They were defenders of absolutism, slavery, and the bloody penal code; they were the resolute opponents of every political or social reform; and they had their reward from the nation outside parliament.  The Bishop of Bristol had his palace sacked and burnt; the Bishop of London could not keep an engagement to preach lest the congregation should stone him.  The Bishop of Litchfield barely escaped with his life after preaching at St. Bride’s, Fleet Street.  Archbishop Howley, entering Canterbury for his primary visitation, was insulted, spat upon, and only brought by a circuitous route to the Deanery, amid the execrations of the mob.  On the 5th of November the Bishops of Exeter and Winchester were burnt in effigy close to their own palace gates.  Archbishop Howley’s chaplain complained that a dead cat had been thrown at him, when the Archbishop—­a man of apostolic meekness—­replied:  “You should be thankful that it was not a live one.”

The people had reason for this conduct—­as you will always find they have, if you take the trouble to inquire.  Let me quote another member of the English ruling classes, Mr. Conrad Noel, who gives “an instance, of the procedure of Church and State about this period”: 

In 1832 six agricultural labourers in South Dorsetshire, led by one of their class, George Loveless, in receipt of 9s. a week each, demanded the 10s. rate of wages usual in the neighbourhood.  The result was a reduction to 8s.  An appeal was made to the chairman of the local bench, who decided that they must work for whatever their masters chose to pay them.  The parson, who had at first promised his help, now turned against them, and the masters promptly reduced the wage to 7s., with a threat of further reduction.  Loveless then formed an agricultural union, for which all seven were arrested, treated as convicts, and committed to the assizes.  The prison chaplain tried to bully them into submission.  The judge determined to convict them, and directed that they should be tried for mutiny under an act of George III, specially passed to deal with the naval mutiny at the Nore.  The grand jury were landowners, and the petty jury were farmers; both judge and jury were churchmen of the prevailing type.  The judge summed up as follows:  “Not for anything that you have done, or that I can prove that you intend to do, but for an example to others I consider it my duty to pass the sentence of seven years’ penal transportation across His Majesty’s high seas upon each and every one of you.”

#Suffer Little Children#

The founder of Christianity was a man who specialized in children.  He was not afraid of having His discourses disturbed by them, He did not consider them superfluous.  “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven”, He said; and His Church is the inheritor of this tradition—­“feed my lambs”.  There were children in Great Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century, and we may see what was done with them by turning to Gibbin’s “Industrial History of England”: