THIS little sketch is an expanded reprint of some papers which appeared in the Guardian of August 11th, 18th, and 25th, 1869. They are republished in the present form at the desire of one, whose wishes have a supreme claim to consideration in all that touches her husband's memory, and especially at the hands of any whose happiness it has been to know and to love him.

In a mere sketch, the Reader will not be disappointed at finding neither the exhaustive treatment nor the orderly sequence of events which belong to a biography. Different friends of the late Bishop will fill up different portions of the outline for themselves. And it may suggest to those who only knew him in the distance, as a public man, that much is unsaid which cannot be said at once; much too which could not fail to interest and to improve. In discussing somewhat at length the motives and drift of the Charge of 1867, the writer has endeavoured as accurately as he could [vii/viii] to represent what he knew of the Bishop's latest mind and wishes. If, in doing this, he has himself too frequently had occasion to furnish the language, it has at least been his endeavour not consciously to discolour the convictions and feelings of his revered master by any unnecessary admixture of his own.

Christ Church,
Michaelmas, 1869.

WALTER KERR HAMILTON was the son of the Ven. Anthony Hamilton, Archdeacon of Taunton and Prebendary of Lichfield, by Charity Graeme, third daughter of Sir Walter Farquhar, Bart., Physician to the Prince Regent. His great-grandfather was Dr. Terrick, Bishop of London, of whose two daughters, one was married to Mr. Anthony Hamilton, subsequently Archdeacon of Colchester, and father of Archdeacon Hamilton of Taunton. His only sister died in 1842, as Mrs. Sotheby; her death was perhaps the greatest sorrow of Walter Hamilton's unwedded life. His mother, who survives him, was well calculated by her remarkable character and accomplishments to exert a powerful influence upon the future of her sons. [She died at Charters, Sunningdale, on Nov. 9, 1869, at the age of 88.] The Bishop's only and younger brother, Mr. Edward W. T. Hamilton, became a distinguished Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where the high opinion and confidence of the late Master of Trinity offered him the prospect of a brilliant academical career. But he devoted his best years to working as a man of business in a distant colony; and he returned, in advanced middle life, to represent Salisbury for a short time in the Liberal interest, but with health too much [1/2] enfeebled by exertion to admit of his doing any real justice to his great abilities, or even of his continuing to discharge routine Parliamentary duties. Mr. Hamilton only resigned his seat in July, 1869, a few days before the Bishop's death.

Walter Kerr Hamilton was born in London on November 16th, 1808. His early childhood was passed at Loughton in Essex, of which parish his father was rector. In January, 1818, when he was nine years old, he was sent to a private school of high reputation at that day, which was kept at Chelsea by Monsieur Clement. Here he worked hard, and laid the foundation of some of the friendships of his later life. In January, 1822, he went to Eton. "At Eton," he used to say, "I was a thoroughly idle boy, but I was saved from some worse things by getting to know Gladstone." His real intimacy with Mr. Gladstone would however appear to have been begun at Oxford; but at Eton he made other and lasting friendships, among them that of the present Bishop of Lichfield. "But I first learnt what work meant when I was sent as a private pupil to Arnold." He left Eton in December, 1825, and in the following month he joined Dr. Arnold.

Dr. Arnold was still at Laleham near Staines, but in the full vigour of his life and work. In the course of a single year he took his pupil through almost all the historians and poets--of course, not the philosophy--which were then necessary to secure the highest classical honours at Oxford, "besides making me write essays," as the Bishop said, "on every sort of subject." Arnold, indeed, inspired him with intellectual and moral interests of the highest order; and Bishop Hamilton was, to the last, grateful to his [2/3] great master, and jealous of the honour of his name and memory. In a letter dated Laleham, December 19th, 1826, Dr. Arnold writes to Archdeacon Hamilton, "I have nothing to say on your son's final departure from Laleham, except to repeat what I have had the pleasure of telling you before, that I never had a pupil who improved his time better, and to whom I felt more indebted for his constant attention to my wishes, and for many instances of peculiar personal civility. I shall hope often to see him at Laleham again; and it will give me great pleasure to hear of his well-doing at Oxford, of which I entertain no doubt."

In January, 1827, Mr. Hamilton went up to Christ Church.

Christ Church was then in its days of glory; Archbishop Longley, who was Mr. Hamilton's tutor, was Censor; associated with him was the present Bishop of St. Asaph; and the esprit de corps of the House was at its highest. Among the most intimate college friends of the Bishop who survive him are the Prime Minister, who followed him to Oxford, Dr. Charles Wordsworth, Bishop of St. Andrew's, Sir E. J. Phillimore, the present Dean of the Arches, Dr. Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Sir Francis Doyle, the present Professor of Poetry;--perhaps others should be named. In December, 1827, Mr. Hamilton was nominated to a Studentship by the late Rev. Dr. Barnes, Sub-Dean of Christ Church, to whom he always referred as "my patron," and for whose benevolent character he ever cherished a warm affection. He read logic for some time with Mr. F .W. (now Professor) Newman, then Fellow of Balliol College; and the Bishop treasured Mr. Newman's lectures, written out with the greatest [3/4] care and method, to the last day of his life. Before taking his degree he spent his last Long Vacation, together with Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Joseph Anstice, [Student of Christ Church, and afterwards Professor of Classical Literature in King's College, London. He was a man of the highest promise. He was cut off by consumption in early life.] in reading at Cuddesdon, under the present Dean of Peterborough, who had the highest character as a private tutor, and who, at the time, was doing duty as curate of Cuddesdon. They occupied what is now known as the "Old Vicarage." "Saunders," he used to say, "insisted that a man who ate plenty of strawberry jam was certain to do well in the schools; but we got a great deal more than strawberry jam out of him."

The name of Walter Kerr Hamilton appears in the First Class in Literis Humanioribus of Mich. Term, 1830, next to that of Henry E. Manning, Balliol. The greater part of 1831 was spent by him at Loughton, and "in Devonshire with the Farquhars." At Easter, 1832, Mr. Hamilton was persuaded, he used to say, by Bishop Charles Wordsworth, to stand for an open Fellowship at Merton. He won it. In the summer of that year he went abroad with the late Mr. Henry Denison, Archdeacon Denison, Dr. Harington, late Principal of Brazenose, the present Bishop of Chester, and Mr. Jacob Ley, afterwards Censor of Christ Church; they all underwent cholera quarantine at Spa, from July 13th to July 17th. He wintered in Rome with his cousin Sir Walter R. Farquhar, and the Hon. R. Curzon. At Rome he was introduced to Baron Bunsen: in a recently-published letter from Bunsen to Arnold, [MS. letter.] the [4/5] Prussian Minister pleasantly alludes to him:--"Pray send me often such specimens of English youth: they are a refreshing species." One of the most intimate of his friends and brother-fellows at Merton refers to this Italian tour as having educated his "keen appreciation of the beauties of art and of natural scenery. Hamilton used to enjoy the recollection of these lovely Italian lakes, and to recall the wonders of Raphael's genius by means of the prints which he had brought home with him." Certainly this love of natural beauty, no less than the kindred feeling for art, remained with him to the last, although he never again enjoyed such an opportunity of gratifying either taste.

He returned to England somewhat hurriedly, and was admitted a full Fellow of Merton at Easter, 1833. It was at Merton that he made or at least strengthened all the chief friendships of his early manhood. Among his brother-fellows were the late Bishop Denison of Salisbury, "my dearest friend and predecessor;" Sir Thomas Tancred, Bart.; the Rev. William Adams, the writer of allegories which of their kind are among the most touching and beautiful samples of modern Christian literature; the Rev. B. E. Bridges, vicar of Haynes, Bedfordshire, for whom during life he entertained the deepest affection, and of whose theological acquirements he had the highest opinion. In 1868, the Bishop appointed Mr. Bridges one of his Chaplains; and it may have been observed that his Chaplain's decease preceded that of Bishop Hamilton, on July 28th, after an illness less prolonged but scarcely less suffering than his own. To the foregoing names must be added those of Bishop Hobhouse, late of Nelson, than whom few, if any, men knew him more intimately; and, [5/6] further, of the Rev. H. E. (now Archbishop) Manning, and Mr. James Hope, now Mr. Hope Scott. The subsequent secession to the Roman Church of the two last-named friends was a life-long sorrow to Bishop Hamilton, but the unavoidable separation never chilled the warm personal love he felt for each of them. Illustrious, too, among his Merton contemporaries were Sir Edmund Head, afterwards Governor-General of Canada, and Mr. Bruce, who, as Lord Elgin, became Governor-General of India. "It is," writes one who was on intimate terms with all of these distinguished persons, "curious to remember reading Plato with Bruce; seeing Manning hard at work getting up the text of the Bible so as to command great facility in applying it; Gladstone working at Hooker; whilst Hamilton was more inclined, I think, to indulge in Aristophanes. Hamilton always impressed me with the idea that he was devoted heart and soul to the work he had in hand." [MS. letter.]

II.

On Trinity Sunday, June 2nd, 1833, Mr. Hamilton was ordained Deacon, his Fellowship being his title, by Dr. Bagot, then Bishop of Oxford; and on December 22nd, in the same year, Bishop Bagot admitted him to Priests' Orders. In later days Bishop Hamilton has often lamented that he did not give himself more time to prepare for the most serious act of his life, and that he entered into Holy Orders within three months of his return from Italy. But in those times, such a [6/7] proceeding would not have suggested any very serious scruples to the most conscientious of men; the ordination examination was scarcely more than a formal exercise, which lasted rather better than an hour, and which, at least in the case of a Fellow of a College who had taken high honours, demanded no special intellectual preparation. No higher kind of preparation was thought of, except such as might be attempted by the individual conscience, without any external guidance or assistance whatever. Looking back upon his ordination in the light of his matured convictions as to the nature and responsibilities of the Priesthood, it was natural in Mr. Hamilton to deplore it; but at the time he acted up to his convictions of what was right, and his first convictions, like those of other good people, were largely formed by the public religious opinion around him.

After his ordination, Mr. Hamilton worked for a time as College tutor, and into this work, as into every thing that he undertook, he threw his whole heart. In the Collegiate life of Merton he felt the deepest interest. He eagerly forwarded any plan for raising the intellectual or the moral tone of the place. He seconded Mr. James Hope's endeavour to reanimate the old statutes, and to breathe--as for awhile he did breathe--into the life of the College an earnest religious and moral spirit not altogether unworthy of its founder. His Divinity Lectures were prepared with great care; and he lost no opportunity of making himself really acquainted with the undergraduates, many of whom were glad enough to make the most of his advances. An eminent layman, who was at the time Fellow of Merton, and who as an earnest Churchman has always been among the Bishop's greatest friends, remembers "its being [7/8] resolved between Denison, Hamilton, and myself, that we would set ourselves against the secular small-talk of the Fellows' table and common-room." [MS. letter.] Whatever became of this particular resolution, the spirit which prompted it cannot but be respected; and, in the long run, that spirit certainly was not without beneficial and marked results.

But, from the first, the work of a parish presented great attractions to Mr. Hamilton. As a Deacon, he became, at Michaelmas, 1833, Curate of Wolvercot. He has often referred to the rapid pace at which he used to walk along the road from Oxford to his parish, and his success in getting his brother-fellows, laymen certainly not less than clerics, to assist in the Sunday Schools. One of them, who threw himself into Mr. Hamilton's wishes with much earnestness, says that among the mostjstriking features of his character at this time, was his keen sympathy with suffering in all its forms; [MS. letter.] a gift which will of itself go far to account for his early ministerial success. He held this curacy until Easter, 1834; at Michaelmas he became Curate to Mr. E. Denison, then Vicar of St. Peter's-in-the-East, and about the same time he was made a Prebendary of Wells by Bishop Law. When, in 1837, his Vicar was promoted to the See of Salisbury, the parishioners petitioned the Crown, who became patron for that turn, that Mr. Hamilton might be his successor. Lord Melbourne at first hesitated. He "had received from many quarters a high character and strong recommendations" of Mr. Hamilton; but "Oxford," he urges, "is a conspicuous place; the University stands in a particular situation with respect to the King's [8/9] Government; a small appointment there may have a great effect; and in such a matter a minister is not left at liberty to indulge his own feelings and inclinations." [MS. letter to Archdeacon Hamilton, March 14, 1837.] Was the motive of this hesitation political or theological? Was it a backward glance at the defeat inflicted on Liberalism by the rejection of Sir Robert Peel; or was it an uneasy presentiment, or something more than a presentiment, of the great religious power which was already making itself felt from the pulpit of St. Mary's? Be this as it may, the interval of suspense was soon ended. A week later Mr. Hamilton received the subjoined note:--

"South Street, March 21, 1837. "Sir,

"From the character which I heard of you from all quarters, I had great pleasure in requesting the Chancellor [Lord Cottenham.] to give you the living of St. Peter's-in-the-East, and

"I remain, Sir,

"Your faithful servant,

"MELBOURNE.

