"* * * did not whistle. We believe that they lose the power of doing so on being consecrate; and that in these days we might as easily meet a corrupt judge as a whistling bishop."
The subject of foreign missions is glanced at in a conversation
between Sowerby and Harold Smith; but on the
the whole it is another neglected topic. Disraeli observes
in Sybil that a missionary from Tahiti might be spared for
needed work in Wodgate, England. The rest in silence,
until Butler, post-Victorian, exposes, with some of his
choicest irony, the fallacy that underlies all proselyting
logic.
Brontë and Kingsley are openly partisan, with a strain of the crudeness inseparable from antagonistic warmth. They are also on the same side,[1] the broad-church position, opposed to Tractarian principles as much as to Catholicism itself.
The real acid of the first chapter of Shirley, entitled Levitical, and promising only "cold lentils and vinegar without oil," is not poured upon the heads of the three curates and the rector, failures though they all were as spiritual shepherds, but upon the contemporary situation. In 1812, the author says, there was no Pastoral Aid nor Additional Curates Society to help out rectors:[2]
"The present successors of the apostles, disciples of Dr. Pusey
and tools of the Propaganda, were at that time being hatched
under cradle-blankets, or undergoing regeneration by nursery-baptism
in wash-hand-basins. You could not have guessed by
looking at any one of them that the Italian-ironed double
frills of its net cap surrounded the brows of a pre-ordained specially
sanctified successor of Saint Paul, Saint Peter or Saint
