BOOKS.

LIFE OF BISHOP HAROLD BROWNE.* IT is as a chapter of contemporary ecclesiastical history, rather than as a biography of very striking personal interest, that Dr. Kitchin's memoir of the late Bishop of Winchester will be read. The contrast is curious between the tranquillity, it may almost be said the absolute uneventfulness of the Bishop's private life, and the stirring period in the Church during which it was his lot to play an important and always characteristic part. Very little material apparently exists, to judge from the scanty use made of it in the memoir, in the shape of letters or other private memoranda of general interest, and the events of the Bishop's quiet life do not lend themselves to any lengthened record. Indeed, from the purely biographical point of view, we cannot help thinking that by exercising a wise power of compression, Dr. Kitchin would have added considerably to the effectiveness of his personal sketch, for without the variety and freshness and intimacy of portraiture which letters give, any narrative con- cerned with the details and issues of domestic life is apt, unless kept within very strict limits, to become quickly tedious to the general reader.

But we have only to recall the course of events which is covered by the twenty-six years of Bishop Harold Browne's episcopate, to see that there need be no difficulty on the score of material of varied historical interest. Such a period includes all that display of renewed vigour and activity in the English Church, which springing from varying sources, and revealing itself in very different ways, was to give widespread and practical assurance of its reality as a living force. It includes also much stormy fighting and many con- troversies, whose associations still cling round the names of Essays and Reviews and Bishop Colenso, and are recalled by the fresher memories that belong to the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, and the Public Worship Regulation Measure of 1874, with its following train of ritual prosecutions and imprisonments. In the midst of this time of stir, and ferment, and new enterprise, the secret of the influence exerted by Bishop Harold Browne, was primarily, as his biographer well brings out, that of character. He inspired respect as a man of peace, as one to whom controversy with all that it brings of fierce language and personal enmities, was sincerely and constitutionally hateful, both in itself and for the hindrances it opposed to the work on which his whole heart was set. It is likely that in his deep instinctive conservatism, and his distrust of all extreme posi- tions and unmeasured statements, he often could not make adequate allowance for the wide varieties of men's minds as they displayed themselves in a time of intellectual unrest and activity; just as he plainly did not always see with sufficient hopefulness the vigour and vitality implied by the new methods and bolder ventures which were everywhere asserting them- selves in the thought and work of the Church. But of the natural equity and moderation and charity which dictated his judgments and marked all his exercise of power, there can be no question. If we add to these qualities his unusual learning, his deep piety, his sober and clearly defined and tenaciously held Anglicanism—with that strangely deep and almost instinctive sense of antagonism towards Rome which accompanied it, and which was such a curiously vivid little trait among the more sober colours of the rest of his con- victions—we touch upon the secret of the influence which, through his long tenure of responsible office, made men defer to his judgment with a trust not always so Barely commanded by stronger personalities and more brilliant gifts.

Before his appointment in 1864 as Bishop of Ely, in his excellent work as a parish priest, and in the power he showed alike as Norrisian Professor at Cambridge, and in various theological writings, of his gifts of orderly thought and clear exposition, Harold Browne was steadily building up a reputation as a sound and cautious and learned divine. Upon the revival of Convocation in 1852, he had been elected, as vicar of Kenwyn, to represent the Cornish clergy. He gave, long after, an interesting account of the presentation to the Queen of an Address from the two Houses, at the close of the First Session. With regard to one point in the preparation

• Edward Harold Browne, Lord Biahop of Wincluistor : a Memoir. By G. W. Kitcbin, Dean Of Dur am. London : John Murray.

of the Address, his action was characteristic ; the whole pic- ture is a curiously old-world and remote one :—

"When the address was sent down from the bishops to the Lower House, I ventured to make my first move, and was some- what frightened by the sound of my own voice. It seemed to me wrong that in a document emanating from a great Christian Church, there should be no word which showed that we belonged to Christ ; and I moved that the defect should be remedied by the insertion of a few words containing the name of our Saviour. Deans and Archdeacons whispered inquiringly who the young proctor was who ventured to correct the orthodoxy of the united Episcopate; but they adopted my amendment all the same. When we went to Buckingham Palace in considerable numbers, we had to wait a weary while in an antechamber. Suddenly the doors were thrown open, and I think we had the most royal scene I have ever witnessed. At the farther end of the presence-chamber the Queen was in front of her throne, under a grand canopy. The Prince Consort and some of the Royal children were just behind her. All the principal Ministers and great officers of State were on the right and left. The Duchess of Sutherland, as Mistress of the Robes, was on her right, holding the largest bouquet I ever saw. The Gentlemen of the Bodyguard in full military dress lined the room, and formed an avenue for us to walk up under the glittering chandeliers The Archbishop read the Address and presented it. The Queen replied sitting. She read with the clearest and most silvery voice, very graciously, but with rather emphatic distinctness, especially when she came to the words, My Supremacy,' which she spoke significantly and incisively. We made our bows ; the Archbishop and the Pro- locutor kissed hand, and we backed out of the Royal presence, into primeval obscurity."

