Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers

20. CHAPTER XX: MR ARABIN (continued)

He had been a religious lad before he left school. That is, he had addicted himself to a party of religion, and having done so had received that benefit which most men do who become partisans in such a cause. We are much too apt to look at schism in our church as an unmitigated evil. Moderate schism, if there may be such a thing, at any rate calls attention to the subject, draws its supporters who would otherwise have been inattentive to the matter, and teaches men to think about religion. How great an amount of good of this description has followed that movement of the Church of England which commenced with the publication of Froude's Remains!

As a boy young Arabin took up the cudgels on the side of the Tractarians, and at Oxford he sat for a while at the feet of the great Newman. To this cause he lent all his faculties. For it he concocted verses, for it he made speeches, for it he scintillated the brightest sparks of his quiet wit. For it he ate and drank and dressed, and had his being. In due process of time he took his degree, and wrote himself B.A., but he did not do so with any remarkable amount of academical eclat. He had occupied himself too much with high church matters, and the polemics, politics, and outward demonstrations usually concurrent with high churchmanship, to devote himself with sufficient vigour to the acquisition of a double first. He was not a double first, nor even a first class man; but he revenged himself on the university by putting first and double firsts out of fashion for the year, and laughing down a species of pedantry which at the age of twenty-three leaves no room in a man's mind for graver subjects than conic sections or Greek accents.

Greek accents, however, and conic sections were esteemed necessaries at Balliol, and there was no admittance there for Mr Arabin within the list of its fellows. Lazarus, however, the richest and the most comfortable abode of Oxford dons, opened its bosom to the young champion of a church militant. Mr Arabin was ordained, and became a fellow soon after taking his degree, and shortly after that was chosen professor of poetry.