The Bishop of St. David's, on Monday, explained clearly to
the House of Lords that nothing very fatal happens to the country in consequence of the temporary inability of certain bishops through old age or sickness to discharge their usual duties. He was evidently not disposed to rate highly the mischief of a Bishop famine. He remarked that a system of personal visitation by Bishops was by no means essential to the weal of a diocese, and that if it were, London would need not one, but twenty bishops. A bishop should direct and stimulate every good work going on within his diocese, but it was not essential he should participate in all of them. A see deprived of the presence and activity of its bishop, though not " in a normal state," was by no means in a desperate state. There was much to "mitigate the misfortune." The archdeacons could do a good deal. The parochial machinery slight go on actively and well in spite of the temporary incapacity cf the bishop. On the whole, if the Bishop of St. David's did not exactly think that the affliction caused by the absence of the bishop might "be blessed" to a diocese, he at least took a sober and even tranquil view of that calamity. Dr. Thirlwall is always rational.
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