she could not do, and the compensatory sacrifice to her was small.
This is really the only attempt at elucidation I can give. She went
regularly all her life to chapel with George, but even when he became
deacon, and "supplied" the villages round, she never would join the
church as a member. She never agreed with the minister, and he never
could make anything out of her. They did not quarrel, but she
thought nothing of his sermons, and he was perplexed and
uncomfortable in the presence of a nondescript who did not respond to
any dogmatic statement of the articles of religion, and who yet could
not be put aside as "one of those in the gallery"--that is to say, as
one of the ordinary unconverted, for she used to quote hymns with
amazing fervour, and she quoted them to him with a freedom and a
certain superiority which he might have expected from an aged brother
minister, but certainly not from one of his own congregation. He was
a preacher of the Gospel, it was true; and it was his duty, a duty on
which he insisted, to be "instant in season and out of season" in
saying spiritual things to his flock; but then they were things
proper, decent, conventional, uttered with gravity at suitable times-
-such as were customary amongst all the ministers of the
denomination. It was not pleasant to be outbid in his own
department, especially by one who was not a communicant, and to be
obliged, when he went on a pastoral visit to a house in which Mrs.
Butts happened to be, to sit still and hear her, regardless of the
minister's presence, conclude a short mystical monologue with
Cowper's verse -


"Exults our rising soul,
Disburdened of her load,
And swells unutterably full