Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers

21. CHAPTER XXI: ST EWOLD'S PARSONAGE (continued)

Mr Arabin accompanied him through the rooms, trying to look wise in such domestic matters, and the other three also followed. Mrs Grantly showed that she herself had not been priestess of a parish twenty years for nothing, and examined the bells and window panes in a very knowing way.

'You will, at any rate, have a beautiful prospect out of your own window, if this is to be your private sanctum,' said Eleanor. She was standing at the lattice of a little room up stairs, from which the view certainly was very lovely. It was from the back of the vicarage, and there was nothing to interrupt the eye between the house and the glorious gray pile of the cathedral. The intermediate ground, however, was beautifully studded with timber. In the immediate foreground ran the little river which afterwards skirted the city; and, just to the right of the cathedral the pointed gables and chimneys of Hiram's Hospital peeped out of the elms which encompass it.

'Yes,' said he, joining her. 'I shall have a beautifully complete view of my adversaries. I shall sit down before the hostile town, and fire away at them at a very pleasant distance. I shall just be able to lodge a shot in the hospital, should the enemy ever get possession of it; and as for the palace, I have it within full range.'

'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 Mahometan 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 Mahometan should disagree.'