1900: The Theology of Loitering
Review by Felix Ambrose Montfort From The Morning Trumpet
There are some books which appear, when one re‑reads them, less as literature than as living acquaintances—eccentric relations who refuse to die quietly. Bishop Mallard’s Late Blooming: or, The Theology of Loitering (1821) is precisely such a volume: too idle for the theologians, too intelligent for the sentimentalists, and altogether too alive for the library’s dust. It has, impossibly, outlived its author, his faith, and possibly his God—though the last, being English, no doubt lingers politely.
Mallard himself is a curiosity of church history. Born Theophilus Archer in 1739, he rose from ornamental obscurity to become Bishop of Ducks‑on‑Ponds, a diocese so small it was once mistaken for a landscape. His sermons (I own a shabby second edition of The Moral Symmetry of the Androgynous Soul) brought him the sort of notoriety reserved for the talented and tactless. He wrote as if Genesis required revision, and as if the Almighty might be improved by conversation. When death claimed him in 1818—while dictating his memoir on a chaise longue—he left behind this final manuscript, Late Blooming, published three years later and instantly accused of heresy by everyone who failed to understand it, which was everyone.
The twentieth century, however, has finally caught up. It is a happy anachronism that Mallard’s philosophy of “holy dawdling” finds itself suddenly modern. At a time when the continent stumbles toward progress as a substitute for happiness, and London’s streets reek of empire and moral disinfectant, the Bishop’s gentle creed—that salvation consists in delight, and virtue in curiosity—seems positively revolutionary.
His prose resembles well‑aired velvet: rich but not oppressive, mechanics of pleasure rather than penitence. The opening line, “Why hurry toward eternity when there are so many taverns along the way?” remains the most charming indictment of piety ever smuggled into English. Mallard insists that life, far from being a vestibule to Heaven, is itself the drawing room of the divine; and that to sprint piously toward the afterlife is to insult the host. He recommends instead a dignified loitering—admiring the furniture, sampling the punch, and exchanging courteous gossip with fellow travellers.
It would be misleading to call the book philosophical; it is rather anecdotal theology. Mallard writes of strolling through gardens, regretting that theology never discovered botany. He compares death to the inconvenience of moving house (“one never finds half one’s possessions again”), and miracles to the small forks of human kindness that appear at the right moments and vanish between courses. He quotes lightly from antiquity, rather as one might drop names at a soirée: “Herodotus understood travel,” he notes somewhere, “but lacked luggage.”
To situate Late Blooming in its time requires imagination. England in 1821 was an empire of clocks, punctual virtue, and funerary poetry. The end of the Napoleonic wars had produced a generation with no battles to fight and ample leisure to reflect upon damnation. The clergy, ever resourceful, filled the emptiness with sermons celebrating moral rigidity. Mallard, presiding over his watery diocese and almost certainly in love with his choirmaster, turned instead to roses, brandy, and metaphysics.
For him, faith was a kind of courtship—flattering when mutual, dangerous when one‑sided. The Bishop’s God is not a patriarch so much as a patient co‑conspirator, indulgent toward laughter and partial to lateness. His Heaven has no trumpets, only viols tuned sufficiently low to allow conversation. “Eternity,” he writes, “will be quite bearable once everyone is seated.”
The scandal at publication was considerable. The Quarterly Review called it “a lazy provocation written by a man who believes in nothing but himself,” which, I must admit, is partly true. The Bishop did believe in himself—ardently, stylishly, as every great heretic must. What his critics missed was that such self‑belief was not arrogance but aesthetic principle: he regarded the soul as one’s first and last artwork, to be tended with diligence and a hint of outrage.
Time has corrected the misreading. Modern readers, fatigued by Puritan diets and moral athletics, will find comfort in his invitation to loiter elegantly in one’s own life. In an age that has produced both the bicycle and pessimism, Mallard’s refusal to hurry towards salvation reads like good manners revived.
The book contains no lessons and no moral; its pleasure is its integrity. One leaves its pages feeling rather as after a sensuous luncheon—unashamed, slightly improved, and desirous of a nap. Late Blooming reminds us that the spiritual world, if it exists, must surely resemble England in April: faintly damp, gloriously unreasonable, and populated by lovable eccentrics who will talk for an hour in order to avoid leaving the house.
The only tragedy is that Mallard’s art of loitering no longer survives among his successors. Our clerics have become administrators of guilt; our writers, accountants of irony. The Bishop would not have prospered today—he would have fled to Italy, stolen a gondola, and declared Venice purgatory with better lighting. But his creed endures: that to linger is not to waste time but to acknowledge its perfume.
For those of us weary of spiritual efficiency and moral upholstery, I commend this new reprint heartily. Read it slowly. Stop often. We have all eternity to misunderstand one another; let us at least take our time doing so.
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