"The Rev. W. K. Hamilton."

Lord Cottenham, indeed, by his Secretary, had anticipated this letter; and there is a curious passage in the correspondence, which since the passing of a recent Act of Parliament will have nothing beyond an historical interest. [Mr. Francis Barlow to Rev. W. K. Hamilton, March 18, 1837.] Was the Presentation to be made out to a Vicarage, as St. Peter's stood in the King's Books, or to a Perpetual Curacy, as it had always been considered of late years by the nominees of Merton College? In the one case, the stamp duty was 30s.; in the other, £20. This matter was quickly settled. [9/10] Among the congratulatory letters which Mr. Hamilton received was one from Dr. Hampden, then Regius Professor of Divinity, who had interested himself in promoting the views of the parishioners.

"Ch. Ch., March 20, 1837.

"My dear Sir,

"It has been a great gratification to me, I assure you, to hear that your flock and yourself are not to be separated, or rather that the tie between you is to be drawn more closely.

"I have done nothing more than express an honest feeling in the matter--a feeling of what was just and proper towards yourself, and of what, in my view, would best serve that common holy cause to which we have given ourselves.

"Mrs. Hampden begs to unite her congratulations; and

"I remain, my dear Sir,

"Yours very sincerely,

"R. D. Hampden.

"Rev. W. K. Hamilton, Merton College."

From 1837 to 1841 Mr. Hamilton was Vicar of St. Peter's-in-the-East; and he often referred to those years as the happiest of his life. He was the most indefatigable of parish priests; and as a preacher and a visitor of the poor, he soon won all hearts that could be reached at all. It was during his incumbency of St. Peter's that his mind underwent that great and decisive change which has already been, and will yet be, so fruitful in its consequences to the English Church.

He was always a moral, God-fearing boy; and one of his companions during his Italian tour bears witness at that early date to the steady development of all the main features of his later character. But the religious atmosphere of his home was what would now be called "high and dry;" it implied great attachment to the Church, as a moral and religious institution established [10/11] by the law, and a sincere wish to do any thing that could be done for the spiritual and temporal bettering of the people. Archdeacon Hamilton lived to rebuild the church at Loughton. He established a village school, which certainly was well-attended and well-disciplined. Nor was there any lack either of the varied practical benevolence, or of the elevating moral tone which belongs to a modern English parsonage. But "orthodox" sermons of the day were wanting in that affectionate devotion to our Divine Lord which was inculcated by the earlier Evangelicals; and Walter Hamilton, like other earnest young men, intellectual and otherwise, sought and found in the Evangelical teaching a warmth which was then sought in vain elsewhere. At the time of his ordination, and for some while afterwards, he was entirely devoted to this phase of religious belief and feeling; and when visiting his father the Archdeacon on one occasion, he gave considerable offence by insisting on cultivating an intimacy, avowedly based upon religious sympathy, with a Dissenting minister in the parish. Certainly love and reverence for his father's high Christian character was one of the governing influences of the late Bishop's life; but God places us, by His providence, in different strata of religious knowledge, and the Archdeacon belonged to one stratum, his son to another.

"In 1838," writes one of his Oxford friends, "I remember being taken by Mr. (now Bishop) Waldegrave to hear Mr. Hamilton as a model Evangelical preacher." St. Peter's was crowded, Sunday after Sunday, with hearers collected from all the parishes of Oxford, to learn that limited measure of positive truth which was enforced so earnestly from its pulpit. But already the preacher was himself listening [11/12] to the accents of a deeper and more perfect representation of the one earliest creed of Christendom. If the Oxford movement is to be dated from 1833, it only made itself felt as putting forward a revived system of belief, feeling, and practice towards the end of the decade, when Mr. Hamilton was already at St. Peter's. The deep piety of Dr. Newman, united to his astonishing genius, had already awed or fascinated the University; and it was impossible that a man in Mr. Hamilton's position, and with his keen religious sensitiveness, could be unaffected by such an influence. It is, indeed, probable that this influence told on him gradually, and more or less unconsciously to himself, at least at first. Although he knew Newman, he was not by any means within the Oriel circle of busy intellectual and religious enterprise; perhaps he was a little disposed to fight shy of it. But, on the one hand, he felt the yeanlings of his own heart for a moral ideal higher than the conventionalized piety around him, and, together with this, for the deepest and most absolute religious truth; while, on the other, he was within hearing of a teaching which could become at one time the most trenchant logic, at another the most soul-subduing pathos, and which had then gained the ear of Oxford. Such sympathies and attractions could not fail to do their work; and the change was as profound and complete as it was destined to be permanent.

He himself was accustomed to connect it with a meeting of Evangelical clergy that was held at Islington for the purpose of denouncing some of the proceedings of Bishop Blomfield and the Oxford Tractarians. The speeches appear to have been of the declamatory kind, which would perhaps be natural under the circumstances. On leaving the room Mr. [12/13] Hamilton grasped the arm of the friend who accompanied him, and asked, "Can this be really doing God's work?" He felt, he said, the contrast between this bitter denunciation of the Oxford School, and the quiet, holy, Christian lives of the men who represented it: it seemed to him that if the fruits of the Spirit were to be taken as an evidence of His guiding Presence, the Tractarians of the day had that evidence on their side. He frequently adverted to this circumstance; and although the real causes of his change were, beyond doubt, deeper and more complex than any passing incident, the reference may at least serve to show, that in his case, as in so many others, the first attraction to the Oxford School was ethical and spiritual rather than doctrinal; that the Movement appealed to a desire to lead a holy life rather than to any craving to fill up gaps which the "reason of faith" could not but detect in an imperfect creed. The intellectual or dogmatic interest came later, when the true and lasting doctrinal springs of ethical beauty had been laid bare to the eye of the anxious conscience; but, at first, Mr. Newman and Dr. Pusey had exercised precisely the influence which would have been wielded a generation before by Cecil, or Venn, or Martyn.

With Mr. Hamilton the change from Evangelicalism to Church principles was in the highest sense a matter of deliberation and conscience; and he determined to shape his course accordingly. St. Peter's did not become aesthetically magnificent; but its religious atmosphere was changed. Henceforth there was less of excitement and more of quiet, earnest thought; less of preaching for its own sake, more of preaching as a means of sanctification and as a stimulus to prayer; less of the preacher, and more of his message; less [13/14] of men and their personal peculiarities, and more of God, of His truth, of His redemption, of His sacraments, as being the great channels of His grace and His life. "The most mighty proof I know," observes an Oxford resident who had opportunities at the time of noting what went on, "of his deep hold on his flock, and of his wiseheartedness in managing them is, that during his change (how entire you know) from the Evangelical school to his riper views he did not lose the confidence of any one." [MS. letter.] His preaching became even more fervent than before, and it was attended with larger results in the increased devotion of his people and in the conversion of sinners to earnest and living Christianity. "It was to him," writes a clergyman of high standing, "and his ministry at St. Peter's, Oxford, while I was an undergraduate, during my first term, October, 1840, that I owe my first impressions of reverence and religious earnestness in special connection with Church principles. I had before seen a good deal of earnestness in the Evangelicals of the time, for which I was and am grateful; but there was in the incumbent and congregation of St. Peter's, and in the whole service, a far deeper and more chastened feeling, which came home to my heart especially, and made an impression on me which, I thank God, has never died out. What his sermons were about I do not now remember; but I know that no sermons ever made such an impression upon me as did his at that time." [Another MS. letter.] Only inferior to preaching, as a means of promoting clearsightedness of faith and holiness of life, was Mr. Hamilton's catechizing on Sunday afternoons. This practice was at the time a novelty, and Mr. Hamilton prepared himself for it with great [14/15] care. The lessons which he thus imparted were by no means confined to the children who answered his questions; old parishioners and members of the University listened most eagerly to these simple instructions in Christian Doctrine; they eagerly expected and they carefully treasured up his answers to questions which they would have not liked themselves to ask. Long after Mr. Hamilton had left Oxford the traces of his deep soul-stirring work survived him; and to this day among the parishioners, and especially the poorer people, there are persons who feel that they owe to his earnest and loving ministry all that is most precious for time and eternity.

A feature of Mr. Hamilton's parochial work which deserves particular mention, was the importance he assigned to the Offertory, as furnishing the appointed means of dedicating our worldly goods to the Service of God. He persuaded his parishioners to give all, or nearly all, their subscriptions to religious and charitable societies and undertakings, of the most various kinds, through this channel and thus, while each gift was itself duly consecrated, the duty and privilege of giving freely to God and His poor was brought home in its religious aspects to the mind of his flock more forcibly than would have been possible in any other way. [MS. letter and conversation.] "Mr. Hamilton was also," writes a contemporary, "the first who began what was then called 'afternoon service in the week' at Oxford. It must have been soon after he commenced, at least seven-and-twenty years since, that being at that time Curate of Garsington, I went into Oxford, and whilst [15/16] walking down the High Street (it was in the long vacation) with Dr. Newman to attend it, I said something to him on the subject, when his reply was very nearly in these words: 'We are very much indebted to Hamilton for giving us the opportunity.' [It would probably have been more: I should suppose twenty-nine.] I have a strong impression that Newman was in the habit of attending daily." [MS. letter of Rev. W. B. P. Sept. 6, 1869.] From this it would seem that St. Peter's did something more than keep pace with the devotional side of the Movement which sprang from St. Mary's: in fact, the heart reasons more quickly in these matters than does the intellect, and is especially likely to be beforehand with it, when a practical conclusion is in question.

Mr. Hamilton's rupture with Evangelicalism never led him to become unloving or disrespectful towards Evangelicals. He always spoke of them as good men, who generally made the most of the truth which they knew, and who by their consistency of life would possibly condemn many to whom God had given what he called "a larger vision." He always, and with deep thankfulness, ascribed his own change to the grace of God the Holy Spirit, and wondered that many better men than he had not shared it. In particular, he frequently referred with the greatest reverence and affection to such friends as Dr. Heurtley and Mr. Whitaker Churton, with whom he "had passed many precious and never-to-be-forgotten hours in the study of God's Word." Indeed, so far as Evangelicalism is a positive and religious system, he had no quarrel with it. Its earnest proclamation of the original sinfulness of our nature, of the atoning and mediatorial work of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of the sanctifying influence of the Holy [16/17] Spirit, never failed to command his heartfelt sympathy. But these vital truths, after all, were but a fragment of the creed which had come from heaven, and Walter Hamilton had discovered the unmutilated whole. The work of the Holy Spirit in the Church as well as in the individual, the power and grace of the Christian sacraments as bringing the soul into living union with the Divine Humanity of the Saviour, were portions of the Christian revelation, upon which Evangelicalism had lost, or rather had not yet regained, its hold. He only broke with it when it had become deliberately negative; when, instead of reviving forgotten truths, it was setting to work to denounce their complete revival. All that was best in its spirit and thought he permanently retained; and he never hesitated, whether in public or in private, to acknowledge the influences to which, in his early ministerial life, he had been so deeply indebted.

To this passage in his spiritual history he had occasion to refer in the winter of 1864, when replying to a protest presented to him by a small number of Clergymen in his diocese, against an earnest desire which he had expressed in his charge of that year for the restoration of Visible Unity to the Church of Christ:--

"I must further say, that conscious as I am of many grave faults of character, I am not conscious of being a coward in the avowal of my principles. I have never concealed from any one that I am what is commonly called a High Churchman. I was not so when I was ordained, but I became so some years before I was a Canon of Salisbury. And when I declare that I number this change among the many mercies which I have received from my God, I can truly say that these my adopted principles have ever made me the more [17/18] anxious never to bear false witness against others; and that instead of drying up they have cherished in my heart a spirit of charity towards those who--whether in our Church or beyond its limits--are in some matters not one with me; and that, in the many instances in which I have failed to carry out tin's spirit--either in my intercourse with others, or into the judgment I have been obliged to form of any part of their conduct--my fault has been one of infirmity."

