28 APRIL 1883, Page 2

The Bishop of Gibraltar has odd ideas about the functions

of a Church. He will not licence an English church in Monaco, The Bishop of Gibraltar has odd ideas about the functions of a Church. He will not licence an English church in Monaco,

• because he thinks Monaco a sink of iniquity, into which it is -wrong to attract English families. "The Church," he writes in the Times, "will give an appearance of respectability" to Monte Carlo, and so "draw English families into that nest of :temptation and vice." How wrong Christ must have been to -dine with those "sinners !" We really had thought that there was no party in the Church of England, many as her parties are, which doubted that her mission was to the erring, or which believed that the end of her being was to keep up an unreal appearance of respectability. One Bishop, however, at all events, thinks that the frequenters of Monaco had better go to -the Devil, than that more frequenters should be attracted there. Does the Bishop really believe that the people who will go to Monaco if it has a church, and stay away if it has not, are the people who will be ruined by roulette and lorettes ?