"So might I, striving morn till eve,

Some purpose in my life fulfil, And ere I pass away some work achieve, To live and move when I am still.

R. CREIGHTON died just before the Queen, and

Dthe appointment of his successor was the first piece

66

of patronage which fell to the lot of the new Sovereign. It was supposed by some that Edward VII., however seriously he took himself in other departments of State, would not concern himself mightily about the choice of the chief pastor of the London diocese. But as Sir George Arthur, who writes on the subject of the Crown and the Church in the April number of the Fortnightly Review, will be glad to know, his Majesty showed no disposition to abate one jot the keen interest which, as a godly Prince," he was bound by his high office to take in the choice of an efficient prelate to fill Dr. Creighton's chair. The Queen, as Canon Liddon used comically to complain, jealously preserved her right to distribute ecclesiastical patronage, and used it chiefly for the purpose of promoting clergymen whose domesticities appealed to her motherly imagination. His Majesty approaches the subject from another point of view. He does not regard the fat things of the Church as premiums to be distributed as rewards of virtue to clerics with large families; but he is none the less determined that the Crown shall have its say in the choice of bishops. When the time came for the appointment of the new bishop, both King and Prime Minister were in happy agreement as to the propriety of offering the Bishopric of London to the Bishop of Winchester, a very admirable and saintly man, who was brought very conspicuously before the country in connection with the death and burial of the

late Queen. Unfortunately, Dr. Randall Davidson does not add to his many moral and intellectual virtues the physical grace of robust health. London would have killed him in twelve months, and he declined to receive the crown of martyrdom, even when it was presented to him by the King and Lord Salisbury.

THE CHOICE OF THE NEW BISHOP.

On receiving his refusal, the King and his Prime Minister found themselves unable to agree upon the next person to whom the offer should be made. Each of them had his own favourite. Such, at least, is the story which is current in well-informed quarters, although, of course, no such State secrets are ever officially divulged. Lord Salisbury, whose interest in the Church and its administrators had been much deeper and of older growth than that of his sovereign, insisted that the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr. Jacobs, formerly of Portsmouth, was the best man on whom to thrust the onerous burden of the London diocese. The King, on the other hand, would none of him. His candidate was the Bishop of Rochester. Dr. Talbot has already administered one half of London with great satisfaction to everybody. Like the Bishop of Winchester, he is a man of saintly character, and the only objection to him is that there is no one to speak ill of him in the whole of London. It is not for profane outsiders to pry into the mysteries of bishop-making,

nor

I ask not, with that work combined,
My name shall down the ages move,
But that my toil some end may find,
That men may see and God approve."

A favourite quotation of the Bishop.

as

are any reports extant to the conversation between the King and his First Minister when they met to make the final decision. It is not quite clear whether Lord Salisbury gave way, and whether the offer was really made to the Bishop of Rochester, and altogether declined on the score of health: but there seems to be no doubt about the fact that the King absolutely refused to accept Lord Salisbury's nomination of Dr. Jacobs. One story goes that as the King refused to have Dr. Jacobs, Lord Salisbury was equally obdurate in rejecting the King's own nominee; but whatever the real truth may be, the public only knows the result that the man ultimately chosen to sit in Dr. Creighton's chair was not one of the three who were first named for the post. The King and his Prime Minister being unable to agree upon the first choice of either, appear to have arrived at a compromise by the selection of Dr. Winnington-Ingram, the Bishop of Stepney, to be the next Bishop of London.

to

A BACHELOR BISHOP.

and

However the lofty disposers of this piece of patronage finally arrived at their conclusion, there is general agreement that they made a very good choice. Dr. Winnington-Ingram is young enough to bear a good deal of killing. He is only forty-three. He is unfortunately unmarried, through no fault of his own, which is a disadvantage for the conservation of energy preservation of life. No doubt celibate Bishops, to say nothing of the celibate Pope, have often lived a good old age; but it is better for a Bishop of London to be married than single. The cares of administering such a diocese as this of London are apt to become too absorbing, and the Bishop is in continual danger of becoming too much of a ecclesiastic, a kind of consecrated head clerk, so much absorbed in his clerical work that he ceases to be human. The fact that there is no Mrs. Winnington-Ingram is the only drawback that even the most censorious have yet discovered to his qualifications for being regarded as an ideal claimant for the vacant see.、

MR. KENSIT'S PROTEST.

mere

Mr. Kensit, it is true, is not satisfied. This valiant defender of the Protestantism of the Anglican Church looks askance at the new appointment. He says :—

"The Protestant Party will look upon him as a most dangerous man, as during the time he has been Suffragan Bishop of East London he has done all in his power to help on the Romanising movement. The most extreme men in the East End of London have been helped and supported by him. I should call it a most deplorable appointment. He will do nothing whatever to stop the Romanising movement. He has patronised St. Augustine's, Stepney, where Mass and Confessional and Masses for the Dead are practised, and given them every encouragement which is no doubt very terrible.

