The Attorney-General made a slight answer, and this new kind of divorce passed without farther opposition.[128] Schisms and holy wars have sprung from smaller seeds! But religious animosities were out of date; the public had no turn for controversy; the Church had no writers to make them fond of it again. This had lately appeared; Dr. Middleton,[129] the best writer of the age, had overturned the Fathers, and exploded some visions of the Bishop of London, without a tolerable answer being made in defence of either. Of the prelates, the Archbishop[130] was a harmless good man, inclined to much moderation, and of little zeal for the tinsel of religion. Hutton, the other Archbishop, was well bred and devoted to the Ministry. Honest old Hoadley,[131] who, to the honour of his times, had, though the champion of Liberty, risen to the rich Bishopric of Winchester, was in a manner superannuated. Sherlock of London, almost as able a combatant for the power and doctrines of the Church, was past his strength, and still fonder of the politics of the Government than of the honour of the Keys. The Bishop of Durham[132] had been wafted to that See in a cloud of metaphysics, and remained absorbed in it. Gooch of Ely, the highest Churchman in his heart, had risen to his present greatness in the Church by shifting his politics. The rest were men neither of note nor temper to give the Ministry any disturbance. Then the præmunire clause was read. Mr. Fox said, “He was ready either to wait for the opinions of the lawyers, or to endeavour to amend the clause himself. That he had several objections to the wording of it; that _Acts passed_ may be Acts of Parliament; that _in order to vary the Settlement_ ought never to be words in a penal Act; by the same rule a person would be guilty of robbery who went to a gunsmith’s with another to buy pistols _in order_ to rob. That _null and void_ must mean Acts of Parliament, not letters-patent, for they cannot supersede Acts of Parliament. That the crimes intended to be punished by this law should be certainly known, and not subject to constructions. That the door of the house where the plague was would be marked, and then whoever entered, let him die!” He then proposed to leave out the word _præmunire_, and to leave the pursuit of the crime to the common course of the law of the land; or to make it even high-treason, provided it was made clear to the subjects, what the crime was to be; as no man can suffer but for known crimes. That the maxim, _Misera est servitus ubi lex est inserta_, can only be meant of penal laws, for all other laws are undoubtedly much too uncertain. Fox frequently attacked the lawyers; he loved disputing as much as they do, but as he loved sense and argument, which they make a trade of perplexing, he could not bear a society who at once inverted the use of reason and the profession of justice.