In 1836 the Ecclesiastical Commission was established by Act of Parliament as a permanent institution for the management of business relating to the Church.  Its constitution and recommendations were very distasteful to Sydney Smith; and, as time went on, he found it impossible to restrain himself from public criticism.  At the beginning of the Session of 1837, he published his “First Letter to Archdeacon Singleton."[119] The Letter begins with an attack on the constitution of the Commission.  It was stuffed with Bishops.  Deans and Canons and Rectors and Vicars and Curates had no place upon it.  The result was that all interests, not episcopal, had been completely overlooked, and that the reforms, though perhaps theoretically sound, were practically unworkable.  Further, the reforms had been far too extensive.  The plan of making a Central Fund from the proceeds of confiscated Prebends,[120] and enriching the smaller livings with it, was chimerical.  The whole income of the Church, equally divided among all its clergy, would only give each man the wages of a nobleman’s butler.  The true method in all professions was the method of Blanks and Prizes.  But for the chance of those Prizes, men of good birth and education would not “go into the Church”; and an uneducated clergy would inevitably become fanatical.—­

“You will have a set of ranting, raving Pastors, who will wage-war against all the innocent pleasures of life; vie with each other in extravagance of zeal; and plague your heart out with their nonsense and absurdity.  Cribbage must be played in caverns, and sixpenny whist take refuge in the howling wilderness.  In this way low men, doomed to hopeless poverty and galled by contempt, will endeavour to force themselves into station and significance.”

Then again there was the difficulty of oaths.  The property of Cathedrals could only be confiscated at the expense of violated vows.—­

“The Archbishop of Canterbury, at his enthronement, takes a solemn oath that he will maintain the rights and liberties of the Church of Canterbury; as Chairman, however, of the New Commission, he seizes the patronage of that Church, takes two thirds of its Revenues, and abolishes two thirds of its Members.  That there is an answer to this I am very willing to believe, but I cannot at present find out what it is; and this attack upon the Revenues and Members of Canterbury is not obedience to an Act of Parliament, but the very Act of Parliament, which takes away, is recommended, drawn up, and signed by the person who has sworn he will never take away; and this little apparent inconsistency is not confined to the Archbishop of Canterbury, but is shared equally by all the Bishop-Commissioners, who have all (unless I am grievously mistaken) taken similar oaths for the preservation of their respective Chapters.  It would be more easy to see our way out of this little embarrassment, if some of the embarrassed had not unfortunately,