is suspended by one medical diploma from the North of England to the South.[79] But, by the new system of interrogation, a man may be admitted into Orders at Barnet, rejected at Stevenage, readmitted at Buckden, kicked out as a Calvinist at Witham Common, and hailed as an ardent Arminian on his arrival at York.”

The Bishop’s reply to the charges brought against him evinces surprise that any one should have the hardihood to criticize or to resist him; and yet, the reviewer asks, to what purpose has he read his ecclesiastical history, if he expects anything except the most strenuous opposition to his tyranny?—­

“Does he think that every sturdy Supralapsarian bullock whom he tries to sacrifice to the Genius of Orthodoxy will not kick, and push, and toss; that he will not, if he can, shake the axe from his neck, and hurl his mitred butcher into the air?  We know these men fully as well as the Bishop; he has not a chance of success against them.  They will ravage, roar, and rush till the very chaplains, and the Masters and Misses Peterborough, request his lordship to desist.  He is raising a storm in the English Church of which he has not the slightest conception, and which will end, as it ought to end, in his lordship’s disgrace and defeat.”

Then the reviewer goes on to urge that discretion and common sense, good nature and good manners, are qualities far more valuable in bishops than any “vigilance of inquisition.”  Prelates of the type of Bishop Marsh are the most dangerous enemies of the Establishment which they profess to serve.—­

“Six such Bishops, multiplied by eighty-seven, and working with five hundred and twenty-two questions, would fetch everything to the ground in six months.  But what if it pleased Divine Providence to afflict every prelate with the spirit of putting eighty-seven questions, and the two Archbishops with the spirit of putting twice as many, and the Bishop of Sodor and Man with the spirit of putting forty-three questions?  There would then be a grand total of two thousand three hundred and thirty-five interrogations flying about the English Church, and sorely vexed would be the land with Question and Answer....  If eighty-seven questions are assumed to be necessary by one bishop, eight hundred may be considered as the minimum of interrogation by another.  When once the ancient faith-marks of the Church are lost sight of and despised, any misled theologian may launch out on the boundless sea of polemical vexation.”

The Bishop’s main line of defence, when challenged in the House of Lords, was that he had a legal right to do what he had done.  This was not disputed.  “A man may persevere in doing what he has a right to do till the Chancellor shuts him up in Bedlam, or till the mob pelts him as he passes.”  But the reviewer reminds him that he has no similar right as against clergymen presented to benefices in his diocese.  They are protected by the patron’s action of Quare Impedit; and all considerations of honour, decency, and common sense should restrain the Bishop from “letting himself loose against the working man of God,” and enforcing against the curate a system of inquisition which he dare not apply to the incumbent.—­