On the distasteful necessity of theological controversy

by Phil Johnson

nthony Trollope was a Victorian novelist whose output and popularity rivaled Dickens. His books aren't as well known today as the Dickens classics, but they are still easily available and Trollope still has a passionate following.

Trollope grew up in a poor but aristocratic family. His father, though related to the landed gentry, failed at practically everything he ever attempted. In later years Anthony's mother, Frances Trollope, scored some remarkable successes as a writer (achieving fame but not much critical acclaim with Domestic Manners of the Americans [1832] and several novels). But her earnings were not enough to overcome her husband's failures, and the family ultimately fled to Belgium so that Anthony's father could avoid debtors' prison.

The incongruity between his family's rank in society and their standard of living contributed much to the themes of Anthony Trollope's novels.

Many of those novels (most notably his best-known series, The Chronicles of Barsetshire) focused on the internal politics and doctrinal disparity within the Anglian church—high vs. low churchmen; evangelicals vs. Puseyites; and youth vs. experience. Trollope's sympathies clearly lay with the high church, anti-evangelical, traditionalist parties. (He was plainly no fan of Charles Spurgeon. He loved to lampoon evangelicals, including those within the established church as well as the nonconformists.) So in all candor I don't share Trollope's theological perspective and rarely appreciate his satirical commentary on ecclesiastical matters. Unfortunately for me, his novels are full of those themes.

But I admire his style of writing and his ability to make even his most outlandish caricatures seem real and living. He also had an uncanny knack for bringing common sense to bear against popular opinion, and at times—even while disagreeing with his fundamental perspective—I find myself in awe of his logic.

Here's a passage I especially resonated with from Barchester Towers. Eleanor Bold is conversing with Mr. Arabin, a vicar:

"I never saw anything like you clergymen," said Eleanor; "You are always thinking of fighting each other." "Either that," said he, "or else supporting each other. The pity is that we cannot do the one without the other. But are we not here to fight? Is not ours a church militant? What is all our work but fighting, and hard fighting, if it be well done?" "But not with each other." "That's as it may be. The same complaint which you make of me for battling with another clergyman of our own church, the Mohammedan would make against me for battling with the error of a priest of Rome. Yet, surely, you would not be inclined to say that I should be wrong to do battle with such as him. A pagan, too, with his multiplicity of gods, would think it equally odd that the Christian and the Mohammedan should disagree." "Ah! But you wage your wars about trifles so bitterly." "Wars about trifles," said he, "are always bitter, especially among neighbours. When the differences are great, and the parties comparative strangers, men quarrel with courtesy. What combatants are ever so eager as two brothers?" "But do not such contentions bring scandal on the church?" "More scandal would fall on the church if there were no such contentions. . . ." Then he continued: "What you say is partly true: our contentions do bring on us some scandal. The outer world, though it constantly reviles us for our human infirmities and throws in our teeth the fact that being clergymen we are still no more than men, demands of us that we should do our work with godlike perfection. There is nothing god-like about us: we differ from each other with the acerbity common to man; we triumph over each 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." . . . . . . . . . . "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."

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