2 JANUARY 1892, Page 10

Lord Salisbury has not been lucky in his recent eccle-

siastical appointments. The best of them,—Archdeacon Norris, to be Dean of Chichester,—has been frustrated by death, the Archdeacon having died from bronchitis on the very day on which he became Dean. We referred to the translation of the Bishop of Sodor and Man (Dr. Bardsley) to the See of Carlisle last week. That is a very modest appointment indeed. But the appointment of the Archdeacon of Huddersfield (Mr. Straton) to the vacant See of Sodor and Man is more than modest, almost an act of penitential self- humiliation on Lord Salisbury's part. The Archdeacon's Evangelicalism is of the noisiest and most militant type, and

only about a year ago he got into a dispute with the Bishop of Chester which made a painful impression on the clergy of the Northern Province. We have not the least wish to see the Evangelicals deprived of their fair share of Church influence ; but we think that it would be well to select the strongest man in every section of the Church for the higher dignities, and not, at all events, the most loud-mouthed. Sodor and Man would hardly like a Bishop of any but decidedly Evangelical bias ; but surely a moderate and spiritual-minded Evangelical would have been welcome in the See which was distinguished by the episcopate of the saintly Bishop Wilson.