THE THREE KINGDOMS.

It is remarked by Mr. Macaulay that the trial of the seven bishops was the first and last occasion on which
two feelings of tremendous potency, which have generally been opposed to each other, and either of which,
when strongly excited, has sufficed to convulse the state, were united in perfect harmony. Those feelings
were love of the church and love of freedom. The fact is pregnant with significance, that the two should
have been combined so rarely; and that as surely as church manifestations have in general led to results
unfavourable to civil liberty, so has the outbreak for liberty as commonly brought about limitations of
the power of the prelacy and priesthood. Whether love of the church or love of freedom be predominant at
present, or whether the second instance of their combination be arrived in our English history, results will
have to determine. One thing only is certain at present. Of the strength and intensity of the agitation
which shakes the kingdom from end to end, there can be no doubt whatever. It occupies every class and
sect to the absolute exclusion of every other interest or subject. The excitement is now in its third stage.
The first was that of the Papal Bull; the second, that of the Pastoral Letter; the third, the attempted
defence to both in the Appeal to the English People. The Appeal seemed at first a sort of bathos after the
Bull and the Letter; but the affected humility of the one, and the declared arrogance of the others, meant
precisely the same thing, and the last has but served therefore, after brief consideration, as fuel to the
other two.

The Papal Bull of the 29th September declared not simply that a Romish hierarchy was re-established
in England, but that all constitutions, privileges, and customs of the church in England were abolished,
whatever their antiquity, and the new bishops invested with full episcopal power. There was no disguise
about this document. It created twelve new bishoprics, dividing the island into corresponding dioceses.
It assigned an archbishop to Westminster, a bishop of Southwark to the two divisions of the metropolis
and the adjoining counties, and a bishop of Beverley to Yorkshire. It divided Lancashire between the sees
of Liverpool and Salford; and Wales, between Salop and Merthyr-Tydvil cum Newport. It erected bishoprics
of Clifton and Plymouth in the west of England, each comprising three counties; in the midland district,
it raised two episcopal sees of Nottingham and Birmingham; and these it flanked by that of Northampton in
the east. Nor had the general amazement at the act yet subsided into a clear comprehension of all the
insolence comprised in it, when forth came a Pastoral Letter from "Nicholas, by the Divine mercy, of the
holy Roman Church by the title of St. Pudentiana, Cardinal Priest, Archbishop of Westminster, and
Administrator apostolic of the diocese of Southwark," addressed "to our dearly beloved in Christ, the clergy,
secular and regular, and the faithful of all the said archdiocese and diocese." In this letter the faithful were
ordered to offer up a thanksgiving that "the great work is complete, and your beloved country has received a
place among the fair churches which form the splendid aggregate of Catholic communion, and has been restored
to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament from which its light had long vanished, and begins anew its course of
regularly adjusted action round the centre of unity, the source of jurisdiction, of light, and of vigour." The
saints of England, "whether Roman or British, Saxon or Norman," were invoked to "look down from their
seats of bliss with beaming-glance upon this new evidence of the faith and the church which led them to
glory;" and were invited to behold, from their habitations of joy, "the lamp of the temple again enkindled
and rebrightening, and the silver links of that chain which has connected their country with the See of
Peter in its vicarial government changed into burnished gold, not stronger nor more closely knit, but more
beautifully wrought and more brightly arrayed!" Then there was added to this infinite rubbish about the
raiments of chains, a quite equal amount concerning his own dignity, and his cardinal's hat, and his red stockings,
and his archiepiscopal pallium, and his title derived from "the church ot St. Pudentiana, in which St. Peter is
groundedly believed to have enjoyed the hospitality of the noble and partly British family of the Senator Pudens"
(about which there has of course been a letter to the Times suggesting St. Impudentiana as the more accurate
title). But finally, in the midst of all this ridiculous arrogance, it was not forgotten expressly to announce
that "until such time as the Holy See shall think fit otherwise to provide, WE GOVERN, and shall continue to
govern, the counties of Middlesex, Hertford, and Essex as ordinary thereof"—without the least reservation of
the pretended authority to the Roman Catholic inhabitants of those counties, or any recognition of the
positive authority of the ordinary of the diocese. The decency of such a reservation never seems to have
occurred to his Eminence, till a cry of indignation and disgust, from one end of England to the other, somewhat rudely aroused him from his exulting dreams as Cardinal Archbishop to his less gorgeous position as
Nicholas Wiseman. Then came forth his Appeal, no longer treating us as if, since the days of the Reformation,
we had been savage or barbarian, but to all appearance recognising us for rational folk, appealing to us in
the name of religious liberty, demanding full completion of the Emancipation Act, and remonstrating
with us for denying to a section of our fellow christians what he had thought it our pride and boast freely
to extend to all. At least this Appeal is an argument purporting to be addressed to the reason, and
inviting fair examination.

Stripping it, then, of its uneasily assumed humility, and paying no heed to the bitter sneers and bursting