and Acts of Parliament, are beginning to be more and more polluted
with these barbarisms, he may even have caught them unconsciously.

And, on looking again at one case of '_thereafter_,' viz. at
page 79, it seems impossible to determine whether he uses it in the
classical English sense, or in the sense of leguleian barbarism.
This question of authorship, meantime, may seem to the reader
of little moment. Far from it! The weightier part of the interest
depends upon that very point. If the author really _is_
a bishop, or supposing the public rumor so far correct as that he
is a man of distinction in the English church, then, and by that
simple fact, this book, or this pamphlet, interesting at any rate
for itself, becomes separately interesting through its authorship,
so as to be the most remarkable phenomenon of the day; and why?
Because the most remarkable expression of a movement, accomplished
and proceeding in a quarter that, if any on this earth, might be
thought sacred from change. Oh, fearful are the motions of time,
when suddenly lighted up to a retrospect of thirty years! Pathetic
are the ruins of time in its slowest advance! Solemn are the
prospects, so new and so incredible, which time unfolds at every
turn of its wheeling flight! Is it come to this? Could any man, one
generation back, have anticipated that an English dignitary, and
speaking on a very delicate religious question, should deliberately
appeal to a writer confessedly infidel, and proud of being an
infidel, as a 'triumphant' settler of Christian scruples? But if
the infidel is right, a point which I do not here discuss--but if
the infidel is a man of genius, a point which I do not deny--was
it not open to cite him, even though the citer were a bishop? Why,
yes--uneasily one answers, _yes_; but still the case records
a strange alteration, and still one could have wished to hear such