_are_
the true Israelites, my Lord of Manchester, on your Exchange? Do they
stretch their cloth, like other people?--have they any underhand
dealings with the liable-to-be-damned false Israelites--Rothschilds and
the like? or are they duly solicitous about those wanderers' souls? and
how often, on the average, do your Manchester clergy preach from the
delicious parable, savoriest of all Scripture to rogues (at least since
the eleventh century, when I find it to have been specially headed with
golden title in my best Greek MS.) of the Pharisee and Publican,--and
how often, on the average, from those objectionable First and Fifteenth
Psalms?"

(B) "I have no idea why I had the honor of being specially mentioned by
name." By diocese, my Lord; not name, please observe; and for this very
simple reason: that I have already fairly accurate knowledge of the
divinity of the old schools of Canterbury, York, and Oxford; but I
looked to your Lordship as the authoritative exponent of the more
advanced divinity of the school of Manchester, with which I am not yet
familiar.

157. (C) "What do you mean by usury?" What _I_ mean by that word, my
Lord, is surely of no consequence to anyone but my few readers, and
fewer disciples. What David and his Son meant by it I have prayed your
Lordship to tell your flock, in the name of the Church which dictates
daily to them the songs of the one, and professes to interpret to them
the commands of the other.

And although I can easily conceive that a Bishop at the court of the
Third Richard might have paused in reply to a too curious layman's
question of what was meant by "Murder"; and can also conceive a Bishop
at the court of the Second Charles hesitating as to the significance of
the word "Adultery"; and farther, in the present climacteric of the
British Constitution, an elder of the Church of Glasgow debating within
himself whether the Commandment which was severely prohibitory of Theft
might not be mildly permissive of Misappropriation;--at no time, nor
under any conditions, can I conceive any question existing as to the
meaning of the words [Greek: tokos], _foenus_; _usura_, or usury: and
I trust that your Lordship will at once acquit me of wishing to attach
any other significance to the word than that which it was to the full
intended to convey on every occasion of its use by Moses, by David, by
Christ, and by the Doctors of the Christian Church, down to the
seventeenth century.

Nor,