Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Religion
Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2
Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Christianity; Church and state -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Church history -- 19th century
A shock like this brings with it also a shock of new knowledge and
appreciation of things. We are made to feel with a new force what it is
that we have lost, and to understand more exactly what is the
proportion of what we have lost to what we still retain. To friends and
opponents the Bishop of Winchester could not but be, under any
circumstances, a person of the greatest importance. But few of us,
probably, measured fully and accurately the place which he filled among
us. We are better aware of it now when he has been taken away from us.
Living among us, and acting before us from day to day, the object of
each day's observation and criticism, under each day's varying
circumstances and feelings, within our reach always if we wanted to see
him or to hear him, he was presented to our thoughts in that partial
disclosure, and that everyday homeliness, which as often disguise the
true and complete significance of a character, as they give substance
and reality to our conceptions of it. As the man's course moves on, we
are apt to lose in our successive judgments of the separate steps of
it--it may be stops of great immediate interest--our sense of its
connection and tendency, of the true measure of it as a whole, of the
degree in which character is growing and rising, or, on the other hand,
falling or standing still. The Bishop of Winchester had many
admirers--many who deeply loved and trusted him--many who, in the face
of a good deal of suspicion and hostile comment, stoutly insisted on
the high estimate which they had formed of him. But even among them,
and certainly in the more indifferent public, there were few who had
rightly made it clear to their own minds what he had really grown to be
both in the Church and the country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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