Page:Satire in the Victorian novel (IA satireinvictoria00russrich).pdf/234



of this unlicked wolf-cub muffled in the fleece, and mimicking the bleat of a guileless lamb. Portions of it reminded me of certain Wesleyan Methodist tracts I had once read when a child; they were flavoured with about the same seasoning of excitation to fanaticism. * * * I smiled then over this dose of maternal tenderness, coming from the ruddy old lady of the Seven Hills; smiled, too, at my own disinclination, not to say disability, to meet their melting favours."

As her reason is not swayed by the arguments of the "Moloch Church," neither is her fancy kindled by its ritual:

"Neither full procession nor high mass, nor swarming tapers, nor swinging censers, nor ecclesiastical millinery, nor celestial jewelry, touched my imagination a whit. What I saw struck me as tawdry, not grand; as grossly material, not poetically spiritual."

Kingsley widens his criticism from the personal to the social point of view. He objects to luxury not so much because it shows up the luxurious as because it takes away even the necessities from those who have not, to add yet more luxuries to those that have. He questions—

"* * * how a really pious and universally respected archbishop, living within a quarter of a mile of one of the worst infernos of destitution, disease, filth, and profligacy—can yet find it in his heart to save £120,000 out of church revenues, and leave it to his family; * * * how Irish bishops can reconcile it to their consciences to leave behind them, one and all, large fortunes population, whom they have been put there to convert to Protestantism for the last three hundred years—with what success, all the world knows."
 * * * taken from the pockets of a Roman Catholic