it and God as he found Him. Indeed for all his years up to manhood
he had been able to take life exactly as in his infancy he took his
carefully warmed and prepared bottle--unquestioningly and beneficially.

And indeed that has been the way with most bishops since bishops began.

It is a busy continuous process that turns boys into bishops, and it
will stand few jars or discords. The student of ecclesiastical biography
will find that an early vocation has in every age been almost universal
among them; few are there among these lives that do not display the
incipient bishop from the tenderest years. Bishop How of Wakefield
composed hymns before he was eleven, and Archbishop Benson when scarcely
older possessed a little oratory in which he conducted services and--a
pleasant touch of the more secular boy--which he protected from a too
inquisitive sister by means of a booby trap. It is rare that those
marked for episcopal dignities go so far into the outer world
as Archbishop Lang of York, who began as a barrister. This early
predestination has always been the common episcopal experience.
Archbishop Benson's early attempts at religious services remind one both
of St. Thomas a Becket, the "boy bishop," and those early ceremonies of
St. Athanasius which were observed and inquired upon by the good bishop
Alexander. (For though still a tender infant, St. Athanasius with
perfect correctness and validity was baptizing a number of his innocent
playmates, and the bishop who "had paused to contemplate the sports of
the child remained to confirm the zeal of the missionary.") And as with
the bishop of the past, so with the bishop of the future; the Rev. H. J.
Campbell, in his story of his soul's pilgrimage, has given us a pleasant
picture of himself as a child stealing out into the woods to build
himself a little altar.