Samuel Horsley, Anglican Bishop

Bishop Samuel Horsley (1733-1806), in A Review of the Case of the Protestant Dissenters with reference to the Corporation and Test Acts  (1790) and A Sermon Preached before the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, on Wednesday, January 30, 1793 (1793), reiterated the doctrine of unlimited submission to the King and his Church, and in so doing greatly angered Dissenting ministers throughout England.  The latter sermon so provoked Robert Hall that he delayed the publication of his Apology so that in his Preface he could attack the Bishop in the following language: “when we reflect on the qualities which distinguish this prelate, that venom that hisses, and that meanness that creeps, the malice that attends him to the sanctuary and pollutes the altar, we feel a similar perplexity with that which springs from the origin of evil” (xvi).