ecome their pastor when he reached the climax of his
career. They gave him a very good salary, enough to enable him to have a
handsome house in one of the terraces overlooking Regent's Park. It is
not a fashionable quarter, but it is not to be despised in any way. The
rooms were good-sized and lofty, and sometimes have been known to
suffice for very fine people indeed, a fact which the Beechams were well
aware of; and they were not above the amiable weakness of making it
known that their house was in a line with that of Lady Cecilia Burleigh.
This single fact of itself might suffice to mark the incalculable
distance between the Reverend Mr. Beecham of the Crescent Chapel, and
the young man who began life as minister of Salem in Carlingford. And
the development outside was not less remarkable than the development
within.

It is astonishing how our prejudices change from youth to middle age,
even without any remarkable interposition of fortune; I do not say
dissipate, or even dispel, which is much more doubtful--but they
change. When Mr. and Mrs. Beecham commenced life, they had both the
warmest feeling of opposition to the Church and everything churchy. All
the circumstances of their lives had encouraged this feeling. The
dislike of the little for the great, the instinctive opposition of a
lower class towards the higher, intensified that natural essence of
separatism, that determination to be wiser than one's neighbour, which
in the common mind lies at the bottom of all dissent. In saying this we
no more accuse Dissenters in religion than Dissenters in politics, or in
art, or in criticism. The first dissenter in most cases is an original
thinker, to whom his enforced departure from the ways of his fathers is
misery and pain. Generally he has a hard struggle with himself before he
can give up, for the superlative truth which has taken possession of
him, all the habits, the pious traditions of his life. He is the real
Nonconformist--half martyr, half victim, of his convictions. But that
Nonconformity which has come 