'Thus I imagine the want of that external and visible Church will be felt as necessary to fix the Creeds pasa katadike.
'But to reverse this process, to cram positive teaching down their throats upon the authority of the Church before they know what the Church is, or feel the need of any power outside (so to speak) their own minds to guide them, does seem to me in a place like this (humanly speaking) suicidal. I cannot, of course, tell how much preparatory teaching they have received, but I must judge from what I see and hear, and deal accordingly in each cottage. Some few there are to whom I can speak, as to Church people in the real sense of the word, but these are as two or three in a hundred.
'One line to say whether you think me right or wrong, would be a great comfort to me. I feel no tendency to latitudinarianism, but only to see much good in systems unrecognised by your very highflyers. I believe that the Church teaching is represented in an unfavourable, often offensive, light to many of our poor, because they hear words and see things which find no response in their hearts; because they are told, ordered almost, to believe things the propriety of believing which they do not recognise; because the existence of wants is implied when they have never been felt, and a system for supplying them introduced which finds no room in the understanding or affections of the patient.
'But you know, dear Father, what I mean, without more dusky attempts at explaining myself.
'Do not many High Churchmen want a little more "experimental religion" in Bishop Jebb's sense of the terms: not a religion of the feelings, but a religion brought home to the heart, and truly felt so as to prohibit any systematic criticism of the feelings?
'I am late this week with my sermons, I have not begun either of them, and may have one to-morrow evening if my voice will do its part. I write very long washy concerns, and find it difficult to do otherwise, for it is a good pull upon me week after week, and latterly I have not been able to read very much. I shall look out two or three that I think fair specimens, and ask you by-and-by to run your eye over them, that you may point out the defects.
'My ignorance of the Bible astonishes me, though not so much as it ought to do. I purpose, D.V., to commence a thorough study of the original texts. I must try to become something of a scholar, at all events, to make any progress in the work. I sometimes hope that, in spite of my many backslidings and broken resolutions, some move is taking place within, where most it is wanted; but I live here so quietly, that I have little (comparatively) food for some special faults. Good-bye, my dear Father,
'Your affectionate and dutiful Son,
'J. C. P.'
'Some move taking place within!' It is impossible not to pause and observe how as Confirmation and Communion had almost palpably strengthened the boy's struggles with his inherent faults, so the grace conferred with the Deacon's orders is now felt to be lifting him higher, and enabling him to see further than he has yet seen.
Sermons were, however, never Patteson's forte. Though his pen flowed so freely in letters, and he could pour out his heart extemporaneously with great depth, fervour and simplicity, his sermons were laboured and metaphysical, as if he had taken too much pains with them as it were, and he could not speak to the abstract, as he could to the individual, or when he saw the effect of his words. It was perhaps owing to the defective system which threw two sermons a week upon a young deacon at a time when his mind was working through such an experimental course of study and thought. Yet his people, who had learnt to believe in little but preaching, would not have come to prayers alone; and the extemporary addresses, in which he would probably have been much more successful, would have seemed to him at his age and at that period—twenty years back—too presumptuous to be attempted, at any rate till he had better learnt his ground. How his system would have succeeded, we cannot tell. The nature of the peasantry of the county he had to deal with is, to be quick-witted, argumentative, and ready of retort; open to religious impressions, but with much of self-opinion and conceit, and not much reverence, and often less conscientious in matters of honesty and morality than denser rustics of less apparent piety. The Church had for a long-period been at a peculiarly low ebb in the county, and there is not a neighbourhood which has not traditions of incredibly ignorant, careless and underbred—if not dissipated—clergy; and though there were grand exceptions, they were only respected as men; faith in the whole system, as a system, was destroyed. Bishop Phillpotts, coming down on such elements as these, was, in spite of his soundness of faith and grand trenchant force of character, better as a warrior than as a shepherd, and the controversial and political sides of his character, though invaluable to the Church, did not recommend him to the affections of the people of his diocese, who could not understand the points of the debate, and wanted the direct evidence of spirituality which they could appreciate.
The cholera of 1832 had been especially terrible in the unwholesome precincts of the Devonshire seaports, and the effect was a great craving for religion. The Church was in no condition to avail herself of it; in fact, she would have viewed it with distrust as excitement. Primitive Methodism and Plymouth Brethrenism supplied the void, gave opportunities of prayer, and gratified the quickened longing for devotion; and therewith arose that association of the Church with deadness and of Dissent with life, which infected even the most carefully tended villages, and with which Patteson was doing his best to contend at Alfington. The stage of gaining the people's affection and confidence, and of quickening their religious life, he had attained; and the further work of teaching them that the Church alone gives security of saving union with Christ, was yet to come when his inward call led him elsewhere.
On the 12th of December he says:—
'Yesterday was a very happy day; Gardiner came to help me and he administered the Holy Communion to twenty-seven or twenty-eight of my own people. This is nearly double the average before I came, and two regular attendants are prevented by sickness from being at Church. I trust I have not urged the necessity of communicating unwisely upon them. I preach on it once a month, as you know, and in almost every sermon allude to it, and where occasion offers, speak about it to individuals at home; but I try to put before them the great awfulness of it as well as the danger of neglecting it, and I warn them against coming without feeling really satisfied from what I read to them, and they read in the Bible concerning it. Six came yesterday for the first time. … Old William (seventy-five years of age), who has never been a communicant, volunteered on Thursday to come, if I thought it right. He is, and always has been (I am told), a thoroughly respectable, sober, industrious man, regular at Church once a day; and I went to his cottage with a ticket in my pocket to urge him to consider the danger of going on as if content with what he did and without striving to press onwards, &c. But, after a long conversation on other matters, he said; "I should like, Sir, to come to the Sacrament, if you have no objection;" and very happy and thankful I felt, for I had prayed very earnestly that this old man might be led thither by God's grace, and now it was done without any urging on my part, beyond what he heard in Church and what I had said to his daughter about him.'
The next of his letters is occupied with the pecuniary affairs of his lodging house for farm boys, and the obtaining of ground where they might grow vegetables for their own use.
In February his family returned home, and his sister Fanny thus speaks of him to a friend:—
'He does not look well; and at first we were quite uneasy, for his eyes were heavy and puffed, but he is much better, and confesses that dinners and evenings here do him good, though he quite denies the starving, and Mrs. Knowles also. She says he gets over anxious in mind, and was completely chilled the week he sat in the hall. No doubt his house is still both cold and damp, and the Church the same, and therefore the labour of reading and preaching is very great. We are by degrees interesting him in our winter life, having heard all his performances and plans; and he is very glad to have us back, though much too busy to have missed us when we were away. Now he has daily morning service, with a lecture; and if it lasts, the impression he has made is really extraordinary. We may well pray that he should not be vain of his works. There are men whose whole lives seem changed, if I am to believe