The Bishop of Manchester,—whom we have always regarded as the
very model of a Bishop in such a community as that of Manchester,—shows a bias on one question only. He is unfair to the Ritualists. He not only permitted the prose- cution, and therefore brought about the subsequent im- prisonment, of Mr. Green, for the use of a ceremonial to which not even three of Mr. Green's parishioners could be found to object, but he repeatedly tells us that he is almost "losing patience and hope, at the continuance of this idle controversy about matters of ritual." Nobody can sym- pathise more heartily with him on the substantive question of ceremonial than do the editors of this journal. And as a matter of fact, we suspect that it is rather half-belief than whole-belief in the doctrines symbolised, which makes men so sensitive and fretful about ritual. But as for having patience with ritualism, a man who knows the world as well as Dr. Fraser ought to know that, human nature being what it is, the heat given out in contests concerning trivialities on the fringe of a great subject, is a sign of genuine earnestness thrown into that subject, and not of indifference. Perhaps human nature ought not to be what it is, but Dr. Fraser is hardly the man to lose patience over that.
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