undignified tittle-tattle with his neighbour’s churchwardens is the duty or the employment of an archdeacon. Open moral misconduct in a clergyman’s life is supposed to be matter of justifiable public scandal--the scandal arising with the clerical sinner, and not with those who tell of the sin--and, as such, is, by the constitution of our Church, an especial subject for the care of our archdeacons, and indeed, under them, of our churchwardens. But in such matters archdeacons are liberal, and much prefer to wink an eye than to see too much. We may imagine that a churchwarden, misunderstanding his mission with regard to scandal, and taking upon himself too promptly the duty of watching the moral conduct of his parson, would not receive much comfort from a visiting archdeacon. No one knows better than an archdeacon--no one knows so well as an archdeacon--that it is needless and absurd to look for a St. Paul in every parsonage. He would, indeed, be very little at his own ease with a local St. Paul, much preferring a comfortable rector, who can take his glass of wine after dinner and talk pleasantly of old college days. St. Pauls, however, do not trouble him; nor is he troubled much by the scandals of his clerical neighbours; but he must be troubled sorely, I should think, by the increasing number and increasing influence around him of those “literate” clergymen who--from want of better, as we must in sorrow confess,--are flocking to us from Islington, Birkenhead, and such like fountains of pastoral care. The man who won’t drink his glass of wine, and talk of his college, and put off for a few happy hours the sacred stiffnesses of the profession and become simply an English gentleman,--he is the clergyman whom in his heart the archdeacon does not love. Thus the archdeacon is a bishop in little as regards his own archdeaconry, which may probably comprise half a diocese; and as an energetic financial secretary at the Treasury may, under an uninstructed Chancellor of the Exchequer, have much more to do with the finances of the country than the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself, so may an energetic archdeacon have a much stronger influence on his clerical district than the bishop who is over him. He is the bishop’s eye, or should be so, and may not improbably become the bishop’s hand.