[Illustration: AFFECTIONATE HUSBAND: "Come, Polly--if I _am_ a little irritable, it's over in a minute."] [Sidenote: _Destitute Clergy_] But _Punch's_ chief objection to the bishops was that they emphasized in the most glaring way the contrasts which existed in what was at once the wealthiest and the poorest of Churches. If the Church was out of touch with the lay poor, she was even more open to criticism for her neglect of her own poor clergy. The scandal of the ragged curates had attracted _Punch's_ attention in the 'forties. On September 19, 1846, he referred to the recent death, "raving mad, in penury and destitution," of the Rev. Mr. Kaye, of St. Pancras. A return, procured by the energetic inquisitiveness of Joseph Hume at the close of 1847, revealed the fact that the total number of assistant curates to incumbents resident on their benefices amounted in 1846 to 2,642, and the number licensed to 2,094. Of these 1,192 received stipends _under_ £100 a year, and as many as 173 _less_ than £50 a year. But the most bitter comment on this modern clerical instance of Dives and Lazarus is to be found in an article in 1856 on "Bishops and Curates":-- A curate--"an Agueish curate"--wishes to know of _The Times_ if curates in general "may look forward for some provision when age and disease have incapacitated them from further labours?" There is disaffection, insolence, in the very question. This curate for twenty years folded the sheep of two curacies. "They were separated by a hedgerow," and the pastor was "exposed to the pestilential atmosphere of Essex Marshes." And the curate sums up the case of bishop and curate as below:-- "To a bishop who has had his labours sweetened by all that life can give of comfort, luxury, and highest dignity--a palace and £6,000 per annum. "To a curate who, for thirty years, shall have done his devoir before God and man, till broken with miasmatic fever, or voiceless from excess of oral exertion, he is obliged to confess his inability to be any longer faithful in his calling--the workhouse." And is it not well that it should be so? A curate on £100 a year, and shaking with a marsh ague, shaking, and praying, and teaching the while, is still a lively representative of the ancient Christian, is still a living extract from the New Testament. Now a bishop, with £22,000 per annum, and, if shaking, shaking with the fat of the land, is, as far as our reading goes, not to be found in the volume to which we have reverently alluded. 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:--