James Fraser, Bishop of Manchester from 1870 till 1885, was born in Gloucestershire, of a Scottish family, in 1818, and died at Manchester in 1885.[30] He took no prominent part in ecclesiastical politics, and no part at all in general politics. Though a sound classical scholar in the old-fashioned sense of the term—he won the Ireland University Scholarship at Oxford, then and still the most conspicuous prize in the field of classics—he was not an exceptionally cultivated man, and he never wrote anything except official reports and episcopal charges. Neither was he, although a ready and effective speaker, gifted with the highest kind of eloquence. Neither was he a profound theologian. Yet his character and career are of permanent interest, for he created not merely a new episcopal type, but (one may almost say) a new ecclesiastical type within the Church of England.

Till some sixty or seventy years ago the normal English bishop was a rich, dignified, and 197 rather easy-going magnate, aristocratic in his tastes and habits, moderate in his theology, sometimes to the verge of indifferentism, quite as much a man of the world as a pastor of souls. He had usually obtained his preferment by his family connections, or by some service rendered to the court or a political chief—perhaps even by solicitation or intrigue. Now and then eminence in learning or literature raised a man to the bench: there were, for instance, the “Greek play” bishops, such as Dr. Monk of Gloucester, whose fame rested on their editions of the Attic dramatists; and the Quarterly Review bishops, such as Dr. Copleston, of Llandaff, whose powerful pen, as well as his wise administration of the great Oxford College over which he long presided, amply justified his promotion. So even in the eighteenth century the illustrious Butler had been Bishop of Durham, as in Ireland the illustrious Berkeley had been Bishop of Cloyne. But, on the whole, the bishops of our grandfathers’ days were more remarkable for their prudence and tact, their adroitness or suppleness, than for intellectual or moral superiority to the rest of the clergy. Their own upper-class world, and the middle class which, in the main, took its view of English institutions from the upper class, respected them as a part of the solid fabric of English society, but they were a mark for Radical invective and for literary sneers. 198 Their luxurious pomp and ease were incessantly contrasted with the simplicity of the apostles and the poverty of curates, and the abundance among them of the gifts that befit the senate or the drawing-room was compared with the rarity of the graces that adorn a saint. The comparison was hardly fair, for saints are scarce, and a good bishop needs some qualities which a saint may lack.

That revival within the Church of England which went on in various forms from 1800 till 1870, at first Low Church or Evangelical in its tendencies, latterly more conspicuously High Church and Ritualist, began from below and worked upwards till at length it reached the bishops. Lord Palmerston, influenced by Lord Shaftesbury, filled the vacant sees that fell to him with earnest men, sometimes narrow, sometimes deficient in learning, but often good preachers, and zealous for the doctrines they held. When the High Churchmen found their way to the Bench, as they did very largely under Lord Derby’s and Mr. Gladstone’s rule, they showed as much theological zeal as the Evangelicals, and perhaps more talent for administration. The popular idea of what may be expected from a bishop rose, and the bishops rose with the idea. As Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Samuel Wilberforce was among the first to make himself powerfully felt through his diocese. His example told upon other prelates, and prime ministers grew more anxious to select energetic 199 and popular men. So it came to pass that the bishops began to be among the foremost men in the Church of England. Some, like Dr. Magee of Peterborough, and afterwards of York, were brilliant orators; some, like Dr. Lightfoot of Durham, profound scholars; some, like Dr. Temple of Exeter, able and earnest administrators. There remained but few who had not some good claim to the dignity they enjoyed. So it may be said, when one compares the later Victorian bishops with their Georgian predecessors, that no class in the country has improved more. Few now sneer at them, for no set of men take a more active and more creditable part in the public business of the country. Their incomes, curtailed of late years in the case of the richer sees, are no more than sufficient for the expenses which fall upon them, and they work as hard as any other men for their salaries. Though the larger sees have been divided, the reduction of the toil of bishops thus effected has been less than the addition to it due to the growth of population and the increased activity of the clergy. The only defect which the censorious still impute to them is a certain episcopal conventionality, a disposition to try to please everybody by the use of vague professional language, a tendency to think too much about the Church as a church establishment, and to defer to clerical opinion when they ought to speak and act with an independence 200 born of their individual opinions. Some of them, as, for instance, the three I have just mentioned, were not open to this reproach. It was one of the merits and charms of Fraser that he was absolutely free from any such tendency. Other men, such as Bishop Lightfoot, have been not less eminent models of the virtues which ought to characterise a great Christian pastor; but Fraser (appointed some time before Lightfoot) was the first to be an absolutely unconventional and, so to speak, unepiscopal bishop. His career marked a new departure and set a new example.

