LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE BISHOPS AND THE WAR.
cro THE EDITOR OF THE " SrECTAT0B.:1 SIR,—I should like to be allowed to say in your columns that, but for an attack of bronchitis, which has kept me a close prisoner to the house for the last three weeks, I should have felt it my duty to place myself by the side of the Bishop of Oxford in the vote which he gave in the House of Lords, on the subject of the war in Afghanistan, so that he might not have seemed to "stand alone" among the Bishops in his judgment of a policy the motives of which, after all that has been said, I yet fail to under- stand, and the morality of which—if morality is still in any measure to regulate the intercourse of nations—I cannot approve. The vote or opinion of a non-political person like myself is of little value or significance, but as a Bishop of the Church of England, I would not be thought indifferent—as by my absence from the division I might be thought—in a case where (to borrow the language of Sir William Harcourt), "the path of truth and justice" is at least as much deserving of regard as the necessity, assumed by the Times, that, per fas out nefas, "we must make ourselves secure." One is aware that different men, equally desirous to act conscientiously, often regard the same transaction with different eyes ; and all I desire, as I had not the opportunity of doing so by my vote, is to express thus, without reserve, my own individual view.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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