It must not be supposed that all the religious activity in King's Warren was confined to the Dissenters. The Reverend John Dodd was a fine old-crusted Tory; the world had gone very well with him. He had his cross, of course, in the shape of his wife Cecilia, and the Reverend B. Smiter was a very thorn in his flesh; but his living was a good living, and his peaches and his port wine were unsurpassed in the county. His archdeacon was an old personal friend of his own, and I am afraid that the post-prandial conversations of the two when the archdeacon made his yearly visitations and Mrs. Dodd had left them to themselves, turned more upon vintages and things of this world than on church matters. But a young and active bishop, of High Church tendencies, now reigned in the neighbouring cathedral, and the archdeacon in a friendly manner suggested to Dodd that it behoved him to set his house in order.
"We must move with the times, Dodd," he said. "The bishop is a man of six-and-thirty and an enthusiast. I am sorry to say he is no respecter of persons. There is no doubt, my friend, that dissent has spread in this parish of late years with frightful rapidity." He spoke of it as if it were a disease. "What you want is an energetic coadjutor, and you can't do better than try Puffin. Puffin has been a Missioner, and he is a wonderful organizer. If you want to be in the bishop's good books you should try Puffin. He'll take every sort of trouble off your hands; all you have to do is to give him plenty of rope. He has his peculiarities, but he is honest in his way, and he did wonders at the East End, where he nearly killed himself by overwork. You won't keep him long, you know, for Puffin's a man certain of good preferment. He'll fill your church, and if anything will stop the insidious progress of dissent in the place, it's Puffin."
"But, my dear fellow, we are very comfortable as we are. I hate a clerical firebrand. Why can't we rub along comfortably for the rest of my time?"
"The days of rubbing along, Dodd, are gone by. As the bishop puts it, the Church in these latter days must be a Church militant, or it will cease to exist."
"But it needn't become a Church pugnacious for all that," said Dodd.
"My dear fellow, if we were certain that I should be archdeacon for ever you might, as you put it, go on rubbing along. But the king who knew not Joseph has arrived. Our spiritual head is a man who will stand no nonsense. If you don't follow his lead, he will look upon you as refractory. Don't be refractory, Dodd; try Puffin. You will find him a perfect panacea."
"But I don't believe in panaceas," said Dodd; "the fellow will set the whole place by the ears before he has been here a month. Why, in this village the aggrieved parishioner does not even exist. If a man doesn't like the church he takes sittings in the chapel, and there is an end of the thing."
"My dear fellow, you mistake the matter altogether. Now-a-days, a real, good, wrong-headed aggrieved parishioner is exactly what you do want. He keeps you before the public, and brings you to the favourable notice of your spiritual head."
"But look at the fuss, the letters, and the lawsuits."
"With a new bishop, Dodd, and a man like Puffin at your back, though there would be lots of fuss, it need not trouble you. Puffin would write all the letters; and as for the lawsuits, you would win them, and the costs would not come out of your pocket. Puffin, of course, sails rather close to the wind, if I may be allowed the expression, but he knows exactly how far he can go. In fact, Dodd, though he puts his candles upon the altar he never lights them, except at evensong, and then he knows he can do so with impunity."