ster
sermons concede all that science, has an indisputable right, or any
pressing need, to ask, and that not grudgingly but generously; and, if
the three bishops of 1887 carry the Church with them, I think they
will have as good title to the permanent gratitude of posterity as the
famous seven who went to the Tower in defence of the Church two
hundred years ago.

Will their brethren follow their just and prudent guidance? I have no
such acquaintance with the currents of ecclesiastical opinion as would
justify me in even hazarding a guess on such a difficult topic. But
some recent omens are hardly favourable. There seems to be an
impression abroad--I do not desire to give any countenance to it--that
I am fond of reading sermons. From time to time, unknown
correspondents--some apparently animated by the charitable desire to
promote my conversion, and others unmistakably anxious to spur me to
the expression of wrathful antagonism--favour me with reports or
copies of such productions.

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
perceives the bearing of his arguments against the alterability of
the course of outward nature by prayer, on the question of miracles in
general; for he is careful to say that "the possib