In 1899, preaching at St. Paul's, the Bishop set forth his views upon the subject of confession in terms which, to the ordinary lay, to say nothing of the Liberal Non

conformist mind, seem reasonable enough. He set his face as a flint against any attempt to compel people to go to confession, or to impose the confessional as an indispensable part of the machinery of salvation. He pointed out the grievous abuses, to which compulsory confession opens the door, but while thus placing himself in line with Mr. Kensit and his friends, he then proceeded to explain that while he was dead against compulsory confession, he was equally dead against any attempt to suppress permissive confession. So long as, firstly, the penitent sought his confessor solely of his own free will; secondly, so long as confession was carried on under strict safeguards; thirdly, that it was allowed to anyone who desired it that is to say, that it was not withheld or denied as a kind of spiritual grace that was within the option of the clergy, he did not see why the Church should run amuck against the practice of voluntary permissive confession. It is this attitude which excites the wrath of Mr. Kensit, to whom all confession is an accursed thing, and who, in his sacred zeal against the abuses of the compulsory confessional, fails to realise what a great need there is in the human heart of having some sympathising friend to whom you can pour out your difficulties and your troubles.

THE CASE FOR A PERMISSIVE CONFESSIONAL.

In

So, in

Of course no one need take any stock in the parapher nalia of absolution, the imaginary importance of which is solely due to a total misconception of the truth which underlies the doctrine. No man, priest or bishop, has power on earth to forgive sins, and every man has a right to proclaim to every other fellow-sinner the divine forgiveness of sins which are truly repented of. That the pronouncement of absolution is reserved in sacerdotal churches to the priest, and is only given by him after due formalities have been had and observed, is merely to heighten the force of the suggestion. It is exactly equivalent to what we see in hypnotic trance. order to give effect to a suggestion, the operator throws his subject into a mesmeric sleep. In that condition the subconscious mind is peculiarly susceptible to the influence of suggestion. A hypnotic person will believe implicitly words spoken when in the trance condition, and the impression will survive after he emerges from his sleep. order to heighten the power of suggestion, without absolutely resorting to hypnotism, the sacerdotal churches have usually done all that they could to heighten the authority of the operator. But in reality every individual man has as much right to proclaim to the sinner that, if he truly repents, he is freely and fully forgiven, as any priest who ever lived, from Hildebrand downwards. As to discerning whether repentance is genuine, no one, priest or layman, can pronounce other than an outside judgment. No doubt priests who have dealt with thousands of human souls become experts in their craft, and are able to discern better than the raw amateur the evidence of real contrition; but of the thoughts and intents of the heart knoweth no man, save God alone; and hence, while everyone has a right to pronounce absolution if the sinner sincerely repents and turns from his evil ways, no one, save the Divine Judge, can ever be in a position absolutely to pronounce upon the reality and sincerity of the repentance of the penitent.

A TRUCE TO TRIVIALITIES.

This, however, by the way, and I feel there is perhaps some apology due to my readers for commenting upon what is, after all, so infinite a triviality compared with the serious questions which have to be dealt with by the Bishop of London. In his diocese there are some millions of

human beings, sinners every one. Of these millions a very small percentage are sufficiently touched with a sense of their sins to wish to get rid of them. Of this small percentage of sinners who are convicted of sin an infinitesimal fraction imagine they can get some kind of peace for their poor souls by talking the matter over with a fellow-mortal decently habited in black and white. This desire of theirs may be a weakness; it may open the door to abuse; but after all it belongs to the intinitesimalities of the diocese. What a bishop has to do is not to worry himself about the way in which ten or a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand persons who feel uncomfortable about their sins seek to disembarrass themselves of their burden, but rather to impress upon the teeming millions in whom the sense of sin is not, or who, if they feel they are sinning, are very well content to go on sinning, the conviction that they are all wrong, and that they must right about face if they are to have salvation in this world or the next. A bishop is a fisher of men. Every day he casts his net into the stream, and myriad shoals of fish pass by uncaught. Why in the name of common sense should he and his friends waste their time discussing how they would cook the handful which they extricate from the meshes of their net, instead of discussing how to increase its sweep, is one of those mysteries which only occur to fishers of men, and would never perplex the practical and mundane minds of the catchers of real fish.

