o do any good no time should be lost."

And then the squire left the room, and Lady Arabella remained alone,
perplexed by many doubts.

CHAPTER XXXII

Mr Oriel

I must now, shortly--as shortly as it is in my power to do
it--introduce a new character to my reader. Mention has been made
of the rectory of Greshamsbury; but, hitherto, no opportunity has
offered itself for the Rev Caleb Oriel to come upon the boards.

Mr Oriel was a man of family and fortune, who, having gone to Oxford
with the usual views of such men, had become inoculated there with
very High-Church principles, and had gone into orders influenced by a
feeling of enthusiastic love for the priesthood. He was by no means
an ascetic--such men, indeed, seldom are--nor was he a devotee. He
was a man well able, and certainly willing, to do the work of a
parish clergyman; and when he became one, he was efficacious in his
profession. But it may perhaps be said of him, without speaking
slanderously, that his original calling, as a young man, was rather
to the outward and visible signs of religion than to its inward and
spiritual graces.

He delighted in lecterns and credence-tables, in services at dark
hours of winter mornings when no one would attend, in high waistcoats
and narrow white neckties, in chanted services and intoned prayers,
and in all the paraphernalia of Anglican formalities which have given
such offence to those of our brethren who live in daily fear of the
scarlet lady. Many of his friends declared that Mr Oriel would sooner
or later deliver himself over body and soul to that lady; but there
was no need to fear for him: for though sufficiently enthusiastic to
get out of bed at five a.m. on winter mornings--he did so, at least,
all through his first winter at Greshamsbury--he was not made of
that stuff which is necessary for a staunch, burning, self-denying
convert. It was not in him to change his very sleek black coat for a
Capuchin's filthy cassock, nor his pleasant parsonage for some dirty
hole in Rome. And it was better so both for him and others. There are
but few, very few, to whom it is given to be a Huss, a Wickliffe,
or a Luther; and a man gains but little by being a false Huss, or a
false Luther,--and his neighbours gain less.

But certain lengths in self-privation Mr Oriel did go; at any rate,
for some time. He eschewed matrimony, imagining that it became him
as a priest to do so. He fasted rigorously on Fridays; and the