APPOINTING BISHOPS

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 110, 10 May 1923, Page 5

APPOINTING BISHOPS

OUTSIDE INFLUENCES BROUGHT

TO BEAR.

York Convocation has been considsring once more the intractable question of the appointment to bishoprics, and we have had the old complaints against the chance which has put successively a Baptist and a Presbyterian into the position of nominating prelates for the Church of England, writes a correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian." Apparently it is -not argued that Mr. Lloyd George's appointments were bad or that Mr. Bonar Law's are likely to be bad; it is the principle of the tfiing. The cyncial student of history might be tempted to intervene with the question, "Who really does appoint Bishops?" Is it possible to point to any period, during which we have had a devout son of the Church as Premier, as a golden age of the prelacy ? Over a considerable neriod there is little doubt that bishoprics could be bought and sold like any other of the merchandise of patronage. There was a time when the favourites (of either sex) o! the Crown had a good deal to do with the nominations. Lord Bosebery has remarked that the apartment of Lady Yarmouth in the Palace of George 11. was really an office. "There, it was said), peerages or bishoprics might sometimes be bought." In any case ambitious clergymen did not neglect Lady Yarmouth. George 111. liked to choose his own prelates and to set black marks against the names of those who offended —"Green —Green shall never be translated." Queen Victoria sometimes pushed her own candidates, and it is said that one of the very few occasions when Disraeli showed temper was an emergence from the Royal closet after a rather heated discussion on the filling of an ecclesiastical vacancy. Shaftesbury was a saint on earth, but were the nominations he made for Palmexston strikingly good? Gladstone took enormous pains, bet were his selections notably better than those*ol Melbourne or of Mr. Lloyd George? Whoever makes the choice is human, and—whether Sovereign, cleric, statesman, or favourite—is open to human i-uiuwcw and prejudices.