THE THREE KINGDOMS.

The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill is now virtually law. It passed the upper house by an enormous
majority on the morning when Miss Talbot was married. Misfortunes seldom come single to holy or
unholy men. The closing incidents of its career in the lower house have some claim to be remembered
among the curiosities of history. The men to whose mortal hatred of it we are indebted for debates
extending over five weary months, are the very men from whom it received, during the debates of its five
closing days, its most stringent and effective provisions. The popular idea of an Irish opposition was
exactly realised by Mr. Reynolds and his friends. They were present when they had better have been
absent, and absent when they ought to have been present. Even at the very last, when their desperate
stand was to have been made on the question that the bill as amended should pass, all were mute on the
question being put. Mr. Grattan was in the library, Mr. Reynolds was in the passage, Mr. Keogh was waiting
for Mr. Murphy, Mr. Murphy did not know he was waited for, nobody else was attending, and the bill passed
in silence. It passed with amendments making the declaratory clause, or preamble, not merely condemnatory
of the particular brief or rescript of last year, but of "all such briefs and rescripts;" applying the
hundred-pound-penalty, not merely to the assumption of the titles conferred by such authority, but to the
act of obtaining, or introducing into the United Kingdom, any future briefs, rescripts, bulls, or letters-
apostolic of a similar tenor; and, finally, vesting the prosecuting power not merely in the Attorney-General,
but, with the Attorney's consent and approval, in any private informer. Such was the characteristic
termination, in the lower house, of an opposition without parallel for unscrupulous means employed, and
abortive results obtained. The bill was then received in the upper house with open arms, and its second
reading passed by a majority of two hundred and twenty-seven; the Pope and his advisers having themselves,
only a few days before, done their best to swell this majority by promulgating a scheme for the erection of
a new St. Peter's in the very heart of London, and for providing that it should be governed by a congregation
of Italian secular priests resident in Rome "that the Roman spirit may always influence the same." Whatever
else may be thought of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, of its chances of efficiency or its liability to abuse,
there cannot be a doubt that it embodies the answer of the English people to all such impudent attempts to
establish an Italian Propaganda among them. It is their counter-promulgation of a fresh protest against
Rome. It is thus they declare, in answer to the lords of the Vatican, that they have not lost their love for
free enquiry, nor their hatred of priestly assumption. It is a message carrying warning with it (if rightly
understood) to the dwellers in palaces less distant than the Vatican, but, if all be true that has lately been
declared, hardly any nearer to the region of the Gospel.

The past month will be memorable in the records of the English Church, even less for the enactment of
a measure protecting her against foreign bishops, than for the proofs brought to light of the necessity that
exists for an enactment protecting her against her own. More scandalous even than the debates of which
the members for Rome were the heroes, have been those in which a majority of the prelates of the English
Established Church have been openly accused of flagrant dishonesty, of direct breach of faith, of having falsified
returns in which they had a personal interest, of having violated their own voluntary promises in respect of
the disposition of property over which they had control, and of having retained for their own uses
enormous sums of money which belonged to other people. If anything could have thrown into greater
prominence these revelations of episcopal excess, it would have been the startling statement of spiritual
destitution which was the occasion that drew them forth.

The question arose upon a motion for Church Extension by means of more equitable division of Church
revenues, in justification of which it had been shown that out of a population of nearly four millions,
distributed over a hundred and thirty parishes in England and Wales, only church-accommodation could be
found for little more than half that number, by the wealthiest and most richly-endowed establishment in the
world. This led to a consideration of the results of that arrangement between the bishops and the
ecclesiastical commission, entered into fifteen years ago, by which those right reverend men were to be
allowed fixed incomes ranging from between four and five to no less than fifteen thousand a-year, but with the
permission of still keeping the management of the property in their own hands, subject only to the paying
over to the commissioners whatever surplus might remain after satisfying those fixed and certainly not
illiberal annual stipends. It might have seemed that such an arrangement could be in no possible danger
of being violated, seeing who were the parties to it. But the reverse turns out to be the fact, to a very sad
and surprising extent. The empty titles which Cardinal Wiseman and his brother bishops have been taking
without any legal right to them, are nothing to the solid thousands which Bishops Blomfield, Maltby,
Sumner, Monk, and their brethren, have been keeping with as little equitable claim to them. The last seven
years' incomes of even the six minor sees show an excess of twenty-eight thousand pounds more than ought in
conscience and honour to have been retained; and as for the owners of the larger sees, one's breath is fairly taken
away by the amount of delinquency imputed to them. For that same period of seven years the Bishop of
Worcester appears to have pocketed, on his own showing, a surplus sum of eleven thousand pounds. During
the fourteen years of the existence of the commission which fixed the stipends of the sees of London and
Winchester at ten and seven thousand a-year, the present owners of those sees appear to have retained
(taking even the very doubtful authority of their own disputed returns) a gross excess above the annual