Fraser spent the earlier years of his manhood in Oxford, as a tutor in Oriel College, teaching Thucydides and Aristotle. Like many of his Oxford contemporaries, he continued through life to think on Aristotelian lines, and one could trace them in his sermons. He then took in succession two college livings, both in quiet nooks in the South of England, and discharged for nearly twenty years the simple duties of a parish priest, unknown to the great world, but making himself beloved by the people, and doing his best to improve their condition. The zeal he had shown in promoting elementary education caused him to be appointed (in 1865) by the Schools Inquiry Commissioners to be their Assistant Commissioner to examine the common-school system of the United States, and the excellence of his report thereon attracted the notice of the late Lord 201 Lyttelton, one of those Commissioners who were then sitting to investigate the state of secondary education in England. His report long remained by far the best general picture of American schools, conspicuous for its breadth of view, its clearness of statement, its sympathetic insight into conditions unlike those he had known in England. On the recommendation (as has been generally believed) of Lord Lyttelton and of the then Bishop of Salisbury, who was a friend of Dr. Fraser’s, Mr. Gladstone, at that time Prime Minister, appointed him Bishop of Manchester in 1870. The diocese of Manchester, which included all Lancashire except Liverpool and a small district in the extreme north of the county, had been under a bishop who, although an able and learned man, capable of making himself agreeable when he pleased, was personally unpopular, and had done little beyond his formal duties. He lived in a large and handsome country-house some miles from the city, and was known by sight to very few of its inhabitants. (I was familiar with Lancashire in those days, for I had visited all its grammar-schools as Assistant Commissioner to the Commission just referred to, and there was hardly a trace to be found in it of the bishop’s action.) Fraser had not been six months in the county before everything was changed. The country mansion was sold, and he procured a modest house in one of the less fashionable 202 suburbs of the city. He preached twice every Sunday, usually in some parish church, and spent the week in travelling up and down his diocese, so that the days were few in which he was not on the railway. He stretched out the hand of friendship to the Dissenters (numerous and powerful in the manufacturing districts), who had hitherto regarded a bishop as a sort of natural enemy, gained their confidence, and soon became as popular with them as with the laity of his own Church. He associated himself with all the works of benevolence or public utility which were in progress, subscribed to all so far as his means allowed, and was always ready to speak at a meeting on behalf of any good enterprise. He dealt in his sermons with the topics of the day, avoiding party politics, but speaking his mind on all social and moral questions with a freedom which sometimes involved him in passing difficulties, but stimulated the minds of his hearers, and gave the impression of his own perfect candour and perfect courage. He used to say that as he felt it his duty to speak wherever he was asked to do so, he must needs speak without preparation, and must therefore expect sometimes to get into hot water; that this was a pity, but it was not his fault that he was reported, and that it was better to run the risk of making mistakes and suffering for them than to refuse out of self-regarding caution to give the best of 203 himself to the diocese. He had that true modesty which makes a man willing to do a thing imperfectly, at the risk of lowering his intellectual reputation. He knew that he was neither a deep thinker nor a finished preacher, and was content to be what he was, so long as he could perform the work which it was in him to do. He lost no opportunity of meeting the working men, would go and talk to them in the yards of the mills or at the evening gatherings of mechanics’ institutes; and when any misfortune befell, such as a colliery accident, he was often among the first who reached the spot to help the survivors and comfort the widows. He made no difference between rich and poor, showed no wish to be a guest in the houses of the great, and treated the poorest curate with as much courtesy as the most pompous county magnate. His work in Lancashire seldom allowed him to appear in the House of Lords; and this he regretted, not that he desired to speak there, but because, as he said, “Whether or not bishops do Parliament good, Parliament does bishops good.”

Such a simple, earnest, active course of conduct told upon the feelings of the people who read of his words and doings. But even greater was the impression made by his personality upon those who saw him. He was a tall, well-built man,[31] 204 erect in figure, with a quick eye, a firm step, a ruddy face, an expression of singular heartiness and geniality. He seemed always cheerful, and, in spite of his endless labours, always fresh and strong. His smile and the grasp of his hand put you into good-humour with yourself and the world; if you were dispirited, they led you out of shadow into sunlight. He was not a great reader, and had no time for sustained and searching thought; yet he seemed always abreast of what was passing in the world, and to know what the books and articles and speeches of the day contained, although he could not have found time to peruse them. With strong opinions of his own, he was anxious to hear yours; a ready and eager talker, yet a willing listener. His oratory was plain, with few flights of rhetoric, but it was direct and vigorous, free from conventional phrases, charged with clear good sense and genuine feeling, and capable, when his feeling was exceptionally strong, of rising to eloquence. He had a ready sense of humour, the best proof of which was that he relished a joke against himself.[32] 205 However, the greatest charm, both of his public and private talk, was the transparent sincerity and honesty that shone through it. His mind was like a crystal pool of water in a mountain stream. You saw everything that was in it, and saw nothing that was mean or unworthy. This sincerity and freshness made his character not only manly, but lovable and beautiful, beautiful in its tenderness, its loyalty to his friends, its devotion to truth.

