I am persuaded that just as Bishop Butler, when he perused the preface of his _Analogy_, had no prescience of the young fellow of Lincoln, who was in a few years to give the Christian faith a fresh hold in the hearts of the common people, who gladly heard him, so in our time many of our Bishops seem unable to perceive the dawn of another “day of the Lord.” Indeed, it is our misfortune in England that Bishops are almost necessarily bad leaders. We are told when an election to the Papacy is imminent that this or that Cardinal is in the list of “Papabili”--a possible Pope--so in like manner we may almost select amongst the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge our future diocesans. These are men clever, shrewd, and hard-working, of estimable private character, and not without some modest patrimony. Early entered in the race for preferment, ambitious, and yet, _mirabile dictu_, devout, they are endowed first of all with the true qualification for episcopacy, a capacity for compromise and a pliant political mind. _Sic itur ad astra_ the excellent curate or tutor, the courteous and accomplished chaplain to the Bishop, the eloquent canon and ecclesiastical courtier is consecrated and enthroned. Henceforward for the rest of his days he must hurry from his study table, crowded with correspondence, to his confirmations, his diocesan society meetings, and his weary, humiliating attendance at the House of Lords. What wonder if Bishops discourage new ventures of faith, who have no time for thinking, no time for reading, and perhaps, sometimes, too little opportunity for prayer! And so we find them not unwilling to accommodate the Catholic Faith to the popular prejudice of the moment, acquiescing in an undogmatic, undenominational, more or less Christian creed. Popularity becomes the very breath of their nostrils, and they proceed to hide in an appendix to the Prayer-book, the hymn _Quicunque vult_. Yet the discerning can see that now is no time for keeping in the background the great truths of religion. Already men are being prepared in many ways to receive them.