ingency, and moves as the wind moves--now softly, then harshly, now
gently, then with great violence. Those who go with Labour are not like
travellers in the Tory coach or the Liberal tram; they are like
passengers in a balloon.

I do not mean that Bishop Temple will ever be so far swept out of his
course as to find himself among the revolutionaries; he carries too much
weight for that, is, indeed, too solid a man altogether for any lunatic
flights to the moon; I mean, rather, that where the more reasonable
leaders of Labour are compelled to go by the force of political and
industrial events, William Temple is likely to find that he himself is
also expected, nay, but obliged to go, and very easily that may be a
situation from which the Lollard Tower of Lambeth Palace will appear
rather romantically if not altogether hopelessly remote.

His career, then, like Mr. Winston Churchill's in politics, is still an
open event and therefore a matter for interesting speculation. This
fair-haired, fresh-faced, and boylike Bishop of Manchester, smiling at
us behind his spectacles, the square head very upright, the broad
shoulders well back, the whole short stocky figure like a rock,
confronts us with something of the challenge of the Sphinx.

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