Harold Browne's temperate and scholarly examination of some of the questions raised by Essays and Reviews and Bishop- Colenso's Old Testament criticism, contrasts very favourably with the violent methods of attack which were for the moment popular, and which certainly serve to illustrate a saying of the Bishop's biographer, that in such matters it was "much easier to disapprove than to disprove." His essay on In- spiration, in the opposition volume to Essays and Reviews,

entitled Aids to Faith, as well as his cautious and conserva- tive work on the Pentateuch, although in a measure super- seded now by more modern writings, exercised a widely reassuring influence at the time. Probably no one did more- to calm and steady perplexed and frightened minds, and his appointment as Bishop of Ely was a widely welcomed one.

The chapters dealing with Bishop Harold Browne's long episcopate are among the most interesting in the volume.

No words of praise ever came so gratefully to him as those- which associated him with Bishop Andrewes, whose successor, by a curious coincidence, he found himself in both his Sees. And the likeness was not merely a fanciful or complimentary one. Andrewes, he said, had always seemed to him the " very best type of the English High Church divine," and, as such, no example or inspiration could have been more welcome, or more willingly followed. Without the brilliant gifts of Bishop Wilberforce, or the imperious love of rule of Archbishop Tait, Harold Browne, alike at Ely and Win- chester, understood how to govern his diocese and to gain its hearty confidence and affection. He held a high view of the opportunities and responsibilities of his office, and in his gentle way it is plain that he was not without a sense of enjoyment in his exercise of power. But it was by his untiring labour, his willingness to spend and be spent for others, his anxious desire to be always just, his generous giving, his power of differing charitably, above all by his untiring insistence on the spiritual standard by which all re- ligions work must at last stand or fall, that he worked out his theory of the episcopal office into practical expression. His love for the poor was singularly pure and true, and found constant expression in word and action. "A Church," he said, "which had lost its poor, had lost its truest riches." His own example was the beet enforcement of a truth he was never tired of insisting on, and which should have special force at the present moment, that "the best method of Church defence is Church work."

It is too early yet to look for any complete account of the inner and more personal aspects of the ecclesiastical policy which issued in the Public Worship Bill of 1874, although most of the ecclesiastical biographies which are now appearing are not without their contributions towards such a history. An interesting glimpse is afforded in some outspoken words of Bishop Harold Browne's to the Bishop of Peterborough during the passage of the Bill, written in strong opposition to a proposed clause which was to allow an appeal to the Archbishop from a Bishop's veto. Plainly, the high-handed methods of the Primate were not at all to his taste :—

"I hope you will do all you can," he writes, "against the clause. The Bill does much to diminish the condition of Bishops. This clause strikes at the root of Episcopacy. It brings the Archbishop into the Bishop's diocese. The Archbishop of Canterbury cares

for nothing but to pass the Bill quocumque Si possis, recte ; si non, quocumque modo, rem.' " And a little later he writes again :— "I confess that this triple alliance between the Archbishop, the Prime Minister, and Vernon Harcourt, seems to me the most

ominous conjuncture against the Church I for one would much sooner pass the Red Sea of Disestablishment, and wander for forty years in the wilderness with the cloud of glory guiding us."

Upon the death of Archbishop Tait, in 1882, the Bishop of Winchester stood, but for his age, marked out as his successor, both by reason of his position and of the singular influence which his wise and charitable and consistent example of jus- tice and tolerance in a time of turmoil and deep exasperation had won for him among all parties. A letter from the Queen, and one from the Premier, gave official confirmation to the widespread popular anticipation, in words which bore a testimony of which any man might be proud. We cannot help regretting that the feeling of disappointment which, for the moment, the Bishop undoubtedly felt at being passed over, on the score of age, should have found expression at the same time. Whether natural or not—and in this case it was plainly no mere personal ambition which prompted the wish t) receive the appointment—there is something in such a feeling which jars with the only worthy conception of a great office like that of the Primacy ; and in thus giving the Bishop's disappointment publicity, there is danger of its receiving an emphasis out of all due proportion with the picture which the book otherwise presents of his lifelong singleness of character and purpose.

No words could more fitly conclude this notice than those spoken by one well used to weigh his words—the present Bishop of Oxford—upon the Bishop of Winchester's resig-

nation of his See eight years later. "He was a man," says Bishop Stubbs, "in whose presence it was impossible to say an ill-natured thing of any one. From him there was a sort of effluence of kindness and goodness, taken in conjunction with his groat learning, most accurate, careful, and loving judgment, which made one feel, every time he had any talk or intercourse even by letter with him, how great and good

a man he was."