Shorter Notice
Walter Howard Frere, Bishop of Truro. By C. S. Phillips and Others. (Faber and Faber. 16s.1 Walter Howard Frere, Bishop of Truro. By C. S. Phillips and Others. (Faber and Faber. 16s.1 Tins memoir is the work of several hands, and composite biographies are apt to achieve continuity at the expense of coherence. If this volume is different, it is because the personality of Bishop Frere evidently presented itself in essentially the same features to all who studied it. He was the first religious to be a bishop in the Church of England since the sixteenth century ; for Charles Gore, the founder of the Community of the Resurrection, had severed his membership of it on his acceptance of the bishopric of Worcester. Frere, who had succeeded him as superior, accepted Truro on con- dition that he was allowed to remain a full member of the com- munity, and to establish one of its houses there. Professor Hamilton Thompson's essay judiciously appraises his contribution to church history ; Dom Gregory Dix, writing on Frere as liturgist, reminds us indirectly of the influence of "Procter and Frere" upon the piety of the Church of England as we know it. It is significant that for Frere the attraction of Anglo-Catholicism was historical and devo- tional, not aesthetic. What he owed and what he gave to Mirfield are described by Father Talbot in the most impressive chapter in this book. Other contributors include Sir Sydney Nicholson, Evelyn Underhill and Dr. Nicholas Zernov, while the main biographical framework is very adequately supplied by Dr. C. S. Phillips as editor and compiler.
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