"If every man and every child is to select, how shall we ever have a creed? and if no creed, how shall we have a church?"
And the layman concludes for him,—
"And if no church, how then parsons? Follow it on, and it
comes to that. But, in truth, you require too much, and so you
get—nothing."
An ingenuous young girl in another story inquires,—[1]
"* * * what is all religion but washing black sheep white;
making the black a little less black, scraping a spot white here
and there?"
Whoever may be meant by Thackeray as "gross caricaturists,"
it cannot be Trollope, for even Mr. Slope is less
repulsive than the alleged portraiture, and the Epicureans
are models of refinement, and treated with a corresponding
delicacy. Dr. Stanhope, sinecurist and pastor in absentia,
had the appearance of "a benevolent, sleepy old lion."
Like the rector at Clavering, and the Barchester archdeacon
(who kept his jolly old volume of Rabelais locked
in his study desk, but brought it out in the security of solitude
as an antidote for the tedium of sermon-writing), he
had a taste for "romances and poetry of the lightest and
not always the most moral description." And like Dr.
Grant, in Mansfield Park,—[2]
"He was thoroughly a bon vivant. * * * He had much to
forgive in his own family, * * * and had forgiven everything—except
inattention to his dinner. * * * That he had
religious convictions must be believed; but he rarely obtruded
them, even on his children."
The dignified bishop, on hearing a startling piece of
news,—[3]
