BISHOP THIBLWALL.
THE resignation of the Bishop of St. David's will weaken the intellectual strength of the Episcopal Bench even more than the death of the late Bishop of Winchester weak- ened its popular influence. The Bishop of St. David's has never been a great debater, like Dr. Wilberforce, nor a great orator, like Dr. Magee, nor a practical moral reformer, like Dr. Fraser, nor a sagacious ecclesiastical statesman, like Dr. Tait; but no Bishop now on the Bench, or who has, in our time, ever been there, has given evidence of so high a calibre of intellectual capacity in relation to the profoundest subjects, or has shown more of the "sweet reasonableness" of Christian liberality in the wish to make the Church of England a strictly just, as well as a comprehensive Church. With a gift for sarcasm in controversial writing which now and then, perhaps even more recently than formerly, he has permitted himself to indulge somewhat too freely, Dr. Thirlwall has always shown hlirse'i anxious to give others the full benefit of the large intellectual freedom he claimedfor himself, and to vindicate to the utmost for all the clergy of the Church the full right to entertain in their own breasts, as he certainly has entertained,— " That grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge, like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."
None of our recent Bishops has ever written charges showing so complete a mastery of the intellectual range necessary for the adequate holding of a great mystery as has been shown by Bishop Thirlwall. In defending Bishop Colenso against the accusations of heresy for having imputed human ignorance to Christ, he pointed out, with the most unshrinking courage, that orthodoxy, as it was called, was just as much in danger of making revelation sound hollow on one side by dissipating belief in the real humanity of Christ, as was the so-called heterodoxy on the other. "The subject," he concluded, "is not only one of the most abstruse with which the human mind can be engaged, but it lies beyond the reach of our faculties, and is one of those mysteries which are to be embraced by faith, not to be investigated by reason." Yet he has never forgotten that, in some sense, reason cannot be banished from faith ; if you cannot get a higher point of view from which to make faith seem reasonable, you can at least reasonably guard against the inclusion of anything distinctly unreasonable in your faith, and so mark out the field of a discerning and thoughtful reserve as to avoid.the falsehoods of an impatient, shallow understanding. Mystery to Dr.
Thirlwall has never meant the field appropriate for en- thusiasm, as it means for so many theologians, but rather the field appropriate for a higher than ordinary self-restraint, a more than normal self-distrust. On the holy ground where the prophet is told to put off his shoes, the thinker must ex- change his firm and self-reliant step for the confession of a profound inadequacy ; nor can it be appropriate to indulge in the most positive and intense moods, even of mere emotion, in a region where the intellect cannot pretend to do more than "go sounding on its dim and perilous way." Something of that sad irony with which prophets and poets offer half-solutions for insoluble problems is much more appropriate to a sphere of spiritual thought full of giddy heights and depths, than the passion of the zealot or the vehement ardour of the devotee. This has been, for the most part, Bishop Thirlwall's view of theological mysteries. He has led the school which treats them with thoughtful reserve, as subjects to be meditated rather than dogmatised upon, as justifying the mood of hesitating awe not that of keen and confident extasy.
In fact, Dr. Thirlwall is one of the few Bishops on the Bench who has always realised the radical uncertainty of theological systems, and therefore, naturally enough, made the most of the tolerably wide verge given by the English Church to variety of interpretation. But with this strong in- tellectual foundation for his theological Liberalism, he has com- bined all the caution of an accomplished historian who knows how doubtful the foundations of history often are, and what are the sure signs of doubtful authenticity. Early in life he translated Schleiermacher's treatise on St. Luke's Gospel, and so showed his sympathy with the critical temper of the most scholarly German interpreters of the Bible, as well as with the genuine piety of one of the most heartily Christian among them. The "History of Greece," which won him so great a name as a scholar and a critic, is, as compared with Mr. Grote's, the work of a detached intellect, of a calm, considerate judgment, while Mr. Grote's is that of a practical politician, who strove to realise afresh the party politics of ancient Greece, and to defend the democratic policy from the unjust slurs cast upon it by modern prejudice. Dr. Thirl historical power was not so much of the kind which restores to us the interior life of the nation whose history it discusses, as of the kind fitted to weigh the conflicting evidence con- cerning it with that cultivated predisposition to find an expla- nation for even the wrong view, by which the sober, judicial intellect is apt to be distinguished from that of the earnest partisan, or even that of the business-like assailant of a time-
