“I judge by what I see. They are generally fond of eating, very cautious about their money, untidy in their own houses, and apt to go to sleep after dinner.” 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.” 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.