THE WORKING BISHOP. T HE warmth and unanimity of the tribute
paid by the Press to the admirable manner in which the late Bishop of Chichester administered, for a quarter of a century, the diocese to which he was appointed in his sixty- eighth year, afford a fresh and satisfactory assurance that, even in this most self-advertising of ages, the loyal and efficient discharge of public duty in a limited sphere may command widespread appreciation. We do not suggest that Bishop Durnford—whose rapidly fatal illness occurred at Basle, as he was journeying home from his Italian holiday, with the intention of presiding next week at his Diocesan Conference—was by any means unknown outside his See, or in the least unmindful of the duties of a Bishop as a Lord Spiritual and a member of the -Upper House of Convocation. On the contrary, he frequently attended the House of Lords, and was not only very regularly to be seen in his place in Convocation, but often to be heard there also, and always with interest and advantage. But the deep respect with which his more public utterances were invariably received, though based on their intrinsic good-sense and fine tone, and on esteem for his lofty character, was greatly enhanced by the general knowledge that in listening to him men were listening to one who, being thoroughly master of his work, did it with singular all-round success. Here, it was felt, speaks a Bishop who, though beginning his episcopate at an age when most men are thinking of retirement from active work, has grappled with the whole of its responsibilities, and, with an unusual degree of fullness and adequacy, has really fulfilled them. He has a personal knowledge of his diocese,—of its clergy, and of its people of all classes, of its special shortcomings and difficulties, its special advantages and excellences. He understands thoroughly its peculiar needs in the way of education, of church ex- tension and restoration, of beneficent activity for Church- women as well as Churchmen ; its particular troubles in the way of friction between eager and zealous, but not always prudent, clergy of the newer school, and the steady- going conservatism which is so prominent a feature of rural Churchmanship in the South of England. He has known how to stimulate organisation for meeting the needs of all parts of his See ; how to conciliate divergent tendencies and influences, none of which could be ignored or overridden without great loss to the Church ; how to economise the moral resources of the Church in his diocese by preventing the waste of conflict; and how to call out the material resources which ought to be at its disposal. Such a Bishop possesses a very high claim to attention on every question of Church interest.
This feeling was an entirely right one, and it is natural that at the present moment attention should be specially directed to the personal grounds for it—the surprising energy and zeal of Bishop Durnford as an octogenarian and nonagenarian, his high inborn faculties for administration, his sympathetic insight into human nature, and the many moral and spiritual graces of his character. But there were other than personal grounds for the remarkable diocesan success achieved by Dr. Durnford, and the sentiments which it rightly inspired. Those grounds are summed-up in the fact that he had a compact diocese of manageable size, both as to area and population. When Dr. Durnford was consecrated Bishop of Chichester, that diocese was the only one coterminous with a single county ; and Sussex, as we all know, is a county of very moderate size, with no industrial centres, and with Brighton—only about 120,000 in popu- lation—as its largest town. The population of the diocese in 1868 was barely 400,000. It cannot be doubted that if Dr. Durnford had been appointed to the Bishopric of Lincoln, or Norwich, or Ripon, he would have made a splendid effort to overtake the responsi- bilities entailed upon the occupant of any one of those great Sees. But one of two other things is not less certain,—either that he would have been compelled to place quite a different interpretation upon the responsi- bilities of his office from that which he formed and prac- tised at Chichester, or that within half the time which he has spent, with honour and conspicuous success, in the Sussex diocese, he would have hopelessly broken down. And even at that sacrifice he would not have approxi- mately realised his ideal. The recent history of the diocese of Durham teaches just the same lesson. Bishop Lightfoot's episcopate was immensely successful. One can hardly visit the diocese of Durham now without being impressed by the feeling of unity which pervades it, and by the healthy vigour of the manifold diocesan activities which Bishop Lightfoot organised or inspired. Bishop Lightfoot, it need hardly be said, was of the great ones of the Church of England. But he could not have done what he did in Durham unless he had been able to obtain an intimate knowledge of, and to become intimately known to, the clergy and people of his diocese ; and it would have been absolutely impossible for him to fulfil either of those conditions if the county of Northumberland had not been cut off into a separate diocese in the early days of his episcopate. If he had attempted to administer the whole of the old Durham diocese as he was able for ten years to administer the reduced one, which is confined to the limits of the smaller county, what would have been the result ? It is practi- cally certain that, instead of the ten years of magnificent episcopal work from him which it had, the Church would have had barely five of work, admirable, no doubt, but reaching a much lower standard of concentrated efficiency.
In view of such considerations as these, it seems per- fectly clear that the Church of England, unless it carries much further that principle of division of dioceses which has already been put into force to a limited extent with such very advantageous results, is deliberately accepting what it recognises as an inferior standard of episcopal administration. The eulogies earned by and freely given to such Bishops as Lightfoot and Durnford are themselves a confession that we wish our Bishops to do, and admire them exceedingly if they do, that of which it is dangerous or physically impossible for many of them to approach the doing. How true this is may be realised by any one who likes to spend an idle hour with his "Bradshaw," arranging hypothetical episcopal journeys between Ripon, Lincoln, or Norwich as a centre, and the remoter parts of the dioceses, more or less ironically called by the names of those cities. We readily admit that not seldom our latter-day Bishops are seduced by their own zeal and good-nature into a waste of their time and strength in the performance of "functions " of comparatively trivial importance. For such objects they too often race headlong about their dioceses, at a pace which cannot allow either of their quietly obtaining a grasp of the circumstances of each parish they visit, or of their being sufficiently available, in an unexhausted condition, for consultation by their clergy. It is most desirable that these excesses of episcopal com- plaisance should be reduced to a minimum ; but even if they were abolished entirely, it would remain the fact that many Bishops of existing dioceses could not pos- sibly obtain a really living hold over the whole of their dioceses, and be also accessible " Fathers in God" to their beneficed and unbeneficed clergy. Of course there are Suffragan Bishops, but no one, and least of all, we should imagine, those hard-working officers of the Church themselves, would pretend that their existence, however zealously and ably they discharge the duties laid upon them, can produce a state of things comparable in respect of general efficiency of administration and of unity of feeling in the individual Sees—a desideratum of enor- mous importance—to that which prevails in a compact diocese of manageable size, under a single earnest and competent prelate. It may be difficult to say whether the removal of the great and obvious want of sufficiency in our Episcopate to meet modern requirements, or the augmentation of the average remuneration of the clergy to a decent "living wage," is the more pressing of the present needs of the Church of England. But there can be no doubt that while things remain as they are in either respect, the Church must, and will, in many ways fall short of the ideal which must be present to the minds of her best sons.
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