Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/584

572 the expense of carriages to take them to their destination. They cannot all have sinister designs on the property of their hosts, else they would soon become known to the police. They are devoured by a desire to mix in society to which they have no legitimate entrance. So long as people organize parties in the way usual at present, so long are unbidden guests likely to be amongst the number.

 

 From The Spectator.

has not long survived his retirement from his episcopal duties. He died at Bath on Tuesday last. We doubt whether the English bench of bishops has included a man of greater intellect than the deceased bishop in its ranks at any time since—now 123 years ago—Bishop Butler died. The work, indeed, by which Dr. Thirlwall will be chiefly remembered is a very different kind of work from that by which Bishop Butler is constantly recalled to the mind of English thinkers; nor is it one which, in spite of its large intellectual grasp, will be likely to perpetuate his memory so widely, still less to win for the church of which he was a prelate so considerable a fame. Indeed, Dr. Thirlwall's mind was greater than his "History of Greece" could give any adequate conception of, and this can hardly be said of Bishop Butler in relation to the "Analogy." It would be necessary to follow the late Bishop of St. David's outside the historical region, to study not only his essay on "The Irony of Sophocles," but his charges and his speeches in relation to the theological and political movements of modern times, before one could adequately appreciate the highest characteristics of his mind,—its reserved power, its delicate and finely-chiselled lines, his keen and constant knowledge of the narrow limits imposed on the speculative powers of man, the cautious sobriety which this steady conviction inspired, and the mastery with which he exposed the ignorance of fanatics and the rashness of dogmatists. We do not, of course, mean that Bishop Thirlwall will rank intellectually with Bishop Butler, and still less that in the special sphere of theology his power was anything like as great. Bishop Butler's mind was of that type which has always achieved the greatest influence in theology,—namely, a mind of exceeding religious intensity, controlled and restrained by an intellect of even more than corresponding depth, clearness, and precision. Dr. Thirlwall had the latter qualities highly developed, but his mind had not the moving power which is the spring of force in such natures as Pascal's, Bishop Butler's, and Dr. Newman's. He saw the difficulties of dogmatizing as keenly as the keenest, but he had not in him that devouring flame of faith which made it a necessity for him to use his intellect for the purpose of solving, or, at least, defining and strictly limiting his own doubts. There was more of discrimination than of ardour in the character of his mind, more of critical than creative power. Still, there was a true vein of piety in him, though it was not of the order of feelings which, taken alone, makes a great character. Certainly the people who could seriously believe that Bishop Thirlwall had composed such a book as "Supernatural Religion," while still retaining his place as a prelate of the Church of England, utterly misunderstood his character. Probably no bishop on the Bench ever felt the inadequacy of man's mind to the problems of theology more keenly than Bishop Thirlwall, but probably also no bishop on the bench was more convinced of the supernatural life in Christianity, or of the inadequacy of the many slashing sceptical refutations with which it had been not only assailed, but, according to the rash dogmatists of the negative sort, demolished.

The peculiarity indeed of Dr. Thirlwall's mind in the special position which he held, and the quality which, in spite of great differences, makes us go back along the long line of English bishops to Bishop Butler, when we think of him, is this,—that amidst a string of theologians who have not unfrequently had no intellects to take much account of, or when they had, had intellects chiefly of the rhetorical and persuasive kind, he, like the great predecessor we have named, had above everything the characteristics of a judicial mind, and this in relation to subjects on which those characteristics are seldom displayed. We have, at the present time, several men of considerable ability on the bench of bishops; fearless and earnest men like Bishop Fraser and Bishop Temple; a great orator in Bishop Magee; a man of weighty and, to some extent, judicial practical sense in the Archbishop of Canterbury; but we 