Before the final crisis of the original Tractarian movement, culminating tragically, as it did, during the Autumn of 1845, in Mr. Newman's secession to the Church of Rome, Mr. Hamilton had left Oxford. In those great disappointments, in those sad and heartrending separations, he had, indeed, his full share; but his loyalty to the Church of England was unshaken, and a distant scene of work saved him from much distress to which he would have been exposed at Oxford. Often, indeed, has he referred to "that sad morning at the Canonry, when we heard that Newman had left us." To the last he retained his hearty admiration of the Parochial Sermons, and his opinion that of all the mistakes that ever were made by well-intentioned men, the conduct of the Heads of Houses in those years was one of the greatest. He "could not help thinking that Newman might have been saved to us if he had been treated with more consideration." But he had formed another friendship, which to the latest hour of his life afforded him the truest consolations, and "for which," as he said in his last illness, "I can never thank my God often or earnestly enough." Before he left St. Peter's parish, the late Mrs. E. B. Pusey had assisted him in setting on foot a Penitentiary [18/19] and other good works; and he was already bound by ties of deep respect and affection to the Regius Professor of Hebrew.

III.

Upon Dr. Denison's consecration as Bishop of Salisbury in 1837, he had at once asked his friend and curate to become his examining chaplain; and the duties imposed upon Mr. Hamilton by this responsible office obliged him frequently to visit his own future home during his incumbency of St. Peter's, in Oxford. How carefully, although for some years single-handed, he did his work as an Examiner for Holy Orders, may yet be seen in the "Examination Book" preserved at the Palace; and it was at some time during these years that, by a conversation with the late Mrs. Denison, he gave the first impulse to that restoration of the cathedral cloisters which was so munificently carried out by his predecessor. Bishop Denison, however, had been from the first anxious to secure for himself and his diocese the nearer presence and undistracted service of his old fellow-labourer; and an opportunity at last presented itself. The only canonry in the gift of the Bishop became vacant in 1841; and it was at once offered to Mr. Hamilton.

But it was only accepted with much reluctance, and after a severe struggle. Mr. Hamilton's true pastoral interest in his parish; his suspicion that there might not [19/20] be any real work for souls to be done in his new position; his love of Oxford, of his college, of his many resident friends; his deep and deepening interest in that tide of religious movement which was still flowing on, in unchecked strength, around him;--all these were strong reasons for remaining where he was. Among such reasons his attachment to his parish was probably the strongest. "No one who knew Oxford at the time could doubt the depth and genuineness of the moral tie that bound him to his flock." When in the event, he left them, they presented him with a handsome testimonial; and thirty years ago the gift of a testimonial to a clergyman who was resigning his duties was at least as remarkable as the omission to give one would be at the present day. Among the subscribers to this tribute of affection and respect are the names of eight Heads of Houses, and of all the leading parishioners in St. Peter's. The most earnest Evangelicalism in Oxford was represented by that truly excellent man the Rev. John Hill, at that time Vice-Principal of St. Edmund Hall; the highest learning and a really accurate and primitive faith, by the venerable President of Magdalen, Dr. Routh. The address, although hearty, was of the conventional type of heartiness. Mr. Hamilton's reply was characteristic. After thanking the Churchwardens for this token of regard, and assuring the parishioners through them of his cordial affection, he adds, "The language in which they express their regard for me is, believe me, most humiliating to me, and forces me to review the past, and to seek for its sober reality. I have now spent all but seven years amongst you, and my whole intercourse with you has been a most happy one; but oh! may God grant that we may be in His sight what we have been in one another's, and that [20/21] when we meet at the Day of Judgment we may do so with joy, and not with grief!"

In later years the Bishop has often dwelt on the strength of these pastoral and other ties to Oxford, and has wondered that any thing could have availed to counterbalance them. But almost coincidently with the invitation from Salisbury there came another call from another diocese. Dr. Law, Bishop of Bath and Wells, pressed Mr. Hamilton somewhat urgently to accept an Archdeaconry then at his disposal; and this second invitation appeared to "show it to be God's will that, for whatever reason, he should change his quarters." If he must choose, he would follow his old friend and Vicar to Salisbury; and in coming to this decision he was probably assisted by a motive, not distinctly admitted as such to himself, but by no means without its influence. Of all the elevating friendships of his early life, that with the late Mrs. Denison was ever cherished by him as among the highest; he was never weary of referring, not indeed to her beauty and accomplishments, which were matters of sufficient notoriety, but to the great moral interest and delicacy of her character, and to her deep and pure enthusiasm for all that could promote the honour of God and the well-being of His Church. The prospect of her companionship, he often said, had done more at least than any other human consideration to reconcile him to the thought of parting with his Oxford friends: and yet when he came to Salisbury, it was only to follow her to her grave in the Cloister. She died on September 22nd, 1841. By her death her husband was plunged into the deepest melancholy; for awhile he "almost entirely shut himself up in his palace;" and Mr. Hamilton, in his isolation, was distressed by the fear [21/22] that he had made a false move in life, by accepting a post which offered fewer opportunities of serving God than he had enjoyed at Oxford, and which did not warrant him in supposing that he was of any real service to the Bishop who had invited him to leave it. He seriously thought of resigning his Canonry, and returning to Oxford within the year. He was prevented from taking this course, partly by the earnest remonstrance of his friend Mr. James Hope, who warned him against the moral risk of "looking back" after "putting his hand to the plough," and partly by an interview with his diocesan. At that interview, Bishop Denison broke through the reserve which was more or less habitual to him, and which had been perhaps deepened by his sorrow, and assured his chaplain that his own best hopes of personal comfort and "of doing any good work in his diocese in time to come were hound up with the continuance of services which he deemed to be simply invaluable."

From that time all hesitation was at an end; and Canon Hamilton threw himself into the duties of his new position with all the fervour of his character. The immediate scene of his work, as a Canon Residentiary, was the Cathedral. The Stall to which he was instituted in 1841 was that of the Treasurer; his most distinguished predecessor in it had been Edmund Rich, afterwards known as S. Edmund of Canterbury. In 1841 he was transferred to the Precentorship; and this virtually gave him the command of the Choir. He at once addressed himself to reforming, and raising the tone of, the daily service. Although he had not a cultivated ear, nor much natural inclination to study music, he endeavoured to supply these defects, so far as it was possible to do so, by hard and conscientious [22/23] labour. He used to regret that the proper rendering of the Cathedral Services should be wholly left to the minor Canons, while the Residentiaries were for the most part unable or unwilling to take their part at the Altar, or elsewhere, without the most inharmonious result. He determined that he would himself contribute nothing to the unseemly discord of the prevailing practice. On the same principle, when Bishop, he intoned the Ordination Service throughout; and he was thought by competent judges to do this remarkably well. The truth is that he loved his duties towards the Cathedral for their own sake, and not merely as conditions attached to a piece of Church preferment. Every chant and anthem that was used during his precentorship was selected by himself, and upon the principle of making the music and anthems, so far as might be, illustrate the Church's seasons, or the prominent features of her teaching in the daily services. He also devoted much time and effort to forming the intimate acquaintance of the choristers and lay-vicars, with a view to leading them to feel their high privilege in taking so prominent a part in the worship of God, and to replacing the perfunctory and irreverent spirit which is too common in cathedral choirs, by a sincere and earnest devotion. At a later date, it was owing to his suggestion and efforts, and to the co-operation of the late Dean Lear, that the choristers, who had previously been lodged at different places in the city, were collected in one of the houses in the Close, under the care of a "Master" in holy orders; their education and discipline being thus sufficiently provided for. Canon Hamilton's own attendance at the services was marked by an unfailing regularity all the year round. He allowed nothing to interfere [23/24] with an obligation so binding upon himself, and so stimulating, in the way of example, to others. In 1847 he discovered that there had been at Salisbury, as in other cathedrals, a daily early morning service, which had been disused; and he obtained the permission of the Dean and Chapter to restore it, making himself responsible for this duty, but not allowing its performance to interfere with his presence at the two great offices in the choir. In 1849 he effected a much more important improvement, by restoring the weekly 8 a.m. celebration of the Holy Communion in the Cathedral. For this ministration, too, he made himself responsible; and although, since his Consecration in 1854, the maintenance of these services has of necessity passed, to a considerable extent, into other hands, he was to the last, when at Salisbury, a constant attendant at the early morning prayer on weekdays, and he made a point of celebrating the Holy Communion in person on Sundays. It cannot be doubted that this portion of his work will survive him.

Such efforts were not without their effect. It was observable in an increased attendance at the Cathedral services, and in the devotion of the worshippers; especially as Canon Hamilton's earnest and constant preaching exerted a most important influence in the same direction. Once on almost every Sunday, and always once on holydays, he appeared in the Cathedral pulpit; and to this day his Saints' day sermons are remembered by persons who attribute to them their first vivid ideas of the various and great graces with which God the Holy Spirit can adorn the human character in those who yield themselves to His transforming and elevating influence.

But when all was done, the Cathedral was very far [24/25] indeed from realizing the ideal which was present to the mind of its Precentor. In the first place it was, architecturally speaking, in as unsatisfactory a condition as was possible, short of its being an absolute ruin. With the best intentions, but with the most disastrous results, the architect Wyatt had been "let loose" upon Salisbury Cathedral, during the Episcopate of Bishop Shute Barrington (1782-1791); the choir screen was removed in order to create a "Gothic vista" extending to the end of the Lady Chapel; the smaller chapels and the monuments, which in their historical position had clustered around the eastern extremity of the church, were swept away; the latter being arranged between the columns of the nave, apparently on an horticultural principle of some sort, but with an absolute disregard of architectural rule and of historical interest. [King's Handbook to the Cathedrals: Salisbury. P. 68.] Neat, cold, unmeaningly symmetrical, the interior of Salisbury chills the soul more cruelly than does the roofless nave of Tintern: in the one case imagination is free to picture "what must have been," in the other there is no escape from the sense of "what is." No other English cathedral, of the same rank of beauty, has suffered from so desolating a scourge. In no other, as has often been remarked, does the outline of the exterior create such lofty anticipations; and nowhere else, as the stranger passes within, are they so bitterly disappointed.

A thorough restoration of this magnificent building, always a most earnest object of desire with Canon Hamilton, was yet to come: and that such a restoration of the exterior has been actually completed, is mainly due to the untiring exertions of the present [25/26] Dean, during Bishop Hamilton's Episcopate; while, as we write, the work of interior repair is commencing with the Lady Chapel. [Since this was written it has been determined to restore the choir of Salisbury Cathedral as a memorial to Bishop Hamilton. It would be impossible to honour his memory in a manner more entirely in harmony with one of his most cherished hopes.] But Mr. Hamilton was anxious for something more than an architectural regeneration. He longed to make his cathedral religiously and ecclesiastically the central influence, the mother church of the city and diocese; and it was still far from being this except in name. His convictions as to the actual state of the case were not altogether at variance with those of a Presbyterian writer of high feeling and culture in the current number of Fraser's Magazin. ["A May Ramble," by A. K. H. B., Fraser's Magazine, August, 1869.] It was impossible to suppose that that thinly-attended service in the choir at all corresponded to the ideal of a cathedral worship; an ideal which the fabric could not but suggest. A church like Salisbury Cathedral implied a worship at once majestic and popular; intelligible, yet splendid; satisfying, in some sort, the higher aspirations and feelings of cultured piety, yet so devised and offered, as also to hush and elevate the thoughts and hearts of a prostrate multitude. Such a church was, in virtue of its very form, manifestly designed to be a sanctuary and home of the people; open to them, like God's presence-chamber above, at all hours of the day, for private prayer, if they so liked, as well as for public praise and intercession; open to them for the religious musings of a leisure half-hour, at the intervals of toil or in the late evening when work was over, not less [26/27] freely than for the capitular service at the usual hours in the choir. Could nothing be done with that vast nave, with those aisles, those transepts? Did all that luxury of space and variety of resource only recall a ritual that had passed away? Was it impossible to cover that pavement with a listening and praying multitude? Was it out of the question ever to associate these chapels with the work of religious guilds or charitable societies in the neighbouring city? Was it hopeless to suppose that the time would ever come when the Bread of Life would be broken at the Altar of the Cathedral once at least on every morning in the year, for all who might seek it; when every evening, within those walls, long after the echoes of the Choral Service had died away, a short instruction in Christian truth, and a few simple prayers and hymns, might attract modern working men to a building in which their forefathers had been at home, but which they had themselves learned to look upon as little better than a huge monument connected with some considerable endowments, and belonging to some fortunate people who lived in the Cathedral Close?

