The distinction must here be made between the official representatives of the Church as such representatives, and as mere human beings. In this discussion therefore clergymen are not cited as cases in point unless they are clearly meant by their authors to be taken as clergy and not as men. The Chadband of Dickens, for instance, and the Bute Crawley and Charles Honeyman of Thackeray, stand on their own feet, and share the common lot of satirized humanity; neither of these novelists having an arrow from his full quiver for the Church itself. Nor has Mrs. Gaskell, though her _North and South_ hinges on the tragedy of Mr. Dale, an Anglican minister turned Dissenter. George Eliot spares likewise the Institution she had herself outgrown. Her Clerical Lives, her Reverends Irwine and Lyon, such diverse types as the modest Dinah Morris and the dominating Savonarola, are treated sympathetically, as is also the pitiful fanaticism of Lantern Yard. Lytton and Reade too grant the consent implied in silence. But other half speak out, briefly or at length. Peacock is most impressed with the uselessness of an institution which seems to exist for the gratification of its dignitaries. The candid Mr. Sarcastic, after horrifying Miss Pennylove on the question of auctioning off brides, proceeds in his frank career:[312] “I irreparably offended the Reverend Dr. Vorax by telling him, that having a nephew, whom I wished to shine in the church, I was on the lookout for a luminous butler, and a cook of solid capacity, under whose joint tuition he might graduate. ‘Who knows,’ said I, ‘but he may immortalize himself at the University, by giving his name to a pudding?’” In his medieval tale he takes up the Church as an institution, with his favorite, backhanded, historical thrust. The Saxons, it seems, had attacked the Bangor monastery and killed twelve hundred monks:[313] “This was the first overt act in which the Saxons set forth their new sense of a religion of peace. It is alleged, indeed, that these twelve hundred monks supported themselves by the labour of their own hands. If they did so, it was, no doubt, a gross heresy; but whether it deserved the castigation it received from Saint Augustin’s proselytes, may be a question in polemics. * * * The rabble of Britons must have seen little more than the superficial facts that the lands, revenues, privileges, and so forth, which once belonged to Druids and so forth, now belonged to abbots, bishops, and so forth, who, like their extruded precursors, walked occasionally in a row, chanting unintelligible words, and never speaking in common language but to exhort the people to fight; having, indeed, better notions than their predecessors of building, apparel, and cookery; and a better knowledge of the means of obtaining good wine, and of the final purpose for which it was made.” To such as this we have Thackeray’s counter-blast, with admonition,--[314]