BISHOP BLOMFIELD.* Tars is a refined and creditable memoir of
a man whose cha- racter, very uninteresting in youth, and never, perhaps, pecu- liarly fascinating, yet developed into one of unusual practical force, and became powerful almost in exact proportion as it filled with the details of public business. Bishop Blom field was a really great and worthy—though by no means liberal—eccle- siastical institution, but he had not the art, at any time in his life, of so impressing himself on his speeches or writings as to give us the intimate sense of being in personal communion with a real individual man. He was an energy of much power, but he always produced the impression of an executive, rather than a deliberative, officer of the Church—a man who took his departure from a level of fixed ideas which he had never probed or mastered for himself. There is a permanent sense in reading his letters, and charges, and speeches, of dealing with an intellect with a false bot- tom to it, below which we never get; and this we mean not from anyindication of insincerity, for he is sincere and straightforward enough, but from a sort of conventional tone which all his notions ha'v'e, especially if you seem to be getting at all near their roots. The furtherwe penetrate downwards, the more do we hear the ring of an artificial bottom which is not of the living substance of his own experience. The farther his convictions are from their sources or roots, the more of Dr. Blomfield do they seem to have in them ; for they gather some of his individuality in the prompt emphasis of their final delivery ; but the more he attempts to unravel them, the deeper does Dr. Blomfield sink into a kind of paste-intellect, cemented together out of the floating ideas of the eighteenth century. There is the same flavour of fluent half. reality (though, of course, more culture) in the substratum of his much admired oratory that there is in much of the rhetoric of the elder United States' rhetoricians, and we were not at all sur- prised to find it stated that the late Daniel Webster thought, "in dignity of manner and weight of matter, no speaker in Great Britain equal to the Bishop of London." Impregnate freely conser- vative formulas with moral platitudes, and you get the ideal, though now extinct, style of the old United States Senate—and this, wielded with the vigour of a practical man and a ready opponent, is the very substance of the late Bishop of London's oratory.
Charles James Blomfield determined to be a bishop when he was still a schoolboy, and he was not only eventually successful at the early age of thirty-seven,but we may almost say that he was never anything but a bishop. "At college," says Chief Baron Pol- lock, "I never heard him originate or repeat an expression which, as a Bishop, he could wish unsaid; and though he largely con- tributed to the vivacity of every party where he was present, and was the author of many witty and smart sayings, which were handed about, he never forgot the decorum that belonged to the path of life he had already chosen." Of the witty and smart say- ings we do not hear much,—unless calling Dr. Valpy " Vealpye" be one,—though undoubtedly in maturer life he occasionally shows a dry humour of his own, but of the decorum we have enough and to spare in his earlier letters and communications. He had, too, in early life, probably a good deal more anxious eye to the main chance than strikes us after he had achieved success. Disin- terested enough as a bishop, he evidently did not think little of preferment while still on the lower steps of the ascent. He writes gravely to his father, after an interview with Lord Bristol, in which his lordship spoke of his desire to promote Mr. Blomfield's advancement in the Church,—" he particularly mentioned that a
"4 Memoir of Charles James Blosndeld, B,,D., Bishop of London, with Selections orotn his Currespondence. Edited by his Son, Alfred Blonilield, M.A. 2 vols., with a portrait Murray. living of the value just mentioned was not such as he should think himself bound to offer me, but that I was entitled to choose of the best at his disposal. We had a good deal of conversation upon literary and general subjects, and I WRe very much pleased by his turn of thinking and expression." No doubt he was. That turn of thinking and express:on which en- titles us to " choose of the best" at a rich patron's disposal is very pleasing to man ; and Mr. Blomfield appears to have been quite as well pleased by his mode of acting. Lord Bristol gave him in 1810, his first living at Quarriugton, in which (there was no par- sonage house) he was not required to reside ; his second more valuable preferment, to the benefices of Great and Little Chester- ford, in 1817; in 1810, lie' called his brother-in-law, Lord Liver- pool's, attention" to Mr. Blomfield, which resulted in his obtain- ing the rich London living of Bishopsgate, with which he was allowed to retain his late living at Chesterford,—and here he was on the recognized threshold of the episcopacy. His early taste for editing /Eschylus's plays with the heavy scholarship of that. era,—of a poetical passion for ./Eschylus th,ere is no trace,—was in itself a kind of foreshadowing of episcopal dignity. And whenever he published, it was in the tone of a future bishop. Speaking of dissent in 1815, when he was but twenty-nine, he anticipated with distinguished success the tone of the bench. " We may still hope, if not to build up the breach which has been made in the unity of the Church, at least to stop the further progress of disunion. It is not yet too late for us to put fresh incense in our censers and to stand between the dead and the living. If," he adds,
there be any circumstance calculated to give additional impart anee to these considerations, it is the awful complexion of the times in which we live." The man who wrote thus as a young beneficed clergyman had clearly the sense ofan episcopal destiny ; the thought is clothed in baggy lawn, and has, besides, a kind of verbal decorum which suggests the apron and dropsy. The only event of his earlier career which has a personal interest and reality about it, is the genuine grief which the death of his brother Edward elicits from him.
