Clergyman's daughter

“ Wo to the fair daughter of the North, whose pure soul is at the mercy of the Southern hyena! Wo to that spirit of slavish reverence for wealth, which winks at any crime, if the criminal be only a man of wealth! In this penurious and licentious age, money is the arch destroyer of female chastity. Wo to the female votaries of Wealth and Fashion, whose feet are in the snares of the soul-destroying seducer! Better to pine in want till the coming of grey hairs, and die unbefriended, than yield thy honor, poor worldling, to the exacting blandishments of wealth! ”

“ A flood of joy ran through Dorothy’s heart. The flash of living colour had brought back to her, by a process deeper than reason, her peace of mind, her love of God, her power to worship. Somehow, because of the greenness of the leaves, it was again possible to pray. O all ye green things upon the earth, praise ye the Lord! She began to pray, ardently, joyfully, thankfully. The wafer melted upon her tongue. She took the chalice from her father, and tasted with repulsion, even with an added joy in this small act of self-abasement, the wet imprint of Miss Mayfill’s lips on its silver rim. ”

“ Since you exist, God must have created you, and since He created you a conscious being, He must be conscious. The greater doesn’t come out of the less. He created you, and He will kill you, for His own purpose. But that purpose is inscrutable. It is in the nature of things that you can never discover it, and perhaps even if you did discover it you would be averse to it. Your life and death, it may be, are a single note in the eternal orchestra that plays for His diversion. And suppose you don’t like the tune? She thought of that dreadful unfrocked clergyman in Trafalgar Square. ”

“ Dorothy watched it pass; and suddenly, as though spontaneously, a word flashed into her mind. The word was “horse.” It faded, but returned presently in the more complex form: “That is a horse.” Other words followed—“house,” “street,” “tram,” “car,” “bicycle”—until in a few minutes she had found a name for almost everything within sight. She discovered the words “man” and “woman,” and, speculating upon these words, discovered that she knew the difference between living and inanimate things, and between human beings and horses, and between men and women. ”

“ Athelstan’s had been; chairs, not pews, but no incense, and the vicar (his name was Mr. Gore-Williams) wore a plain cassock and surplice except on festival days. As for the services, they were so like those at home that Dorothy could go through them, and utter all the responses at the right moment, in a state of the completest abstraction.
There was never a moment when the power of worship returned to her. Indeed, the whole concept of worship was meaningless to her now; her faith had vanished, utterly and irrevocably. It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself. ”

“ They pile themselves in a monstrous shapeless clot, men and women clinging indiscriminately together, like a bunch of toads at spawning time. There is a writhing movement as the heap settles down, and a sour stench of clothes diffuses itself. ”

“ The humming of many unseen insects sounded in her ears, and the hot summery fume from the tangled swathes of vegetation flowed up and enveloped her. Near by, tall stalks of fennel were growing, with trailing fronds of foliage like the tails of sea-green horses. Dorothy pulled a frond of the fennel against her face and breathed in the strong sweet scent. ”

“ If we may not go by "parity of reasoning,"' that is, regard no moral parallelism, make no inferences, but be bound only by the bare letter; than a man marry his own daughter or sister! for they are not expressly prohibited.
To apply this to the case in hand: Lev. xviii. 16. "Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife; it is thy brother's nakedness "—repeated in chap. xx. 21 with a special curse. Here a woman is forbidden to marry her deceased husband's brother; and the strict parallel is that a man is forbidden to marry his deceased wife's sister. ”

“ It was very rarely that a week passed when Victor did not write a letter to the Church Times. He was in the thick of every controversy and in the forefront of every assault upon Modernists and atheists. He had twice been in combat with Dr Major, had written letters of withering irony about Dean Inge and the Bishop of Birmingham, and had not hesitated to attack even the fiendish Russell himself—but Russell, of course, had not dared to reply. Dorothy, to tell the truth, very seldom read the Church Times, and the Rector grew angry if he so much as saw a copy of it in the house. ”

“ Even heathen writers reproached the Asiatics with their dissoluteness: "Such is the whole barbarian race: a father has intercourse with his daughter, a youth with his mother, a maiden with her brother." (Euripides, Androm, 173) . The Law of Moses re-established holy limitations of domestic virtue, but not ignoring the civil custom of the time. The Law of inheritance applied first to the husband's next of kin; but he was not only exempt from taking the widow if she were within the prohibited degrees—he dared not take her. ”

“ The words of Maimonides, in the English translation, are as follows:
"When a man has betrothed a wife, there are six women of near relations prohibited to him, and each one of them is prohibited for ever: and those are they, her mother, and her mother's mother, and her father's mother, and her daughter, and her daughter's daughter, and her son's daughter, and if he approach any one of these in tho life-time of his wife, they are burnt, . . . . . . and so his wife's sister is prohibited to him until his wife die." ”

“ This is the only advantage on the side of marriage, and it is but relative; for a celibate clergy has also its female allies who are scarcely less devoted; and in the Church of Rome there are great organized associations of women entirely under the control of ecclesiastics. Again, there is a lay element in a clergyman’s family which brings the world into his own house, to the detriment of its religious character. The sons of the clergy are often anything but clerical in feeling. ”

“ None of that, Dorothy! No Nature-worship, please! Her father had warned her against Nature-worship. She had heard him preach more than one sermon against it; it was, he said, mere pantheism, and, what seemed to offend him even more, a disgusting modern fad. Dorothy took a thorn of the wild rose, and pricked her arm three times, to remind herself of the Three Persons of the Trinity, before climbing over the gate and remounting her bicycle.
A black, very dusty shovel hat was approaching round the corner of the hedge. It was Father McGuire, the Roman Catholic priest, also bicycling his rounds. ”

