She was of opinion that his lordship had misunderstood the case,
or had mismanaged it; her confidence in him, too, was not so illimitable
since he had permitted the Puseyites to have candles on their altars,
although he had forbidden their being lighted, as when he had declared,
twenty years before, that the finger of God was about to protestantise
Ireland. His lordship had said and had done many things since that
time which had occasioned the duchess many misgivings, although she had
chosen that they should not occur to her recollection until he failed in
convincing her son that religious truth was to be found in the parish
of St. James, and political justice in the happy haunts of Montacute
Forest.
The Bishop had voted for the Church Temporalities' Bill in 1833, which
at one swoop had suppressed ten Irish episcopates. This was a queer
suffrage for the apostle of the second Reformation. True it is that
Whiggism was then in the ascendant, and two years afterwards, when
Whiggism had received a heavy blow and great discouragement; when we had
been blessed in the interval with a decided though feeble Conservative
administration, and were blessed at the moment with a strong though
undecided Conservative opposition; his lordship, with characteristic
activity, had galloped across country into the right line again,
denounced the Appropriation Clause in a spirit worthy of his earlier
days, and, quite forgetting the ten Irish bishoprics, that only
four-and-twenty months before he had doomed to destruction, was all for
proselytising Ireland again by the efficacious means of Irish Protestant
bishops.
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