to the Holy Church. He
did not recollect any people on earth, but those of Great Britain, who,
having rejected the religion of God, were again restored to the bosom of
the Church. The hierarchy was restored, the grave was opened, and Christ
was coming out."

Great as was the excitement produced throughout the country by the event
itself, and by the preposterous pretensions of the new Roman bishops,
the public feeling was much intensified by a letter of Lord John
Russell's to the Bishop of Durham. The prelate was supposed to be an
ardent and consistent Protestant, and the circumstance of a man of such
a character being selected by the premier as the medium through which to
give his opinions to the public, parliament not being then sitting, led
the country to believe that his lordship really sought its support
for some great and practical purpose; that the letter was intended to
indicate an anti-papal policy for the future, for which the support of
the nation was sought. It was as follows:--

_TO THE RIGHT REV. THE BISHOP OF DURHAM_.

My dear Lord,--I agree with you in considering "the late aggression
of the pope upon our Protestantism" as "insolent and insidious," and I
therefore feel as indignant as you can do upon the subject.

I not only promoted to the utmost of my power the claims of the
Roman Catholics to all civil rights, but I thought it right, and even
desirable, that the ecclesiastical system of the Roman Catholics should
be the means of giving instruction to the numerous Irish immigrants in
London and elsewhere, who, without such help, would have been left in
heathen ignorance.

This might have been done, however, without any such innovation as that
which we have now seen.

It is impossible to confound the recent measures of the pope with the
division of Scotland into dioceses by the Episcopal Church, or the
arrangement of districts in England by the Wesleyan Conference.

There is an assumption of power in all the documents which have come
from Rome--a pretension to supremacy over the realm of England, and a
claim to sole and undivided sway, which is inconsistent with the queen's
supremacy, with the rights of our bishops and clergy, and with the
spiritual independence of the nation, as asserted even in Roman Catholic
times.

I confess, however, that my alarm is not equal to my indignation.

Even if it shall appear that the ministers and servants of the pope in
this country have not transgressed the