A GRADUATE OF THE EAST END.

The Bishop of Stepney has graduated in the East End, and being brought day by day, year in and year out, in contact with the palpitating realities of human life, being familiarised with the incessant wear and tear of nerve and brain, which comes from the contemplation of the problem of the dwellers in mean streets, namely, the question as to how to make both ends meet, to provide sufficient food for the body and raiment for clothing the same, to say nothing of securing a rain-proof roof over your head-all these things naturally come to be seen by him in their proper perspective. There will be very little casuistical hair-splitting about theological points in Fulham Palace when the late head of Oxford House and former Bishop of Stepney is sitting in the chair of Dr. Creighton. He is a practical man, who has manfully for years past dealt with human needs, physical, mental, moral and spiritual. He has never concentrated exclusively upon the soul, but has recognised the claims of its bodily tenement. Not that he is in any sense a materialist bishop; he recognises as much as anyone, that it takes a soul to move a body, even to a cleaner stye; but nevertheless he realises to the full the fact that you can rot a soul by compelling it to dwell in a stye. I do not know that he would agree with Mr. Moody in his famous declaration that there was much more need of homes in London than there was of churches; but he has acquired a salutary conviction in the course of his East End experiences, that the housing question is much more serious, much more important, even from the point of view of the Christian ecclesiastic, than ritual correctitude or the exact pronunciation of theological shibboleths.

THE KIND OF MAN HE IS.

There are reports that he is said to have expressed an opinion that it would be well to re-translate the Athanasian Creed, which is a pious opinion upon which the citizens of London in their absolute indifference are perfectly willing for him to hold what opinions he chooses. They are much more interested in the attitude

which he took up in the recent water-famine and the London County Council election than they are in speculations upon the inscrutable mysteries about which men multiply words with much more rapidity than they widen or deepen their ideas. In a speech he made some time ago, in denunciation of the water companies, in support of the reforming project of the London County Council, he said

I was visiting a dying giri in a top garret on one of the hottest days in the summer. Every one was out at work except the sister, who was downstairs attending to the kitchen; the poor girl's lips were parched with thirst, and she was dying fast. I looked round for something to moisten her lips with, but there was no water in the house, and I had myself to go half a mile to where I lived and fetch some of the water we had stored ourselves from the early morning supply.

The fact that the Bishop was willing to fetch and carry for half a mile through the streets of London, in order to get a drop of water to moisten the lips of a dying girl, stands to his credit, and will be remembered by multitudes of those who care absolutely nothing about his views upon ritual or upon the practice of confession.

A MAGNETIC MAN.

The first requirement for a bishop, after that of physical health, is that he should have a level head, and should see things straight, and not cross-eyed, and in their due perspective. After that comes the need of a temperament that predisposes him to unity. The true Bishop for London should be a peripatetic Eirenicon in gaiters. His mind should naturally incline to points of agreement with his fellow-men, rather than to points of difference. Instead of preaching impossible absurdities concerning a unity based upon apostolic succession or other fetishes of the ecclesiastical nursery, his mind should be as a magnet that attracts round him all the men and women who are in sympathy with the ideal of a Christianised humanity. In so far as he fails to attract anyone because of differences of belief, or of party, or of class, to that extent he is an imperfect bishop, and the iron-filings which he ought to have attracted from the dust-heap in which they lay inert will wait the coming of a more magnetic soul.

WHAT HE MIGHT DO.

I do not venture to hope that the new Bishop will be so far able to emancipate himself from the swaddling clothes of his ecclesiastical infancy as to be absolutely colour-blind to sectarian differences, but if he were able to rise to the height of the great ideal from which he could contemplate all the men and women who dwell within his diocese as being merely human souls, brothers and sisters of his own, reaching forth blindly in the darkness towards something better and higher than the miserable conditions of sin and imperfection in the midst of which they live, he might reconstitute the unity of the Church in London to a degree and an extent which no one has yet believed to be possible. Cardinal Manning, Roman Catholic though he was, in his latter years attained more nearly to this ideal than any prelate of the Establishment. The new Bishop is badly handicapped by the feeling of caste and class generated by the Establishment which does so much to poison English life. But so far as his past record goes, he seems to have recognised that in the work that he has got to do he must accept all men as fellow-workers, ignoring whether they are Catholics or Protestants, Churchmen or Dissenters, bond or free, agnostics or believers, so long as they are joined together in the unity of the spirit working for the redemption of humanity.

