Untitled - Electric Scotland

1856] THE FREEDOM FROM PARTY 195
Durham. 1 The Bill was hotly opposed, not only by the
Radicals, as represented by Mr. Hadfield, Mr. Roebuck,
and others of the same school, but also, on totally
different grounds, by such Churchmen as the Bishops
of Oxford and Exeter, Mr. Gladstone, Lord Robert Cecil,
and Sir William Heathcote.
Their opposition was, however, fruitless, and the Bill
became law on July 26th. The long discussions on the
subject had called public notice to the importance of the
Bishop of London s position, both in the Church and in
the country, and had greatly enhanced the interest of the
question who was to be the new Bishop. When Dean
Tait s nomination was announced, public criticism was, to
a large extent, mere guesswork, so little was the Bishop-
designate known in an ecclesiastical aspect outside the
comparatively limited circle of his Oxford and Rugby
friends, and of those interested in University Reform.
But if he was at a disadvantage in thus entering upon a
great position without any of the prestige attaching to
previous successes in a similar field, there was something,
too, to be said upon the other side. He was entirely
untrammelled by any partisan allegiance. Critics who
tried to label the new Bishop with the name of some
party in the Church found themselves able to go no
further than to say that he was certainly not a High
Churchman. Indeed,
if he had had himself to choose a
leader from among the Bishops, it is hard to say to whom
he would have been willing to turn. The Episcopal
Bench was on the whole far better manned than it had
been a few years before. Several distinct types of work
and thought were now apparent. The piety and evan-
Bishop Blomfield was seventy years old, and had been a Bishop for
thirty-three years. Bishop Maltby was eighty-six years old, and had been a
Bishop for twenty-five years.