If a non-Anglican may contribute to this thread, I am reading The Way We Live Now for the first time (not top drawer Trollope–too much whinging about swindling rich men, as if Lewis Lapham had written a novel).

Roger Carbury, the umpteenth occupant of Carbury Manor, had befriended an R.C. priest (he converted, or “perverted,” as the book’s Anglicans say, when he was at Oxford, so he is a gentleman). But his Catholic friend lays on the apologetics a bit thick, and Roger grows tired of it. Trollope comments: “Perhaps also Roger felt that were he to take up the cudgels for an argument he might be worsted in the combat, as in such combats success is won by practised skill rather than by truth.”