Lord Bishop

This week, if he keeps safe from storm by night and peril in Canada, will arrive in the U. S. the Right Honorable and Right Reverend Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram, Lord* Bishop of London. Guest of the Department of Religious Education of the National Council of the Episcopal Church, he will spend six weeks here, lecturing at colleges and schools. "You might also arrange," he wrote an executive, "for me to play tennis or squash raquets or golf with young men, as I am still playing all of these pretty well."

The Lord Bishop is 68. He likes boys. An active, voluble man with a big mouth and a professionally magnetic smile, he is skilled in the art of human intercourse, that art which consists of a measured degree of self-withdrawal combined with a hint of infinite comprehension. It is an art which can be practiced, in its higher degrees, only by amateurs, but when Bishop Ingram oversteps urbanity in his social assault upon the young persons submitted to his attention, he always has his Faith as an excuse. He has done an immense amount of good. He was appointed Lord Bishop of London at the early age of 43 upon nomination by the Crown after four years of a lesser episcopacy. Until that time he had been working in Bethnal Green, London, a slum district, full of immigrants, threaded with crooked little streets that began in Ireland and ended in Palestine; he had started the Oxford Settlement, a social centre whose purpose it was to apply Oxford methods of tempered decency to roughs, toughs, hooligans. He read of his appointment on top of a bus, and looked dismally forward to the time when he would be forced to live in a palace. The Right Honorable and Right Reverend Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram took two rooms in the palace for himself. The rest he turned over to the servants. Every Saturday afternoon he gave a party, but instead of the Duchesses and financiers' widows who had so often graced the board of his predecessor, Bishop Creighton, the guests at Bishop Ingram's parties were working-girls and bargees. During the War he held scores of services on the battlefront. The press has called him, at various times, the Omnibus Bishop, the King's First Bishop, the Breezy Bishop, the Bishop of the Slums. Punch one lampooned him in some gentle verses.* Before starting for the U. S. he offered his palace rent-free "to any churchman or churchwoman who will pay the salaries of the servants and the taxes on the house." Some years ago he stated that while his income was -L-10,000 ($48,700) a year, his expenditures were -L-10,795. Only -L-294 ($1,432) went for personal expenses.

*All British bishops are entitled to be addressed as "my lord." Besides the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Bishops of London, Durham, Winchester, have permanent seats in the House of Lords. Twenty-one other bishops sit by ecclesiastical election.

*From morn till evening, from evening till night.

I preach and organize, lecture and write,

And all over London my gaitered legs fly --

Was ever a Bishop so busy as I?

When writing my sermons, the best of my work'll

Be done in the trains on the Undergound circle;

I can write one complete, with a fine peroration,

Between Charing Cross and Mansion House Station.

For luncheon I swallow a sandwich of ham.

As I rush up the steps of a Whitechapel tram;

Or with excellent appetite I will discuss

A halfpenny bun on a Waterloo bus.

No table is snowy with damask for me;

My cloth is the apron that covers my knee;

No manservants serve and no kitchenmaids dish up

The frugal repasts of this Suffragan Bishop.