THE NEW BISHOP OF DURHAM.
TOED BEACONSFIELD deserves great credit for his selection of the new Bishop of Durham. Canon Light- foot is not only a man of very remarkable learning and very strong judgment, but of great general power. If Cambridge be, as we believe it is, much less under the influence of the prevalent theological anarchy than Oxford, it is greatly due to the strong impression made by Canon Lightfoot on the Divinity Students of the University. Hardly any man of our generation has grappled with the historical problems raised by the New Testament with so much force as Canon Lightfoot ; and cer- tainly none of those who have so grappled with them have shown equal candour in appreciating the exact force of the evidence, negative and positiye, which can be brought to bear upon the issues of faith and doubt. Dr. Lightfoot's criticisms in the Contemporary Review on "Supernatural Religion " have been the ablest, as well as the most learned, critical dissertations on the evidences concerning the origin of the Canonical Gospels which have appeared in England in the present century. Again, his book on the reasons in favour of a revision of our existing translation of the New Testament is really final,—if a final argument be needed,—for the work which has now been almost brought t,o completion, and is an argument, moreover, in which hardly a sentence is wasted, or a single weak consideration put forward. As far as his books reveal him, there appears to be not a touch of weakness in Canon Lightfoot. Even his books on St. Paul's Epistles do not overflow, as such books too fre- quently do, into liquid levels of " edification." They are terse, scholarly, and significant,—the work of a man who, whatever else he may be, is assuredly strong. Such a man, it is clear, had a sort of moral claim to the offer of any position of dignity in the Church which our rulers could persuade him to accept; and Lord Beaconsfield has proved, not for the first time, that he knows the difference between significance and insig- nificance, when he asked Canon Lightfoot to accept at once one of the most important of the Bishoprics of the Church, instead of following the more ordinary course of translating to Durham; and offering the less important Bishopric so vacated to-Canon Lightfoot. Unquestionably the Bishop Designate of Durham, is the equal of the ablest Bishops on the Bench, and the superior of much the greater number of them. He adds a new dignity to the office of Bishop.
But while we recognise at once the wisdom of the Prime Minister in selecting so learned, so thoughtful, and so strong a man as Canon Lightfoot for the Bishopric of Durham, we are by no means so sure that Canon Lightfoot has acted wisely in giving way to the very natural urgency of his friends, and ac- cepting the offered bishopric. The gossip of the newspapers, very likely untrustworthy, asserts that the Dean of Durham (Dr. Lake) failed to persuade Canon Lightfoot to take the Bishopric, and that he yielded most reluctantly at last to the persuasions of the Archbishop of Canterbury. "The diffi- culty," said a member of the Government, according to one account, "was to get him to take it;" and for our own parts, we regret that the difficulty was overcome. There are other divines in England who might have done for the diocese of Durham, if not all that Dr. Lightfoot may do, yet not much less. There is hardly any other divine in England who will do the work which ()anon Lightfoot was doing, and which he will now be able to do no longer, in his Divinity Professorship at Cam- bridge; Organisation is a good work, but it is the good work of'a lifetime 'only. To write books which help men to appre- ciate more truly the exact historical phenomena of Christianity, and the. exact worth of the attacks upon Christianity from the negative side, is not only the good work of a lifetime, but work that is likely to retain all-its-effect for many generations after the lifetime of him who has written them. No one would doubt that what Bishop Butler did when he wrote the "Sermons " and the " Analogy " was a greater work, than what he did in the way of practical organisation in the diocese over whith Dr. Lightfoot is to preside,—though that, too, short as it was in duration' was good work, and was long remembered amongst those for whom it was achieved. But Bishop Butler would never have achieved, as' Bishop Butler, what he achieved as Rector of Stanhope and Preacher at the Rolls Chapel. And much less can any modern Bishop, with the administration of the great and populous diocese of Durham on his hands, hope to accomplish a work which requires uninter- rupted study and undisturbed thought. Canon Lightfoot had accumulated as Margaret Professor of Divinity a great intellec- tual capitallor the illustration of the historical problems con- nected with the origin of Christianity, and we doubt whether that capital will now ever be invested in the only way in which it could be made available for the world at large. Have not the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dean of Durham,— if they were indeed the means of persuading Dr. Lightfoot to alter his purpose in life,—forgotten to some extent, in their generous eagerness for the credit of the diocese of Durham and of the Bench of Bishops, how much more hopeless it will be to fill worthily the place in the world which Canon Light- foot is vacating, than it would have been to fill worthily the place which he is about to occupy? It seems to us always to be a matter for regret when a man whose previous life has prepared him for a unique work, postpones it to other work, even though it be quite as high and