10 AUGUST 1895, Page 3

Dr. Randall Thomas Davidson, now Bishop of Rochester, is to

become the new Bishop of Winchester,—to succeed Bishop Thorold. He has made a very good and able Bishop of Rochester, in spite of a good deal of ill-health, and he him- self thinks that in his new diocese he will be able to economisebetter that exhausting evening work by which in a great city diocese he has been most sorely tried. The new Bishop belongs to that class of theologians who make rather light of dogma, as the part which he took in the discus- sion on the Athanasian creed showed. That is the only ground we could find for criticising his appointment to this great dio- cese, which ranks, we suppose, next in order to the two Arch. bishoprics. We do not sympathise with the modern tendency to make light of dogma. That tendency is a product of the Time-spirit, which is certainly rather out of accord with the things that are eternal. But so many of the clergy are infected with this distrust of dogma, that we may well expect to see it represented on the Bench of Bishops. We only hope that, like other products of the Time-spirit, it may disappear almost as quickly as it grew up.