Over and over again that voice breaks in upon the slumbrous torpor of
Israel and smites the dead souls of priests and people alike. Now
it is a Balaam, now it is an Elijah, a David, an Isaiah, a John the
Baptist, a Paul the Apostle, a Peter the Hermit, a Savonarola, a Huss,
a Whitefield, a Wesley, a Frederick Maurice, a Frederick Robertson, a
Phillips Brooks.

Do not mistake me. I do not say that there were not many others. But
these names are typical, and that for which they stand cannot easily
be mistaken. I affirm without qualification that, in that gift of
vision and of exaltation for which they stand, they stand for the
highest and the best,--that one thing for which the Church of God most
of all stands, and of which so long as it is the Church Militant
it will most of all stand in need: to know that the end of all its
mechanisms and ministries is to impart life, and that nothing which
obscures or loses sight of the eternal source of life can regenerate
or quicken;--to teach men to cry out, with St. Augustine, "_Fecisti
nos ad te, Domine, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in
te_": Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is unquiet
until its rests in Thee,--this however, as any one may be tempted to
fence and juggle with the fact, is the truth on which all the rest
depends.

Unfortunately it is a truth which there is much in the tasks and
engagements of the episcopate to obscure. A bishop is preeminently,
at any rate in the popular conception of him, an administrator; and
howsoever wide of the mark this popular conception may be from the
essential idea of the office, it must be owned that there is much in
a bishop's work in our day to limit his activities, and therefore his