I'

T is, as a seventeenth-century lord. remarked of Lady Mary Wortley, a perfect education to know some people. One of these most edifying personalities is Dr. Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram, who has been appointed Bishop of the great See of London, at an age phenomenally youthful for the English prelacy.

The progress of what is specially understood in England by the expression "Christian Socialism" is particularly marked by this preferment of the young Bishop of Stepney to the higher metropolitan position; for this famous clergyman is the leading representative of the school of dignitaries in the Anglican communion who have followed in the wake of Frederick Denison Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and, to name the most illustrious of their lay coadjutors, John Ruskin. The brightest lights of this section of the clergy are Canon Scott Holland, of St. Paul's Cathedral, and the new Bishop. Dr. Winnington Ingram is the fourth of the English Bishops of our time to win the popular epithet of "The People's Bishop." The celebrated Fraser, of Manchester; the manly and athletic Selwyn, first of New Zealand and then of Lichfield; and the beloved Walsham How, of Bedford and then of Wakefield, have each in turn gained the appellation. This latest Bishop of London, however, even more than any of these famous prelates, has ingratiated himself in the esteem of the masses.

Dr. Ingram is being loaded with distinctive descriptive titles. He is the "King's First Bishop." He is par excel lence the "up-to-date Bishop." He is the "Bishop of the Slums." He is an "omnibus Bishop." The poverty-stricken East Enders delight specially to claim him as "our Bishop." Some admirers denominate him "the breezy Bishop." I have heard him entitled "The Poor Man's Bishop." Indeed, the catalogue of his designations threatens to become interminable. They form a splendid index to his many sidedness.

The Bishop of London's biography may be briefly told, and his ecclesiastical position can be tersely enough defined. It is his relation to the great movements of the age which is most worthy of extended notice. Born of a clerical family, this prelate is one of those hereditary priests who are very numerous in England. He is son of a Worcestershire vicar, and grandson, on the maternal side, of the noted Bishop Pepys, of Worcester. He belongs by every tie to a preaching race, and it is not wonderful that, of all his many great attributes, the homiletic faculty shines out the most brilliantly. A man who can rivet, Sunday after Sunday, a throng of five thousand in the vast nave of St. Paul's, thrilling one of the most cultured audiences in the world by successive peals of eloquence, in alternate declamation and argumentation, must be reckoned one of the great masters of pulpit logic and rhetoric. His career has been wonderfully rapid. He is an Oxonian graduate, and has done more than any living man besides to draw his grand university into the popular social current of modern progress. He was for a short time curate in the beautiful West of England, but soon removed to the most crowded scene of London life, being appointed rector of the teeming hive of poverty and toil called Bethnal Green. Here it was, in a sad, squalid parish, the living catacomb of the metropolis, that he learned to know the common people, to love them, and make himself the subject of sympathy, affection, and gratitude in a degree almost without precedent.

Accepting a cordial invitation to luncheon with the Bishop, I found him in his study waiting to give me his own spontaneous account of his life and his work. No man I have ever known has seemed more pleased to gratify the legitimate curiosity of an admirer of his extraordinary career. But I at once detected in him that playful and innocent simplicity which was the main secret of the ineffable fascination of C. H. Spurgeon's personality. The same broad smile, the same frank

flash of recognition of a visitor as a Chris tian friend and brother, the same instant outburst of fluent words expressing whatever thoughts happened to be uppermost, and the same conscious desire to pour out as much as possible lest others should come to interrupt the colloquy, mark this equally busy worker. No two men could be at once more alike and yet unlike.

Amen Court is so still and secluded that it might be imagined to be a hundred miles away from London, yet it is situated in the very heart of noisiest London, under the shadow of the most glorious of English cathredals. The retreat of the busiest of all the prelates lies here, in the quaint but beautiful medieval precincts of the ecclesiastical center of English life. It is a bachelor's home, for the Bishop of London is unmarried. As I looked at him, I remembered how he was called to the bishopric of Stepney, in East London, only three years ago, and how that event happened only seventeen years after he was ordained a clergyman. I could see that, though only forty-three years of age, he looks even younger than that, so buoy ant is the whole expression of personality conveyed by feature, gesture, and demeanor. Private intercourse shows him as a happy Christian, as witty as the venerable and evergreen Archbishop of Canterbury.

My part was to listen, and I soon found that the Bishop loves a good listener as much as did Dr. Johnson or Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He is a brilliant conversationalist, and the stream of beautiful talk is full of musical charm. Each question which punctuates the conversation sets gushing a new current. I wanted to know something from the Bishop himself of that great Oxford Movement of which he was the head and center. This is of course something totally different from the Oxford Movement of which the world has heard so much for three-quarters of a century, which was initiated by Pusey, Manning, Newman, Faber, and Ward, and was religious, ecclesiastical, Anglican, ritualistic, and Romanizing. The newer and infinitely more glorious Oxford Movement is social, philanthropic, industrial, economic, popular, plebeian, ameliorating, elevating, humanizing, and eminently religious. I knew many things about Oxford

House at the East End, but here I had approached the fountain-head of the stream of influence.

