ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an interpretation of the way in which Protestant writers described the Catholic system of values, trying to portray it as their Other. The Catholic values were portrayed as foreign and alien, strange masochistic inversion of normative English Protestant world, elevating celibacy over family life, suffering over happiness, total subjection to authority over self-determination. Catholics are unable to keep a balance between fast and feast, because they are unable of exercising self-discipline, one of the most valued virtues in the Victorian culture. Similarly, Catholic flagellation and other means of mortifying the body remained an object of fascination for many Protestant polemicists. Thomas de Longueville, a Catholic author, skewers Ritualists for what from his point of view appears to be making a juvenile play out of Catholic traditions; when his hero goes down with typhoid fever, the monastic Anglican community where he lives eagerly seizes this opportunity to perform number of religious ceremonies on him which "them considerable enjoyment".
