the people verily thirst to love and reverence; and that their love is
the only love worth having, because it is disinterested love, and
endures, and takes heat in adversity,--reflect on it and wonder at the
inversion of things! So with a Church. It lives if it is at home with
the poor. In the arms of enriched shopkeepers it rots, goes to decay in
vestments--vestments! flakes of mummy-wraps for it! or else they use it
for one of their political truncheons--to awe the ignorant masses: I
quote them. So. Not much ahead of ancient Egyptians in spirituality or
in priestcraft! They call it statesmanship. O for a word for it! Let
Palsy and Cunning go to form a word. Deadmanship, I call it."--To quote
my uncle the baron, this is lunatic dribble!--"Parsons and princes are
happy with the homage of this huge passive fleshpot class. It is enough
for them. Why not? The taxes are paid and the tithes. Whilst
commercial prosperity lasts!"'

Colonel Halkett threw his arms aloft.

'"Meanwhile, note this: the people are the Power to come.
Oppressed, unprotected, abandoned; left to the ebb and flow of the
tides of the market, now taken on to work, now cast off to starve,
committed to the shifting laws of demand and supply, slaves of
Capital-the whited name for old accursed. Mammon: and of all the.
ranked and black-uniformed host no pastor to come out of the
association of shepherds, and proclaim before heaven and man the
primary claim of their cause; they are, I say, the power, worth the
seduction of by another Power not mighty in England now: and likely
in time to set up yet another Power not existing in England now.
What if a passive comfortable clergy hand them over to men on the
models of Irish pastors, who will succour, console, enfold, champion
them? what if, when they have learnt to use their majority, sick of