IN GAITERS, BUT STILL HUMAN.

Dr. Winnington- Ingram is a strong Churchman and a staunch Churchman, and a High Churchman, and after the manner of men who are made Bishops, he attaches considerable importance to his churchmanship. To the majority of those who constitute his diocese, the quality of his churchmanship is comparatively indifferent. What they are interested in is the humanity of the man. Up to the present moment, it may fairly be said that he has given every proof of possessing qualities which are needed in his high office that is to say, although he will be a man in gaiters, he is still a man, and is likely to be an essentially human bishop. He told me the other day that he had received letters of congratulation upon his appointment from General Booth of the Salvation Army, from the Jewish Rabbi, from the Greek Archimandrite, from Cardinal Vaughan, and from an indefinite number of Nonconformist ministers, with whom he had been for years past on the most friendly and fraternal terms. He is a practical man who sees the immensity of the work that needs to be done, and how very few there are who are willing to do a hand's turn towards getting the task accomplished. Hence there has never been on his part any disposition to exalt his churchmanship into a kind of false god, the worship of which so often stands in the way of that service of humanity for which the Church was created.

A PARK PREACHER.

Looking over the record of his activities in the East End, we see the same note of active, persistent, restless energy running through it all. He is one of the few bishops who have taken an active part in park preaching. Victoria Park is a great free rostrum of propagandists of

all kinds. Sunday after Sunday used to find him holding forth, cheek by jowl with itinerant spouters of Atheism, Socialism, and all the theories which have sufficient hold upon the mind of men to drive them to stand up in the Park and hold forth to their fellows in the hope that they may, by the foolishness of preaching, convert some to their own way of thinking. The Bishop was thoroughly at home in this democratic open-air forum. He is possessed of a ready wit and a good sense of humour, a fine carrying voice, and a sympathetic earnestness which made him always popular with his heterogeneous congregation. He was President of

the Christian Evidence Society of East London. The following are some of the subjects upon which he spoke in the East End Park: the difference between the English and Roman Church; the difference between Christianity and secularism; the popular objections to Christianity; the history of hospitals; St. Paul in history; is Christianity a dying creed? some mistakes about the Bible; what working-men owe to Jesus Christ and Mahomet inism. These open-air services usually began on the 1st May. His preaching did a world of good :

"Many men who have come to East London full of doubts abou: God, and theoretical uncertainty about the revelation by Christ have," he says, "worked off their doubts by the simple process of working for their fellow-creatures. The Gospel, which seems so far away when looked at from an arm-chair at Oxford, was a different thing altogether when seen in action; and the sight of a brother's face looking back in gratitule and sympathy gave a new reality and clearness to faith in the unseen God which ha I almost vanished from their life."

You could not very well imagine his predecessor, Dr. Creighton, student, scholar and statesman, although somewhat of a cynical turn, holding forth in this fashion; but Bishop Winnington-Ingram not only took to it as a duck takes to water, but enjoyed it thoroughly.

HIS AMERICANISM. There is somewhat in his manner more American than English. Nothing strikes an Englishman more on his first visit to America than the kind of hail-fellow-well-met spirit which prevails among all classes. The millionaire director of a railway or a factory will gossip familiarly with his day labourers without any detriment to the severity of the discipline which is enforced in his establishment. It is extraordinary at Washington to sit in a Cabinet Minister's office, and to find it invaded by an endless succession of nonentities who will sit down and talk to the great man as if they were his colleagues in the Cabinet, without any apparent resentment on the part of the Minister in question. How they get through their work often puzzles me, but they do it somehow. Now, Bishop Ingram has somewhat of the American manner of address. When he meets his reclaimed hooligans, or parish workers, or old friends, it is all the same. It is "old friend," "dear boy," "old fellow," with his hands on their shoulders, almost as if he were going to put his arm round their neck. Certainly no man up to the present moment has developed less of that arrogant "side" which is the bane and curse of English manners. It will be curious to see how long this excessive abandon of manner and free and easy style of deportment will last after its owner migrates to Fulham Palace.

A HARD WORKER.

