One of the charges Bentham made against the Church of England was that it aimed at, and achieved to some degree, the ‘prostration of understanding and will’. The phrase was taken from a visitation sermon by Bishop Howley, in which he warned against the dangers of Unitarianism as a shelter for ‘infidelity’. Fortunately, in Howley’s view, the appeal was as yet confined to men of limited education who had not spent much thought on religion, or who, ‘loving rather to question than to learn, [had] approached the oracles of divine truth without that humble docility, that prostration of the understanding and will, which [were] indispensable to proficiency in Christian instruction’.