Devil or none, some clerks will play the Devil.
AT THE CATTLE SHOW
(A Troublesome Lot.)
The intransigent attitude of the High Church party towards Nonconformists is condemned with equal frankness when a Cornish vicar repudiated the title of Reverend as it was "desecrated" by the "carrion of dissent." In the same year the Rev. Arthur Tooth, of Hatcham, was inhibited by the Dean of Arches, and Punch warns Mother Church that she will have no peace till she has got rid of this tooth. The familiar line of argument is adopted that he was neither a sound Anglican nor a true Romanist, and his church is called "St. James's (Colney) Hatcham." Frequent and unflattering allusions to a manual entitled, The Priest in Absolution, occur in 1877; and ironical comment is passed on the suggestion made in the Lower House of Convocation, that vestments might be allowed as from a distance they were not distinguishable from a surplice.
Mr. Mackonochie's continued recalcitrancy also occupied Punch's attention a good deal in 1877. In December he explains the views on canonical obedience of the Vicar of St. Alban's, Holborn, as follows:—
When a Ritualist has gone on too long playing at Popery, he may, through impaired biliary function affecting the sensorium, finally contract a subjective delusion, induced upon his dominant fixed idea that he is his own Pope, etc.
A week later, when Mr. Mackonochie was reported to have withdrawn into a Retreat, Punch kindly suggests that in earlier ages it would have been Anticyra—the town celebrated for hellebore, the chief remedy in antiquity for madness. Later on he gives specimens, under the heading of "Obedientia Docet," of correspondence from Mackonochie's Letter Writer to meet the situation of a subaltern reprimanded by his colonel, a stockbroker replying to a client who has objected to an investment effected on his credit, etc.—in all of which insubordination and disregard of orders and instructions are casuistically defended. On matters of doctrine and discipline Punch differed acutely from Archdeacon Denison, but he greeted the publication of his Notes of My Life affectionately, holding the author to be "most optimist of pessimists, John Bullest of John Bulls." In 1879 under the heading, "Coronatus, non Pileatus," Punch applauds Newman's refusal of a cardinal's hat, accompanying his approval with a back-handed sarcastic reference to Manning, who had accepted the honour in 1875. Manning's instructions for the observance of Lent are roughly handled in the lines which end,
Will the great Lord Cardinal kindly make known