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I will try in five words to set before you the ideal of a bishop: humility, self-sacrifice, simplicity of heart, undaunted courage, moral faithfulness. Of holiness and of diligence I need hardly speak — no bishop could ever imagine himself to be a true bishop without these; but glance for a moment at the others, for they go to the very root of the matter.

1. First, utter humility — "not lording it over God's heritage," etc., Pride is a sin foolish and hateful enough in any man, but it seems doubly so in a bishop. How instructive is that story of Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury. When he summoned the other bishops to meet him, they asked a holy hermit of Bangor how they might know whether Augustine was or was not a man of God, and he answered that they might follow him if they found him to be of a meek and humble heart, for that was the yoke of Christ; but if he bore himself haughtily they should not regard him, for then he was certainly not of God. They took his advice, and hastened to the place of meeting, and when Augustine neither rose to meet them nor received them in any brotherly sort, but sat all the while pontifical in the chair, they would not acknowledge him or denote that they owed him any obedience but that of love. One of the noblest men the Church has ever seen — St. — was also one of the most truly humble. Once a celebrated cardinal was seen passing to the high altar of his cathedral in scarlet robes and jewelled pectoral, in the midst of magnificent ecclesiastics; but one who knelt behind him, seeing a little stream of blood trickling where he knelt, observed that under the sweeping silken robes the great cardinal had been walking with bare feet over the flinty path, that his heart might be mortified amid the splendour of his state. Deep humility within — a violet which scarcely ever grows except at the foot of the cross — should be the mark of a true bishop.

2. Nor is utter self-sacrifice less necessary. If pride is detestable in a bishop, greed is no less so. The bishop who uses the revenues of his church to enrich his family, is false to one of the first duties of his post. The brother of the Bishop of Lincoln, in the twelfth century, complained that he was still left a ploughman. "Brother," said the great bishop, "if your cow dies, I will give you another, and if your plough wants mending I will have it mended; but a ploughman I found you, and a ploughman I mean to leave you." The income of the see should be spent upon the see. Poverty is never so honourable as in men who might be rich. When Archbishop Warren, Cranmer's predecessor, was told on his deathbed that he had only thirty pounds in the world, he answered with a smile, "Enough to pay my journey to heaven."

3. Simplicity of heart. None but small and unworthy men would lose by it. Neither pomp, nor wealth, nor office — prizes of accident as oft as merit — ever made any small man great. Once I was staying as a boy in a bishop's house, and there was dug up the brass plate from the tomb of one of his predecessors, and I have never forgotten the inscription on it: "Stay, passer by! See and smile at the palace of a bishop. The grave is the palace they must all dwell in soon!"

4. Unbounded courage. Scorn of mere passing popularity should be among his first qualities. When that persecuting emperor, Valens, sent his prefect to threaten St. Basil, and was met by a flat refusal of his demands, the prefect started from his seat and exclaimed, "Do you not fear my power?" "Why should I?" answered Basil. "What can happen to me?" "Confiscation," replied the prefect, "punishment, torture, death." "Is that all?" said Basil. "He who has nothing beyond my few books and these threadbare robes is not liable to confiscation. Punishment! How can I be punished when God is everywhere? Torture! — torture can only harm me for a moment; and death — death is a benefactor, for it will send me the sooner to Him whom I love and serve." "No one has ever addressed me so," said the prefect. "Perhaps," answered Basil, "you never met a true bishop before." You may think that bishops in these days have no need for such courage. They will not have to face kings and rulers, I dare say; but I wish all had the bolder and rarer courage to face the false world; to tell the truth to lying partisans, religious and other; to confront the wild and brutal ignorance of public opinion; to despise the soft flatteries of an easy popularity; to know by experience that Christ meant something when He said, "Blessed are ye when all men revile you for My name's sake."

5. Again, I ask, are bishops never called upon by their duty to exceptional moral faithfulness — to be, as it were, the embodied conscience of the Christian Church before the world? That was the splendid example set by St. . was a great, and in many respects a good, emperor; but in a fierce outburst of passion he had led his soldiers into the amphitheatre of Thessalonica, and had slain some five or six thousand human beings, the innocent no less than the guilty, in indiscriminate massacre. Courtiers said nothing; the world said nothing; civil rulers said nothing; then it was that St. Ambrose stood forth like the incarnate conscience of mankind. For eight months he excluded the emperor from the cathedral, and when he came at Christmastide to the Communion, he met him at the door, and, in spite of purple and diadem and praetorian guards, forbad him to enter till he had laid aside the insignia of a guilty royalty, and, prostrate with tears, upon the pavement, had performed a penance as public as his crime.

(Archdeacon Farrar.)

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KJV: For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre;

WEB: For the overseer must be blameless, as God's steward; not self-pleasing, not easily angered, not given to wine, not violent, not greedy for dishonest gain;