Canon Hamilton did not think that it was purely Utopian to hope, if not for all of these particular improvements, yet for some improvements of the kind; for changes that should make the Cathedral something more than an historical and antiquarian museum, by transfiguring it into a central sanctuary of warm and hearty Christian worship. Undoubtedly it would have been a mistake to imagine that the nave of Salisbury could ever be filled like those of Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's. The limited population of the whole city, the attachment of the Church-going people to their parish churches, and the natural unwillingness [27/28] of the cathedral clergy to weaken existing ties between the parochial clergy and their flocks, by attracting the latter elsewhere, were considerations which forbade this. But, short of an impossible ideal, there was room for vast improvement;--an improvement the earlier stages of which Bishop Hamilton lived to witness. The use of the nave by large congregations at meetings of the two Societies, and on Sunday afternoons during the summer months of the last eight years, kindled his hopes of better things. On Thursday, May 30, 1861, he himself preached, before the Salisbury Diocesan Choral Association, the first sermon that had been heard in the nave for more than eighty years. "The thought," he begins by saying, "which is filling almost unduly my mind and heart at this present moment, is that I am again taking possession, as it were, of a place from which, in former days, many of the predecessors of us the Clergy of this Cathedral Church used to witness to the Truths of the Gospel, and so have helped to hand on to ourselves that sacred deposit." [Cathedrals and Church Music: a Sermon preached on occasion of a meeting of the Salisbury Diocesan Choral Association, in the nave of their Cathedral, on Thursday, May 30th, 1861, by Walter Kerr, Bishop of Salisbury. Salisbury: Brown and Co. P. 1.] He glances rapidly at the long history of his Cathedral Church; at its original foundation on the neighbouring heights of Old Sarum; at its transfer by Bishop Poore to the water-meadows of the Avon valley; at the six centuries which link those days to these. But this splendid temple is much more than a link with the past: it has a social and religious value at the present day. The nave of a Cathedral Church is, in a peculiar sense, [28/29] the common home of the people. "The space in it is unappropriated; all persons have equal rights in it; and these rights have not been interfered with by those arrangements for families in pews, which, whatever be their advantage, have the manifest inconvenience of repelling many who cannot be thus provided for, from their common place of meeting, their parish church.....Such foundations as this were intended .... to strengthen the weak parts of the parochial system. In the very best things in this world there is ever a tendency to evil; and there is in the parochial system that which, though in itself most admirable, may lead to such an exclusive attention to the interests of a small portion of the Body, as to withdraw the thoughts and affections of the members of the Church from the well-being of the whole, and so to the loss of that Spirit of Unity which should bind together every individual member of the Body, to the Body itself, and so to Him Who is its Head, even Christ." [Ibid. p. 11.] The cathedrals might thus promote a large-hearted charity; and they might invigorate both public Prayer and Preaching, by giving fuller scope to the play of that sense of sympathy which the presence of a multitude, intent on a common sacred object, cannot fail to inspire. [Ibid. p. 13.]

Even this moderate measure of improvement had not been attempted when Mr. Hamilton was a Canon; and he felt keenly the disproportion which existed between the scale of the cathedral establishment and the spiritual work it achieved. It seemed to him a cruel libel on the spirit and capacity of the English Church to say that her cathedral services could never be made [29/30] worthy of the fabrics which she had inherited from the middle ages; that she was merely a guardian of antiquarian treasures which she knew not how to use,--the invading insect which rattled in one claw of the empty lobster-shell, instead of the living creature to whom the whole shell really belonged, and who would fill it as a matter of course. But he was convinced that if a change was to be wrought, it must begin with those upon whom the actual government and administration of these churches devolves. Until the Canons of our cathedrals are able to give their whole hearts to the work which canonries imply, nothing, he was convinced, would really secure to the cathedrals their true place in the system of the Church. "Let Deans and Canons," he said, "be the best of men; yet if they have parishes, their hearts will be probably in the duties of their cure of souls, and the three months' residence at the cathedral will have passed away before they have undertaken any real, definite work; and of course any continued engagement in such works as specially belong to cathedrals is absolutely impossible." He was "persuaded that our Church suffers great damage and loss from the use of cathedral patronage, either as a means of eking out the small incomes of ill-paid parish priests, or of rewarding good but well-endowed parish priests with additional preferment." [Cathedral Reform: a Letter to the Members of his Diocese, from Walter Kerr, Bishop of Salisbury. London: Rivingtons, 1855. P. 6.] His chief panacea, therefore, for the feebleness and failure of the cathedral system was to enforce constant residence upon the Canons as well as upon the Dean; and, as a consequence, to [30/31] allow no member of the Residentiary Chapter to hold his Deanery or Canonry together with any other preferment. He himself acted upon this principle during the thirteen years of his life as a Canon. He resolutely declined the Rectory of Loughton at his father's death, when he would gladly have enabled his mother to live on in her old home if his conscience had permitted him to accept it. Although, in consequence of the successive elevations of Canons Bickersteth and Waldegrave to the Episcopate, the Crown relieved him, as Bishop of Salisbury, of the duty of presenting to the one Canonry in the gift of his see, he never made any secret whatever of his intention, if the occasion should arise, to exact both a promise of constant residence, and an engagement to accept no other preferment whatever during the tenure of the Canonry, from any clergyman on whom he might himself confer it. If the late Lord Herbert of Lea had been spared to his Church and country, it is, at this date, no violation of confidence to say that he would have at least introduced into the House of Lords a measure of Cathedral Reform, to which Precentor Hamilton's opinion upon the subject of Canonries would have contributed some of its most important clauses.

For very obvious reasons, it would be unreasonable to anticipate that any such measure would command universal popularity among those whom it might most immediately affect. But these reasons are not generally urged by upholders of the still existing system. It is more commonly pleaded that four resident Canons would have nothing to do; and that able and hardworking clergymen would be demoralized by the inertia, if not by the social pettinesses, of a Cathedral Close. [31/32] But Bishop Hamilton's idea was to connect certain diocesan duties with each of the stalls; a specific fitness for which would govern the selection of its occupant. "One Canon would be Archdeacon; another at the head of the Theological College; another would organize and forward the work of the two great Church Missionary Societies in the diocese; a fourth might superintend the progress and inspection of Diocesan Education." These duties, supplemented by a common and equal interest in promoting the efficiency and beauty of the cathedral services, would afford full occupation to earnest men; and when it was understood that the salary of a Canonry was not really prize-money, but was attached to the discharge of a specific work, public opinion would co-operate with the conscience of individual Canons to do the rest. For himself, while still Precentor of Salisbury, Mr. Hamilton wrote as follows, in days when the idea of any close connexion between diocesan responsibilities and a Canonry would scarcely have been entertained in any quarter:--"The absence of a full complement of definite duties will probably secure to this reputed idler an amount of other business that may make the place of a resident Canon a far harder one than that of a not idle parish priest. When I had a parish in Oxford I was not an idle man; but I had more leisure for study and for my own pursuits than I have ever enjoyed here as Canon, and Secretary to the Board of Education, and Bishop's Chaplain." [Cathedral Reform, p. 21.]

This, then, was the leading idea of the pamphlet which Mr. Hamilton published in 1853, on the subject of Cathedral Reform, and which he reprinted, [32/33] together with a Pastoral Letter addressed to the members of the Church in his diocese, when, in 1855, he had already been for a year Bishop of Salisbury. He included, indeed, in his idea of Cathedral Reform a great deal besides improvement in the religious services. Cathedrals, he thought, ought to be centres of religious education; and he advocated "the plan which was always so fondly cherished by my very dear and honoured friend and tutor, Dr. Arnold," of opening "a hall in Oxford or Cambridge for the most meritorious of our choristers and other grammar scholars." [Cathedral Reform, p. 27.] He thought it important to revive the ancient privileges of the Great Chapter of non-residentiary Prebendaries. Bishop Denison had saved these stalls from total suppression when they were deprived of their endowments; the seat in the choir and the legal right to a vote in the Great Chapter upon certain occasions remained. Bishop Hamilton wished to make that vote a reality; and also "under the presidency of the Dean, and subject to the correction of their measures by an appeal to the visitor of the cathedral," to entrust the prebendaries with large powers of supervision and control. [Cathedral Reform, p. 7.] He was particularly desirous of adding to and improving the cathedral library, and of making it as widely useful as possible. He further proposed adequately to endow vicarages and perpetual curacies in parishes where the Dean and Chapter were impropriate Rectors; and to make a provision for the chaplaincy of the city workhouse and of Bugmore Hospital. Of these aspirations, some have been more or less satisfied, and others rendered impossible, by the proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for [33/34] England. But it is still open to Episcopal patrons and to friendly members of the Legislature, who might make the constant residence of all future Canons strictly compulsory, to preserve what remains of the cathedral system, by putting an end to a state of things which threatens nothing short of an entire collapse, whenever the subject is seriously discussed in a reformed Parliament.

But Canon Hamilton's object in his various proposals was higher than any wish to save the cathedrals from being "parochialized" or even from being confiscated to secular uses. Cathedrals might be of real service, he believed, to the true work of the Church; and he earnestly desired to make them thus serviceable. "That God may in His great mercy and goodness be pleased to raise our cathedrals from their present low estate to the one they should occupy in the judgment and affections of right-minded, true-hearted Churchmen, is the anxious hope and prayer of one who only cares for any of these things as a means of extending our Blessed Lord's Kingdom, and of building up its members in their most holy faith." [Cathedral Reform, p. 8.] That certainly was the ruling motive of the writer's interest in the subject: he was not thinking chiefly of antiquity or of art, but of the glory of God and of the edification of souls.

It has already been implied that much of Canon Hamilton's time and interest was devoted to the subject of education. The Training School for Girls, which was established in the Close during Bishop Denison's Episcopate, absorbed a great deal of his time and interest during the week and on Sundays. He was formally secretary and practically chaplain to [34/35] this institution; and he succeeded in raising its intellectual and religious standard most markedly. Besides this, he constantly and readily lent a helping hand to the parochial clergy of Salisbury. It was his usual practice to preach at the Sunday evening service in St. Thomas's Church; and he thus enabled its devoted curate, at that time single-handed, to carry on his work under circumstances of much difficulty. [The Rev. Prebendary Renaud, now Vicar of St. Thomas's.] Mr. Hamilton further re-arranged and read through all the cathedral archives. He restored and refitted the cathedral muniment-room, making it a safe receptacle for these documents; just as, in later years, he made similar provision for the archives of the diocese over the eastern gateway of the palace grounds. The study of the manuscripts cost him "really hard work;" an illustrious predecessor in undertaking it had been Chancellor Drake, the Editor of Andrewes's "Devotions," in the reign of Charles II. The broad result of his reading was to "disillusionize" him as to the state of things in the close of Sarum before the Reformation. Petty quarrels; constant appeals to Rome; groundless scandals of a grave kind, and scandals that rested, unhappily, upon very good grounds; all the grosser struggles about income and preferment which we usually associate with the eighteenth century; these and such like materials were the staple of the history. They went to show that the Church had suffered in the Middle Ages from many of the causes which have depressed her hi later days; causes which are so rooted hi human frailty, as often to overmatch the grace of Christ; and that in some respects the Reformation, especially while the personal influence of Bishop Jewel was still felt, [35/36] had considerably improved the tone of the cathedral body.

