How is it, I wonder, that all religious officials, from God the Father to the parish beadle, should be so arbitrary and exacting.

Ch. 23; this is one of the passages excised from The Way of All Flesh when it was first published in 1903, after Butler's death, by his literary executor, R. Streatfeild. This first edition of The Way of All Flesh is widely available in plain text on the internet, but readers of facsimiles of the first edition should be aware that Streatfeild significantly altered and edited Butler's text, "regularizing" the punctuation and removing most of Butler's most trenchant criticism of Victorian society and conventional pieties. Butler's full manuscript, entitled Ernest Pontifex, or The Way of All Flesh, was edited and issued by Daniel F. Howard in 1965. It is from this edition that this quote is derived; it was excised by Streatfeild in the first edition.