Dr. Gray, the " lion-hearted " Metropolitan of Cape Town,
as he is now so often termed, has had a paper war with the Times, completed last Saturday, in which we need scarcely say that the Bishop got very much the worst of it. It was not, indeed, doing himself full justice for Dr. Gray to pit himself against the Times. He has been accustomed all his life to let his opinions cloud his view of facts, and this is not a fortunate habit for a man who wishes to obtain a victory over a shrewd editor. The Bishop was foiled at every point, and on the case he himself furnished. The correspondence brought out a letter from Miss Burdett Coutts's solicitor, explaining that his client had subscribed as she did to the Colonial Bishopric Fund only under the impression that the Church in the Colonies would be legally subject to the Queen's supremacy and the English tri- bunals, like the Church at home,—which Courts Dr. Gray now repudiates. Dr. Gray replies that the Privy Council, not he, has declared him a'Bishop of a free Church. But this is a mistake. Lord Rotnilly's judgment declared that, in conformity with the Long judgment, every Churchman in the Colonies was assumed to have bound himself by the same conditions, so far as applicable, as those of the Church at home, and that the Colonial Courts would regard all trust-money given for the Colonial Church as impressed with these conditions. If this be so, we take it that Dr. Gray's refusal to take any account of the legal tribunals of the English Church, and his claim to decide on heresy by other standards than those admitted as valid here, would prove fatal to his claim for any share in the revenues of the Colonial Bishoprics' Fund.
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