The Romanist prelates in England may call themselves what they like, but that does not constitute them such as they name themselves. Recently died in Paris a Monsieur Jacques Lebaudy, who claimed to be Emperor of the Sahara, though all of the Sahara that he possessed was a quarter pound tobacco-tin full of the sand of the desert. And the number of Papists in England, if we exclude the Irish, is microscopic. I use the expression, borrowing it from the lips of a Romanist, when speaking of the Papists in the so-called papal diocese of Plymouth, as compared with the teeming population, Anglican and Protestant, of the Three Towns.
In spite of the opposition of Gladstone, Cobden and Bright, who saw the futility of the measure, the Government brought in the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill — a measure making it penal for any Papist prelate to call himself Archbishop or Bishop of any place in England. Let him be Archbishop Wiseman, or Cardinal Wiseman, or Archbishop of Mesopotamia, if he pleased, but not Archbishop of Westminster. The bill was carried and made law. "There it remained," wrote Justin McCarthy. "There never was the slightest attempt made to enforce it. The (R.) Catholic prelates held to the titles the Pope had given them, and no English court, judge, magistrate, or policeman ever offered to prevent or punish them. No other proceeding so ludicrous, so barren, as the carrying of that measure has been known in the England of our time."
At the close of 1850 appeared Lord John Russell's Letter to the Bishop of Durham, in which he threw the blame of the Aggression upon the Tractarian party, and this led to an outburst of Protestant fanaticism, that was fomented against all who sought to recover the decencies of Prayer-book worship.
In 1851 Archbishops Sumner and Musgrave, and twenty-two bishops, of whom Wilberforce of Oxford was one, subscribed to an Address to the Clergy, which, under a thin disguise of inconsistent advice, administered a castigation to the unpopular party in the Church. Bishop Wilberforce is said to have set his name to this paper with the sole object of preventing it from being worse than it really was. It was a "Hear, hear! " of the bishops to Lord John Russell's letter.
An answer made by Henry (Philpotts) of Exeter in a pastoral
