“Of other care they little reckoning make,
Than how to scramble at the shearers’ feast.
_Blind mouths_—”
I pause again, for this is a strange expression; a broken metaphor, one
might think, careless and unscholarly.
Not so: its very audacity and pithiness are intended to make us look
close at the phrase and remember it. Those two monosyllables express the
precisely accurate contraries of right character, in the two great
offices of the Church—those of bishop and pastor.
A “Bishop” means “a person who sees.”
A “Pastor” means “a person who feeds.”
The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be Blind.
The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed,—to be a
Mouth.
Take the two reverses together, and you have “blind mouths.” We may
advisably follow out this idea a little. Nearly all the evils in the
Church have arisen from bishops desiring _power_ more than _light_. They
want authority, not outlook. Whereas their real office is not to rule;
though it may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke: it is the king’s office
to rule; the bishop’s office is to _oversee_ the flock; to number it,
sheep by sheep; to be ready always to give full account of it. Now it is
clear he cannot give account of the souls, if he has not so much as
numbered the bodies, of his flock. The first thing, therefore, that a
bishop has to do is at least to put himself in a position in which, at
any moment, he can obtain the history, from childhood, of every living
soul in his diocese, and of its present state. Down in that back street,
Bill, and Nancy, knocking each other’s teeth out!—Does the bishop know
all about it? Has he his eye upon them? Has he _had_ his eye upon them?
Can he circumstantially explain to us how Bill got into the habit of
beating Nancy about the head? If he cannot, he is no bishop, though he
had a mitre as high as Salisbury steeple; he is no bishop,—he has sought
to be at the helm instead of the masthead; he has no sight of things.
“Nay,” you say, “it is not his duty to look after Bill in the back
street.” What! the fat sheep that have full fleeces—you think it is only
those he should look after while (go back to your Milton) “the hungry
sheep look up, and are not fed, besides what the grim wolf, with privy
paw” (bishops knowing nothing about it), “daily devours apace, and
nothing said”?
“But that’s not our idea of a bishop.” {7} Perhaps not; but it was St.
Paul’s; and it was Milton’s. They may be right, or we may be; but we
must not think we are reading either one or the other by putting our
meaning into their words.