The Church has lost an eminent prelate in Dr. Brooke
Foss Westcott, Bishop of Durham, who died on July 27th, aged seventy-six. He was the greatest theologian the Church of England has recently produced, a scholar who was respected even by German controversialists, and a man whose mental power impressed all with whom he came in contact. His first book, "An Introduction to the Study of the Gospels," was published when he was only twenty-five, and is still a text- book with serious theological students, and his "Cambridge Text" of the New Testament, which it took him with his great colleague, Dr. Hort, twenty-eight years to prepare, is accepted throughout the world as the most learned and suggestive. Though far from illiberal, he was very orthodox, and his defence of the authenticity of St. John's Gospel is the one on which all disputants on that side rely. As Bishop he was remark- able for his interest in social questions, his leaning being towards a Collectivism based on Christianity, and it was his judicious but sympathetic intervention which termi- nated the great miners' strike of 1892. He was, in short, a grand example that a learned Bishop—and, as we have argued elsewhere, a few learned Bishops are indispensable—need not be an inefficient controller of a diocese.
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