Barchester Towers Anthony Trollope (iphone ebook reader .TXT) 📖

other with human frailty; we allow differences on subjects of divine origin to produce among us antipathies and enmities which are anything but divine. This is all true. But what would you have in place of it? There is no infallible head for a church on earth. This dream of believing man has been tried, and we see in Italy and in Spain what has come of it. Grant that there are and have been no bickerings within the pale of the Pope’s Church. Such an assumption would be utterly untrue, but let us grant it, and then let us say which church has incurred the heavier scandals.”

There was a quiet earnestness about Mr. Arabin, as he half-acknowledged and half-defended himself from the charge brought against him, which surprised Eleanor. She had been used all her life to listen to clerical discussion, but the points at issue between the disputants had so seldom been of more than temporal significance as to have left on her mind no feeling of reverence for such subjects. There had always been a hard worldly leaven of the love either of income or of power in the strains she had heard; there had been no panting for the truth; no aspirations after religious purity. It had always been taken for granted by those around her that they were indubitably right; that there was no ground for doubt; that the hard uphill work of ascertaining what the duty of a clergyman should be had been already accomplished in full; and that what remained for an active militant parson to do was to hold his own against all comers. Her father, it is true, was an exception to this, but then he was so essentially anti-militant in all things that she classed him in her own mind apart from all others. She had never argued the matter within herself, or considered whether this common tone was or was not faulty; but she was sick of it without knowing that she was so. And now she found to her surprise, and not without a certain pleasurable excitement, that this newcomer among them spoke in a manner very different from that to which she was accustomed.

“It is so easy to condemn,” said he, continuing the thread of his thoughts. “I know no life that must be so delicious as that of a writer for newspapers, or a leading member of the opposition⁠—to thunder forth accusations against men in power; to show up the worst side of everything that is produced; to pick holes in every coat; to be indignant, sarcastic, jocose, moral, or supercilious; to damn with faint praise, or crush with open calumny! What can be so easy as this when the critic has to be responsible for nothing? You condemn what I do, but put yourself in my position and do the reverse, and then see if I cannot condemn you.”

“Oh, Mr. Arabin, I do not condemn you.”

“Pardon me, you do, Mrs. Bold⁠—you as one of the world; you are now the opposition member; you are now composing your leading article, and well and bitterly you do it. ‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite’⁠—you fitly begin with an elegant quotation⁠—‘but if we are to have a church at all, in heaven’s name let the pastors who preside over it keep their hands from each other’s throats. Lawyers can live without befouling each other’s names; doctors do not fight duels. Why is it that clergymen alone should indulge themselves in such unrestrained liberty of abuse against each other?’ and so you go on reviling us for our ungodly quarrels, our sectarian propensities, and scandalous differences. It will, however, give you no trouble to write another article next week in which we, or some of us, shall be twitted with an unseemly apathy in matters of our vocation. It will not fall on you to reconcile the discrepancy; your readers will never ask you how the poor parson is to be urgent in season and out of season and yet never come in contact with men who think widely differently from him. You, when you condemn this foreign treaty, or that official arrangement, will have to incur no blame for the graver faults of any different measure. It is so easy to condemn⁠—and so pleasant too, for eulogy charms no listeners as detraction does.”

Eleanor only half-followed him in his raillery, but she caught his meaning. “I know I ought to apologize for presuming to criticize you,” she said, “but I was thinking with sorrow of the ill-will that has lately come among us at Barchester, and I spoke more freely than I should have done.”

“Peace on earth and goodwill among men, are, like heaven, promises for the future;” said he, following rather his own thoughts than hers. “When that prophecy is accomplished, there will no longer be any need for clergymen.”

Here they were interrupted by the archdeacon, whose voice was heard from the cellar shouting to the vicar.

“Arabin, Arabin,”⁠—and then, turning to his wife, who was apparently at his elbow⁠—“where has he gone to? This cellar is perfectly abominable. It would be murder to put a bottle of wine into it till it has been roofed, walled, and floored. How on earth old Goodenough ever got on with it I cannot guess. But then Goodenough never had a glass of wine that any man could drink.”

“What is it, Archdeacon?” said the vicar, running downstairs and leaving Eleanor above to her meditations.

“This cellar must be roofed, walled, and floored,” repeated the archdeacon. “Now mind what I say, and don’t let the architect persuade you that it will do; half of these fellows know nothing about wine. This place as it is now would be damp and cold in winter and hot and muggy in summer. I wouldn’t give a straw for the best wine that ever was vinted, after it had lain here a couple of years.”

Mr. Arabin assented and promised that the cellar should be reconstructed according to the archdeacon’s receipt.

“And, Arabin,