The dignified bishop, on hearing a startling piece of news,—[322]
“* * * 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 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,[323] 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:[324]
“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 John; nor could you have foreseen in the folds of its long nightgown the white surplice in which it was hereafter cruelly to exercise the souls of its parishioners, and strangely to non-plus its old-fashioned vicar by flourishing aloft in a pulpit the shirt-like raiment which had never before waved higher than the reading-desk.”
“Yet even then,” she adds, “the rare but precious plant existed—three rods of Aaron blossomed within a circuit of twenty miles.” Their clerical functions are summed up later by the gardener William:[325]
“They’re allus magnifying their office: it is a pity but their office could magnify them; but it does nought o’ t’ soart.”
The autobiographical heroine of Villette recounts her experience of being subjected to persuasive priestly exhortation, and ironically repeats the phrases:[326]
“I half realized myself in that condition also; passed under discipline, moulded, trained, inoculated, and so on.”