One of the chief modernists said to me the other day:  “Temple is the most dangerous man in the Church of England.  He is not only a socialist, he is also Gore’s captive, bow and spear.”  But another, by no means an Anglo-Catholic, corrected this judgment.  “Temple,” said he, “is not yet hopelessly Catholic.  He has, indeed, attracted to himself by his Christlike attitude towards Nonconformists the inconvenient attentions of that remarkable person the Bishop of Zanzibar.  His sympathies with Labour, which are the core of his being, are sufficient reason for ——­’s mistrust of him.  I do not at all regard him as dangerous.  On the contrary, I think he is one of the most interesting men in the Church, and also, which is far more important, one of its most promising leaders.”

So many men, so many opinions.  Strangely enough it is from an Anglo-Catholic who is also a Labour enthusiast that I hear the fiercest and most uncompromising criticism of this young Bishop of Manchester.

“All his successes have been failures.  He went to Repton with a tremendous reputation; did nothing; went to St. James’s, Piccadilly, as a man who would set the Thames on fire, failed, and went to Westminster with a heightened reputation; left it for the Life and Liberty Movement, which has done nothing, and then on to Manchester as the future Archbishop of Canterbury.  What has he done?  What has he ever done?

“He can’t stick at anything; certainly he can’t stick at his job—­always he must be doing something else.  I don’t regard him as a reformer.  I regard him as a talker.  He has no strength.  Sometimes I think he has no heart.  Intellectual, yes; but intellectual without pluck.  I don’t know how his brain works.  I give that up.  I agree, he joined the Labour movement before he was ordained.  There I think he is sincere, perhaps devoted.  But is there any heart in his devotion?  Do the poor love him?  Do the Labour leaders hail him as a leader?  I don’t think so.  Perhaps I’m prejudiced.  Whenever I go to see him, he gives me the impression that he has got his watch in his hand or his eye on the clock.  An inhuman sort of person—­no warmth, no sympathy, not one tiniest touch of tenderness in his whole nature.  No.  Willie Temple is the very man the Church of England doesn’t want.”

Finally, one of those men in the Anglo-Catholic Party to whom Dr. Temple looks up with reverence and devotion, said to me in the midst of generous laudation:  “His trouble is that he doesn’t concentrate.  He is inclined to leave the main thing.  But I hear he is really concentrating on his work at Manchester, and therefore I have hopes that he will justify the confidence of his friends.  He is certainly a very able man, very; there can be no question of that.”

It will be best, I think, to glance first of all at this question of ability.