and the remains of Beckett’s tomb, but adds, “A good handsome wench I kissed, the first that I have seen a great while.”  There is something ludicrously incongruous about the idea of Samuel Pepys in a cathedral, just as there is about his presence in the Great Plague and Fire.  Among any of these grand phenomena he is altogether out of scale.  He is a fly in a thunderstorm.

His religious life and thought are an amazing complication.  He can lament the decay of piety with the most sanctimonious.  He remembers God continually, and thanks and praises Him for each benefit as it comes, with evident honesty and refreshing gratitude.  He signs and seals his last will and testament, “which is to my mind, and I hope to the liking of God Almighty.”  But in all this there is a curious consciousness, as of one playing to a gallery of unseen witnesses, human or celestial.  On a fast-day evening he sings in the garden “till my wife put me in mind of its being a fast-day; and so I was sorry for it, and stopped, and home to cards.”  He does not indeed appear to regard religion as a matter merely for sickness and deathbeds.  When he hears that the Prince, when in apprehension of death, is troubled, but when told that he will recover, is merry and swears and laughs and curses like a man in health, he is shocked.  Pepys’ religion is the same in prosperous and adverse hours, a thing constantly in remembrance, and whose demands a gentleman can easily satisfy.  But his conscience is of that sort which requires an audience, visible or invisible.  He hates dissimulation in other people, but he himself is acting all the time.  “But, good God! what an age is this, and what a world is this! that a man cannot live without playing the knave and dissimulation.”