Nevertheless the farmers themselves were perfectly aware of the distinction between them and the parson, and had not at all the less belief in him as a gentleman and a clergyman for his easy speech and familiar manners.

Mrs.
Parrot smoothed her apron and set her cap right with the utmost solicitude when she saw the Vicar coming, made him her deepest curtsy, and every Christmas had a fat turkey ready to send him with her 'duty' And in the most gossiping colloquies with Mr.Gilfil, you might have observed that both men and women 'minded their words', and never became indifferent to his approbation.
The same respect attended him in his strictly clerical functions.

The benefits of baptism were supposed to be somehow bound up with Mr.
Gilfil's personality, so metaphysical a distinction as that between a man and his office being, as yet, quite foreign to the mind of a good Shepperton Churchman, savouring, he would have thought, of Dissent on the very face of it.

Miss Selina Parrot put off her marriage a whole month when Mr.Gilfil had an attack of rheumatism, rather than be married in a makeshift manner by the Milby curate.
'We've had a very good sermon this morning', was the frequent remark, after hearing one of the old yellow series, heard with all the more satisfaction because it had been heard for the twentieth time; for to minds on the Shepperton level it is repetition, not novelty, that produces the strongest effect; and phrases, like tunes, are a long time making themselves at home in the brain.
Mr.Gilfil's sermons, as you may imagine, were not of a highly doctrinal, still less of a polemical, cast.

They perhaps did not search the conscience very powerfully; for you remember that to Mrs.Patten, who had listened to them thirty years, the announcement that she was a sinner appeared an uncivil heresy; but, on the other hand, they made no unreasonable demand on the Shepperton intellect--amounting, indeed, to little more than an expansion of the concise thesis, that those who do wrong will find it the worse for them, and those who do well will find it the better for them; the nature of wrong-doing being exposed in special sermons against lying, backbiting, anger, slothfulness, and the like; and well-doing being interpreted as honesty, truthfulness, charity, industry, and other common virtues, lying quite on the surface of life, and having very little to do with deep spiritual doctrine.