It should be explained that on July 10 in the same year a Bill had been introduced in the Lords enabling the Bishops of London and Durham to resign, and making provision for them:--
The annual income of Dr. Blomfield is £10,000 a year, and he has enjoyed it for twenty-eight years, having previously had four years at Chester with £1,000 a year; total receipt, £284,000. And the annual income of Dr. Maltby is £24,000, and he has enjoyed it for twenty years, having previously had five years at Chichester with £4,000 a year; total receipt, £500,000.
The "Prince Bishops," with their princely revenues, have long since departed: nowadays no one charges bishops with indolent opulence. The scandal of the poor curates and underpaid country clergymen still remains, but the disparity is not so great. The best paid prelates find it hard to make both ends meet or to make provision for their families. Some of them even publish balance-sheets of their receipts and expenditure.
In the domain of doctrine and religious controversy _Punch's_ record is somewhat chequered. He was equally antipathetic to High Church and Low Church. We have seen what he thought of Exeter Hall. But Pusey and his followers stirred him to even greater wrath. He called the Puseyites "Brummagem Papists." He saw no beauty or dignity in an advanced ritual, but only an absurd and wicked "playing at religion." So when the famous Papal Brief was published in the autumn of 1850, constituting a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales in place of the Vicars Apostolic, followed up by the pastoral from the newly appointed Cardinal Wiseman welcoming the restoration of England to the communion of the Roman Church, _Punch's_ indignation knew no bounds; he became the most violent champion of English Protestantism. In earlier days he had welcomed the Liberal political views which Pius IX had expressed in the opening stages of the _Risorgimento_ movement in Italy, and had printed a laudatory set of verses, headed "A Health to the Pope," in the issue of February 20, 1847, in which he had congratulated Pio Nono on his masculine wisdom, courage, and reforming zeal. His severest censures were reserved for the sectarian zealots at home. "Everybody knows that the great obstacle to popular education is the agreement of sects, on the one hand, that it is necessary to teach orthodoxy, together with secular knowledge, and their inability, on the other, to agree what doxy is ortho-."