

The Ruins of the Church Establishment. 51 



these our days will be dragged down from its dusty eminence; and 

 what work of any character will it be possible to open, that will not con- 

 tain some evidence of episcopal greediness ; some fact which related of 

 any thing in animated nature, save a ravening tenant of the forest, would 

 be monstrous and incredible ? In conformity with this theor^, the 

 charges and speeches of the Right Reverend bench will be understood 

 to mean their roarings for prey ; their visitations and progresses through 

 their sees will be construed into midnight prowlings ; their palaces will 

 be supposed to have meant their dens. The woods of Durham and Can- 

 terbury will be said to have produced the largest and most savage ; and 

 in proof of their extreme ferocity and daring habits, it will be mentioned 

 that they even carried their ravages into the heart of the metropolis ; and 

 on several occasions appeared in parks at Westminster, and would have 

 committed the most frightful depredations, had not the citizens formed 

 themselves into combinations called Unions, for the purpose of mutual 

 protection against their inroads. The laborious antiquary will even be 

 so minute in his researches as to be enabled to produce a particular 

 instance of one of these mischievous creatures, which, in the month of 

 May 1832, was bold enough to single itself from the pack, and penetrate 

 alone into the city, where it got into St. Bride's Church, while divine 

 service was performing, threw the female part of the congregation into 

 hysterics, but narrowly escaped being knocked on the head by the males, 

 headed by the churchwardens of the parish, who pursued it to the western 

 side of Temple Bar. 



A second essayist will treat this zoological theory with supreme con- 

 tempt ; he will not only ridicule the notion of a bishop having signified 

 a beast of prey, but he will hardly deny that the term stood for any living- 

 thing whatsoever. A bishop, he will stake his reputation as a philologist 

 and antiquary, was nothing in the world but a kind of vane or weather- 

 cock, fixed on the roofs of cathedrals and tops of steeples, and intended, 

 like all weathercocks, to indicate which way the wind blew. It was for 

 this reason, he will proceed, that we find our ancestors designating them 

 as the heads (by which they simply meant the highest points) of their 

 churches ; and hence the explanation, and the only explanation possible, 

 of such expressions as the following, which are met with everlastingly in 

 the productions of those days; such a bishop suddenly veered from one 

 point of the compass to the opposite ; such another shifts every day ; a 

 third can tell you which way is the wind as well as any other weather- 

 cock in the kingdom. How is it possible to make any sense out of such 

 sentences as these, unless we bring in JEolus to untie the knot? Adopt 

 this theory, its advocates will say, and the solution is natural and easy. 

 When we read of the Bishop of London pointing to Durham, or the 

 Bishop of Chester to London, it merely means that the wind is blowing 

 from the south in the former instance, and from the north in the latter: 

 in like manner, when it is stated that " the Bishop of Exeter has been 

 remarkably steady for some time, a change may soon be expected ;" how 

 exactly does this phraseology agree with the weathercock hypothesis, 

 and how impossible is it to account for it in any other way ! To be sure, 

 it may be asked, how, upon this supposition, certain epithets, which are 

 frequently found in ancient records, applied to these Bishops, are to be 

 explained ; what sense, for example, in such an expression as a " Right 

 Reverend Weathercock ;'' can spirituality be predicated of a vane? To 



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