“ Let the public at large notice what the Rev. W. Morley Punshon, President of the Wesleyan Conference, distinctly says: It appears to me, and has always appeared to me that the doctrine of this passage (Rom. VI: 2) 'is that the relationship of affinity created by law, ceases when the law ceases." An astounding, a tremendous conclusion! Observe, so a man may marry his father's wife, his son's wife, his brother's wife, his wife's mother, his wife's daughter, his wife's grand-daughter—all expressly fordidden in Scripture! ”

“ And you will go on with that slavish, worrying life that you have lived, struggling to make both ends meet, drilling the Girl Guides, reading novels to the Mothers’ Union, polishing the altar brasses, cadging money for the organ fund, making brown paper jackboots for the schoolchildren’s plays, keeping your end up in the vile little feuds and scandals of the church hen coop. Year after year, winter and summer, you will bicycle from one reeking cottage to another, to dole out pennies from the poor box and repeat prayers that you don’t even believe in any longer. ”

“ Dorothy objected.
“My dear child, can you show me a philosophy of life that isn’t hedonism? Your verminous Christian saints are the biggest hedonists of all. They’re out for an eternity of bliss, whereas we poor sinners don’t hope for more than a few years of it. Ultimately we’re all trying for a bit of fun; but some people take it in such perverted forms. Your notion of fun seems to be massaging Mrs. Pither’s legs.” ”

“ She sat down, filled her mouth with pins and began pinning the two halves of the breastplate together, to get it into shape before the glue should be ready.
The smell of glue was the answer to her prayer. She did not know this. She did not reflect, consciously, that the solution to her difficulty lay in accepting the fact that there was no solution; that if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that faith and no faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is customary, useful, and acceptable. ”

“ It matters not that the daughter and grand-daughter are no blood relations of the man—enough that they are her near kinswomen." Wnat now becomes of the implied liberty on the removal of the restriction, "as long as she liveth?" Does the point need to be pressed? Do we not now see that all things are not to be concluded as sanctioned by law, which are only not expressly forbidden by it? Does Mr. Punshon "bow" to so clear a meaning? ”

“ Quite half the women on her list, Dorothy knew, were at heart atheistical in a vague unreasoning way. She came up against it all day long—that vague, blank disbelief so common in illiterate people, against which all argument is powerless. Do what she would, she could never raise the number of regular communicants to more than a dozen or thereabouts. Women would promise to communicate, keep their promise for a month or two, and then fall away. ”

“ But in places like Southbridge, if you have no family and no home to call your own, you could spend half a lifetime without managing to make a friend. There are women in such places, and especially derelict gentlewomen in ill-paid jobs, who go for years upon end in almost utter solitude. It was not long before Dorothy found herself in a perpetually low-spirited, jaded state in which, try as she would, nothing seemed able to interest her. ”

“ Simultaneously, Miss Allcock was planning to begin stealing old Creevy’s pupils as soon as she had got a footing in the school.
Having decided to sack Dorothy, it was obviously most important to prevent her from finding it out. For, of course, if she knew what was going to happen, she would begin stealing pupils on her own account, or at any rate wouldn’t do a stroke of work for the rest of the term. (Mrs. Creevy prided herself on knowing human nature.) Hence the marmalade, the creaky smiles, and the other ruses to allay Dorothy’s suspicions. ”

“ The only helper on whom Dorothy could count at all regularly was Miss Foote, a tall, rabbit-faced, dithering virgin of thirty-five, who meant well but made a mess of everything and was in a perpetual state of flurry. Mr. Warburton used to say that she reminded him of a comet—”a ridiculous blunt-nosed creature rushing round on an eccentric orbit and always a little behind time.” You could trust Miss Foote with the church decorations, but not with the Mothers or the Sunday School, because, though a regular churchgoer, her orthodoxy was suspect. ”

“ Miss Mayfill wore a long musty black overcoat, with a little collar of greasy-looking astrakhan, which had been the same ever since Dorothy could remember. It was of some very peculiar stuff, like watered silk but coarser, with rivulets of black piping wandering all over it in no discoverable pattern. It might even have been that legendary and proverbial substance, black bombazine. Miss Mayfill was very old, so old that no one remembered her as anything but an old woman. A faint scent radiated from her—an ethereal scent, analysable as eau-de-Cologne, mothballs, and a sub-flavour of gin. ”

“ Without a word, except to inquire Dorothy’s name, the woman led the way up some dark stairs to a twilit, fireless drawing room, where she turned up a pinpoint of gas, revealing a black piano, stuffed horsehair chairs, and a few yellowed, ghostly photos on the walls.
Mrs. Creevy was a woman somewhere in her forties, lean, hard, and angular, with abrupt decided movements that indicated a strong will and probably a vicious temper. Though she was not in the least dirty or untidy there was something discoloured about her whole appearance, as though she lived all her life in a bad light ”

“ She felt her young sister’s shame, then a kind of swift protecting love for the baby, a feeling that included the mother; she was at a loss before her father’s religious sentiment, and she felt and resented bitterly the mark upon the family, against which the common folk could lift their fingers. Still she winced from the sound of her father’s words. It was a painful ordeal.
“It is hard for you,” began the clergyman in his soft, lingering, unworldly voice. “It is hard for you today, but the Lord gives comfort in His time. A man child is born unto us, therefore let us rejoice and be glad. ”

“ Dorothy had not realized till now how hard it is for children who come from poor homes to have even a conception of what history means. Every upper class person, however ill-informed, grows up with some notion of history; he can visualize a Roman centurion, a medieval knight, an eighteenth-century nobleman; the terms Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution evoke some meaning, even if a confused one, in his mind. But these children came from bookless homes and from parents who would have laughed at the notion that the past has any meaning for the present. ”