Besides this, as throughout his life, Mr. Hamilton read regularly, and as a matter of conscience, solid theology, for its own sake, and not merely with a view to preparation for the pulpit. His Patristic knowledge was wide and accurate; he made constant and systematic references to all that he read, and he possessed in a high degree that cultivated theological instinct which could anticipate with remarkable precision the kind of language that was or was not likely to be found in a particular writer. He was always a diligent student of Holy Scripture. He not unfrequently expressed the opinion that many modern Churchmen were in danger of impoverishing their spiritual life by neglecting Holy Scripture, amid the abundance of recent devotional books. He did not wish to depreciate these books, but he was jealous of any interference with the paramount claims of Scripture upon the daily attention of every soul. There was, he thought, some risk in the natural violence of a reaction from the popular Puritan conception that each individual can elaborate a religion for himself by dint of a study of the Authorized Version. Although, by her Creeds, the Church saves her dutiful children from the perils whether of absurd and blasphemous speculation, or of painful uncertainty and bewilderment; she does not thereby disparage, much less forbid, the duty incumbent upon all Christian souls, of listening to the voice of God the Holy Ghost, speaking to the heart and conscience through the Bible, as He speaks through no other existing book. To Bishop Hamilton himself a conversation on the sense of some portion of Scripture was one of the greatest enjoyments of his [36/37] life. In his last illness he dwelt upon the pleasure which he derived from the pages of his Bible: "One gets nothing like it out of any other reading," he said. And on his better days he read through entire books of Scripture, spending many hours upon them, and afterwards discussing particular points which they had raised in his mind. In this way, while he was at 33, Grosvenor-street, he read through the whole of the Acts of the Apostles on one day, and the Epistle to the Komans on another. He used to say that the Holy Spirit helped his personal needs most completely through the Book of Hosea in the Old Testament, and through the Epistle to the Philippians in the New. He never wearied of reading and re-reading Dr. Pusey's beautiful commentary upon the first of the Minor Prophets; the contrast between the sin and ingratitude of Israel, and the tenderness and depths of the Divine compassion, satisfied at once his own sense of sinfulness before God, and his hope of acceptance through the Redemptive Work of Jesus Christ. In the Epistle to the Philippians he was attracted by the constant exhortations to "rejoice in the Lord;" [Phil. iii. 1; iv. 4.] lightheartedness being at once the right and the duty of a redeemed Christian whose conscience is in fairly good order. He used to "wish that he could rise more perfectly above personal and diocesan troubles to the spirit of that Epistle." In it, too, he admired some most characteristic manifestations of St. Paul's great gift of sympathy. [Phil. i. 3-8.] The varied personal allusions in the Epistle, [Phil. ii. 19-22. 25-29; iv. 2, 3.] its overflowing affectionateness, the gratitude, and yet the delicacy, with which the Apostle touches upon the sacrifices made on his account by [37/38] the Philippian converts, [Phil. iv. 15-18.] not to mention the great passage on the stupendous Incarnation of the Eternal Son;--all had the most living meaning for Walter Hamilton. [Phil. ii. 5-11.] When referring to this Epistle in conversation, he has sometimes found himself so overcome by his sense of the generosity of the Apostle's character, or still more, of the vastness of the Love and Pity of Jesus Christ, as to be quite unable to proceed. Of the Fathers he chiefly read St. Augustine. Even in January, 1869, he took the volume of the folio Benedictine edition, containing the De Civitate Dei, to London, with the intention of again reading the later books of that great work during his illness. Among the older Anglican writers, Donne, the eloquent Dean of St. Paul's, was probably, on the whole, most familiar to him; "I read Donne through more than once before I left Merton." In his earliest ministerial life Leighton had been his favourite author. Although in later years he deplored the taint of Calvinistic fatalism, and the poverty of sacramental teaching which mark this writer, he never lost his value for the profoundly devotional spirit of the Commentary on St. Peter,--so welcome to every practical Christian. Among modern foreign theologians he was very fond of referring to the "Loci Theologici" of Melchior Canus; while of recent sermons, "none," he thought, "could compare with Newman, whether for style or matter." He read a great deal of French prose, and enjoyed it; and, less frequently, Italian. German writers he never read except in translations; and he had but little sympathy with the characteristic forms of thought even in orthodox German writers. [38/39] Considering the great influence which Germany, whether Protestant or Catholic, exercises both for good and evil upon the religious mind of England, it will perhaps in some quarters be thought that this was a weak point in a theologian of such generally wide sympathies and far-reaching culture. [It should, however, be added that among the last books which he read through were Martensen's Dogmatik (Clark's Theol. Library), and Döllinger's First Age of the Church, which has been given to the English public in the unrivalled translation of the Rev. H. N. Oxenham.]

Of Mr. Hamilton's theological knowledge the foundations were completed, if they were not laid, during his precentorship. One fruit of his earlier ministry had been a book of "Family Prayers," which has been printed in Dr. Hook's "Devotional Library." It was originally published in 1842; and in the Preface, which is dated from the Close, Sarum, on July 18th in that year, Mr. Hamilton offers it to his quondam parishioners at Oxford, as a link to bind them to their old pastor; while the work is dedicated with a "reverence, affection, and gratitude," which the writer most certainly felt, to Bishop Bagot of Oxford. It is not, possibly, so accurate in all of its liturgical expressions and forms as a more modern book might be: but it must be used, if it is to be appreciated. It is redolent of the spirit of Scripture, of early liturgies, of Andrewes's "Devotions;" it abounds in prayers which cannot be repeated sincerely without exerting upon the conscience the most powerful and searching influence; it does not pall upon the spiritual taste after long use; and it provides very remarkably for the needs and capacities of old and young alike, or rather of those who know little of the practice and [39/40] spirit of prayer, and of those who have made some way in it.

Among the various features of this book one appears to merit especial notice, from its connexion with a prominent feature of Mr. Hamilton's devotional life. A large proportion of the prayers are addressed directly to our Lord Jesus Christ. Although in the Eucharistic service of the Church prayer is for the most part offered to the Eternal Father through the Son, according to an ancient and recognized principle; yet in all other devotions, the Son Himself has been always, and equally with the Father, an object of the most profound adoration that the Christian soul can offer. Indeed a willingness to pay Him this His rightful honour is a test of serious belief in His real Divinity, as distinct from acquiescence in some Arianizing or Socinianizing theory, fatal not merely to His Divine claims and honour, but to the truthfulness and modesty, and therefore to the perfection, of His Human Character. No man felt this more deeply than the late Bishop of Salisbury; and the worship which he offered, day by day, to Jesus Christ, was proportionately intense and deliberate. He carefully obeyed the Divine rule "that all men should honour the Son even as they honour the Father." [John v. 23.] The suggestion that the adoration of Christ was "contrary to the spirit of the English liturgy" struck him as being not less hostile to our Lord's prerogatives than it was, historically speaking, untrue. Towards our Lord he entertained a deep, personal affection, such as a good man would feel for a very holy friend; while yet this friendship, without ceasing to be such, shaded off into the deepest worship, as being due to One Who [40/41] is truly God as well as truly Man. Language is now sometimes heard which seems to imply that Jesus Christ is only a figure of the distant past, reanimated to the eye of imagination by a careful critical study of the pages of a remarkable book. But the real value of the Gospels which show what Jesus Christ was eighteen centuries ago, appeared to the Bishop to consist in the fact that they show what Jesus Christ is, at this very moment; unseen, it is true, but not less truly living than in the days of His flesh. What our Lord thought, or wished, or disapproved, was just as practical a consideration, hour after hour, to the late Bishop of Salisbury as are the tastes of a wife and children, or of associates to men in general. "Whom not having seen, we love; in Whom, though now we see Him not, yet believing, we rejoice,"--was the motto of the Bishop's life. [1 Pet. i. 8.] No man can have been intimate with Walter Hamilton without feeling that to him Jesus Christ was just as truly present as a living Person as He was to His first Apostles;--the constant object and stimulus and centre of thought, and affection, and disinterested effort, and loving self-sacrifice, and homage as enthusiastic as it was profound.

Mr. Hamilton's position and occupations did not make him a recluse: he was perhaps one of the most popular Canons that could easily be found in any English cathedral close. When he left Laleham in 1826, Dr. Arnold wrote to him, "Now you are gone away I learn no news of the village, and only conjecture that Harris continues his opposition by seeing his cart stand where it used to do." [MS. letter. Dec. 31, 1826.] The habits of social interest and observation which had been so useful at Laleham were transferred to Salisbury. Canon [41/42] Hamilton knew everybody, and everybody knew him. As a Salisbury resident observed to the present writer in later years, "Our Bishop, sir, has lived here so long among us, that he is less like a Bishop than one of ourselves." Whenever he was not prevented by circumstances which he could not control, it was his practice on Sundays to invite six or eight poor people to dinner; he took a particular pleasure "in feeding the poor." He generally had some cases of sickness in hand about the city, to which he brought spiritual and temporal relief at all the intervals of work he could command. When the cholera broke out in 1849, Canon Hamilton at once joined his Diocesan in visiting the sufferers. He was, however, speedily laid up by an illness which, somewhat later in that autumn, obligedhim to seek a restoration oHiealth abroad. In after years he always maintained that, whatever men might say elsewhere, the Salisbury people would never misunderstand him. He felt, so to speak, that he had his hand upon the pulse of his cathedral city; and this confidence was the result of his constant and intimate habits of intercourse with its inhabitants during his precentorship.

On January 9th, 1845, Mr. Hamilton was married to Isabel Elizabeth, daughter of the Very Rev. Francis Lear, Dean of Salisbury, and eight children survive him. The joys and the sorrows of that union are too recent and too sacred for any thing beyond the barest record. But a friend, who knew him well at the time and afterwards, writes that in Mr. Hamilton's case marriage certainly did not involve any lowering of the religious standard; "it impressed a deeper devotional element on his life." [MS. letter.]

[43] His domestic lot, while he was a Canon of Salisbury, had its full share of sorrow. On March 6th, 1842, he lost his only and dearly beloved sister, Jane Sotheby. His own very serious illness in September, 1849, was followed on March 23rd, 1850, by the death of his father-in-law, the Dean of Salisbury, and by that of his infant child Osmund, on October 11th in the same year. These wounds were scarcely closed, when his own father, Archdeacon Hamilton, died, on September 10th, 1851. Of his later family sorrows, one of the sorest was the loss of his eldest child, Mary Isabel, on April 18th, 1859.

Of his life as a Canon between 1841 and 1847 the following picture is supplied by one who knew him intimately and visited him often:--"His whole soul was set on making his work and office as efficient as he could. This desire gave occasion to his pamphlet on Cathedral Reform.....It was by way of keeping before him a reminder of his work that he used to wear his cassock all day, and it was not until after the afternoon service that he put on his coat for a walk. Till then his time was given to work within the Close and in his study. Cheerful and full of fun as he was, and utterly devoid of stiffness and formality in restricting conversation to serious subjects, one could not but observe that these latter were those to which he continually recurred, always following up with readiness any opening for them. Many an evening we have talked over Church prospects and Church progress and Church anxieties and perplexities in the diocese, and at Oxford, and at large. Once, before taking leave for a longer time than usual, I remember going with him by moonlight into the cathedral, and there praying that God would supply what was wanting in the [43/44] Church among us, and preserve her from the perils which most beset her." [MS. letter.]