honourable; which many men could do almost as well as himself. We should have regretted Mr. Free- man's getting into Parliament—he has been a candidate for a division r of Semersetshire—just as we regret Canon Lightfoot's taking a b'ctsy and responsible Bishopric, because it would have diverted energies specially and exceptionally trained for one kind of work, to work which did not need that special and exceptional training at all. No one would take any pleasure in seeing ground specially adapted and prepared for the culture of a very rare species of vine, appropriated to the growing of a crop of wheat, even though the wheat should be a little better in kind and more abundant in quantity than the average wheat of the district. No one likes to see a grand Gothic cathedral converted to the purposes of an hotel de ville, for that which is specially appropriate and suited to the church is lost upon the hotel de vile. And yet this kind of diversion of the fruits of a very rare training to the purposes of a somewhat ordinary career, is common enough among men, and no one thinks it worthy of regret, so long as the diversion is from an outwardly less dignified to an outwardly more dignified office,—for instance, from the office of a scholar, student, and teacher, to the office of a Bishop. To our minds, the regret is not the less legitimate on that account, for it is of course the dignity which is the misleading element in the matter ; and without it, the career would not have been changed, and the special training wasted. Before now, a great scientific training has been thrown away on the Bar and the Judicial Bench, and the loss was none the less for the dignity of the sphere into which the scientific energy was transferred. Not unfrequently the training of a great Constitutional states- man has been thrown away on the career of a second-rate Bishop, or the subtlety of a great thinker lavished on the work of an indifferent Member of Parliament. And of course we do not lament the misapplication of special power the less that the temptation to misapply it has been great In fact, the work of the world is so very generally done by men who might have done-almost anything else nearly as well, that when the rare ease of a special func- tion and a special training for the fulfilment of that function, are really 'combined, we feel all the more keenly the diversion of the power employed in it to other functions for which much more ordinary training was good enough. Men hardly con- sider sufficiently how very few specific callings there are in life, and how very great a loss it is when the man who really has been called to one kind of life, and who has been dis- charging his duty admirably in it, is tempted into other pursuits for which he is not much better suited than many others, while there is none able to replace him in his former duties.
And this seems to us to be Canon Lightfoot's position. The literature whieh has grown up in connection with the his- tory of what &nazi calls " the origins "of Christianity, is now a really great literaturei which it takes highscholarahip a,nd more than-half a lifetime to master. Those who do master it are seldom gifted with the ability to judge between- opposite argu- ments and evidences with as much firmness and sagacity as the issues at stakerequire. And even those who have both the learn- ing and the sagacity,-often fail in the power of exposition requisite to make the case they have mastered known to the world. Canon Lightfoot has all these qualities in rare combination. A fine scholar, a deeply-read critic of the great field of literature which the fascination of Christianity for man has called into existence, a bold and candid inquirer who faces difficulties fairly instead of shrinking from them, a skilful and vigorous writer, he might have written the book which, of all merely historical books, is now the most needed, which would have gone over the whole -field which Paulus, and Strauss, and Baur, and Renan, and the author of "Supernatural Religion," and a hundred others, have traversed with the intention of verifying some par- ticular theory of the origin of Christianity, and reviewed the whole evidence in a clear, judicial spirit, though from a very different point of view ; and thus he might have convinced a very large part of the more reasonable thinkers that no view of Christianity is, on the whole, so strictly reason- able and in accordance with the vast number of very complex facts which bear upon it, as the view which traces it hack to a divine origin. This would have been a great work to do, and it was one for which Canon Lightfoot had slowly accumulated immense paraphernalia, which can never be really used by any one but himself. We fear that in accepting the diocese of Durham, he abdicates in a great degree his function as the most learned and able of the Christian critics of the day. And if this be so, t is to be regretted that his friends succeeded in persuading him to surrender the resolution to which hitherto, in spite of similar temptations he has been so wisely faithful. No doubt, the Church of England has obtained a first-rate Bishop ; but if in exchange for that first-rate Bishop she has lost a first- rate historical critic of the early centuries of the Church, we fear she has paid too great a price, and one which all Christendom may have reason one day to regret. Neverthe- less, the Prime Minister has performed his part well. Lord Beaconsfield is often unscrupulous in his choice of persons ; butwhen he chooses to make a great choice, no one knows better where to look, and how to judge.
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