The Ruins of the Church Establishment. 53 



Voracity and flexibility, are both qualities which are found in the fish 

 tribe to a remarkable degree. But there is one argument which will 

 nearly set the question at rest ; all the best informed and most credible 

 writers agree in applying the epithet " cold-blooded," to the bishops. 

 Now this expression contains the precise zoological or anatomical cha- 

 racteristic by which every naturalist knows that the inhabitants of the 

 waters are distinguished ; and it consequently overthrows most decisively 

 the system of all, who, to display their ingenuity at building theories, 

 would fain make out the bishops to have been either flesh or fowl, much 

 less a dry piece of metal like a vane, in which nobody but Hood or Rogers 

 could detect the least drop of blood, cold or warm. 



By way of reply to all this, some plain man in the time to come, will 

 be apt to propose the simple question how is it possible that a fish, any 

 more than a weather-cock, could have been styled Right Reverend ? 

 Barbarous and extravagant as our progenitors uncontrovertibly were in 

 the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is it conceivable that they could 

 have ever addressed a porpoise or shark, by the title of the Right 

 Reverend Father in God? What answer the antiquary of two hundred 

 years hence will make to these interrogatories we know not ; but were 

 we in the land of the living to prompt him, we would suggest the follow- 

 ing : that no absurdity is too gross or prodigious to be credited of an 

 age, which, calling itself free and enlightened, retained an establishment 

 of idle and luxurious priests, at an annual expense of seven or eight 

 millions sterling, while the people of the land wanted bread to eat, and 

 clothes to wear; which, calling itself free and enlightened, submitted to 

 be governed by a chamber of noble blockheads, who had no other title to 

 govern, than that their fathers, who were noble blockheads before them, 

 had been permitted to do so; which, calling itself free and enlightened, 

 sat patiently down for two years, looking on and listening, while a 

 banditti of boroughmongers, with their subordinates and tools, coolly 

 debated not how to escape the rope or the axe, but whether the time was 

 arrived or not, when the plunder of the nation was too dangerous a trade 

 to be carried on any longer ; and how far it was consistent with their 

 dignity the dignity of a gang of swindlers to admit the people to the 

 slightest share in the management of their own nearest and most vital 

 concerns. Surely if posterity credits such enormous instances of folly as 

 these and credit them they must, or shut their eyes to the light of his- 

 tory ; they will scarcely express much surprise when the antiquary 

 informs them that about the same period it was usual in England to talk 

 of the spirituality of a weather-cock, to call a shark a divine, and to 

 entitle a porpoise the Right Reverend Father in God. 



There is still one conjecture, which, daring as it is, will probably be 

 hazarded by somebody or other, in the wide range of speculation upon 

 these subjects. It is too wild, however, to have the slightest chance of 

 success with posterity ; in fact it will be no sooner broached than scouted. 

 The opinion we allude to is, that the bishops were a Christian hierarchy, 

 spiritually descended from the twelve apostles, and the representatives of 

 the saints and martyrs of the primitive church. The holder of this opi- 

 nion will be counselled to enjoy it in the silence and secrecy of his own 

 study, or to propound it only in Utopia; 



" For of such doctrine never was there school, 

 But the heart of the fool, 

 And no man therein doctor but himself." 



