THE BISHOP. I'm sorry to say I dont. Soames will know. Alice,
where is Soames?
HOTCHKISS. He's in there [pointing to the study].
THE BISHOP [to his wife] Coax him to join us, my love. [Mrs
Bridgenorth goes into the study]. Soames is my chaplain, Mr
Collins. The great difficulty about Bishops in the Church of
England to-day is that the affairs of the diocese make it
necessary that a Bishop should be before everything a man of
business, capable of sticking to his desk for sixteen hours a
day. But the result of having Bishops of this sort is that the
spiritual interests of the Church, and its influence on the souls
and imaginations of the people, very soon begins to go rapidly to
the devil--
EDITH [shocked] Papa!
THE BISHOP. I am speaking technically, not in Boxer's manner.
Indeed the Bishops themselves went so far in that direction that
they gained a reputation for being spiritually the stupidest men
in the country and commercially the sharpest. I found a way out
of this difficulty. Soames was my solicitor. I found that Soames,
though a very capable man of business, had a romantic secret his-
tory. His father was an eminent Nonconformist divine who
habitually spoke of the Church of England as The Scarlet Woman.
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