like pile, is one of the most capacious auditoria which the English Church now possesses, and drinking in the manly sermon with which Dr. Hook started the proceedings, was one of the most striking spectacles of popular Churchmanship which the Church in these latter days has beheld.
Bristol was Manchester over again, with a difference, and that just the difference which exists between the two places in their material aspect. Both are big, bustling towns, but Manchester is the bigger and more bustling. Manchester, beyond the old Collegiate Church, now a Cathedral, and the little knot of half-timbered houses that lie between it and the Irwell, is all modern, and in no part built for pleasure. Bristol is composed of a large, staid old quarter, full of ancient houses and mediæval churches, yet refurbished up for modern needs and commerce, at the bottom of the hill, and of a genteel, half-gay, half-evangelical watering place above. Bristol and Clifton together make up one place without themselves being exactly one. So the Bristol Congress was not quite so full as the Manchester one, and matters there were taken perhaps a little more easily. The quality of the debates was certainly superior, and yet to the local community the whole affair may not have been quite so much of an event. Still, in its way, it was quite as important. The friends of Church Congresses no more desire them to become sensational than flat, and as, except in one incident, of which we shall have to speak farther on, there was no sensation about this meeting, so certainly it could not at all be accused of flatness; while the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol went to the presidential chair much better prepared for his functions than the episcopal president of the year before, clever as the Bishop of Manchester undoubtedly showed himself in learning his duties as the Congress moved on. There were also some influential persons present at Bristol who certainly would not have shown themselves there if they had not believed in the reality of the affair.
We will only mention one name. If there is a man in England who is respected for the peculiar attribute of wise caution—wisdom no doubt, but wisdom always strongly tinged with caution—it is Lord Harrowby; last year Lord Harrowby only made a spasmodic appearance at Manchester, and that as the advocate of an unpopular body, the Ecclesiastical Commission. This time he not only sat through the entire Congress, but also came forward constantly and cheerfully, to take a useful part in its deliberations. The extension of the Episcopate, or rather the multiplication of Bishops, and the introduction of something approximating to collegiate organization in large town parishes, separately debated as they were, were at bottom
