1904: Preface: The Collected Curiosities of Right Reverend Lord John Mallard, Bishop of Ducks-on-Ponds
Notes and Reflections by his Great‑Niece, Euphemia Mallard
In my younger and more impressionable days—before murder mysteries and manuscript deadlines absorbed all higher questions—I occupied myself with the riddle of existence. I believed, rather dutifully, that one could reason one’s way to the Almighty as one might to the culprit in a drawing‑room tragedy. Such was my enthusiasm for deduction that I took divinity as though it were another branch of criminology: the search for a missing motive behind creation. God, I supposed, would either be proven guilty of invention, or acquitted for lack of evidence.
It was during that period of metaphysical enquiry (or self‑advertised seriousness) that I stumbled upon a small walnut trunk in the attic of our family house at Chelsea—a trunk which rattled faintly, like conscience. Inside lay a confused but promising assortment of manuscripts, bound in blue ribbon and damp with history. The papers, as far as I could tell, belonged to my great‑uncle, John Mallard—the Bishop Ducks-on-Ponds, whose sermons, I later discovered, had populated satire columns and inspired more conversions to scepticism than to faith.
Before examining the sermons themselves, I knew little of him beyond a few family rumours: that he redecorated three parsonages in Italianate style; that he employed an organist scandalously handsome and equally inefficient; and that he once attempted to taxidermy a pheasant as an exercise in “pastoral patience.” It seemed promising material for a novel. Yet the more I read, the less fictional he became, and the more he resembled a living commentary on theology’s capacity for self‑dramatisation.
His character—allow me to sketch it briefly—may be described as devoutly egocentric. The Bishop was a man who adored God in much the same manner he adored mirrors: as a convenient reflection of the better parts of himself. He possessed an urbane eloquence, a taste for excess, and a moral philosophy in which pleasure was the mortal’s highest form of gratitude. His published sermons betray a devotional sensuality that made even the word penitence sound upholstered. You sense in every line his conviction that Heaven, properly appointed, must include chandeliers.
He was not an atheist; he was worse than that—he was original. He delighted in ideas for their elegance rather than their accuracy. In Virtue Vindicated he asserted that sin, though regrettable, was “a necessary pigment in the mural of grace.” In The Holiness of Self‑Indulgence he proposed that holiness consisted chiefly of taste and lubrication. “Charm,” he wrote in a private note, “may yet prove the strongest apologetic.” What annoyed his contemporaries, I think, was not his blasphemy but his coherence. His cousins, lesser clergy of rural ambition, attempted rebuttals—earnest sermons bound in such prose as can only be described as self‑sweating—but none succeeded in eradicating the lingering perfume of his rhetoric.
Reading them all, and comparing sermon with sermon, I felt as one might when investigating a particularly artistic forgery: admiration and unease in equal measure. The theology was scandalous, yes, but the underlying temperament—cheerful despair leavened with self-awareness—was strangely modern. His language gleamed with careless intelligence, the sort that can quote Saint Augustine in one breath and upholster the pulpit in the next. I imagine he spoke as much with his eyebrows as with his voice.
I confess that my initial purpose in examining the papers was pious—or what passes for pious in an agnostic novelist. I hoped to trace some moral evolution, to find perhaps a turning point at which irony yielded to revelation. Instead, I found only the reverse: wit growing subtler as faith receded. It was not that he disbelieved in God altogether; he simply ceased to find the proposition sufficiently interesting. “Faith,” he wrote in a marginal note, “is a kind of conversational politeness toward Heaven—it begins in civility and ends in habit.”
In following the trajectory of his life, I sought answers to my own unoriginal question: whether God was yet another myth, handsomely embroidered by culture, tidy as fiction, improbable as truth. After months with his sermons, correspondence, and ecclesiastical daydreams, I am left with more questions than ever—intellectual, moral, and aesthetic—but not that one. That now seems obvious. God, I am persuaded, is most certainly a myth; merely an excellent, enduring, domesticated one, preserved—like lavender—in the drawer of human vanity.
And yet, as I wrote notes for this edition, I felt an odd sympathy with my great‑uncle’s contradictions. In his confusions, I recognised my own. In his delight at moral paradox, I heard the faint laughter of anyone who ever tried to make sense of holiness and settled, instead, for charm. He was every inch a Bishop—theatrical, omnivorous, well‑dressed—and perhaps, for that reason, the most truthful of believers. I can think of no better advertisement for disbelief than a man who preached it in such style.
This volume, therefore, makes no claim to theology, nor to biography properly speaking. It is a curiosity cabinet, an autopsy of spiritual wit. To those who read for revelation, I offer disappointment; to those who read for character, scandal; and to those, like myself, who read merely to be entertained by moral acrobatics, I offer my uncle’s papers whole.
I invite the reader to proceed as I did—with sceptical affection. Here are his ten celebrated sermons, in all their melodious absurdity, followed by fragments of his correspondence, sketches from his redesigned parsonage, and one confessional note written, I believe, to himself. I present them, not to resolve the problem of God, but to display, as the Bishop might have said, “the Divine comedy of taking oneself seriously.”
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