He had visited Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, Spurgeon's
Tabernacle, the City Temple, and had studied--so he told
me--English Wesleyanism and, Congregationalism in several
provincial centres. He was particularly bitter about one
Nonconformist who had accepted a large salary to go to the United
States. He returned to Germany impressed with the idea that the
Nonconformist and State Churches alike were a body of sycophants,
sharing the general decadent state of the English. What struck him
principally was what he referred to continually as the lack of
discipline and uniformity. Each man seemed to take his own point
of view, without any regard to the opinions of the particular
religious denomination to which he belonged. All were grossly
ignorant of science and chemistry, and all were very much overpaid.
Here, I think, lay the sting of his envy, and it is part of the
general jealousy of England, a country where everybody is supposed
to be underworked and overpaid.

The only worse country in this respect from the German point of
view is the United States, "where even the American Lutheran
pastors have fallen victims to the lust for money." The particular
Lutheran of whom I am speaking had been the guest of an English
Nonconformist minister and his wife, who had evidently tried to be
as hospitable as possible, and had no doubt put themselves out to
take him for excursions and outings in the Shakespeare country.

"It was nothing but eating and drinking and sightseeing," remarked
the Herr Pastor.

I suggested that he was a guest, to be looked after.