1812: Right Reverend Lord John Mallard, Bishop of Ducks-on-Ponds
(Extract from his private journals, later collected, with tactful omissions, in “Accretions: or the Architecture of the Soul,” published 1825 in Bath by J. Fennimore and Sons.)
I have come to the faintly ridiculous conclusion that I have spent the greater portion of my life suffering from a slow and genteel infection: influence. It begins, of course, in youth when one mistakes admiration for conviction and imitation for intellect. What one first absorbs out of curiosity eventually hardens into creed by sheer repetition. Then—decades later—one finds the walls of one’s mind papered not with beliefs but with quotations.
This morning, after breakfasting on coffee and mild guilt, I found myself reading The Psychology of Habitual Piety, that newly fashionable book by Dr. Prendergast, which insists that men of religion are governed less by faith than by tone. His thesis—uncharitable but persuasive—is that belief, in the ecclesiastical sense, is rarely personal; it is a professional accent, cultivated and seldom reassessed. I closed the book at once, furious at the accuracy. For I find myself daily growing allergic to my own pieties.
Strange it is to look back upon the youth I once was, polished and certain, as though recalling a cousin one never really liked. I was then determined to prove that intelligence could exist within the Church without spoiling the furniture. I believed ideas were to be managed, like servants—encouraged but watched. I can remember sermonising with all the passion of the innocent, the kind that mistakes eloquence for faith. The critics called me unorthodox; I called it style. Now, though the doctrines remain unchanged, I am rather inclined to suspect that my style was my only doctrine.
The trouble with time is that it breeds perspective—anathema to all institutions. The clergy, like the military, does its best work in narrow quarters. I have begun to notice that every opinion I borrowed in my thirties took up residence in my forties, and now in my sixties has installed itself as proprietor. Influence, left unchecked, accrues like plaster dust; soft at first, then impossible to remove without damaging the architecture.
Of course, I was influenced by everyone in my earnest ascent—archbishops with titles as long as their consciences, philosophers who cloaked doubt in Latin, and those women of intellect who fluttered about theological soirées, pressing books into one’s hands and certainties out of one’s grasp. Worse still, there were the bright young men of my curacy: they shaped me with the unselfconscious audacity of youth, mistaking me for an elder statesman when I was merely an elder dilettante.
Now, with the luxury of leisure and insomnia, I have begun to excavate these layers. It is a delicate operation: peeling back the polite conformities of middle age to find the raw curiosity I smothered beneath them. That early ambition of mine—to translate disbelief into beauty and beauty into something resembling God—still glimmers beneath the strata. The miracle, it seems, is that despite a lifetime’s acquaintance with the Almighty, I remain an atheist heading politely for Heaven.
The paradox no longer unnerves me. I am reconciled to the irony that belief can survive intellectual demolition, much like ivy clinging gorgeously to ruins. If there is a God, He must surely enjoy the contradiction of my continued employment. I am certain He reads The Daily Register and laughs.
Historically, it has been a most stimulating year for confession. The Napoleonic wars stagger on—half Europe ablaze with the righteousness of expansion—and here I sit in Bath, writing self-revelations with the zeal of a man polishing his own eulogy. The newspapers trumpet victories, but I am unconvinced. I have seen too much of institutional triumph—national, clerical, marital—to trust in it. Change, real change, rarely arrives by drum or decree. It creeps in quietly, like mildew, or affection.
My episcopal correspondence grows more sanctimonious as my patience shortens. The clergy from the provinces write to inquire about property, precedence, and the proper arrangement of morals. I reply vaguely, quoting myself where I can; one must maintain an appearance of consistency. Beneath the official serenity, however, I find delight in my own apostasy. I have stopped apologising for irregular thoughts. One advantage of seniority is that people assume one’s eccentricities are wisdoms prematurely understood.
Last week, I started rereading The Origins of Virtue, an anonymous volume published in ’97, long ago suppressed for suggesting that conscience has chemical origins. I liked it then; I adore it now. Between its lines, I can see a pale shadow of the hopeful sceptic I was at twenty-one—asking not whether God existed, but whether it mattered if He did. That hope, I realise, has survived influence’s slow annexation; it has simply disguised itself as discretion.
And so, in these autumnal years, I am attempting a little re‑alignment—a personal reformation of sorts. I am pulling away the layers of borrowed reverence to recover something vibrant beneath. Not a change of faith, but of furniture; moving the icons of my mind a few inches nearer the light. If religion has taught me anything, it is that absolutes belong only to those too young to know what they mean.
Perhaps that is the final cruelty of influence: that one must live long enough to recognise which thoughts were truly one’s own. The rest—those borrowed convictions, those polished second-hand certainties—fall away like politician’s promises in a fresh wind. What remains, I suspect, is the soul, or whatever continues to hold the pen when one grows tired of justifying it.
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