Among the "anxieties" and "perplexities" referred to were those defections from the English Church to which allusion has been already made, and the causes which more immediately led to them. Although the secession of Mr. Newman in 1845 was in itself and in its consequences of graver importance to the Church than that of Archdeacon Manning and others in 1851; it is probable, in the judgment of the present writer, that Mr. Hamilton was even more distressed by the later than by the earlier disaster. This was due, partly to the fact of his close and affectionate friendship with Archdeacon Manning, and partly to the aggravation of Mr. Hamilton's sense of the loss thus inflicted upon the English Church which was caused by the miserable episode that precipitated, although it could not justify the step. The Gorham Judgment may have furnished some few waverers with the final impulse, with the producible pretext, for deserting their old spiritual mother: but to the most loyal and loving of her children that Judgment was, and is, a cause of very serious embarrassment. Such distress was occasioned, not merely by the violence with which a clergyman, denying the revealed doctrine of Baptismal Grace, was forced by the civil power, and in the teeth of his Bishop, into an English benefice; but, much more, by the alarming commentary which the case supplied upon the real meaning of the Acts 2 and 3 William IV. c. 92, and 3 and 4 William IV. c. 41. It now appeared that by these Acts, a court of civilians, who might or [44/45] might not be believers in Christianity, were invested with the power of overruling the decision of the Church's own courts, and of pronouncing upon the gravest and most delicate questions of Christian doctrine, under the semblance of determining the true sense of formularies which happened to be also legal documents. Alas! that terrible evil, festering at the very heart of our Church system, and pregnant most assuredly with spiritual mischief in the times to come, is still viewed, as it would seem, with indifference or even with approval, by most of our rulers in Church and State; and it may be feared that the necessity of remedial legislation will only be discovered when it is too late. But the question was, and is, not whether such a state of things is desirable, nor yet whether it is dangerous, but whether it is fatal to the life of the English Church, and still more whether it amounts to a demonstration of the claims or pretensions of the Church of Rome. The relations between the as yet undivided Church and the Constantinopolitan Emperors supplied parallels which showed that the interference of the State, even in matters of doctrine, might up to a certain point be tolerable. The spiritual assumptions of the Judicial Committee did not really prove that the Papal claim to an (Ecumenical supremacy had any solid basis either in Scripture or in history; nor could the Roman cultus of the Blessed Virgin be shown to be God's Will by the fact that an insult had been offered by the civil power in England to one of His sacraments. This, or something very like this, was Mr. Hamilton's mind in those trying times; and it accounts both for his personal distress and for his decision to part company with friends whom he loved, and with whom, up to a certain point, he had deep sympathy. It explains [45/46] that which followed, and which, in a man of his thorough sincerity, might have been otherwise inexplicable. Notwithstanding his sense of the great evil referred to, he had, in the year 1854, that robust belief in the life and mission of the English Church which alone could have permitted him to accept a bishopric.

On Monday, March 6, 1854, Bishop Denison was called to his rest. "On the morning of Ash-Wednesday (the preceding Wednesday) he was obliged to send for his medical attendant, and said repeatedly during the day that he felt very ill. On Thursday and Friday the symptoms seemed to be mitigated:" on Monday it had become plain that all was already over, except in fact; and the manner in which the Bishop spent that day in preparation for his passage to another world has been described, in a well-known sermon, by his chaplain. ["In the Midst of Life we are in Death:" a Sermon preached in the Cathedral Church of Salisbury, by the Rev. Walter Kerr Hamilton, Chaplain of the late Bishop of Salisbury, on March 12, 1854. London: Rivingtons, 1854. P. 25.] But before he passed away, Bishop Denison dictated a message to Lord Aberdeen, who was at the time Prime Minister, to the effect that in the judgment of a man, now almost in the act of dying, Mr. Hamilton would be of all others best able to carry on the work of Christ in the diocese. Lord Aberdeen felt that to yield at once might create a precedent which would interfere with the free exercise of the Crown's choice as patron. He "passed a sleepless night;" it was impossible to entertain Bishop Denison's petition. [MS. letter of the Rev. W. B. Heathcote.] The See was accordingly offered to the Rev. J. J. Blunt, the then eminent Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. Professor Blunt was [46/47] three times urged to accept the position, "but he declined it on the ground that although then in fair health, he was too old to make an efficient Bishop for more than a short while." ["H.," in "Guardian" of August 25, 1869.] The Premier then felt himself at liberty to do that which he would have done in the first instance if his sense of duty to the Crown had permitted it; and Bishop Denison's dying message was obeyed. [This statement is made on the authority of the late Bishojj. It is perfectly reconcilable with "H.'s" assertion, that "Lord Aberdeen seriously intended Professor Blunt to be Bishop." In offering the See to Professor Blunt, Lord Aberdeen had set aside his own original wishes in obedience to a sense of duty, and, it must be added, in favour of a man who commanded universal respect.]

Certainly to no one did that summons cause surprise more complete, or more unaffected and keen distress, than to the man who was most concerned. The interval of painful deliberation,--the determination to say "No" at once,--the hurried journey to London,--the influences which were brought to bear on him, and which it is, even yet, too soon to discuss,--that "agonizing walk, up and down, in front of Lord Aberdeen's house,"--the final yielding;--all these he has often described, even with tears, to friends who could sympathize and understand. He was consecrated Bishop of Salisbury, by Archbishop Sumner, on May 14th, 1854, in the Chapel of Lambeth Palace; his consecration sermon being preached by his intimate friend, and, for some few years, brother-chaplain, the late Ven. Henry Drury, Archdeacon of Wilts.

[48] IV.

The boy is the father of the man, and Bishop Hamilton's life as a parish priest and as a cathedral Canon has already prepared us for his Episcopate. The circumstances of his call to that high office, and his deep love and reverence for Bishop Denison, had the effect of making his language and administration during the first year or two of his office scarcely more than a continuation of the words and action of his predecessor. A writer who has been already quoted expresses the opinion that during his chaplaincy to Bishop Denison Mr. Hamilton had "deferred to him too much, and in loyally upholding the views of his Bishop had too often repressed his own." [MS. letter.] If this was a mistake, it was a mistake on the right side; and Bishop Hamilton, after his consecration, continued at first to act as if he were still chaplain to his friend and patron. In his earlier Pastoral Letters he makes constant references to Bishop Denison's practice and wishes as a reason for his own; and his Primary Charge to his clergy, delivered in August, 1855, is, to a considerable extent, a description of the works which had been carried out in the diocese by his predecessor, together with a review of the most valuable features of his teaching and example.

The sayings and maxims which Bishop Hamilton has collected from Bishop Denison's Charges are in truth most beautiful and suggestive, [Charge of the Lord Bishop of Salisbury, at his primary Visitation in August, 1855, pp. 24-28.] and form, in their [48/49] entirety, a "Sacra Privata," from which, as Bishop Hamilton suggests, no inadequate idea of the inner life of their author and its governing principles may be gathered. Bishop Denison "carried into all his counsels the deep conviction of his soul, that, after all, the real and absorbing duty of a Bishop is to keep safe from all encroachment that sacred deposit which has been committed to him--the whole Doctrine of Christ and of His Holy Church." "And, indeed," exclaims his successor, "wherever I go, in the cathedral city, and, I might say in almost every parish of my diocese, my mind traces the same inscription [Bishop Denison's name] on schools and churches, yea, on every thing which would persuade men so to live that they may die with the hope of a Christian. My beloved friend and spiritual father had been called of God to do the work of a Bishop; and we are surrounded by tokens of the measure he took of that work, and how, in doing it, he made full proof of his ministry."

But, in truth, there was a real difference between the governing principles of the two administrations, the moral side of which has been happily sketched by an acute and observant writer in the Devizes Gazette:--

"If we were asked to give the one distinctive feature in Bishop Denison's character, we should name prudence. This gift it was which gave him, even in his outward demeanour, a lofty calmness of spirit. He had real clearness of view and an eye for consequences, measured his end by his means, sat down and counted the cost before he began to build his tower, was a good judge of character, patiently waited for times and seasons, readily complied with circumstances when no [49/50] vital principle was involved, avoided needless multiplication of these principles, gave great consideration to existing facts, allowed for the modifying influences of custom, accepted the condition of the times, welcomed small improvements as an earnest of greater things, advised calmness and consideration, deprecated excitement and extravagance. [Compare Charge of the Lord Bishop of Salisbury at his primary Visitation in August, 1855. At p. 23 these qualities are exhibited in harmony with Bishop Denison's "sure belief that he had received, by the gift of Christ, power, and the keen sense of responsibility which this gift brought with it."] All these qualities are so many manifestations of prudence, and explain the secret of his steady and unvarying success.

'Nullum numen abest, si sit Prudentia.'

On the other hand, the striking characteristic of our late Bishop was generosity. In whatever sense that word is taken, whether in the lower meaning of pecuniary liberality, or in that higher and truer meaning which expresses the impulse of a man who devotes himself for the good of others, the life of the Bishop of Salisbury was the manifestation of a large, simple, warm, unselfish, ungrudging nature. Whether as a College Tutor at Merton, or as Vicar of St. Peter's-in-the-East at Oxford, or as Canon of Salisbury and coadjutor to his predecessor, or as a Bishop himself, all the actions of his public life were marked with unbounded generosity. He freely gave himself for his work, wherever it might he, or whatever it might be. It is notorious that had he sooner listened to the voice of warning, and sooner desisted from his labours, his life might have been further prolonged, and he might have been still among us. He was generous in all his intercourse with others. With him the true idea of [50/51] the position in which the laity and clergy should stand to one another was that of mutual confidence. He strongly deprecated the notion that the Bishop was merely the overseer of the clergy. The truth which he was anxious to master, and make the ground of every thought, word, and deed, was that his office was ministratio, non dominatio. 'I have not dominion over your faith, but am a helper of your joy.'" [Ibid. p. 50.]

This discriminating writer would be very far from implying that, in the contrast which he has thus sketched, the presence of the one quality implied the absence of the other; that Bishop Denison was ungenerous, or Bishop Hamilton imprudent. Any such supposition would be at once dismissed upon an examination of the document which the writer has principally in view, and in which the self-control of Bishop Hamilton, and the enthusiasm of which his predecessor was at times capable, are equally evident. But the question is as to the ruling natural impulse, the predominating quality, in the two men; and there can be no doubt, with this reservation, of the justice of the general picture. The quality here called "generosity" in Bishop Hamilton, was, in its practical manifestations, enterprise in action, and unreserve in language. In the long run it makes a very great difference to a diocese whether each proposal for Church improvement and Church extension is instinctively met by its presiding mind with the question, "Why should we not?" or with the question, "Why should we?" whether sympathetic impulse, not without caution, or cautious restraint, not without some occasional dispositions to move, be the governing feature in the Bishop's character. So far as diocesan measures were concerned, [51/52] Bishop Hamilton was heart and soul for movement and progress; and his real and profound deference for the memory of his predecessor certainly did not lead him to content himself with only keeping the diocese up to the mark at which he found it.

This was observable, first of all, in the great increase of the number of places at which he held Confirmations. Bishop Denison had largely advanced upon the practice of his predecessor, Bishop Burgess, who had confirmed, after the old fashion, in a few great centres. Bishop Denison extended this to some of the more considerable villages in the diocese: Bishop Hamilton gradually carried the extension to the point of giving a Confirmation in almost every church where the incumbent might ask for it. The justification of this enormous increase of labour lay, he felt, partly in the more intimate knowledge of individual clergymen and of the spiritual condition of their flocks which he thus acquired, and partly in his thus "ceasing to be responsible for the mischief which so often attended late returns to their homes on the part of the country folk after attending a Confirmation in a strange parish, perhaps a distant one." In the year 1855, according to the printed records, he held 56 Confirmations; in 1856, 74; in 1858, 94; in 1859, 90; in 1861, 91; in 1862, 93; in 1864, 90; in 1865, 96; in 1866, 95. These figures are taken from the programmes of the Confirmation tours: as a matter of fact, the Bishop often added largely to his original scheme at the desire of particular clergymen. He devoted the greatest care to the administration of this most sacred rite; feeling, as he said, its extreme importance to the young people concerned. He "had no right to spare himself any [52/53] necessary trouble in administering a blessing, which was given only once in a lifetime to each person who received it." Until his last Confirmation in Dorsetshire, in October, 1868, when at the desire of his medical advisers he restricted himself to a single address, it was his practice to give two addresses, each of considerable length, at every Confirmation; and these addresses were prepared with conscientious care. As he generally held two Confirmations in the day, this practically amounted to his preaching four sermons on each day during a Confirmation tour. It is needless to add that he did not confirm "by railfuls" or "by twos" at a time. Such expedients, which are sometimes quoted in order to justify the practice, so disturbing and painful to well-informed and reverent Churchmen, of administering even the Holy Communion "to railfuls" with one utterance of the words designed by the Church to be addressed to each recipient, were to him "altogether repulsive." Nor was such care without its fruits. There are on record some signal proofs of the blessing with which God visited that loving reverence and those earnest words;--words in which the great solemnities of life and death were brought before the souls of young servants of Christ with such faithful and affectionate power.

