Tyrant and Jesuit were first.
In Punch's view there was nothing to choose between the two. But his hostility was not confined to one Order: it embraced Vaticanism in the widest sense, and there were many moments when he anticipated, and acted on, Gambetta's phrase, "Le cléricalisme, c'est l'ennemi." Thus, to take one instance, the demonstration of Irish Roman Catholics at Blackheath at the close of 1862 moved him to fury. It was the time of the French occupation of Rome, and the spectacle of these "Irish Yahoos" hurrooing for the Pope and groaning for Garibaldi was altogether too much for Punch. He would have quenched their zeal for the "temporal absolutism" of the Pope with water from a fire-engine, and he described the demonstrators as "prepared to shed the last drop of their blood if the perpetual enslavement of the Romans should require that precious sacrifice." The French, by their intervention, were only "propping by force the rule of superstition." This was just after Garibaldi had been wounded at Aspromonte, and when the bullet was removed Punch said that this, at any rate, was a true relic. Rome—Papal Rome—was to him the Scarlet Lady, a red rag to John Bull.
As a set-off to this special hostility to the Roman Communion, it is only fair to admit that other Churches and Sectarianism generally came in for a great deal of shrewd and, at times, bitter criticism. Punch was by no means an orthodox Churchman. Kingsley and Maurice and Stanley were his heroes. He stood for comprehension and toleration, and fair play for the "Higher Criticism." He had far more sympathy with underpaid curates than opulent bishops—indeed, he had little respect for the episcopal bench, if we except Temple and Tait.
The Sabbatarianism of Evangelicals, Presbyterians, and Nonconformists generally, continued to excite him to indignation or derision—as when in 1858 Sunday walking was tabooed by some Scots fanatics, who also sought to stop all Sunday sailings, or when early in 1861 a controversy arose in Scotland as to whether the sale of milk was permissible on that day.[7]
In 1868 the Lord's Day Observance Society addressed a memorial to the Brighton Railway Company against Sunday trains, which ended as follows:—
"Lastly, as recognizing the Christian principle of a particular Providence, we cannot conceal from ourselves the conviction of the signal instances of the Divine displeasure in two accidents on the Sabbath Day, one of which in the Clayton Tunnel ended in the hurrying of several lives in a moment of time into eternity and which, in a financial point of view, resulted in a loss to the proprietary of not less than £50,000."
THE BROMPTON AREA-SNEAK
Punch acidly comments on the authors of this "pretty specimen of snuffle," that they evidently know no more about the Grand Prix than they do about the Tower of Siloam.