138 AN EPISCOPAL TRILOGY IV 



I found one of the latter category among the 

 accumulated arrears to which I have already 

 referred. 



It is a full, and apparently accurate, report of a 

 discourse by a person of no less ecclesiastical rank 

 than the three authors of the sermons I have 

 hitherto been considering; but who he is, and 

 where or when the sermon was preached, are 

 secrets which wild horses shall not tear from 

 me, lest I fall again under high censure for 

 attacking a clergyman. Only if the editor of this 

 Review thinks it his duty to have independent 

 evidence that the sermon has a real existence, will 

 I, in the strictest confidence, communicate it to 

 him. 



The preacher, in this case, is of a very different 

 mind from the three bishops and this mind is 

 different in quality, different in spirit, and different 

 in contents. He discourses on the a priori 

 objections to miracles, apparently without being 

 aware, in spite of all the discussions of the last 

 seven or eight years, that he is doing battle with 

 a shadow. 



I trust I do not misrepresent the Bishop of 

 Manchester in saying that the essence of his 

 remarkable discourse is the insistence upon the 

 " supreme importance of the purely spiritual in 

 our faith," and of the relative, if not absolute, 

 insignificance of aught else. He obviously per- 

 ceives the bearing of his arguments against the 



