TWO ENGLISH BISHOPS.* THE founder of the Jesuits spoke wisely
of the qualities
required in a religious superior. " He is pious," it was urged on behalf of a certain candidate for office ; " Let him pray," was the answer. Of another, " He is learned" ; "Let him teach." Of a third, " He is prudent " ; " Let him govern." And the appointment was made. This is why men of the highest type, moral or intellectual, are not, as a rule, those who hold office in the Churches : saints are not bishops, for the same reason that philosophers are not kings. Nor are the exceptions such as to wish us to increase their frequency.
Neither the saint, nor the scholar, seems quite at home in the episcopate ; the latter, in particular, can do better work elsewhere. Not, of course, that bishops should be either illiterate or unspiritual—though they may well be both when the Church Times, which has lately been devoting its attention to the subject of Bishop-making, appoints them : but that there are diversities of gifts ; all good, but not all the same.
Saints are few ; and the word has been used so loosely in religious biographies that it has been cheapened. But the quality which it denotes was conspicuous in the late Bishop of Durham' His atmosphere was one of goodness : the level on which he lived, and led others to live, was high ; " It is natural," says his successor, " to apply to him that profound and luminous phrase of scripture, ' He walked with God.' " His Cambridge career was distinguished ; he was Second Classic (1864) ; Fellow of Trinity (1865) ; Norrisian Professor (1899) : but he retained throughout the traditional evangeli- cism of his childhood. He was a pillar of the C.M.S. ; he took part in the Moody and Sankey Mission of 1882; he was a familiar figure at the Keswick Convention ; he withstood the disastrous " Perfectionist Movement " ; he was an ardent supporter of the China Inland Mission and of the " Cambridge Seven " of 1884. This religious outlook does not generally go with scholarship, and for a short period (1867) he seems to have been perplexed by " the continual droppings of the controversies and questions of the present day, and the differences, real and apparent, between Christians." But whether it was that his studies had been rather literary than historical, or that the greater light within outshone the lesser lights without, his mind quickly recovered its usual tone ; and in 1919 we find him confessing " his expectation (not hastily formed) that ere very long the Return, ill manifested majesty, of the risen and ascended Christ, will rise on the human scene ; no symbolical mystery, but a supreme event." Think as we will of such convictions, they produced in him the same temper and spirit which the sacramental system of Catholicism produces, not infrequently, in those who stirrender themselves to it—a result of which so detached a critic as Jowett writes that " we see something in the lives and thoughts
of these men and women, which we would gladly transfer to our own, and for which in this degenerate age we vainly look." Under their surface differences Christians resemble one another more closely than either they, or, their critics, suppose.
He was too religious to be a fanatic ; he lived within. Hence he had points of contact with other schools than his own. Of prayer for the dead, for example, he writes :- "Perpetual greetings to the beloved ones gone are my delight. I daily and by name greet my own beloved child, my dearest parents, and others precious to me. And I regard every prayer for the Lord's coming as specially a prayer for their ' perfect consummation and bliss' . . . If to such prayers we could always keep, I should never be shy of its practice. But, alas, the craving to return to the Middle Ages and their gloom is so strong. I dare not talk about it."
• Of marriage with a deceased wife's sister :-
" I do not find that the Written Word tends to censure it . . . I express my most earnest hope that no incumbent will debar from the Holy Table Christian people married under this new law (1907) on the sole ground of such marriage. Remember—such refusal is the • (1) Life of H. C. Cl. Mode, Bishop of Durham, 1901-1920. By T. B. Hanford and F. C. Macdonald. London : Hodder and Stoughton. 120a4--(2) Lgo and Leers of Edward Lee Hicks, Bishop of Lincoln, 1910-1919. Di J. H. Fowler. London: Chri.stophers. 110e. 6d.1 greatest censure which we can !daily lay upon an evildoer. I believe such refusal to persons who have so married, with clear conscience, under the sanction of the Christian State (for such, with whatever defects of Christian quality, it is), and unable to see a prohibition in Holy Scripture, would be to them a censure tremend- ous in itself, and quite failing to commend a response from their own moral consciousness, which might be disastrous in its effects."
And he proceeds to recall the solemn promise made by every English clergyman. at his ordination to " maintain and set forward love and peace." That this obligation may be borne in mind during the, perhaps, imminent controversy with regard to Marriage Law Reform is greatly to be desired.
Bishop Hicks' was a man of another type, training and temperament. A product of the Oxford Greats School in the 'sixties, he was influenced by Mill, Comte and Grote. His special subject was Greek Epigraphy, in which his reputation was European—his Manual of Greek Historical Inscriptions is still in use in Germany ; politically he was a Radical of an advanced type. In 1870 he took Orders, to the surprise of not a few of his friends ; accepting a little later a college living ; from which he passed to Hulme Hall, a hostel in connexion with Owen's College ; then to a Manchester canonry to which a large parish was attached ; and finally (1910) to the See of Lincoln. His love of liberty amounted to a passion ; the suspicion of tyranny, whether in an individual, a class, or a trade, moved him to wrath. He was a champion of unpopular causes—local option, women's suffrage, cremation ; he believed Disestablishment, with at least partial Disendowment, to be inevitable ; he sympathized with the Conscientious Objector ; he regarded war as " the sport of a corrupt gang of financiers, armament-makers, and Imperial filibusters, made popular through an equally corrupt Press." He was not always tactful : the incident which his biographer (p. 238) dismisses as " an absurd storm in a teacup " was more un- fortunate than one would gather from such a description ; and
whether his transfer of the late Archdeacon of Stow from the Liverpool to the Lincoln diocese was " an asset " to the latter is a matter on which more than one opinion will be held. Ecclesiastically it is not easy to place him. He appeai.g to have used what Mr. Fowler describes as " the full Eucharistic vestments " in his private chapel : on the other hand, he had " an almost morbid horror of Rome . . . at one time he shrank from a crucifix ; he was intensely nervous about incense and reservation ; and scented danger in the title Mother of
God.' " The National Church must, he believed, have a national, not a sectarian, policy : " it is a very serious thought," he wrote (1904), " that the Catholic Revival of the last half- century has throughout Europe tended to become, or to be engineered by others, as a force for reaction. When I reflect upon this, I am really afraid." And his comment on Eminent Victorians, which he read with genuine enjoyment, was : " It is very clever and amusing. Of course, he exaggerates. Religion is not, all of it, ridiculous. A great deal of it, mind you, is ! " In the same mood—" The sound Christian is largely an agnostic. He sees enormous difficulties, gaps in his
knowledge, clouds on the intellectual horizon. But, on the whole, the balance goes more to his side." A bishop who can think and speak in this way commends his message : those who differed most from him in opinion recognized that they had to do with one who was very emphatically a man.
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