But Mr. Blomfield no sooner began to be really important than he ceased to a large extent to seem ostentatiously so. Even in, his Bishopsgate living he made his practical power felt, and was noted for his thorough personal knowledge of his populous parish. During the severe winter of 1822-3, when the people were relieved partially in proportion to the size of their families, Dr. Blomfield's quick eye discerned the same children's faces on more than one storey of the same house, and on investigating the matter he found that they were let down in a basket from window to window as he descended the stairs. This is a specimen of the al acrity of Dr. Blomfield's practical perceptions. In Bishopagate (whence, after about four years, he was promoted to the see of Cheater)- he was long loved and remembered for his thorough organization of the charities and other clerical duties. He was made chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Archdeacca of Colchester before this higher promotion.
He was still, however, by no means inattentive to his own interests. The bishopric of Chester would have been a descent in income from the rich London living, and accordingly he obtained permission to hold the latter still in commendam. But the more responsible and practical his duty, the better, on the whole, he- performed it ; and certainly, after his translation to London, when he became absorbed in his great work of civilizing the metropolis, so far as the multiplication of churches and clergymen in the wild districts would do it, there is much less trace of the self- sufficiency and ostentation of his youthful style. Probably he was not very popular in his first see where he intro- duced notions of Church discipline and a respect for thee rubrics, for which his diocese was not prepared, with an authoritative manner not very pleasant to read of. But something must be allowed for the first flush of episcopal dignity. He had changed his views since his early days upon Catholic emancipation, from the Liberal views which were in favour with the Whig set, to the more Conservative clerical timi- dities which belonged properly to his character, and on entering the House of Lords he defended his position with a fluent dignity which produced some sensation. The entry in his diary is ohs- racteristic:—" April 21,1825. Presented petition for congregation of Dissenters ; spoke on it, and was well heard. I humbly pray that Almighty God will subdue in me all love of the applause of men, all conceit of my own strength or wisdom ; all trust in my own goodness. . . . 0 Lord, to Thee be ascribed all the praise and honour and glory by us, Thy sinful, weak, unworthy creatures." The find prayer is sensible enough, but whether, speaking reverently, the "praise, honour, and glory" of the
Bishop of London's speech against the Catholics was in any respect whatever an object to Him in whose favour the Bishop was so pious as to resign it, is, we think, more than dubious.
The Bishop of London is best and greatest in the gigantic practical labours of his London diocese. Few men could have entered into so vast a task with so strong a spirit, or have dis- charged it with so great a success. To build and endow fifty new churches in the criminal wildernesses of the metropolis, by appeals to private generosity alone, was an enterprise before which any other man would have quailed ; and yet he joined with it heavy labours in the ecclesiastical commission, of which he was so much the soul, that Archbishop Vernon Harcourt used to say, "Till Blomfield comes we all sit and mend our pens, and talk about the weather." Sydney Smith, indeed, called the commis- sion "The Bishop of London, with some watery dilutions," and ascribed its dangerous activity to the Bishop's "ungovernable passion for business." So great was his early London reputa- tion for spontaneous energy in assailing practical abuses, that when, bitten by a dog, he wrote to excuse himself from a dinner party, saying that a dog had rushed out of the crowd and bitten him, Sydney Smith, who was present, is said to have remarked, "I should like to hear the dog's account of the story."
As a practical ecclesiastical reformer and philanthropist, few were ever more generous, and none, probably, more energetic than the Bishop of London. As a teacher of doctrine and administrator of ritual discipline Dr. Blomfield was much less successful. Without fundamental principles himself, — with an ingrained conservatism, and love of com- promise where conservatism seemed likely to fail—the position he took, or failed to take, in the ritualistic controversy conse- quent on the Romanizing movement was often so hesitating as to be really ridiculous. His mind was incapable of grasping, in all their breadth, either Dr. Nevrman's principles or any which he might have opposed to them ; and his position, when, after recommending a strict adherence to the rubrics, he found that he had only stimulated Romanizing eccentricities, was as de- plorable as the hen's when she sees her brood of ducklings take to the water. His moralizing and pastoral letters to friends in weak health, or friends in giief, whom he thought on that account proper subjects for feeble and rather imper- tinent moralities, are the worst of his didactic writings,—which are all bad. A schoolboy in his old parish at Chesterford, being asked what the catechism meant by speaking of his "succouring" his father and mother, replied, "giving on 'em milk ;" and of this nature was Bishop Blomfield's spiritual succour —not, moreover, healthy country milk, but blue metropolitan milk. As an ecclesiastic, he was thoroughly real only when he came to business.
On the whole, we lay down this well-edited memoir with
confirmed impression that the late Bishop of London was intrinsically a formalist, but, like many formalists, seemed to reserve for masterly practical work a power which be did not spend on realizing for himself the inner, truths of life. As a man of business, he was prompt, large, and lucid- minded, and therefore habitually aggressive on all practical evils. He was without proper intellectual power, and therefore, touching the foundations of faith, timid, compromising, and con- servative. Great in transactions, destitute of them tellectual faculty, he was able to serve the Church of England nobly, far from able to steer her course. We may be thankful that he has been succeeded by a Bishop wha, if his inferior in practical statesman- ship, is indefinitely his superior in insight into the intellectual and spiritual necessities of our own day.
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