questions, which he proposed to every candidate for Orders, and to every clergyman who sought his license to officiate.  Failure to answer these questions to the Bishop’s satisfaction was to be punished by exclusion from the diocese of Peterborough.  Happily, the Evangelical clergy of that period was very little disposed to sit down under Episcopal tyranny.  The Bishop’s set of questions was met by a hailstorm of pamphlets.  Petitions for redress were poured into the House of Lords.  The Bishop was forced into the open, and constrained to make the best defence he could in a published speech.  In November 1822, Sydney Smith, in the Edinburgh Review, came to the assistance of his brother-clergy against the high-handed tyranny of the Persecuting Bishop.

The reviewer begins by giving the Bishop credit for good intentions; but maintains that his conduct has been—­

“singularly injudicious, extremely harsh, and in its effects (though not in its intentions) very oppressive and vexatious to the clergy....  We cannot believe that we are doing wrong in ranging ourselves on the weaker side, in the cause of propriety and justice.  The Mitre protects its wearer from indignity; but it does not secure impunity.”

After this preface Sydney Smith goes on to develop his argument against the Bishop, and he starts with the highly reasonable proposition that a man is presumably wrong when all his friends, whose habits and interests would naturally lead them to side with him, think him wrong.—­

“If a man were to indulge in taking medicine till the apothecary, the druggist, and the physician all called upon him to abandon his philocathartic propensities—­if he were to gratify his convivial habits till the landlord demurred and the waiter shook his head—­we should naturally imagine that advice so disinterested was not given before it was wanted.”

The Bishop of Peterborough has all his brother-bishops against him, though they certainly love power as well as he.  Not one will defend him in debate; not one will allege that he has acted or would act as Peterborough has acted.

Then, again, the bishop who refuses to license a curate unless he satisfactorily answers Eighty-Seven Questions, thereby puts himself in opposition to the bishop who ordained the curate.  One standard of orthodoxy is established in one diocese; another in another.  The theological system of the Church becomes local and arbitrary instead of national and fixed.—­

“If a man is a captain in the army in one part of England, he is a captain in all.  The general who commands north of the Tweed does not say, ’You shall never appear in my district, or exercise the functions of an officer, if you do not answer eighty-seven questions on the art of war, according to my notions.’  The same officer who commands a ship of the line in the Mediterranean is considered as equal to the same office in the North Seas. The Sixth Commandment