e 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