 be warlike: I am aware that he should be a man of peace; I have
some faint outline of an idea of what a clergyman's mission is amongst mankind,
and I remember distinctly whose servant he is; whose message he delivers, whose
example he should follow; yet, with all this, if you are a parson-hater, you
need not expect me to go along with you every step of your dismal,
downward-tending, unchristian road; you need not expect me to join in your deep
anathemas, at once so narrow and so sweeping - in your poisonous rancour, so
intense and so absurd, against the cloth; to lift up my eyes and hands with a
Supplehough, or to inflate my lungs with a Barraclough, in horror and
denunciation of the diabolical rector of Briarfield.
    He was not diabolical at all. The evil simply was - he had missed his
vocation: he should have been a soldier, and circumstances had made him a
priest. For the rest, he was a conscientious, hard-headed, hard-handed, brave,
stern, implacable, faithful little man: a man almost without sympathy, ungentle,
prejudiced, and rigid; but a man true to principle, - honourable, sagacious, and
sincere. It seems to me, reader, that you cannot always cut out men to fit their
profession, and that you ought not to curse them because that profession
sometimes hangs on them ungracefully: nor will I curse Helstone, clerical
Cossack as he was. Yet he was cursed, and by many of his own parishioners, as by
others he was adored: which is the frequent fate of men who show partiality in
friendship, and bitterness in enmity; who are equally attached to principles and
adherent to prejudices.
    Helstone and Moore, being both in excellent spirits, and united for the
present in one cause, you would expect that, as they rode side by side, they
would converse amicably. Oh, no! These two men, of hard bilious natures both,
rarely came into contact but they chafed each other's moods. Their frequent bone
of contention was the war. Helstone was a high Tory (there were Tories in those
days) and Moore was a bitter Whig - a Whig, at least, as far as opposition to
the war - party was concerned: that being the question which affected his own
interest; and only on that question did he profess any British politics at all.
He liked to infuriate Helstone by declaring his belief in the invincibility of
Bonaparte; by taunting England and Europe with the impotence of
