The Bishops of the English Church would certainly have a
hard -time of it, if it were a matter of great importance-to them, —which it is not,—to please the different schools among their clergy. -The three Bishops in whose dioceses the London districts lie, namely, the Bishops of London, Winchester, and Rochester, put out on Saturday last a reply to certain memorialists who had represented that the " Mission " of the present week would certainly be used by the High-Church party as a mode of extending the habit of what is called "sacramental 'eonfession." The Bishops say that the request to sanction -the Mission-week came from all parties in the Church, and -that the sanction was given in the firm persuasion that no use would be made of a great moral opportunity of this kind to -extend practices which it was well known that they (the -Bishops) did not approve. They did not fear, they even hoped, that in particular cases recourse would be had by those whose consciences had been suddenly roused to the spiritual advice of the preachers who had awakened the new life in them, but it would not be loyal to use such opportunities for the promotion of the habit of confes- sion and absolution. In like manner, it would not be loyal for the Broad Churchmen to use the opportunity for introducing laymen or Nonconformist ministers into their pulpits, without the sanction and against the will of -the Bishops,—a hint put in, of course, as a sort of makeweight, to show that the Bishops wished to be impartial in resisting the innovations proposed from opposite sides ;—not a bad reply, as it seems to us, for such Bishops as ours are, in such a Church as -the Establishment.
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