ess
culminated in the year 1820, when he drew up a set of eighty-seven
questions, which he proposed to every candidate for Orders, and to every
clergyman who sought his license to officiate. Failure to answer these
questions to the Bishop's satisfaction was to be punished by exclusion from
the diocese of Peterborough. Happily, the Evangelical clergy of that period
was very little disposed to sit down under Episcopal tyranny. The Bishop's
set of questions was met by a hailstorm of pamphlets. Petitions for redress
were poured into the House of Lords. The Bishop was forced into the open,
and constrained to make the best defence he could in a published speech. In
November 1822, Sydney Smith, in the _Edinburgh Review_, came to the
assistance of his brother-clergy against the high-handed tyranny of the
Persecuting Bishop.

The reviewer begins by giving the Bishop credit for good intentions; but
maintains that his conduct has been--

"singularly injudicious, extremely harsh, and in its effects (though
not in its intentions) very oppressive and vexatious to the clergy....
We cannot believe that we are doing wrong in ranging ourselves on the
weaker side, in the cause of propriety and justice. The Mitre protects
its wearer from indignity; but it does not secure impunity."

After this preface Sydney Smith goes on to develop his argument against the
Bishop, and he starts with the highly reasonable proposition that a man is
presumably wrong when all his friends, whose habits and interests would
naturally lead them to side with him, think him wrong.--

"If a man were to indulge in taking medicine till the apothecary, the
druggist, and the physician all called upon him to abandon his
philocathartic propensities--if he were to gratify his convivial
habits till the landlord demurred and the waiter shook his head--we
should naturally imagine that advice so disinterested was not given
before it was wanted."

The Bishop of Peterborough has all his brother-bishops against him, though
they certainly love power as well as he. Not one will defend him in debate;
not one will allege that he has acted or would act as Peterborough has
acted.

Then, again, the bishop who refuses to license a curate unless he
satisfactorily answers Eighty-Seven Questions, thereby puts himself in
opposition to the bishop who ordained the curate. One standard of orthodoxy
is established in one diocese; another in anoth