In dark corners behind easy-chairs were the deep-sea pools of theology,--pools which had long since given up all the fish they had in them for their owner,--slabs of antique divinity, such as you would find likewise in the equally cherished library of Londonderry Senior.
Such were the fathers that slumbered on in a well-earned repose, and which, far from desiring new readers, were so old that they were glad to rest undisturbed,--being far too self-important to confuse a considerate regard for their repose with neglect.

And many of them were really quite valuable as decoration, because of their fine old coats of gilded leather; and such were ranged in the more penetrable shadows or even in the lamp-light.

Theophilus would point to them as to a portrait-gallery of dead ancestors.

One might admire the quaint and distinguished cut of their clothes without dreaming of wearing the same,--and indeed old divinity, he used to say, was poor food for young divines.
His divinity indeed was fed on the technical side, it is to be feared, by the more destructive biblical criticism, like most destructive engines, coming all the way from Germany, and at its more vital centres by importations of strong meat from Russia and Scandinavia.

Tolstoi and Ibsen were his archprophets.
There was likewise a great Paris moralist called Zola, and a strange old American father called Walt Whitman.