He has had a rush-about, racketting life since he first came to London. Punch happily paraphrased a passage in a speech of his on one occasion, in which he had described the straits to which he was put to get through his work. Punch's verses were entitled "The Lay of a Suffering Bishop." They ran as follows:

"From morning till evening, from evening to night,
I preach and I organise, lecture and write;
And all over London my gaitered legs fly-
Was ever a Bishop so busy as I?

When writing my sermons, the best of my work 'll
Be done in the trains on the underground circle;
I can write one complete, with a fine peroration,
Between Charing Cross and the Mansion House Station.

For luncheon I swallow a sandwich of ham,
As I rush up the steps of a Whitechapel tram;
Or with excellent appetite I will discuss

A halfpenny bun on a Waterloo 'bus.

No table is snowy with damask for me;

My cloth is the apron that covers my knee;

No manservants serve and no kitchenmaids dish up
The frugal repasts of this Suffragan Bishop."
HIS POPULARITY.

A writer in the British Weekly says:

Under the new rector, St. Matthew's quickly became one of the most crowded of East End churches. On one Christmas morning no fewer than thirty-one weddings were celebrated, for the poor of the district loved to have the knot tied by their favourite clergyman or his curates.

One of the first acts of the rector was to hand over to the parish the large disused churchyard round St. Matthew's, to be laid out as a public recreation ground. A careful list was made of the inscriptions on the graves, which were chiefly those of the old Huguenot settlers in the district, who came there after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

One of the pleasantest events at the Rectory was the weekly garden party, held on Saturday afternoons during the summer. The working men who came belonged mainly to the non-churchgoing classes. Once the Oxford House residents took a religious census in the district, and found that the proportion of churchgoers was one to eighty, while out of a thousand boys, nine

hundred had the letters "G. N." (goes nowhere) written against their names.

The Bishop is said to have inquired whether or not he could avoid taking up his abode in Fulham Palace. He may learn to rejoice in the failure of his desire. Saturday afternoon garden parties in the grounds of Fulham Palace, where men of all classes and all creeds could meet, were begun by his predecessor. If he continues this pleasant innovation, it might conduce much to the efficiency of his Episcopate.

As might be expected, Dr. Winnington-Ingram has never found time to put on much flesh. He is spare, not to say lean, well knit, and well proportioned, and his intense vitality has kept him immune from all the infections and diseases of the poor among whom he has worked. He told me that during the thirteen years he had been hard at work in the East End, he had never suffered any malady worse than a cold. He is a splendid example of the mens sana in corpore sano, and has kept himself from morbid brooding over the miseries of humanity by regular and vigorous athleticism. He is an enthusiastic golfer, and he does not intend to lay down the golf club when he grasps the crozier.

OXFORD HOUSE.

I shall never forget the pleasant impressions made upon me on my first, my only visit to Oxford House, some seven or eight years ago. I went there to meet Mr. Buchanan, who has had such success in founding Teetotums or self-supporting clubs, making their profits by the sale of tea. Dr. Ingram was not present on that occasion, but his spirit pervaded the place. Oxford House was the hub of Bethnal Green. It simply buzzed with all manner of social activities. The Bishop reminded me of what I had quite forgotten--that after going over the House and seeing its manifold departments for ministering to the needs of the toilers in the midst of whom it was set, I flung myself back in the chair, and said: "Behold my church!" Oxford House was indeed an institution that came near to realising Longfellow's ideals of an institution as lofty as the love of God, and wide as are the wants of man." It was a great club with all manner of amusements. It was also a theatre for amateur theatricals for the purpose of developing dramatic talent, exercising the memory and appealing to the higher mind of its members. If Dr. Winnington-Ingram can succeed in making every church in his diocese, hum with the manifold activities which are generated at Oxford House, he will effect in London a beneficent revolution, the result of which would be felt in every nook and corner of the great city.

66

HIS LATEST AMBITION.

One of the latest undertakings to which Dr. Ingram put his hand was an attempt to extend the beneficent influence of such civilising centres as Oxford House. It has hardly had justice done to it on account of its association with the passing exaggerated cry against hooliganism. A committee was formed, composed of representatives of all denominations ard opinions, for the purpose of ascertaining what could be done in the way of coping with that particular form of barbarism which has been christened hooliganism. Hooliganism, Dr. Winnington - Ingram claims, does not exist in the shadow of Oxford House. He has a class of at least 400 young men, who attend church and enjoy the benefits of the club, like orderly self-respecting citizens, who would probably have all been hooligans but for the self-denying labours of the workers whom he has gathered round him at the University Settlement. What was pro