"I was only thirty, a very young parson," said the Bishop, "when, on All Souls' day, 1888, I started the Oxford Settlement. It was very bold as an initiative on the part of one of the junior clergy like myself thus to invade the very citadel of 'Darkest London,' and, above all, to bring cultured and exclusive Oxford, with all its patrician and traditional conservatism, into direct contact with the 'roughs,' the 'toughs,' and the Hooligans' of the submerged million. But when once Oxford House was inaugurated, it became the center of enthusiastic interest. The present Prime Minister has from the beginning been a generous patron, both as a sympathizing friend of the movement and as a contributor to the funds. And Lord Salisbury's son, Lord Hugh Cecil, became one of the residents, and has been an occasional lecturer."

Though the Bishop did not say so, I felt that it was not surprising, in the light of these remarks, that Lord Salisbury had secured the King's assent to the appointment to the Metropolitan See of the man whom he had been for the last few years deservedly honoring by this kind of practical sympathy. I proceeded, at the first pause in his talk, to ask Dr. Ingram what were the chief difficulties which he had encountered in firmly establishing the Settlement.

"There was no difficulty so far as the University was concerned. I used to go down to Oxford occasionally to push the propaganda and to enlist new recruits. But the real obstacle was the spiritual inertia of the East Enders. I never realized before, nor did the young Oxonians, what the paganism of East London meant. It was the heathenism of absolute stolidity, of apparently heartless indifference, not of malignant hostility. I was appalled to discover that scarcely one in a thousand of the residuum ever crossed the threshold of any sanctuary."

"Was not much of your most effective work done in the shape of open-air preaching and lecturing ?" I asked.

Assuredly. Those Sunday lectures were memorable occasions. I became President of the Christian Evidence Society for East London, and threw myself

actively into the task of counteracting the influence of secularist orators, who made Victoria Park their happy hunting-ground. The audiences were, naturally, almost entirely composed of workingmen. They came in great numbers. But the scene was often a very exciting one. Tremendous tussles went on, and I had to stand up to picked champions of infidelity. It was often my reward, after a heated debate, while the hundreds of artisans and laborers watched and listened, with flushed faces and eager eyes, to hear the listeners shout,The parson has got the best of it!' But the reflex effect on the lay residents from Oxford was splendid. Young Oxford found a new gymnasium for intellectual and spiritual athletes in Victoria Park. When the late Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Benson, paid his last visit to East London, he was so gratified with what he saw and heard that he soon afterwards wrote me a note, in which he said, nals.'

I envy you your College of Cardi

Of course all this was very absorbing. I often had to prepare my sermons on the top of an omnibus, to think out my speeches for important meetings in tram-cars, and to eat my luncheon in underground trains. I was at times astonished, as Suffragan Bishop of Stepney, to find how much my doings were being noticed, as if it were some novel thing for a Bishop to be engrossed with the welfare of the common people. For instance, after I had, in a speech, been alluding to my hurrying and scurrying, Punch' took up that speech of mine in the following vivacious style:

"THE SUFFERING BISHOP

"From morning till evening, from evening till night,

I preach and I organize, lecture and write; And all over London my gaitered legs flyWas ever a Bishop so busy as I ?

When writing my sermons the best of my work'll

Be done in the trains in the underground circle; I can write one complete, with a fine peroration,

Between Charing Cross and the Mansion House Station.

For luncheon I swallow a sandwich of ham,
As I rush up the steps of a Whitechapel tram;
Or with excellent appetite I will discuss
A halfpenny bun on a Waterloo 'bus.

No table is snowy with damask for me;
My cloth is the apron that covers my knee.

No manservants serve and no kitchenmaids dish up

The frugal repasts of this Suffragan Bishop."

Suddenly breaking off some of his remarks more particularly connected with the affairs of the Church of England in the East End of London, the Bishop exclaimed, as he hastily, with one of his customary jerky actions, pulled a worn note-book from his pocket, "Just look at this! This will tell you whether my life is still a busy one." Glancing at the little diary, I saw that every page was crowded with appointments for most of the hours of every day. "How do you get through it all without breaking down?" was my natural query.

"Oh, well, I have never thought of breaking down, and have never been anywhere near that!" This rejoinder was uttered with a really merry little peal of laughter. "I simply do the next thing, and take all very quietly, and God helps me through," he went on. "But I must tell you that total abstinence and cycling have been the two sheet-anchors of my physiological immunity. During my Stepney bishopric I have gone off at seven every morning on my wheel to meet a Boys' Club' at Whitechapel and have a spin before joining in at some breakfast to a lot of poor people. But there is a fearful amount of hard work to be done in that East London. Some of my summer holidays have had to be spent in wandering about England on begging expeditions.

cadging' for Bethnal Green. The rich in this country do not know how the poor live and suffer and die; and some of us have had to toil tremendously to make them understand. In 1896 I went touring through Worcestershire, my native county, and held a series of garden meetings at parties in the chief houses. The result was that a Worcestershire Association was founded for the help of the metropolitan poverty.

"I have found," testified the Bishop, "that isolation of one class from another is the root of all the social evils. Contact with the neglected people and the lapsed masses was the method of Christ's reclamation of the lost. It is the only method that can succeed now. Accordingly, while I was rector of Bethnal Green, I not only went about the slums, but also got the people to come about me. Every Saturday afternoon during the summer we had