these fruits of the industrious piety of past ages, indifferent as to
any right on his own part, or of any injustice to others! We must
express an opinion that nowhere but in the Church of England, and only
there among its priests, could such a state of moral indifference be
found."

I must for the present leave my readers to imagine the state of Mr
Harding's mind after reading the above article. They say that forty
thousand copies of _The Jupiter_ are daily sold, and that each copy is
read by five persons at the least. Two hundred thousand readers then
would hear this accusation against him; two hundred thousand hearts
would swell with indignation at the griping injustice, the barefaced
robbery of the warden of Barchester Hospital! And how was he to
answer this? How was he to open his inmost heart to this multitude,
to these thousands, the educated, the polished, the picked men of his
own country; how show them that he was no robber, no avaricious, lazy
priest scrambling for gold, but a retiring, humble-spirited man, who
had innocently taken what had innocently been offered to him?

"Write to _The Jupiter_," suggested the bishop.

"Yes," said the archdeacon, more worldly wise than his father, "yes,
and be smothered with ridicule; tossed over and over again with
scorn; shaken this way and that, as a rat in the mouth of a practised
terrier. You will leave out some word or letter in your answer, and
the ignorance of the cathedral clergy will be harped upon; you will
make some small mistake, which will be a falsehood, or some admission,
which will be self-condemnation; you will find yourself to have been
vulgar, ill-tempered, irreverend, and illiterate, and the chances are
ten to one, but that being a clergyman, you will have been guilty of