The congregation of St Agatha's were a prejudiced people, and had
long been established in their own ways. The previous vicar, who had a
certain fame as an orator of the florid order and rose to be an honorary
canon, was a churchman of the lowest depths, and did things which Father
Jinks used to mention with a shudder. He preached in a black gown, and
delighted to address religious meetings in unlicensed places without any
gown at all; he administered the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper once a
month, and preferred to do so at evening service; he delighted to offer
an extempore prayer before sermon, and never concluded a discourse
without witnessing against the errors of the Church of Rome; he
delighted in a three-decker pulpit, and would occasionally, in visiting
the church for a baptism, leave his hat on the communion table where
there was no other ornament. In his early days the music was led by a
barrel organ, which was turned by the clerk, and later, when a large
harmonium was introduced, the Psalms were read--the clerk leading the
congregation with a stentorian voice--and Moody and Sankey's hymns were
freely used. It was understood that the Canon had received a sudden call
to the ministry while engaged in commercial pursuits, and had not found
time for a University education--the hood which he wore at marriages was
an invention of his wife's--and he was therefore very careful to
correct the inaccuracies of the accepted versions, saying, with much
impressiveness, “In the original Hebrew of this Gospel,” or, “The Greek
of Isaiah has it,” although, in order to prevent monotony he would next
Sunday reverse the order of languages and again conform to traditional
belief. Critical persons, connected by blood with the families of St
Agatha's and attending services there on occasion, declared openly
that the Canon was a preposterous personage and a wind-bag; but he had
without doubt a certain vein of genuine piety, which unsympathising
people were apt to call unctuous, but which was, at any rate, warm; and
a turn for rhetoric--he was of Irish birth--which might not be heavily
charged with thought, but was very appetizing to the somewhat heavy
minds of St Agatha's parish. While he did not allow excessive charity to
interfere with comfortable living, and while he did not consider it
his duty to risk a valuable life by reckless visitation of persons with
contagious diseases, the Canon, by his popular religious manner--his
funeral addresses which he delivered at the grave, wearing a tall
hat and swaying an umbrella, moved all to open grief,--and by his
sermons,--an hour long and rich in anecdotes--held the parish in his
hand and kept St Agatha's full. People still speak of a course of
lectures on “The Antichrists of the Bible,” in which Rome was compared
to Egypt, Samaria, Nineveh, and Babylon, and the strangers sat in the
aisles; and there can be no doubt that the Canon convinced the parish
that a High Churchman was a Jesuit in disguise, and that a priest was
(probably) an immoral person. So far as I could gather, the worthy man
believed everything he said--although his way of saying it might savour
of cant--and he was greatly impressed by an anonymous letter threatening
his life and telling him that the eye of Rome was on him. He had
been guided to marry three times--possibly as a protest against
celibacy--with cumulative financial results of a fairly successful
character, and his last wife mourns her loss at Cheltenham, where she
subscribes freely to “escaped nuns,” and greedily anticipates the field
of Armageddon.
When the new patron, who had bought his position for missionary
purposes, appointed the Rev. John James Jinks to be vicar of St
Agatha's, there was a rebellion in the parish, which, of course, came
to nothing, and an appeal to the Bishop, which called forth a letter
exhorting every person to peace and charity. Various charges were made
against the new vicar, ranging from the fact that he had been curate in
a church where the confessional was in full swing, and that the morals
of the matrons of St Agatha's would be in danger, to the wicked calumny
that he was an ex-Primitive Methodist, and was therefore, as is natural
in such circumstances, very strong on the doctrine of apostolical
succession. As the last insinuation cut Jinks to the quick, and was,
indeed, almost the only attack he really felt, it is due to his memory
to state that he was the son (and only child) of a country rector, whose
living was worth £129, and who brought up his lad in the respectable, if
somewhat arid, principles of the historical High Church school, which in
the son blossomed rapidly into the luxuriance of Ritualism. It was only
by the severest economy at the Rectory that Jinks could be sent to one
of the cheaper Halls at Oxford, and it was the lasting sorrow of his
blameless life that the Rector and his wife both died before he secured
his modest pass degree. His mother used to call him John James, and had
dreams that he would be raised to the Episcopate long after she had
been laid to rest; but he knew very well from the beginning that his
intellectual gifts were limited, and that his career would not be
distinguished. While he magnified his priestly office beyond bounds, and
was as bold as a lion for the Church in all her rights and privileges,
he had no ambition for himself and was the most modest of men. Because
he was only five feet four in height, and measured thirty-two inches
round the chest, and had a pink and white boyish face, and divided his
hair down the middle, and blushed when he was spoken to by women and
dons, and stammered slightly in any excitement, they called him Jinksy
at Tommy's Hall, and he answered cheerfully; and when our big Scots
doctor availed himself on occasion of the same familiar form of address
he showed no resentment No one, however, could say, when he was with us
in St Agatha's, that he forgot his position, not only as a priest with
power to bind and loose, but also as the disciple of his Lord; for if
any clergyman ever did, our little Father adorned the doctrine of Christ
by his meekness and lowliness of character, and by a self-sacrifice
and self-forgetfulness which knew no limits. He wore a low-crowned,
broad-brimmed hat, and in winter a garment resembling a Highland cloak,
which gave him as he imagined a certain resemblance to a continental
abbé; and as he skimmed at all hours along our sombre, monotonous
streets on errands which were often very poorly requited, and in many
cases may have been quite uncalled for, he was, if you pleased to see
him from a certain angle, a rather absurd figure; but as his simple,
boyish face grew thinner and paler every month, and his eyes grew
brighter and more spiritual, one's smile rather passed into the tears
of the heart And now that he is gone, and no one in St Agatha's is vexed
either by his chasuble or his kindness, it comes to us that Father Jinks
followed the light given to him without flinching, and has rendered in a
good account.