You ask me about your pet, the Bishop of Exeter. Well, the clergy of his diocese have just suffered what’s called his “charge;” a charge, grandmother, in which the Bishop generally contrives to put in a lot of small-shot to pepper about him right and left. As usual, he talked a good deal about himself; making Exeter out such a soft gentle person--such a lump of Christian butter--that in this hot weather it’s wonderful he hasn’t melted long ago. Ha, grandmother! what a lawyer was spoiled in that bishop! what a brain he has for cobwebs! How he drags you along through sentence after sentence--every one a dark passage--until your head swims, and you can’t see your finger close to your nose! He talked about this Puseyite stuff--this play-acting of the Church--for I don’t know how long; but whether he very much likes it or very much hates it, it’s more than any cabman’s brains can make out. I never read one of Exeter’s charges, that I don’t think of a sharp lawyer quite spoiled; but this last is a greater tangle than all. He talked a great deal about “the apostolical succession,” the truth of which he would defend. How I should like to hear him trace himself--Henry of Exeter--_upwards_! He then came to the new Bill that was to take the right of divorce out of the hands of the Church. He said, “Let the _Liberalism_ of the age be content with what it had already achieved. It was enough for one generation that men and women might be coupled together in a Registrar’s Office, with as total an absence of all religious sanction as if one huckster were coupled up in partnership with another.” Here the Bishop’s right enough, no doubt. For if the Bishops’ Court loses cases of divorce, what lots of fees go from them to the mere lawyers! A wedding-ring and a licence are things almost dog-cheap; but, O grandmother! what a lot of money it takes to break that ring!--what a heap of cash to tear up the licence! and that’s the reason that divorce, like green peas at Christmas, can only be afforded by the rich. Next, the Bishop had a fling at what he called “the unhappy beings who went to mechanics’ institutes and lecture-rooms.” He said they wanted “the discipline of the heart, and the chastening influence of true religion.” I’m an ignorant cabman, grandmother; but if so many “millions,” as the Bishop said, want this, I must ask, What do we pay the Church for? If so many of us are no better, as Exeter said, than “any of the wildest savages who devoured one another in New Zealand,” for what, in the name of pounds, shillings, and pence, do we pay church-rates? Why don’t the bishops and the high preachers of the Church come more among us? Why, thinking of “the apostolical succession,” don’t they copy more than they do the fishermen and tentmakers who are their forefathers? I can’t help asking this, though, as I said, I know I’m an ignorant cabman.