I am very glad you and Ralph liked John’s letter to the Bishop of Durham.  It was necessary for him to speak out, and having all his life defended the claims of the Roman Catholics to perfect toleration and equality of civil rights with the other subjects of the Queen, I should hardly have expected that they would take offence because he declares himself a Protestant and a despiser of the superstitious imitation of Roman Catholic ceremonies by clergymen of the Church of England.  Such, however, has not been the case:  and Ireland especially, excited by her priests, has taken fire at the whole letter, and most of all at the word “mummeries.”  The wisest and most moderate of them, however, here, and in Ireland with Archbishop Murray I hope at their head, will do what they can to put out the flame.  No amount of dislike to any creed can, happily, for a moment shake one’s conviction that complete toleration to every creed and conviction, and complete charity to each one of its professors, is the only right and safe rule—­the only one which can make consistency in religious matters possible at all times and on all occasions.  Otherwise it might be shaken by the new proofs of the insidious, corrupting, anti-truthful nature and effects of the Roman Catholic belief.

They have shown themselves for ages past in the character and conditions of the countries where it reigns, and now the Pope’s foolish Bull is the signal for double-dealing and ingratitude among his spiritual subjects—­and consequently for anger and intolerance among Protestants—­wrong, but not quite inexcusable.

    Lady John Russell to Lady Mary Abercromby

    PEMBROKE LODGE, November 29, 1850

Far from wondering at your vacillations of opinion about John’s letter, both he and I felt, on the first appearance of Wiseman’s pastoral letter, that the whole scheme was so ridiculous, the affectation of power so contemptible, the change of Vicars Apostolic into Bishops and Archbishops, so impotent for evil to Protestants, while it might possibly be of use to Roman Catholics, that ridicule and contempt were the only fit arms for the occasion.  But when he came to consider the chief cause of the measure—­that is, the great and growing evil of Tractarianism—­of an established clergy becoming daily less efficient for the wants of their parishioners, and more at variance with the laity and with the spirit of the Church to which they outwardly belong; when the whole Protestant country showed its anger or fear; when such a man as the Bishop of Norwich (Hinds), a man so tolerant as to be called by the intolerant a latitudinarian, came to him to represent the necessity for some expression of opinion on the part of the Government, and the immense evils that would result from the want of such an expression; when, after a calm survey of the state of religion throughout the country, he thought he saw that