Birmingham

Not every Bishop is a world figure. One is about to be.

To an episcopal throne will presently be elevated the Rev. Ernest W. Barnes, Doctor of Science, Fellow of the Royal Society, Canon of Westminster and onetime Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He will become Lord Bishop of Birmingham.

Canon Barnes will shepherd the greatest industrial diocese in the British Empire and will sit in the House of Lords; but his greatness has greater radii.

It is widely conceded that the Reverend Bishop-elect possesses more scientific knowledge than any bishop or archbishop in the history of Christendom.

Secondly, Canon Barnes is probably the greatest inspirational preacher in England today. It was a Congregational paper (Barnes is, of course, Anglican—equivalent of Protestant Episcopal in the U. S.) which declared that since Dr. John H. Jowett died (TIME, Dec. 31), no preacher has been able to create a queue outside a church-door in London except Canon Barnes.

Greatest scientist, greatest preacher, shepherd of the greatest industrial flock —such will be My Lord Bishop of Birmingham.

But the story is not all sweet. The most definite movement in contemporary English religion is the Anglo-Catholic, a movement which accepts much of Roman theology and which desires, on its own terms, "reunion" with the Roman Catholic Church. To this Canon Barnes is greatly opposed. Said he: "A reasonable system of faith and thought cannot be derived from the theories peculiar to Anglo-Catholicism. The earnestness and zeal of Anglo-Catholics only make the more pathetic the fact that their system is a hybrid, bred by fear in the Victorian era.* Its founders were afraid of liberal theology. ... In Latin Catholicism, the ancestral sacramental paganism of the Mediterranean races is veneered by Christian sentiment. To attempt to graft it on the English church is hopeless."