In carrying out these and similar improvements he made great use of the sympathy and co-operation of his chaplains. Among them, during the earlier years of his Episcopate, were the Hon. and Rev. C. A. Harris, now Bishop of Gibraltar, the Hon. and Rev. W. Scott, Rector of Maiden-Newton, the Rev. J. L. Popham, Prebendary of Salisbury and Rector of Chilton, the Ven. Henry Drury, Archdeacon of Wilts, the Rev. James Fraser, Vicar of Cholderdon and [53/54] Fellow of Oriel, the Kev. W. B. Heathcote, late Fellow of New College and Precentor of Sarum, and the Bishop's brothers-in-law, the Rev. Francis Lear, Rector of Bishopstone and subsequently Precentor of Salisbury, and the Rev. S. H. Lear, his domestic chaplain. Such a staff furnished him with wide scholarship, accurate theological learning, practical administrative talent, earnest pastoral zeal, and tried friendship and loyalty. Nothing could be more affectionate and cordial than the relations which subsisted between them; and the Bishop certainly lost no opportunity of showing his sense of this, when occasion arose, and at whatever cost of popularity to himself.

Earnestly desirous as the Bishop was to make his Confirmations contribute as much as possible to the spiritual life of his diocese, he was even more anxious to raise the tone of all that preceded and accompanied the administration of Holy Orders. He had at first intended to hold Ordinations at each of the Ember seasons, as a matter of course. But, in an agricultural diocese, the difficulty felt by his clergy in sparing their Deacon-curates during the busy week preceding Christmas, obliged him to content himself with ordaining regularly in Lent, at Trinity, and in September. Long before each Ordination he became nervously anxious about the dispositions and capacities of the several candidates; feeling, as he said, the older he grew, more and more acutely, how terrible was the responsibility of conferring the ministerial character upon unfit recipients. In order to spare himself and others the pain of rejecting candidates on the score of great and fundamental ignorance, he held a preliminary examination, six weeks before the Ember-tide, by which he [54/55] ascertained whether a man had a fair chance of passing. This gave him an opportunity of pointing out the particular reading which was necessary in order to correct serious deficiencies before the examination, or of privately advising the candidate to delay his ordination for another three or six months. The general result of the plan was to spare a great deal of pain and annoyance, and to add to the attainments of some men who knew least. The Bishop was indeed most anxious, if it might be, to raise the standard of knowledge required by his examinations; and, in particular, to insist upon some acquaintance with Hebrew in all his ordinands. With a view to this and other improvements, after taking counsel with his chaplains, he issued in 1864 a new list of "Subjects and Books in which Candidates for Holy Orders are Examined;" and appended to it a "Supplementary List, recommended as useful to Candidates for Holy Orders," and intended to furnish some direction and impulse to preparatory or subsequent studies. What amount and kind of knowledge suffices to constitute a high or an adequate standard is, of course, a matter of opinion: unquestionably it would be too much to say that the Bishop's own hopes and anticipations on this score were completely realized. But he felt that, beyond a certain point, he could not press the improvements which he desired; he had, at least, succeeded in raising his examination-standard on the whole considerably; and, for the rest, the intellectual and theological attainments of the majority of candidates for holy orders depended upon causes which were in reality beyond his reach, and which, vital as is the importance of the subject, cannot be discussed within these limits. But the spiritual, as distinct from the intellectual, preparation for Holy Orders, was a matter perhaps nearer [55/56] than any other to Bishop Hamilton's heart. It seemed to him to be "a pitiable thing" that the three days immediately preceding the most solemn spiritual act in a man's whole life should be spent amid the mental anxieties and exhaustion which belong to an examination in the schools, flavoured by a single administration of the Holy Communion, and by attendance at morning and evening service. At the evening service, it is true, the Bishop addressed the candidates; but, after answering three considerable papers of Questions on Divinity, men are often too fatigued to listen even to the most effective Sermon with sympathy and profit. Such, however, was the practice of the diocese up to 1864, when Bishop Hamilton carried out a partial improvement. Of this the most important feature was that the examination began on Wednesday morning and ended on Friday night; the whole of Saturday being thus relieved of any duties that could interfere with a purely spiritual preparation for the Sunday. Henceforth the Holy Communion was to be celebrated on Saturday as well as on Wednesday morning; and a little work, drawn up under the Bishop's direction, and published with his authority, as "Prayers for use at a Midday Service, during the Four Days preceding an Ordination," supplied an additional devotional element, intended to bring before the minds of the ordinands the real nature of the responsibilities on which they would presently enter, and the kind of preparation which was required of them. At this midday service on Saturday one of the chaplains in attendance was appointed to give an address; while the Bishop himself continued his practice of preaching on each of the four evenings in his chapel, generally taking his text from the service of the day, and insisting upon some one aspect of [56/57] ministerial life and work. In these addresses, at least, of late years, he always took occasion to enforce a practice which he himself scrupulously observed, as being, in his judgment, of binding obligation upon the conscience of the clergy; the practice of saying the Morning and Evening Service daily, in private if not in public, unless a man be hindered by sickness or other urgent cause, according to the plain direction of the Prayer Book. ["And all Priests and Deacons are to say daily the Morning and Evening Prayer either privately or openly, not being let by sickness or some other urgent cause." Book of Common Prayer, Concerning the Service of the Church.] Bishop Hamilton was of opinion that such a habit was practically of great importance in promoting a healthy development of the spiritual side of the clerical character. And he rarely lost an opportunity of saying so. [Charge of the Lord Bishop of Salisbury, in August, 1858, p, 32. Also Charge, 1864, p. 89. Also Charge, 1867, p. 126.]

By these and other changes a considerable improvement was effected in the religious accompaniments of the Examinations for Holy Orders. But, to the last, they fell very far short of the ideal which the Bishop had before his mind. He would have preferred to begin the Examination on Monday morning and to end it altogether on Wednesday night. He would then if it were possible, have devoted, the three last days of the week to a Spiritual Retreat; in which all the great realities of the soul's life, of sin and Redemption, of life and death, might be brought clearly and searchingly home to the conscience of each one of the candidates. In the way of such an arrangement there were difficulties which need not be reviewed here; but the Bishop never abandoned the hope of moving in this direction, and at the same time, of course, of increasing [57/58] the number of celebrations of the Holy Communion, and otherwise providing for the strictly religious side of preparation for the great day of ordination itself.

It was his deep sense of the crying deficiencies of the Church of England in respect of the training of her clergy for their life and work, which led him, at the very outset of his Episcopate, to resolve upon the establishment of a Theological College at the earliest possible date. "Indeed," says the Bishop, "the thought of it was first suggested to me by my beloved predecessor in 1841. But neither he nor I after him ever saw the way of giving effect to it, till in God's good providence an anonymous benefactor enabled me to purchase a house, and so to lay the foundation of an institution, to the effective carrying on of which I hope, as long as I am spared, to give my very best endeavours. It was, I believe, the same merciful Providence to which I owe the college, which brought before me in a remarkable and unexpected manner a person well known to the late Bishop and myself as one of the best candidates for holy orders we had ever examined, and whose tried services as a curate to one of the most distinguished theologians in the diocese marked him out as eminently qualified for the office of Principal." [Charge, August, 1861, p. 18.] The college was thus opened under the auspices of the Rev. E. P. Eddrup, assisted by the Rev. H. T. Kingdon as his Vice-Principal. Upon Mr. Eddrup's acceptance of the vicarage of Bremhill, in the course of 1868, the Principalship was conferred on the Rev. John Daubeny, who became at the same time Chancellor of the Cathedral.

The Chancellor's Stall had been held by Mr. [58/59] Daubeny's predecessor, and on the ground that the ancient statutes of Salisbury, as generally of cathedrals on the Old Foundation, attached to that office the delivery of divinity lectures at stated periods. Bishop Hamilton was particularly anxious to connect his Theological College closely with the cathedral, and thus to make its establishment a first step in the realization of those improvements which he had sketched in his pamphlet on Cathedral Reform. "There are very obvious reasons," he urged, "for placing Theological Colleges in our cathedral cities, where by the constitution of our Church all hearts should meet, and which ought to be a centre of all those good influences to which we should especially desire to subject the minds of those who are hoping to be numbered among the clergy of their Church." [Charge, 1861, p. 19.] On the other hand, it was, perhaps, open to question whether, under our actual circumstances, this determination might not involve some sacrifice of the interests of the college to the claims of the cathedral; whether a heartier worship in a village church and in the college chapel might not practically have been more helpful to the students than the stately, but somewhat cold, services in the cathedral choir; whether the social distractions of a cathedral city would present no difficulties which could be escaped if the college were placed at some little distance in the country. These considerations were present to the Bishop's mind; but they did not appear to him strong enough to outweigh his old and decided feeling in favour of reanimating the spiritual activities of his cathedral church. Yet as time went on he endeavoured to provide for the efficiency of the college more perfectly than was at first possible. In its earlier years [59/60] the students had lodged at various places in the city; the house in the Close being occupied only by the Principal. The natural tendency of this arrangement was to reduce the "College" to a system of divinity lectures, supplemented by a certain amount of required attendance at the cathedral services: and it was difficult to see in what respect such an institution could be said to present higher advantages than might be secured by a prolonged residence at Oxford or Cambridge. Indeed, if this was all that Theological Colleges could effect, the Universities offered attractions to divinity students which, in the long-run, were likely to be much more powerful. No cathedral city could hope to rival the lectures offered by that large staff of Divinity Professors, or those splendid libraries, or those intellectual and literary traditions which make study so natural to University residents. But, on the other hand, it was in the power of a Theological College to do that which no college in the Universities, at least in modern times, has even attempted; it could create a corporate religious atmosphere. Thus its proper work would not merely consist in furnishing its students with an intellectual outfit enabling them to pass a creditable examination. Besides this, and emphatically, its endeavour should be to form in them those spiritual tastes and habits, to accustom them to those religious points of view, to elicit and develope in them that pastoral temper, keen, chastened, and more or less at home with the things of heaven and of the soul, which would make a clergyman's work natural and easy to them. It was clear enough that nothing of this kind could be attempted, with any hope of permanent success, unless the students lived together, in constant intercourse with a Principal who, like the Apostle, "would travail until Christ was [60/61] formed in them." [Gal. iv. 19.] Not merely in the formal capacity and with the authority of a lecturer, but at meals and during walks, and in the hourly casual intercourse of the day, it would be his business, as an equal living with his equals, to endeavour to recommend to each and all of those under his charge, by every means in his power, those solemn truths and duties which too often are only understood in their real aspects and proportions long after men have already undertaken the solemn responsibilities of the ministry. Moreover, frequent services and Communions, together with special instructions, not only in the outward mechanism of clerical work, but in the spiritual life of God's servants; in a knowledge whose very terminology may be a strange language to those who are supposed, as a matter of course, to understand its inmost secrets;--all this and much else of the same kind was needed, if the college was to do more than offer an easy way into holy orders to young men who had not had the advantage of an University education, or who could not pass the examination for the B.A. degree.

The most recent changes then in the administration of the college were carried out by Bishop Hamilton with the specific intention of making it a real training-school, so far as was possible, of "able ministers of the New Testament." [2 Cor. iii. 6.] Full well he knew how many anxieties surrounded his work; how many varieties of failure were only too possible; how largely, if he was to succeed at all, he must draw upon the sympathy and disinterestedness of those who worked with him. But in a case where some effort of the kind was, in his judgment, so altogether necessary, the Bishop would not allow himself to dwell, in a faithless spirit, upon [61/62] the difficulties which he had to surmount. Certainly upon no other part of his diocesan work was his interest directed with more eager intensity; to no other undertaking of his Episcopate did he refer in his last illness so frequently, or with such earnest expressions of a desire for its continued usefulness. He "could have wished sometimes that God had spared him to see the college more firmly established; but, of course, all was well as it was, and the work would be taken care of by God, if it was destined to do Him any good service."

