his "Bank of Faith" how food was provided for them in a very wonderful manner. Looking out, as he did, for the direct help of God in all things great and small, he got the habit of making daily observation of the judgments, mercies, and providences of God. His relation of these events in his "Bank of Faith" has brought upon him the utmost indignation and contempt. Southey says, "There is nothing like it in the whole bibliotheca of knavery and fanaticism." And yet Southey, I imagine, would not have objected to Dr Arnold's assertion of the special providence of God as manifested in an event of such proportions as the break-up of the Napoleonic power by the unprecedented severity of the winter of 1812. But when it comes to Divine interposition on behalf of a poor labouring man and his family, the result appears so inadequate to the grandeur of the power exercised, that it strikes him as incongruous and absurd. But this is as unreasonable as it is contrary to the teaching of the Gospels.
William Huntington may well be called a representative, typical man. In him the character of the peasant of the great Weald of Surrey, Sussex, and Kent is most forcibly expressed. A man of intense individuality, and therefore very independent in thought and action, very obstinate in his own opinions, and most indomitable in carrying out his own plans; his profound reverence for all that was above him rendered him naturally a firm believer in the Divine order of things, just as he found it around him. No Tory of the Tories could possibly have been more so. He accepted, without a doubt, the glaring disparities of life—the destitution and starvation of some, the plethoric wealth of others—as agreeable to the Divine intention, and regarded all liberals and reformers as "lovers of rebellion," and "men given to change." In the King, the Church, and the Squirearchy it was natural to him to believe. And if he turned upon the clergy, and spoke slightingly of the services of the Church at this period of his life, it was in that bitterness of spirit with which a child turns upon indifferent and careless parents, the bitterness of one who feels he has been defrauded of a father's and a mother's love.
