134 MINISTRY AT WARRINGTON. [Chap. IV. 



this was going on, how much more trouble it is amusing people 

 than preaching to them. In the latter case, you have to speak 

 the word whether they hear or forbear ; in the other, you have 

 to think and plan what will please." He afterwards wrote to 

 his mother that the entertainment, from four o'clock till mid- 

 night, with his share of the presents, cost him under To 

 him there was nothing incongruous in prayer in the midst of the 

 games. On the previous Sunday his sermon was from Luke xv. 

 24, "And they began to be merry." When he first delivered it 

 at Stand, eight years before, in his happier days, he had to bite 

 his lips now and then, and he felt misgivings when he saw some 

 of his hearers merry ; now he soberly records, " I do not see 

 anything in it but what is true." 



The next Christmas, 1852, he had just returned from a 

 visit to Mrs. Harriet Martineau. In her Autobiography she 

 relates how when her beloved attendant was married to Mr. 

 Andrews, then master of the Bristol Ragged School, she " had 

 the honour of having Miss Carpenter for the bridesmaid, and 

 the Rev. Philip P. Carpenter to perform the ceremony." Philip 

 had known Mr. Andrews at Stand. At Mrs. Martineau's re- 

 quest, he delivered a temperance lecture the night before. A 

 cordial intimacy arose between them : in her letters before the 

 wedding she had written, " Dear Mr. Carpenter • " ever after it 

 was, " My dear friend." Almost the last note I received from 

 him referred to her Autobiography, which he expected " to 

 devour, however much her statements shock me. It cannot 

 be otherwise ; she was a very great and noble woman, and 

 more unselfish without Christianity than most of us are with it: 

 so much more shame for us." Though he kept very few letters, 

 about fifty of her notes are preserved. In one of them, Feb- 

 ruary, 1855, when she was in daily expectation of death, she 

 asks if he will undertake her funeral and make the arrange- 

 ments with her nephew. She had been duly christened, and 

 therefore could be buried with the usual rites in the churchyard ; 

 but she wished there to be no occasion for strife or painful 

 feeling. She knew that Philip was a devoted Christian, and 

 he had told her that if he held her negations, he should be 



