Mr. Fox opposes the bill because it would be a prop to established Episcopacy, and Mr. Sidney Herbert does
the same thing for a reason exactly opposite. It is denounced by Sir Robert Inglis for doing nothing to
protect Englishmen in their allegiance, and by Mr. Reynolds for doing everything to drive Irishmen
from theirs. No two members support it—no two oppose it—with the same object in view, or even on
grounds intelligibly similar.

It is not our purpose to take part in discussing what nobody can give any clear account of. It is very
possible, before these lines see the light, that Ireland may have been struck out of the bill, or the trust
clauses may have been re-inserted in it: no one can say what may happen, from hour to hour. It will be
enough for the present to point to the seven days' debate as without precedent or example in the history of
rational men, whether it be for the vehemence that has denounced, or the pertinacity that has supported,
such a measure. Needless is it to observe, at the same time, what a moment's reflection will suggest to all,
that the real question cannot be this which a proposed paltry legislation against bishops' titles would seem to
raise. It cannot be this which causes Lord John Russell, the author of the Test and Corporation Act, the
steady champion of religious liberty, to be baited and burnt in effigy as a second Titus Oates. It cannot be
this which enables Sir James Graham, the resolute resistor of the Irish Appropriation Clause, and the author
of Education Clauses in the Factory Bill which not eight years ago deliberately re-imposed the most
narrow religious tests, to assume suddenly the airs of a champion of conscience. The truth is far otherwise.
Unhappily, a great argument has unexpectedly presented itself for solution, and no one dares to grapple
with it. Every one is running away from it. There is nothing on all sides but the invention of excuses and
pretences to evade it; and the natural result is, that every one is in a position false to himself, and unintelligible
to lookers-on. Sooner or later, therefore, the people of England will have themselves to do what
their statesmen dare not attempt. They will have to deal, in their rude grand way, with a matter calling for
the highest discrimination of the most capable of intellects; and the almost certain result must be, that a
large alloy of evil will accompany the good. For what will have to be determined is the compatibility of
any kind of claim to ecclesiastical domination with the rights of political equality; and it extends further
than is at this moment perceived. The amount of organisation and development of what is called religious
freedom, which can with safety to civil freedom be permitted to continue, will have to be settled at last, and
for ever; and in the treatment of the case at popular hands, doctrine and discipline may alike fare hardly.
Small is the hope, nevertheless, that the existing combatants will be warned before that greater combatant
steps in: though the time is fast advancing when all means of interference less peremptory will have passed
away. There is not a family in the kingdom at whose hearth the facts disclosed in the case of the poor
French miser, Mathurin Carré, and in that of the orphan English heiress, Augusta Talbot, have not, within
the past few days, excited a feeling more fraught with danger to the substantial power as well as the flaring
vanities of Cardinal Wiseman, than Lord John's retained or abandoned clauses strengthened fifty-fold, and
backed by the support of Lords and of Commons and of the forces of the whole Protestant Establishment.

Mathurin Carré, with one leading antipathy in life (the hatred and avoidance of women), seems to have
had two over-mastering desires: to scrape together money, and get back to his native country. But the
sordid habit engendered by the first interfered to baffle the last; and, ultimately foiled in both his insatiable
cravings, he died, as he had lived, an exile and a beggar. He surrendered his country at the opening of
life, in alarm at the reign of terror; and in subjection to a worse terror at the close of it, he yielded up his
money-bags. But though in revolutionary France, sixty years ago, political tyranny stalked about free and
uncontrolled, it remains to be seen whether the law-courts of quiet and constitutional England, at the present
day, are not able to render powerless a spiritual tyranny yet more degrading and hardly less appalling. It
is in proof in this case, upon uncontradicted or admitted testimony, that, upon a particular morning, it
became known to a priest of the Chapel of St. Aloysius in Somers Town that an old man, a miser, apparently
in forlorn destitution but in reality the possessor of ten thousand pounds stock in the Bank of England,
was dying in a wretched unfurnished lodging not far from the chapel; that, within a few minutes afterwards,
the same priest presented himself at that lodging, and insisted on seeing the dying man without witnesses;
that, within the next few days, similar interviews and intrusions followed, with more or less of violence on
the part of the priest; that, meanwhile, a deed of gift and a will had been prepared, by an agent of the
priest, not an attorney or solicitor, but a barrister and recent convert to Romanism, who played the part of
both law-stationer and law-adviser on the occasion; that the will divided three thousand pounds between
the testator's brothers and sisters, and that the deed of gift gave the remaining seven thousand to a Roman
Catholic Female Charity, in connexion with the priest's chapel; that, while these proceedings were in progress,
no order or petition of the sinking man could keep the priest from his bedside; that there, too, on a particular
day, two women, friends of the priest, were introduced to witness the execution of the instruments;
that, on that same day, held up in his bed, the priest hanging over him and speaking vehemently in a language
understood by no other person present, the wretched miser and woman-hater signed the papers disinheriting
his family and endowing the Female Schools; that these deeds, as soon as executed, were carried off by the
priest in spite of the dying man's vehement desire to retain them; that the priest, having thus achieved
his object, returned no more to his so-called "spiritual" charge that day, nor the next day, nor the next;
and that on the evening of the latter the old man died, unconfessed and unshriven, but not before the
savings of his miserable life, and the hard price of what should have been its last consolation, had been
surrendered at the Bank of England to their new possessors! Such a case as this is worth a hecatomb of
bills against Ecclesiastical Titles; and, as surely as the part which one of the new holders of those titles
would seem to have played in the case of Miss Augusta Talbot shall be as clearly proved against him, will
Cardinal Wiseman have to rue the day when he and his master's insolent brief issued forth, from the
Flaminian Gate. Strange destiny, that should couple the old miser on the brink of the grave, with this
handsome girl in the flush of youth! But all is fish that comes into the net impressed with "the seal of the
fisherman;" and inasmuch as £80,000. have yet greater charms than ten, we have an entire holy sisterhood,
and a bishop, and an earl, and a countess, set to work in Miss Talbot's case, for what was more efficiently
done by a simple parish priest, and a barrister, in the case of Mathurin Carré.

The Spring Assizes have presented a heavy accumulation of crime, and not a few startling revelations of
ignorance, its unfailing accompaniment. In charging the grand jury at Stafford, Mr. Justice Talfourd took
occasion to comment on the significant fact that the calendar contained the names of thirty-four prisoners who