So here am I slaving away, a subordinate priest, while such fellows as Peter the Reader look down on me as their slave.

But it's always so.

There never was a bishop yet, except the blessed Augustine--would to Heaven I had taken my abbot's advice, and gone to him at Hippo!--who had not his flatterers and his tale-bearers, and generally the archdeacon at the head of them, ready to step into the bishop's place when he dies, over the heads of hard-working parish priests.

But that is the way of the world.

The sleekest and the oiliest, and the noisiest; the man who can bring in most money to the charities, never mind whence or how; the man who will take most of the bishop's work off his hands, and agree with him in everything he wants, and save him, by spying and eavesdropping, the trouble of using his own eyes; that is the man to succeed in Alexandria, or Constantinople, or Rome itself.