Arrest the Bishop? Quotes

“I have taught little to the candidates, but I carry away the knowledge that I must learn humility, that I must distinguish, as I have never done, between my zeal for the Church and my pride, yes, personal pride as a priest! Humility—that fair forsaken Christian virtue—”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“Scotsmen think little of Bishops but much of mothers,”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“car”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“an extraordinary sense of lightheartedness, quite unjustified by the pains and aches of his body. A wedding bouquet on a hearse I feel like,”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“the policeman was escorting Staples across the hall to Mack now, and if ever a fellow wore the guise of a convicted criminal it was the poor little red-haired parson. There was Canon Wye rustling towards the stairs in his cassock on his way from Chapel, looking like a murderous saint or a saintly murderer. The Palace might be a Dartmoor convict gang as far as looks were concerned!”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“fingered”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“You just think over your sins, and a bit more quietly,” was Mack’s advice as he turned to cut the Canon’s answer short. “And if you’ll excuse me just think over the sixth commandment and make sure you didn’t murder Ulder!”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“And any way, remember this. I’m a plain ordinary man and no theologian. When I read a book in defence of the Presbyterian Church I don’t think it has a leg to stand on. When I read an attack on it I rise up ready to fight for every word in the Shorter Catechism. I expect this book of yours turned lots of young men to the Church, for we’re all alike, Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians. We won’t have our nests fouled by our own species and that’s a fact.”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“Over Dick swept that wave of depression no honest Christian can occasionally combat. “One could see Christ if it weren’t for the Church and the clergy!”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“Cowardice, so often unsuspected in the victims of inferiority complexes, is often enough the instigator of crime.”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“But what, after all, thought Dick despairingly, does one man know of the twisted convolutions of another’s mind?”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“just the sort of well-paid, inefficient, church-going pack of parasites you’d expect to find in one of these bloated Palaces.”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“the sun faded, rather than sank, into the threatening clouds. For a moment he saw gloomily in it a parable of the Church, set and formal, snow and ice-bound:”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“Well, good-bye! I’ll see you both on the steps of the gallows, I expect!”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“but, of course, all you clever young men think nothing of needle-spotting in haystacks.”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“He glanced through the half-open door into a littered bedroom which suggested the early stages of a jumble sale in the East End.”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“Twice she was so sure that she heard a creak, and then a swish, in the distance that she crept to the door, but each time the passages lay before her as dark and inscrutable as the avenues of death itself.”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“but I can’t help noticing the cowardice of our—our leaders. I love the Bip, but he’d do anything to avoid a row. Canon Wye is good at getting up a scrap, but he funks the issue. With the Registrar and the Diocesan Board generally one lives in a sort of Trollope atmosphere of stuffy offices, crammed with seals and tapes, red-faced, casual, prejudiced lawyers catching at eighteenth-century regulations to prove some unimportant point and afraid, yes, afraid to take action against a man like Ulder, because of the scandal.”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“Winifred Peck
Arrest the Bishop?”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“One of the penalties of high ecclesiastical office must obviously be the impossibility of owning to a disinclination for Church services.”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“Ordinary people had not at that date begun to see themselves as in a State of Conflict. The Bishop would have diagnosed his state of mind as a want of consistent grace rather than dignifying himself as a split personality, but there was indeed a hidden conflict between the stately ascetic divine revered by his diocese and wife, and the terrified heart, haunted by memories, beset by future fears, which beat beneath his episcopal garb.”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?

“the excrescence of a more or less Georgian new wing, with a suite of drawing-rooms which Mrs. Proudie might have envied,”
― Winifred Peck, Arrest the Bishop?