and practical good sense, of brilliant or persuasive or pathetic eloquence.  In all this he had equals and rivals, though perhaps he had not many in the completeness and balance of his powers.  Nor do we say anything of those gifts, partly of the intellect, but also of the soul and temper and character, by which he was able at once to charm without tiring the most refined and fastidious society, to draw to him the hearts of hard-working and anxious clergymen, and to enchain the attention of the dullest and most ignorant of rustic congregations.  All these are, as it seems to us, the subordinate, and not the most interesting, parts of what he was; they were on the surface and attracted notice, and the parts were often mistaken for the whole.  Nor do we forget what often offended even equitable judges, disliking all appearance of management and mere adroitness—­or what was often objected against his proceedings by opponents at least as unscrupulous as they wished him to be thought.  We are far from thinking that his long career was free from either mistakes or faults; it is not likely that a course steered amid such formidable and perplexing difficulties, and steered with such boldness and such little attempt to evade them, should not offer repeated occasions not only for ill-natured, but for grave and serious objections.

But looking over that long course of his Episcopate, from 1845 to the present year, we see in him, in an eminent and unique degree, two things.  He had a distinct and statesmanlike idea of Church policy; and he had a new idea of the functions of a Bishop, and of what a Bishop might do and ought to do.  And these two ideas he steadily kept in view and acted upon with increasing clearness in his purpose and unflagging energy in action.  He grasped in all its nobleness and fulness and height the conception of the Church as a great religious society of Divine origin, with many sides and functions, with diversified gifts and ever new relations to altering times, but essentially, and above all things, a religious society.  To serve that society, to call forth in it the consciousness of its calling and its responsibilities, to strengthen and put new life into its organisation, to infuse ardour and enthusiasm and unity into its efforts, to encourage and foster everything that harmonised with its principle and purpose, to watch against the counteracting influences of self-willed or ignorant narrowness, to adjust its substantial rights and its increasing activity to the new exigencies of political changes, to elicit from the Church all that could command the respect and win the sympathy and confidence of Englishmen, and make its presence recognised as a supreme blessing by those whom nothing but what was great and real in its benefits would satisfy—­this was the aim from which, however perplexed or wavering or inconsistent he may have been at times, he never really swerved.  In the breadth and largeness of his principle, in the freedom and variety of its practical applications,