Education, indeed, in all its stages, was a subject upon which the Bishop dwelt with constant anxiety. He was well persuaded that it would be the battle-field upon which, not Church and Dissent, but the Christian and the infidel theories of human life, would engage in a desperate struggle before the end of the present century. He was wont to repeat a maxim of Bishop Denison's that "Education is a Christian calling, a ministration in the Church of Christ." [Charge of the Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 1855, p. 17, where he quotes Bishop Denison's Charge of 1845, p. 23.] It involves so much of the discouragement which is inseparable from monotony, difficulty, and failure, that he felt the necessity of keeping this high, invigorating belief in the real nature of the work steadily in view. On a similar ground he warmly supported the "Prize Scheme" which was set on foot in 1859. "The work of Education," he pleaded, "is one of faith and hope, struggling with much that seems to be dull, disappointing, routine duty; and thus it requires all the aid that we can give it from the external pressure of encouragement." [Charge of the Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 1861, p. 23.] But he would consent, in no shape whatever, to sanction the principle of a Conscience Clause. It was [62/63] better, he thought, in the last resort, to forego the assistance of public money altogether, than to allow truths, which were a part of the Divine treasure committed to the guardianship of the Church, to be treated in any schools under her influence as practically open questions. "We know," he said, "the worst of poverty; but who can say how God will punish the sin of unfaithfulness?"

The Conscience Clause has of late been advocated on the ground that its timely adoption can alone save us from the misery and degradation of a purely secular system of education. In his last public utterance on the subject, Bishop Hamilton states his reasons for anticipating a very opposite result.

"As far as I can judge, though I admit that my judgment may be warped by my fears, the great and pressing question of a National Education for all who require the assistance of the State will eventually be decided in favour of a secular system.....Such an issue will be indeed a deplorable one. But there is another thing which I dread far more than such a conclusion, and this is, the process by which it seems not unlikely that we may reach it. This process may render the Church unfit to deal with the evils which her acts of concession to and co-operation with those who will only use her for their own ends, will have fostered and produced.

"The concession I am specially alluding to is that held in the acceptance of the Conscience Clause. It is proposed to school-builders as an arrangement, which will in no way weaken the religious teaching of the school, but only equitably meet and relieve the scruples of Dissenters, and even through such consideration of them, possibly disarm their opposition, [63/64] and so really in most cases leave the religious teaching of the school where it was.

"But I have no hope that such will be the result. Persons who get legal claims established will most surely and most justly show their value for their rights, and will soon take steps to secure for their children the same privileges of definite religious teaching which the Church is to have, it is said, exclusively; and I for one could not refuse to help them in what I should deem, in their altered circumstances, a righteous effort for their children's well-being.

"Any one, however, who will calmly consider what would be the result of such a further, and, as I think, right and necessary, concession, and what complication of strifes and difficulties would arise, will not have much confidence in the continuance, under those altered circumstances, of a so-called religious Education." [Charge of the Lord Bishop of Salisbury, 1867, pp. 17, 18.]

In the centres of the Higher Education within his diocese, the Bishop felt the liveliest interest; although his relation to them was, necessarily, one of sympathy and encouragement, as distinct from any direct control. But he used to hope that a Confirmation at a great school, besides securing more important results to the souls of the pupils, would give such a moral impulse to the whole work, as to lighten the task of the Head Master and his fellow-labourers. No Confirmation addresses cost him so much forethought as those which he gave to the boys of Marl-borough and Sherborne; and he was convinced that the dearest interests of the Church made it important to raise the teaching standard of all the old Grammar-schools, and, if possible, to inspire them with a more [64/65] Church-like and religious spirit, while invigorating them with a heartier educational enthusiasm.

If Christian Education is nothing less than the instrument by which the Church of Christ maintains her hold upon countries which are already Christian, it is scarcely more important than that other agency, whereby she proclaims the Name and Work of Our Divine Saviour to the millions of our race who are still "lying in darkness and the shadow of death." Bishop Hamilton used to say that he feared people were getting to look upon the duty of supporting Christian Missions as a mere matter of taste. He held that every Christian, as such, was bound to be a missionary. The Truth which each Christian has received has only been received upon the condition of its being communicated to those who do not as yet possess it. If, therefore, a Christian is prevented by other obligations from discharging his natural duty to the heathen in person, he is bound to discharge it by deputy. No man, whose heart has really felt the love of a Crucified Lord, will require the case to be stated in this way; and yet to state it thus, is to put the matter on its true basis. Bishop Hamilton heartily supported both of the great Missionary Societies; but he preferred the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, as being, in his opinion, the more loyal in its practical working, to the principles of the Church of England. At the same time he regretted the tendency--which is perhaps inseparable from all such organizations until they can be placed upon a footing more distinctly religious than is at present the case--to bury the action of one of the highest and purest movements of the Divine Spirit in the heart of redeemed Christians beneath an accumulation of meetings, platform oratory, [65/66] subscription lists, committee elections, deputations, secretaries, and the like. These things are of course necessary to the work; but they are not unlikely, as matters stand, to occupy the whole field of vision, in the apprehension of the people. Although, therefore, the Bishop made the Meeting in support of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Salisbury one of the greatest occasions in the diocesan year, by inviting some eminent prelate to preach on the occasion in the Cathedral, and by doing all that he could to procure the attendance of his clergy and laity, he was in truth more anxious for men than for money. He was more anxious to be sure that God was really moving the hearts of His people zealously to forward this work, so deeply affecting His Name and Honour, than to see a larger contribution from the diocese to the funds of the Society; strongly as he felt and urged the importance of contributing. At the desire of the Archdeacons and Rural Deans of the Diocese, he himself prepared a Litany for Missions. It was always used on Friday mornings, at the family prayer in the Palace Chapel, and the Bishop looked anxiously for an answer in a visible increase of the missionary spirit. [Charge, 1861, p. 29.] He took particular pleasure in dwelling on the fact that the Diocese of Salisbury had recently sent forth two eminent pastors to preside over important Colonial; [Dr. Tufnell, Bishop of Brisbane, and Dr. Cotton, late Metropolitan of India, are the Right Reverend Prelates referred to.] and the present writer well remembers his unfeigned delight when two sons of one of his clergy devoted themselves to Missionary work in China. [Rev. H. Moule. See Charge, 1861, p. 29.] "If" he said, [66/67] "there is an increasing difficulty of finding clergy for all our churches and chapels in England, what must be the difficulty, humanly speaking, in supplying the demand abroad? And yet the difficulty must be met; and its very greatness throws us upon the only true grounds of confidence, namely, the workings of God's grace in the hearts of men, drawing them by very special tokens to this more difficult ministry, and the fostering all such operations of God's Spirit, by such appliances as God may place in our hands." [Charge, 1861, p. 28. Accordingly he was warmly interested in the success of the Training Institution for Missionaries, which has been established at Warminster by the vicar, and placed under the care of the Rev. J. R. Madan, in order to act as a feeder to St. Augustine's College at Canterbury. "Many vocations to the missionary life," he thought, "are simply wasted through neglect of making the most of them; and such an estimate of the higher gifts of the Holy Spirit cannot but be very offensive to Him."

In all forms of "doing good" throughout his diocese the Bishop's interest was of that genuine kind which showed itself in the turn of his private conversation, as well as in his official action. Under Bishop Denison he had had a chief hand in establishing a Penitentiary at Salisbury. [Charge, 1855, p. 19.] And he always looked forward to placing that institution under the care of Sisters of Mercy;--an experiment which has worked so well in the dioceses of Oxford, London, Ripon, Exeter, Gloucester, and elsewhere. A glance at the subjects even of his published sermons (and they form but a very small proportion of those which he preached on this kind of occasion) will show how much thought and [67/68] labour he gave to the promotion of various forms of philanthropic activity. Thus we have a sermon for Welsh charity schools preached on St. David's Day in 1855; another, on behalf of the Church Penitentiary Association, in 1857; another, in 1859, for the Lunatic Asylum at Fisherton, a species of institution in the religious conduct of which he always felt the deepest interest; another, in the same year, for the Wilts Friendly Society; another, in 1862, for the Hospital at Dorchester, preached at the opening of its chapel. He was, indeed, an indefatigable preacher; constantly taking vacant turns at the Cathedral, and willingly responding to invitations from all parts of his diocese whenever he could possibly accept them. Thus he has left published sermons on "The Present Claims of the Principle of Tithes," on "Church Music," on "Cathedrals and Church Music," on "The Soldier's Calling," preached to the Volunteers. In it he insists upon a Christian duty, too often, as he thought, and too lightly overlooked, that, namely, of personal loyalty and love to the Queen. There are also sermons to the Charity Children at St. Paul's; and, in 1858, at the special evening service in Westminster Abbey, besides others in Lent courses at Oxford. Perhaps no one of his sermons contains so much of his mind, or expresses it so characteristically, as "Our Founder's Purpose," delivered at the 600th anniversary of the foundation of Merton College, Oxford, and dedicated to the Bishop's old and honoured friend, the Warden; while those on "Henry Drury; his Faith and the End of his Conversation," and on the death of Mrs. Tooke, the devoted and holy wife of the late Rector of St. Edmund's, Salisbury, show how deep and individualizing was the [68/69] admiration he felt for goodness and the sympathy which he felt for sorrow in others,--or rather, how thoroughly all such sorrow was his own.

Fearless as was the Bishop in expressing his own convictions when he was conscientiously satisfied of the duty of doing so, he attached the greatest importance to ascertaining, as accurately as he could, the opinions of his clergy, and of embodying them in his own public utterances. With this view he took the greatest interest in the proceedings of the Ruridecanal Chapters throughout the diocese. He himself always prescribed the subjects for discussion at these meetings. The conclusions arrived at were duly reported to him; and he carefully studied both the average bearings and the prominent eccentricities of clerical opinion within his diocese. Among the subjects which he suggested for consideration are the following:--The chief wants in Elementary Education; the Ministrations of Women in charitable works; proposed alterations of the 29th Canon (March, 1859); services of laymen in the Ministry of the Word; revival of the Offertory, under what restrictions and for what definite purposes; the establishment of Bible or Communicant Classes for the Confirmed; how better to utilize Sunday-schools; how to provide for Disabled Clergy; on proposed alterations in the Burial Service; does the Church of England fulfil her duty as a Missionary Church? how best to promote Missions to the heathen; the establishment of Missionary Studentships; difficulties of Revision of the Prayer Book; should the Authorized Version of the Bible be revised? should laymen attend the Ruridecanal Chapters? how to make preaching effective; the Scriptural doctrine and obligations of Marriage; the [69/70] true idea and functions of a Cathedral. Of all these discussions he tabulated the results with the most conscientious accuracy; and by this means he was able to occupy a double relation towards the opinion of his clergy,--a relation at once governing and representative; he first gave it a direction, and then, so far as he possibly could, he set himself to proclaim and carry out its average verdict. He often expressed the opinion that if the Church's ancient organization in Ruridecanal Chapters were properly worked, there would be no necessity for embarking in the modern, and in some respects perilous, experiment of Diocesan Conferences. He "could not but fear that such Conferences would in time lead to giving the laity a vote upon questions of doctrine." He should be thankful to lay members of the Church if they would manage the economical and charitable affairs of the Diocese as exclusively as possible. But if the Ministerial Commission was in any serious sense of Divine origin; if the authorization to teach and to guard the deposit of Christian truth had really been committed by Christ to an Apostolical order of men; then it was not possible, without ignoring our Lord's ordinance at least, to admit the laity to a vote upon any purely doctrinal questions in a Church Synod. Were the laity ever to be so admitted, it would be a natural and logical consequence at once to beg them to occupy the pulpits of the Church, and to do away with the teaching prerogatives of the ministry altogether: since it was quite clear that a vote on a doctrinal subject in Synod, implying permanent results upon the faith and practice of a province or a diocese, was in reality a more emphatic exercise of a commission to teach, than was involved in a sermon, having no doctrinal consequences [70/71] beyond the deepened impressions of the hour upon a single congregation.

It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that Bishop Hamilton was only the Bishop of his clergy; and that the laity of his diocese were neglected. As he spent his whole time in the diocese, never taking a house in London after the year during which his chaplaincy to the House of Lords obliged him to do so, he was a constant visitor at the homes of laymen in Wilts and Dorset. His frank and genial bearing made him universally popular. One of his maxims was that, whenever it was fairly practicable, a Bishop ought to settle difficulties "on the spot." Accordingly, when differences had arisen in a parish he would, if he could, spend two or three days with either the clergyman or the squire, and "arrange in a friendly conversation a matter which might have been prolonged interminably if it had been left to correspondence." And towards prominent laymen in the diocese, such as t