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.—
"Prelates are fond of talking about my see, my clergy, my diocese, as if these things belonged to them as their pigs and dogs belonged to them. They forget that the clergy, the diocese, and the bishops themselves, all exist only for the public good; that the public are a third and principal party in the whole concern. It is not simply the tormenting bishop against the tormented curate; but the public against the system of tormenting, as tending to bring scandal upon religion and religious men. By the late alteration in the laws,[80] the Labourers in the vineyard are given up to the power of the Inspector of the vineyard. If he has the meanness and malice to do so, an Inspector may worry and plague to death any Labourer against whom he may have conceived an antipathy…. Men of very small incomes have often very acute feelings, and a curate trod on feels a pang as great as a bishop refuted."
Another of the Bishop's ways of defending himself was to boast that, in spite of all his interrogations, he has actually excluded only two curates from his diocese: and this boast supplies the reviewer with one of his best apologues. "So the Emperor of Hayti boasted that he had only cut off two persons' heads for disagreeable behaviour at his table. In spite of the paucity of the visitors executed, the example operated as a considerable impediment to conversation; and the intensity of the punishment was found to be a full compensation for its rarity."
In conclusion, the reviewer says:—"Now we have done with the Bishop…. Our only object in meddling with the question is to restrain the arm of Power within the limits of moderation and justice—one of the great objects which first led to the establishment of this journal, and which, we hope, will always continue to characterize its efforts."
To this period also belong two splendid discourses on the principles of Christian Justice, which Sydney Smith, as Chaplain to the High Sheriff, preached in York Minster at the Spring and Summer Assizes of 1824. The first is styled "The Judge that smites contrary to the Law."[81]
At the outset, the preacher thus defines his ground:—