I learned with much regret of the death of the
Bishop of Ripon last week just as this column had gone to press. The first time I met Dr. Burroughs, close on thirty years ago, he was clad in vest and shorts, and pounding along with one or two young Oxford and Cambridge men like himself on a paper-chase got up in connexion with a week's mission to schoolboys. Last month I was to have lunched with him on my way south from Scotland through Ripon, but the illness that proved fatal had already seized him and he could see no one. No Bishop, I suppose, was a more brilliant scholar, but scholarship is not the first qualification for episcopal office, and I think the writer of the obituary notice in The Times was right in saying that Burroughs would have done himself more justice and the Church more service as an exponent of the liberal evangelicalism which he held so strongly if he had not had the cares of a diocese to take toll of his energies. As it was he was not a great Bishop and he never had sufficient 'freedom to establish himself as a great person- ality. Almost, if not quite, the last published contri- bution from his pen, by the way, was a letter in The Spectator of June 22nd on the Unitarian contro- versy at Liverpool.
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