Mr. B’s disused family chapel symbolizes how he and his family have neglected religion. Before meeting Pamela, Mr. B was a rake who got involved in duels and who fathered a child with the unmarried woman Sally Godfrey, showing a lack of respect for traditional Christian marriage conventions. At first, Mr. B acts similarly toward Pamela, totally disregarding her wish to remain celibate until marriage with his many sexual advances and assaults. At one point, he even schemes to use Pamela’s religious beliefs against her, trying to trick her into a sham-marriage so that he can have a sexual relationship with her while still having the option to break off their relationship at any point.
Eventually, however, Pamela’s good example begins to change Mr. B’s behavior, particularly after he reads some of her journal entries and learns more about how she thinks. When Mr. B proposes to Pamela—for real, not as a sham—Pamela insists that they should get married in a proper church rather than his house. This leads Mr. B to clean out his family’s chapel, which they had been using as a shed to store lumber. The lumber in the chapel signifies how Mr. B and his family prioritized worldly economic issues over spiritual ones. Pamela’s decision to clean and revive the chapel so that she and Mr. B can get married in it, then, shows how Pamela’s virtuous example brings religion into Mr. B’s life, and so the chapel symbolizes the positive, transformative effect that religion can have on a person.
Chapel Quotes in Pamela
I have no Will but yours, said I (all glowing like the Fire, as I could feel:) But, Sir, did you say in the House? Ay, said he; for I care not how privately it be done; and it must be very public if we go to Church. It is a Holy Rite, Sir, said I; and would be better, methinks, in a Holy Place.
And thus, my dearest, dear Parents, is your happy, happy, thrice happy Pamela, at last, marry’d; and to who?—Why, to her beloved, gracious Master! The Lord of her Wishes!—And thus the dear, once naughty Assailer of her Innocence, by a blessed Turn of Providence, is become the kind, the generous Protector and Rewarder of it.