New men and new measures, long credit and few scruples, great success or wonderful ruin, such are now the tastes of Englishmen who know how to live.
Alas, alas! Under such circumstances Mr.Harding could not but feel that he was an Englishman who did not know how to live.

This new doctrine of Mr.Slope and the rubbish cart, new at least at Barchester, sadly disturbed his equanimity.
"The same thing is going on throughout the whole country! Work is now required from every man who receives wages!" And had he been living all his life receiving wages and doing no work?
Had he in truth so lived as to be now in his old age justly reckoned as rubbish fit only to be hidden away in some huge dust-hole?
The school of men to whom he professes to belong, the Grantlys, the Gwynnes, and the old high set of Oxford divines, are afflicted with no such self-accusations as these which troubled Mr.Harding.They, as a rule, are as satisfied with the wisdom and propriety of their own conduct as can be any Mr.Slope, or any Dr.Proudie, with his own.

But unfortunately for himself Mr.Harding had little of this self-reliance.

When he heard himself designated as rubbish by the Slopes of the world, he had no other resource than to make inquiry within his own bosom as to the truth of the designation.

Alas, alas! The evidence seemed generally to go against him.
He had professed to himself in the bishop's parlour that in these coming sources of the sorrow of age, in these fits of sad regret from which the latter years of few reflecting men can be free, religion would suffice to comfort him.