His conscientious anxiety to say nothing more than he thought was apt to make him an embarrassing ally. It happened more than once that when he came to speak at a public meeting on behalf of some enterprise, he was not content, like most men, to set forth its merits and claims, but went on to dwell upon possible drawbacks or dangers, so that the more ardent friends of the scheme thought he was pouring cold water on them, and called him a Balaam reversed. In a political assembly he would have been an enfant terrible whom his party would have feared to put up to speak; but as people in the diocese got to know that this was his way, they only smiled at his too ingenuous honesty. As he spoke with no preparation, and was naturally impulsive, he now and then spoke unadvisedly, and received a good deal of newspaper censure. But he was never involved in real trouble by these speeches. As Dean Stanley wrote to him, “You have a singular 206 gift of going to the very verge of imprudence and yet never crossing it.”

No one will wonder that such a character, set in a conspicuous place, and joined to extraordinary activity and zeal, should have produced an immense effect on the people of his city and diocese. Since Nonconformity arose in England in the seventeenth century, no bishop, perhaps, indeed no man, whether cleric or layman, had done so much to draw together people of different religious persuasions and help them to realise their common Christianity. Densely populated South Lancashire is practically one huge town, and he was its foremost citizen; the most instant in all good works; the one whose words were most sure to find attentive listeners. This was because he spoke, I will not say as a layman, but simply as a Christian, never claiming for himself any special authority in respect either of his sacerdotal character or his official position. No English prelate before him had been so welcome to all classes and sections; none was so much lamented by the masses of the people. But it is a significant fact that he was from first to last more popular with the laity than with the clergy. Not that there was ever any slur on his orthodoxy. He began life as a moderate High Churchman, and gradually verged, half unconsciously, toward what would be called a Broad-Church position; maintaining the claim of the Anglican Church to 207 undertake, and her duty to hold herself responsible for, the education of the people, and upholding her status as an establishment, but dwelling little on minor points of doctrinal difference, and seeming to care still less for external observances or points of ritual. This displeased the Anglo-Catholic party, and even among other sections of the clergy there was a kind of feeling that the Bishop was not sufficiently clerical, did not set full store by the sacerdotal side of his office, and did not think enough about ecclesiastical questions.

He was, I think, the first bishop who greeted men of science as fellow-workers for truth, and declared that Christianity had not, and could not have, anything to fear from scientific inquiry. This has often been said since, but in 1870 it was so novel that it drew from Huxley a singularly warm and impressive recognition. He was one of the first bishops to condemn the system of theological tests in the English universities. He even declared that “it was an evil hour when the Church thought herself obliged to add to or develop the simple articles of the Apostles’ Creed.” These deliverances, which any one can praise now, alarmed a large section of the Church of England then; nor was the bishop’s friendliness to Dissenters favourably regarded by those who deny to Dissenting pastors the title of Christian ministers.[33]

The gravest trouble of his life arose in connection with legal proceedings which he felt bound to take in the case of a Ritualist clergyman who had persisted in practices apparently illegal. Fraser, though personally the most tolerant of men to those who differed from his own theological views, felt bound to enforce the law, because it was the law, and was at once assailed unjustly, as well as bitterly, by those who sympathised with the offending clergyman, and who could not, or would not, understand that a bishop, like other persons in an official position, may hold it his absolute duty to carry out the directions of the law whether or no he approves the law, and at whatever cost to himself. These attacks were borne with patience and dignity. He was never betrayed into recriminations, and could the more easily preserve his calmness, because he felt no animosity.

A bishop may be a power outside his own religious community even in a country where 209 the clergy are separated as a caste from the lay people. Such men as Dupanloup in France show that. So too he may be a mighty moral and religious force outside his own religious community in a country where there is no church established or endowed by the State. The example of Dr. Phillips Brooks in the United States shows that. But Dupanloup would have been eminent and influential had he not been a clergyman at all; and Dr. Brooks was the most inspiring preacher and the most potent leader of religious thought in America long before, in the last years of his life, he reluctantly consented to accept the episcopal office. Fraser, not so gifted by nature as either of those men, would have had little chance of doing the work he did save in a country where the existence of an ancient establishment secures for one of its dignitaries a position of far-reaching influence. When the gains and losses to a nation of the retention of a church establishment are reckoned up, this may be set down among the gains.

If the Church of England possessed more leaders like Tait, Fraser, and Lightfoot—the statesman, the citizen, and the scholar—in the characters and careers of all of whom one finds the common mark of a catholic and pacific spirit, she would have no need to fear any assaults of political foes, no temptation to ally herself with any party, but might stand as an establishment 210 until, after long years, by the general wish of her own people, as well as of those who are without, she passed peaceably into the position of being the first in honour, numbers, and influence among a group of Christian communities, all equally free from State control.

Fraser’s example showed how much an attitude of unpretending simplicity and friendliness to all sects and classes may do to mitigate the jealousy and suspicion which still embitter the relations of the different religious bodies in England, and which work for evil even in its politics. He created, as Dean Stanley said, a new type of episcopal excellence: and why should not originality be shown in the conception and discharge of an office as well as in the sphere of pure thought or of literary creation?