Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/337

 1857-1862 277 for him the sobriquet of " Soapy Sam "; but it was due to real kindliness of spirit, and to dislike of the stand-off and humph, ha! manner of most of the bishops in dealing with their clergy; but being obsequious enough to laity in power and to the nobility. It was a curious misreading of the facts of the case that The Times and Punch and other papers, besides such as were frankly Low Church, such as the Record, regarded Bishop Wilberforce as a High Churchman. Punch had a cartoon representing the Bishop as a shepherd coquetting with the Church of Rome as a fair shepherdess ; and Mr. Goldwin Smith in the Bystander, a Canadian magazine, described him as a High Anglican who floundered about trying to find a logical standing-place for the illogical party, and who would have gone to Rome, like his two brothers, if he had let his real convictions have fair play, and had he not been held back by the ties of position and wealth. But, as a fact, Soapy Sam, as he was vulgarly called, never was a High Churchman, either on account of his early Evangelical training or through subsequent conversion. On the contrary, the secessions in his own family drove him in an opposite direction. Bishop Wilberforce remained to the end of his days what he had been bred, a Church Evangelical of the type of his father and of the younger Venn, a type as distinct from the Church Association variety as it was marked off from that of High Churchism. What he was shrewd enough to see was that the Church of England, given its liturgy and polity, could not be successfully run on the lines of the non-church Evangelicals, and there were not enough left of his father's school to constitute a working factor in the body, as most of that section had shaded off into the Broad Church ranks, and such as remained were imbeciles. He was thus forced to throw himself into the High Church movement, but it was reluctantly, and with the purpose of utilizing it as a force, whilst directing it into narrow channels such as approved themselves to himself. But the strength of the movement was beyond his restraining or directing power. As to the theology of the party, he never accepted it, where it differed from what he had acquired as a child. This it was which constituted the real secret of his seeming inconsistency and insincerity : that he had to work on lines which he accepted only as a less evil than those of the narrow and illiterate school which monopolized that name