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, in the distinctness of his
purposes and the intensity of his convictions, he was an example of
high statesmanship common in no age of the Church, and in no branch of
it. And all this rested on the most profound personal religion as its
foundation, a religion which became in time one of very definite
doctrinal preferences, but of wide sympathies, and which was always of
very exacting claims for the undivided work and effort