Sunday at Home.

Southern Cross, Volume 12, Issue 44, 28 January 1905, Page 2

Sunday at Home.

A BUSY BISHOP. DR WINNINGTON INGRAM’S WORK IN LONDON. « That’s the- Bishop of London’s church. He has to read the Lessons there twice on Sundays, and he g *ts ,£IO,OOO a year for doing it ’ —A bus driver passing St. Paul’s. * I have just completed my 560th official visit to the parirhes.’ —Bishop of London. Dr Wiuuington Tngrim, we (Daily Mail) have now his own authority for saying, does not spend his evenings toasting his toes before the fire and reading a nice books. It is the falsest of false notions.

When we have settled for ever the problem of the unemployed, we shall turn ourselves, perhaps, to another question not less the question of the overworked. And we shall begin with the Bishop of London. Has it ever occurred to the ordinary worker in London t hat no man is more furiously occupied with the affairs of the metropolis than its Bishop P The most efficient secretaries and the most tactful chaplains cannot lighten the load of his personal responsibility. He is forever conscious of the vastness of his task, and forever mindful of the complexity of his duties. To rise at an hour when servants are still jabed, and to go to his couch when most of us have been an bout asleep, does not suffice to provide Dr "Winnington Ingram with time for his day’s work. Brotherly Help. The Bishop is not only at the head of innumerable societies working for the physical and spiritual salvation of London, he is also the personal friend and comforter of every parish priest in the metropolis. To give audiences to these hardworking and ill-remunerated servants of the public, and to encourage them in their heart-break-ing work, is one of the first duties of the Bishop ; and he pushes this duty still further into the tegton of intimate and personal sympathy by visiting all the clergy in his huge diocese, and by preaching in t heir churches. This is one of his chief duties, and one which he loves as much as any other. For it is to the parish priest, struggling manfully in the most difficult situations, that the Bishop must always stand as the representative of Divine encouragement, the earthly comforter and consoler in work which is very often almost sordidly secular^

“ Every Word Counts.” He could wish for greater opportunities for reading, and he perceives the danger to a spiritual life of days packed full with practical and bush uess-like details of administration. But what can he do? He eis London with 90 per cent of its school children in a- half-famished condition ; its streets crowded with an alien profligacy ; its shops and railway stations visited by the unspeakable emissaries of vice ; its churches struggling tor lack of funds ; its missions clamouring for assistance; its hospitals on the verge of bankruptcy ; its people passing more and more into the paganism which is not so much a desire for exercise and open air as an utter indifference to religion. Not only this, but Church and sect are at variance, and the work of Christ is let and hindered by the childish animosities Which keep Christians not only apart, but in a perpetual and deadly enmity. Here, then, is work and enough to the Bishop’s hand, and he throws himself into the glaring battle with only an occasional sigh for the quiet hoars of spiritual contemplation. “ How do you get through it all F” I asked him one afternoon, as we walked back from a meeting concerned with rescue work in London streets.

“ By taking each little duty—trivial enough in itself, perhaps—as the great and insistent concern of the day. If I go to a workhouse service, and the dear old inmates honour me with a seven-fold Amen, I am content to regard that service as one of the

central duties of the day. If one thought of the problems of London as a whole—if one could see all the misery and hunger, and wickedness, and evil in one single flash of the eye —why, one would go mad. The thing is, to take each duty separately, to believe that every word counts, and to leave the rest in the hands of our Father.” “ Every word counts.” It is here that the Bishop reveals an aspect of his personality, and by that phrase we may see . what Father Adderley means. ..For the Bishop has the happy gift of being able to speak naturally . about religion in high places, and many a great house in London can attest with the deepest gratitude the truth of the Bishops faith shat “every word counts.” In all his visits in society, even at the weddings of the rich and noble, the Bishop is already a powerful missioner for Christ.