The sudden death of the Dean of Canterbury (Dean Alford)
will be felt widely in the English Church. The Dean was hardly a scholar or theologian, and still less a high philosophical thinker ; but he was a man of great common-sense, of wide and liberal mind, of a good deal of practical energy, hard-working, genial, earnest, and one of the foremost men in the party of compre- hension. His edition of the New Testament will not rank as an edition satisfactory to scholars, but Dean Alford was a great popularizer, and very few indeed of our dignitaries thought so much of the people, and worked so hard to teach them. He was one of that class—too few in the English Church— who really understand that unless the Church can get a thorough hold of the common people, it has no right to the name of a National Church. He preached as usual in Canterbury Cathedral on Sunday, and presided on Monday at a meeting of clergy and gentry to distribute money for the relief of the poor. On Tuesday he was really ill,—he had not been well for some time past,--and on Thursday he died from a rapid conges- tion of the lungs. He was not the traditional English Dean at all ; but if the English Church ever becomes a really popular in- stitution, there will be a good many Deans of the type of Dean Alford.
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