wheat gathered into the Vatican garner.] which index, continually,
she is enlarging by successive supplements, needs also an _Index
Expurgatorius_ for the catalogue of her prelates. Weeds there
are in the very flower-garden and conservatory of the church. Fathers
of the church are no more to be relied on, as safe authorities,
than we rascally lay authors, that notoriously will say anything.
And it is a striking proof of this amongst our English bishops,
that the very man who, in the last generation, most of all won the
public esteem as the champion of the Bible against Tom Paine, was
privately known amongst us connoisseurs in heresy (that are always
prying into ugly secrets) to be the least orthodox thinker, one or
other, amongst the whole brigade of fifteen thousand contemporary
clerks who had subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles. Saving your
presence, reader, his lordship was no better than a bigoted Socinian,
which, in a petty diocese that he never visited, and amongst South
Welshmen, that are all incorrigible Methodists, mattered little,
but would have been awkward had he come to be Archbishop of York;
and that he did _not_, turned upon the accident of a few weeks
too soon, by which the Fates cut short the thread of the Whig
ministry in 1807. Certainly, for a Romish or an English bishop
to be a Socinian is _un peu fort_. But I contend that it is
quite possible to be far less heretical, and yet dangerously bold;
yes, upon the free and spacious latitudes, purposely left open by the
English Thirty-nine Articles (ay, or by any Protestant Confession),
to plant novelties not less startling to religious ears than
Socinianism itself. Besides (which adds to the shock), the dignitary
now before us, whether bishop or no bishop, does not write in the
tone of a conscious heretic; or, like Archdeacon Blackburne[Footnote:
He was the author of _The Confessional,_ which at one time
made a memorable ferment amongst all those who loved as sons, or