John's
College, Cambridge, Margaret Professor of Divinity, Bishop of Llandaff from
1816 to 1819, and of Peterborough from 1819 till his death. He was a "High
Churchman of the old school"--perhaps the most unpleasant type of
theologian in Christendom. We know, from the Life of Father "Ignatius"
Spencer,[78] that Bishop Marsh played whist with his candidates for Orders
on the eve of the ordination, and all that we read about him beautifully
illustrates that tone of "quiet worldliness" which Dean Church described as
the characteristic of the English clergy in the earlier part of the
nineteenth century. But what he lacked in personal devotion he made up (as
some have done since his day) by furious hostility to spiritual and
religious enthusiasm in others. He opposed the civil claims alike of Roman
Catholics and of Dissenters. He attacked the Bible Society. He denounced
Charles Simeon. He insulted Isaac Milner; and he determined to purge his
diocese of Evangelicalism (which, oddly enough, he seems to have identified
with Calvinism). His manly resolve to stifle religious earnestness
culminated in the year 1820, when he drew up a set of eighty-seven
questions, which he proposed to every candidate for Orders, and to every
clergyman who sought his license to officiate. Failure to answer these
questions to the Bishop's satisfaction was to be punished by exclusion from
the diocese of Peterborough.
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