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on his elevation to the Episcopate. To him this so-called theological teaching, which was neither bold nor deep, neither critical, nor Anglican, nor patristic, nor even devout, dissociated almost entirely from any thorough study of the history of the Jewish or the Christian Church, seemed miserably inadequate. He was likely to welcome any efforts to lay the foundation deeper, and to raise upon it a more goodly super

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The loss of his Cambridge tutorship was followed, as was natural, by preferment from the Whig Ministry of the day, and the living of Kirby-Underdale, with a small population of about 300, to which Lord Brougham presented him, gave him the leisure which he needed for the completion of the History ' of Greece.' It was followed, after an interval of five years, by Lord Melbourne's selection of the representative of Cambridge liberalism for the bishopric of St. David's.* Like the equally bold appointment of Dr. Hampden to the Regius Professorship of Divinity in 1836, and to the See of Hereford in 1847, it caused some outcry by way of protest from the organs of religious parties, but there was no systematic agitation backed by the force of University authority, as there was at Oxford, and he was left to begin his episcopate in peace. It was characteristic at once of the quick capacity of the scholar, and the high standard of duty with which he entered on the office of a chief pastor of the Church, that his first work was to make himself master of the language of the people who were now committed to his charge, and without a knowledge of which he felt that he and they would be, in St. Paul's language, as barbarians,' as strangers and foreigners to each other. Within six months he was able to preach to them in their own tongue, and bringing to the task a more skilled elocution, somewhat tremulous in its emphasis, and a higher culture in composition, made that tongue more capable of rhythmical form and musical intonation than in the mouths of most of those to whom it was their native speech. Of the Bishop's labours in his diocese this is not the place to speak in detail, but it may, at all events, be said that he gave abundant proof

When Dr. Thirlwall paid the formal visit to the Prime Minister which etiquette requires from those who have thus reaped the advantages of his good opinion, Lord Melbourne is said to have called after him as he was leaving,' By the bye, Dr. Thirlwall, why did you translate that 'book of Schleiermacher's?' Little as the outer world suspected it of the man who seemed almost too much of a dilettante to be a statesman, there were few speculative or theological works of mark with which he was not familiar.

that the habits of the scholar were not incompatible with the activity of the Bishop, and that he could look back at the close of his career with as much ground for thankful satisfaction as most other prelates, on a long list of churches built, restored, or enlarged; of schools founded, and supplied by a Training College with more efficient teachers; or last, but not least, of parsonages built, or poor livings augmented (to the extent, in the course of his Episcopate, of 30,000l.) out of revenues which he might without reproach have claimed and treated as his own. If he did not present, in the management of his diocese, the ubiquitous activity and the marvellous power of adaptation to men of all classes and tastes which were characteristic of Bishop Wilberforce, he was at least among the most active of the bishops of the Principality, and took his place as a leader in all works of good for the benefit of its people. It is not without good cause that those who wish to pay honour to his memory have decided that, while the grave and the bust at Westminster shall bear their witness of the historian of world-wide fame, and scholarships or a professorship perpetuate at Cambridge the memory of one who had once been her glory and her shame,' but whom now all alike delight to honour, the chief personal monument, the living form and likeness, of the Bishop and Pastor, should stand in the remote Cathedral of St. David's.*

But that which for some generations to come will cause the Episcopate of Connop Thirlwall to live in the memories of men is to be found, beyond a doubt, in the series of eleven Charges, in which from time to time he reviewed not only the successive stages of the work done in his own diocese, but the movements of thought and feeling which were affecting the condition of the Church of England as a whole. For the most part these utterances, however eloquent and earnest, have but a fame limited in extent and fugitive in duration. The clergy listen sometimes, when the speaker is a Wilberforce or a Magee, with rapt attention, sometimes with a weary patience. They are charged,' as Bishop Blomfield said in one of his punning moments, till they go off.' The discourse, half-sermon and half-essay, when printed, is circulated in the diocese and sent to friends, and there its work for the

* We learn, not without regret, as these sheets are passing through the press, that this plan has been abandoned, and that it has been determined (chiefly under the counsels of the Bishop's successor in the see) to do honour to Bishop Thirlwall's memory by effecting the restoration of the west front of St. David's, and inserting, if there are enough funds, a memorial window.

most part ends. With the exception of Bishop Butler's memorable Charge to the Clergy of Durham, which both on its own merits, and as being included in the volume of his Sermons, is still, we suppose, read and studied, we can hardly call to mind a single exception to the law which dooms such compositions to the dim region of the forgotten. That which gained for Bishop Thirlwall's Charges a wider attention when they were delivered, and will, we believe, rescue them, for many years to come, from oblivion, was that they had, more than most others, the character of Charges of another kind. The speaker was as a judge addressing himself, not merely to the clergy of his own diocese, but to the wider jury of thoughtful and earnest minds, clerical and lay, throughout the English Church and people, weighing evidence, stating the arguments on either side, pointing out their weakness or their strength, and summing up with an almost unequalled clearness and precision. As such, the future historian of the ecclesiastical life of England during the last thirty years will find them among his most valuable, if not indispensable, materials.

