George Bertram, author of The Romance of Scripture, and The Fallacies of Early History, exponents of the Higher Criticism, over which “there was a comfortable row at Oxford,” discusses religion with his cousin the curate. The attitude of prayer, he says, is beautiful from the communion it symbolizes. But imagine the attitude with no such communion,—[319]
“You will at once run down the whole gamut of humanity from Saint Paul to Pecksniff.”
As to the practicability of freedom of thought, the churchman argues,—
“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,—[320]
“* * * 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,—[321]
“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.”