It had seemed to me in former visits to England that the Christian
Sabbath was a more depressing day there than here, but from the last
I have a more cheerful memory of it. I still felt it dispiriting in
London, where as many fled from it as could, and where the empty streets
symbolized a world abandoned to destruction; but this was mainly in the
forenoon. Even then, the markets and fairs in the avenues given up to
them were the scenes of an activity which was not without gayety, and
certainly not without noise; and when the afternoon came, the lower
classes, such as had remained in town, thronged to the public houses,
and the upper classes to the evening parade in the Park. As to the
relative amount of church-going, I will not even assume to be sure; but
I have a fancy that it is a rite much less rigorous than it used to
be. Still, in provincial places, I found the churches full on a Sunday
morning, and all who could afford it hallowed the day by putting on
a frock-coat and a top-hat, which are not worn outside of London on
week-days. The women, of course, were always in their best on Sunday.
Perhaps in the very country the upper classes go to church as much as
formerly, but I have my doubts whether they feel so much obliged to it
in conformity to usage, or for the sake of example to their inferiors.
Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there are pretty
well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive spectacle, and one
could imagine people resorting to its functions for aesthetic reasons.
But, in these guesses, one must remember that the English who remained
at home were never Puritanized, never in such measure personally
conscienced, as those who came to America in the times of the successive
Protestant fervors; and that is a thing which we are apt to forget. The
home-keeping English continued, with changes of ritual, much like the
peoples who still acknowledged as their head “the Bishop of Rome.”
Their greater morality, if it was greater, was temperamental rather than
spiritual, and, leaving the church to look after religion much more than
our Puritans did, they kept a simplicity of nature impossible to the
sectaries always taking stock of their souls. In fact, the Calvinists
of New England were almost essentially different from the Calvinists of
Holland, of France, even of Scotland. If our ancestors were the children
of light, as they trusted, they were darkened by the forest, into which
they plunged, to certain reasons which the children of darkness, as the
Puritans believed the non-Puritans to be, saw by the uncertain glimmers
from the world about them. There is no denying that with certain great
gains, the American Puritans became, in a worldly sense, provincialized,
and that if they lived in the spirit, they lived in it narrowly, while
the others, who lived in the body, lived in it liberally, or at any rate
handsomely. From our narrowness we flattered ourselves that we were able
to imagine a life more broadly based than theirs, or at least a life
from which theirs must look insufficient and unfinal, so long as man
feels within himself the prompting to be something better or higher than
he is. Yet the English life is wonderfully perfected. With a faery
dream of a king supported in his preeminence by a nobility, a nobility
supported in turn by a commonalty, a commonalty supported again by a
proletariat resting upon immeasurable ether; with a system of government
kept, by assent so general that the dissent does not matter, in the
hands of a few families reared, if not trained, to power; with a society
so intimately and thoroughly self-acquainted that one touch of gossip
makes its whole world kin, and responsive to a single emotion; with a
charity so wisely studied, and so carefully applied, that restive misery
never quite grows rebellious; with a patriotism so inborn and ingrained
that all things English seem righteous because English; with a
willingness to share the general well-being quite to the verge, but
never beyond the verge, of public control of the administration--with
all this, the thing must strike the unbelieving observer as desperately
perfect. “They have got it down cold,” he must say to himself, and
confirm himself in his unfaith by reflecting that it is very cold.