enthusiastic ladies like Mrs. and Miss Ducklet, who like to obtain a reputation for sanctity, and to keep it when obtained, none knelt.

I could not help observing everything that went on around me; the circumstances were so strange, every-thing about the church wore so entirely new an aspect, that it would have been impossible for the most fervent piety at once to have settled down into its wonted spirit of devotion.

CHAPTER X.

THE FASHIONABLE CHURCH IN CALCUTTA.

ON looking round the church I was astonished to find that the men who were labouring at the punkahs were the only natives in it! After the glowing accounts I had read in England and Ceylon of the success of missionary exertions in India, I was naturally astonished at this, and looked and looked again, in the vain hope of discovering some quarter of the church set apart for neophytes and proselytes. No, there was no such thing. I was in a fashionable church, and were native converts encouraged to attend it, it would no longer be a fashionable one.

I found on enquiry that there were churches which the native converts attended, but they

were those which the European community did not attend. There might be a community of feeling between English and Indian Christians, but there was no community of seats. and sittings and churches. Even those who were warmest in praise of missionary exertions were sometimes also warmest in deprecating the idea of mixing Europeans and Hindoos in places of worship—" It would be putting the natives on a footing of equality with us at once," observed one fair enthusiast; "And Christianity does not do so," I remarked. "Yes, in religious privileges, it does, but not in material matters," was the reply; "there must be due subordination and proper distinctions made on earth."

It is the very principle which has driven the poor so much from the Church of England in its native home. The well-dressed "respectability" of England can find pews and seats ready for them, where they may meet other well-dressed respectabilities like themselves, but the poor man finds no such welcome; his worn or torn coat is a sufficient reason for thrusting him into remote corners and inconvenient seats where he can probably hear

nothing, or else is made a gazing-stock for his well-dressed neighbours; and finding that the House of God is no home for him, he turns on his way, determined that he shall intrude no more. The very poor, at the present day, too often have not the gospel preached to them by the Church at least in England-let the Church look to it ere it be too late.

At length, Mr. Lollipops mounted the pulpit stairs, and, with a bland, benignant aspect, surveyed the congregation beneath him in all the meekness of clerical inspection. He would have been a well-looking man had he. allowed nature to make him so, but he would not, and the large cheeks and chin which she would have covered with black shining curls were left in as naked ugliness as the razor could accomplish. He was one of those extraordinary products of this extraordinary age who united the ideas of sanctity and shaven faces, of wickedness and beards, forgetting that the Divine master whom he professed to follow, and the early fathers whom he professed to imitate, shaved off neither beard nor

moustache.

Plastered down carefully on either side of his face were black locks, which nature had intended to be waving and beautiful in form, not stiff in ugly rigidity and waxy immobility. But these well-combed ornaments, these shining plastered black hairs that exhibited so well the phrenological development of the saint-like Lollipops, were other symbols of piety and meekness, or, at least, were intended as such, and by numerous ladies of his congregation were so regarded. Such men would leave soldiers alone the attributes of humanity, sinking themselves and others into a state of mawkish insipidity and affected sentimentalism, which would have all the characteristics of female weakness without its charms.

Miss Ducklet was quite right in saying that the sentiments of Mr. Lollipops were like those of a babe in simplicity. He was one of those men who, without being fluent, insist on preaching extempore. He explained to us that light and darkness were opposed to each other, that the one was considered the contrary to the other—that "the glorious light of