These are questions which often present themselves to the lay mind, and the answer usually returned to them involves some very circuitous reasoning. The Bishops, say their henchmen, must have large incomes because they have to live in Palaces; and they must live in Palaces--I hardly know why, but apparently because they have large incomes. Such reasoning does not always convince the reformer's mind, though it is repeated in each succeeding generation with apparent confidence in its validity. After all, there is nothing very revolutionary in the suggestion that Episcopal palaces should be, in the strictest sense of the word, confiscated. Sixty-four years ago Dr. Hook, who was not exactly an iconoclast, wrote thus to his friend Samuel Wilberforce: "I really do not see how the Church can fairly ask the State to give it money for the purpose of giving a Church education, when the money is to be supplied by Dissenters and infidels and all classes of the people, who, according to the principles of the Constitution, have a right to control the expenditure. The State can only, if consistent, give an infidel education; it cannot employ public money to give a Church education, because of the Dissenters; nor a Protestant education, because of the Papists; and have not Jews, Turks, and infidels as much a right as heretics to demand that the education should not be Christian?" This strikes me as very wholesome doctrine, and, though enounced in 1843, necessary for these times. And, when he turns to ways and means, Dr. Hook is equally explicit: "If we are to educate the people in Church principles, the education must be out of Church funds. We want not proud Lords, haughty Spiritual Peers, to be our Bishops. Offer four thousand out of their five thousand a year for the education of the people. Let Farnham Castle and Winchester House and Ripon Palace be sold, and we shall have funds to establish other Bishoprics.... You see I am almost a Radical, for I do not see why our Bishops should not become as poor as Ambrose or Augustine, that they may make the people really rich." It is not surprising that Samuel Wilberforce, who had already climbed up several rungs of the ladder of promotion, and as he himself tells us, "had often talked" of further elevation, met Dr. Hook's suggestions with solemn repudiation. "I _do_ think that we want Spiritual Peers." "I see no reason why the Bishops' Palaces should be sold, which would not apply equally to the halls of our squires and the palaces of our princes." "To impoverish our Bishops and sell their Palaces would only be the hopeless career of revolution."