honoured prejudice. In his capacity of prelate, Bishop Thirl- wall has often shown the sort of caution which discovers an unexpected reason for acting with people whose own motives he has disliked and disapproved. He was heartily opposed to the Sabbatarian ground of the objection against Sunday excursion trains. But he opposed Sunday excursion trains, though ex- clusively from non-Sabbatarian reasons, because be was struck with the evidence that Sunday excursions led to a great in- crease of waste, drunkenness, and other vices. He was heartily opposed to the omission of the sentence in the Burial Service which expresses a "sure and certain hope of the resur- rection to eternal life," but he advocated the appointment of .Commission to consider the Burial Service with a view to 'needful alterations, because he objected to the very different prayer "that it may please thee of thy gracious goodness shortly to accomplish the number of thine elect, and to hasten thy kingdom," which he regarded as dictating to God. In this way Bishop Thirlwall has not unfrequently found a reason, peculiar to himself, for supporting a movement origi- nated by men wholly at issue with him, and only two or three times in his life has he come forward with full conviction to take a strong side on a well-defined battle-field. He was hearty in his support of the abolition of the Irish Church, devoting an elaborate and very vigorous speech to the exposure of the argument against it grounded on its being a "sacri- legious" measure. Again, he spoke of the celebrated " Ox- ford Declaration," in favour of which the clergy were so keenly canvassed,—the declaration, we mean, to the effect "that the Bible not only contains, but is, the Word of Cod,"—as "a sort of moral torture ;" "for," said the Bishop, "the adjuration employed implied that unless persons ap- pended their names to it, they were wanting in love to God and the souls_ of men." He spoke severely, also, in one of his Charges, against Bishop Gray, and the injustice with which the Bishop of Natal was treated in the ecclesiastical trial at Capetown. On the whole, whenever the Bishop of St. David's has seen a clear case before him, his courage has been as conspicuous as his intellect is clear ; but with the caution of a historian who always suspects the existence of a stronger case than is apparent for an erroneous popular impression, he has been apt at times to discover reasons for his opponents, of the existence of which they themselves were quite unconscious.
Probably no thinker of our time has ever been more keenly alive either to the intellectual difficulties of his own position, or to the irony of the destiny which awaits those fanatics who block up for themselves the only path of escape out of an untenable position, through very wrath at the sugges- tion of the foe that it is untenable. The partisans of the inspiration of the Bible did this, in his opinion, when they insisted on declaring that the Bible "not only contains, but is the Word of God ;" and the Roman Catholics did the same when they declared a few years later, that the Pope himself was infallible in his official declarations of doctrine. Already, in 1866, three years before the Council of the Vatican met, Dr. Thirlwall declared in a charge, with a certain grim humour, that reunion with the Catholic Church might not perhaps be so impossible, if the Pope would only abdicate his usurped authority, and declare "a fairly large number of acts done by him and his predecessors null and void." And when, instead of taking this course, the Council of the Vatican declared the dogmatic infallibility of the Holy See, Dr. Thirlwall evidently regarded with both amuse- ment and amazement, the voluntary joining of this direct issue on a question on which he held that not only the falli- bility, but the blunder of the Church could be absolutely de- monstrated. The caustic wonder with which he has always treated the propensity of theologians to make fresh difficulties for themselves, by "burning the ships" which a wiser instinct had induced their predecessors to leave ready to facilitate their escape, has been one of the most distinguishing of his characteristics. There has always been something of the glimmer of speculative amusement visible in his dignified, not to say stately intellect, at the graver blunders of men, —an amusement not inhumane, but due to the keen sense of the paradox of human fate. Thus in the fine essay he once published on the irony of Sophocles, he re- marked on the "amusement" one might find "in comparing the history of great cities with that of their respective States, -md in observing how often the splendour of the one has • increased in proportion to the weakness and rottenness of the others,"—a remark, for example, which might have been frequently applied in modern times to the relation of Paris to France. In truth, even as theologian, the Bishop has been
more of a critic than a direct teacher ; but as a critic, his tone has always been benignant as well as lofty, and the twinkle of his doubtful smile when he has contemplated the perplexities which human beings carefully create for them- selves, has never been caused by the sufferings of others, but only by the apparent superfluity of the folly to which those sufferings are due.
On the whole, a Bishop of more cultivated intellect, of wider range of capacity, of sincerer faith in a theology of com- prehension, of a truer refinement, and a more perfectly- adjusted judgment, has not been during this generation, and is not now, on the Bench of Bishops. He has, no doubt, been more of a thinker and a scholar than of a popular reformer or a statesman. It has been his function rather to overawe bigotry and steadily discourage the spasms of superficial enthusiasm, than to pioneer the Church in active enterprises for the good of the people. But we have had almost as much need of such intellectual warnings and cautions as he could supply, as even of practical energy and sagacious zeal. And we shall greatly miss that equanimity of purpose, that keen insight into the high paradoxes of divine lore, that commanding sobriety of judgment, that delicate intellectual discrimination, that finely- chiselled phraseology, that dignified and clear-cut utterance, which have so long secured for the Bishop of St. David's not only the confidence of the national Church to which he belongs' but the respect of the friends of English culture and English liberty all over the Empire.
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