go, but he enjoys a yearly income
of L4,500, besides the patronage of forty-nine livings. Now this quite
equals the salary of the Prime Minister of the greatest empire in the
world, and the Bishop of Carlisle should therefore be a truly great man.
We regret however, to say that he is very much the reverse, if we may
judge from a newspaper report which has reached us of his lecture
on "Man's Place in Nature," recently delivered before the Keswick
Scientific and Literary Society. Newspaper reports, we know, are often
misleading in consequence of their summary character; nevertheless
two columns of small type must give some idea of a discourse, however
abstruse or profound; here and there, if such occured, a fine thought or
a shrewd observation would shine through the densest veil. Yet, unless
our vision be exceptionally obtuse, nothing of the kind is apparent in
this report of the Bishop's lecture. Being, as his lordship confessed,
the development of "a sermon delivered to the men at the Royal
Agricultural Society's Show last summer," the lecture was perhaps, like
the sermon, adapted to the bucolic mind, and thus does meagre justice to
the genius of its author. His lordship, however, chose to read it before
a society with some pretentions to culture, and therefore such a plea
cannot avail. As the case stands, we are constrained to accuse
the bishop of having delivered a lecture on a question of supreme
importance, which would do little credit to the president of a Young
Men's Christian Association; and when we reflect that a parson occupied
the chair at the meeting, and that the vote of thanks to the episcopal
lecturer was moved by a canon, who coupled with it some highly
complimentary remarks, we are obliged to think the Church more short of
brains than even we had previously believed, and that Mene, Mene, Tekel,
Upharsin has already been written on its temple walls by the finger of
doom.

Very early in his lecture the Bishop observed that "the Scriptures are
built on the hypothesis of the supreme and unique position of man."
Well, there is nothing novel in this statement. What we want is some
proof of the hypothesis. His lordship's way of supplying this need is,
to say the least, peculiar. After saying that "he would rather trust the
poet as an exponent of man than he would a student of natural history,"
he proceeds to quote from Shakespeare, Pope and Plato, and ends that
part of his argument with a rhetorical flourish,