It need hardly be said that in discussing the questions which thus came under his review Bishop Thirlwall found himself for the most part on the side of the few and not of the many, and often stood alone, or all but alone, among his brother bishops. It was characteristic of him, as it was of Hare and Maurice, and of other living representatives of the same school, not of opinions (for in this they often differed widely), but of independent thought, that they had a kind of instinctive sympathy with minorities. To be ever strong upon the stronger side' was a sin to which they were scarcely tempted. The peril, if any, was that they were perhaps too ready to assume that the majority must be wrong; that, as Gregory of Nazianzus said that he had never known any good result from the Councils, numerous, famous, œcumenical though they were, in which he had taken part, so they were disposed to think that now the greater part of men, and especially of the clergy, were swayed by passions and prejudices, by suspicions and by fears, which made them more or less incapable of a righteous judgment. Few bishops have spoken publicly with keener scorn of the petitions and memorials signed by clergy who are reckoned by the thousand, in which each period of agitation during the last forty years has been so fruitful. To him ten thousand signatures did but represent, for the most part, a unit with so many ciphers after it, and never influenced his

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Epist. ad Procop. 55.

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judgment or his conduct. We can imagine few contrasts more striking or more instructive than that which would result from a comparison of the Charges now before us with the addresses of this nature, so full of passionate indignation and alarm, asking for something to be done,' and 'prognosticating a whole 'year of sects and schisms,' which now sleep beneath their seldom-disturbed dust in the closets of the library at Lambeth. With the Primary Charge of 1842 this was pre-eminently the case. It was delivered at a time when the Oxford movement, then in its less advanced stage, had already excited the alarm of the Evangelical party in the Church, and disturbed the minds of the laity by innovations in ritual which, though now accepted as harmless, were then regarded with suspicion. Bishops and archdeacons were, with scarcely an exception, charging' strongly against the movement as at variance with the principles of the Reformation.' It was a welcome surprise to its leaders to find that the new Liberal Bishop of St. David's took a different tone. He stated, in terms more emphatic than even they had adopted, the objections which they had urged against the popular Protestantism of the day as a system which undervalues the authority of the Church, disregards her ordinances, neglects her ritual, disparages her sacraments;' which substitutes empty phrases, barren unreal notions, sensible excitement, feelings, and impressions for the 'substance of religion;' and avows his own conviction both of the reality and of the extreme prevalence of the evil' (p. 44). Of Mr. Newman's Lectures on Justification,' then the chief object of attack, as 'radically false and utterly irre'concilable with the Church's teaching,' he declares that, after the closest attention he could give to the dispute, he viewed it 'as one of words, involving no real difference of opinion,' and consequently looked upon both parties as equally orthodox' (p. 47). He vindicated the 'high' doctrine of Apostolical Succession from the charge of being exclusive and uncharitable,' and called attention to the fact that those who maintained it most firmly (as, for example, Mr. Newman) taught also that God's favour is not limited to the bounds of His heri'tage,' but that in the Church, or out of the Church, every 'one that called on the name of the Lord out of a pure heart shall be saved' (p. 57). Even in regard to the famous 'Tract XC.,' which more than any other had made men ring the tocsin of alarm, his tone is that of an apologist. While he notes the possible dangers of the licence for which Mr. Newman contended in that Tract, and the just offence' given by the language used in it and elsewhere as to the Reformation,

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he yet claims for those who used it the right to express regret' and disapprobation' at the course pursued by some ' of the Reformers, and especially at the extent to which they were swayed by foreign influence.'

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'I have yet to learn that such views and feelings are inconsistent with the obligations of a minister of our Church, or with a sincere attachment to her. I know of no authority that is entitled to prescribe to us any of the opinions which we must hold as to the history of the Church, or the lessons which we must gather from it; and I have no wish to see such an authority established, whether it is to be administered by a few or by the many. Rather I would say, we cannot be too cautious of any approach towards such an odious and pernicious species of spiritual tyranny.' (P. 70.)

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We have dwelt at some length on the contents of this Charge because its tone and temper seem to us eminently characteristic of the spirit in which he entered on his work in the episcopate, and on the theological questions on which, now for the first time since the translation of Schleiermacher and the Cambridge pamphlet, he had not only to form but to express his convictions. It is clear, we think, that what attracted him to the Oxford movement was that it promised to revive the scholarship of the English clergy, in at least one direction, and to raise their theology above the low level of which he had spoken in earlier days with such righteous indignation. It was for him a matter for rejoicing that the study of Divinity should have begun to embrace a wider range, that it should have become more generally conversant with Christian antiquity, with Ecclesiastical History, and with the original 'sources from which the knowledge of these subjects is derived,' instead of being confined to a narrow circle of modern com'pilations, systems, outlines, and commentaries' (p. 37). Here too, in the new life and heartiness that they had given even to week-day worship, he found a contrast to the deadness and coldness which marked the chapel services of Cambridge in the days when he had declared that they were a hindrance, and not a help, to the religious life.' His own sympathies were, as he did not affect to conceal, with studies of another kind, and with conclusions which they did not accept; but it was not his office as a bishop to contract the limits of the freedom which had hitherto been enjoyed. It is a singular instance of the recklessness and perversity of the odium theologicum that long afterwards, when the rift that separated him from the opponents with whom he then dealt in so frank and chivalrous a spirit had grown into a chasm which it was difficult to bridge

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