By the Rev. Canon W. H. Rich Jones. 169 



would call famous ; still doing their work for God humbly and 

 quietly ; and witnesses, that even in a generation when love was cold, 

 and when what religion there was seemed but a dull and spiritless 

 formalism, there was still a remnant in whom " the salt had not 

 quite lost his savour/'' 



And now I have told you my story. My special object has been 

 to put before you what was the true ideal of a cathedral, and to show 

 you, in the history of one out of some fifty-two prebendal stalls, some 

 illustration of its practical working. That any cathedral ever really 

 attained the high ideal which was before the mind of its founders 

 is too much to assert — in all things human there are defects, and 

 our cathedrals were not exempt from them — still, when I can point 

 to so illustrious a band of spiritual ancestors, as Bishop Roger 

 de Mortival, the framer of our statutes and the brave defender of 

 the rights of his see — and William de Edingdon, the builder of that 

 beautiful Church, but a few miles from my own home — and Thomas 

 Rotherham, the trusted friend and executor of Edward IV. — and 

 Richard Hooker, the learned defender of the policy of our church 

 against Geneva — and John Pearson, the able exponent of its 

 catholic doctrine against the Deist and the Socinian — and remember 

 also that this same church of Sarum reckoned first of all among its 

 canons and then as its bishop — John Jewel — its great apologist 

 against Rome — I may be pardoned in expressing a regret that it was 

 not deemed possible, some forty-five years ago, to remedy acknow- 

 ledged abuses, without the wholesale confiscation of all our prebends. 



Happily there has been within the last few years a revival of real 

 interest in our cathedrals. At the present moment a Commission 

 is sitting, with the view of considering how best they may be 

 adapted to the wants of our day. The accession to the primacy of 

 a prelate, than whom no one is more intimately acquainted with 

 their purpose and their workings, may well give us good heart in 

 believing that recommendations will no longer, as was formerly 

 the case, be made hastily or without a full knowledge of the whole 

 matter. And so we will hope, that a real and useful work of 

 reformation will be carried out. We who have travelled the greater 

 part of life's journey may not be spared to see it. Still we will trust 



