Canon Liddon preached an eloquent sermon at Graffham on Tuesday,
when the parish church there was reopened, after a restoration made in memory of the late Bishop Wilberforce. His encomium, on which we have passed some criticism elsewhere, was, no doubt, perfectly honest, but certainly excessive, and the sense in which he applied to Bishop Wilberforce St. Paul's account of himself, "I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some," was not the sense in which many of his readers will accept its application. It is true, as Canon Liddon says, that St. Paul was himself charged with insincerity as a consequence of his tender and wide sympathies ; but who that reads St. Paul, and compares his language with that of Bishop Wilberforce's mellifluous sentences, can fail to see the difference in reality between the two styles ? Or to compare modern things with modern, examine Canon Liddon's own style by the side of the too often hollow unction of his friend's, and the same difference appears at least as striking. "I believe," says Canon Liddon, "that no man was ever more sincere in his assertions, more sincere in his hesitations, more sincere in his negations, more sincere in his beliefs." May be. But if so, no sincere man was ever more unreal in his oratory. Read, for in- stance, his attacks on Bishop Colenso, and see if you can even make out what he means by his vague rhetoric as to Dr. Coleus() and "the foot-fall echoes of the great Anti-Christ"—of whom Dr. Colenso apparently was a forerunner—and about " the moonlight shining of his semi-intelligence." In a man of mediocre intellect, that sort of talk might mean mere confusion. In Bishop Wilber- force, it seemed like unctuous unreality, to say the least, and we suspect that what it seemed, it was.
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