Worcester, Hereford, Lichfield and Coventry, Lincoln, and Norwich.

The dioceses of the two English archbishops, or the districts in which they have ordinary episcopal functions to perform, were remodelled by 6 & 7 Wm. IV. c. 77. The diocese of Canterbury comprises the greater part of the county of Kent, except the city and deanery of Rochester and some parishes transferred by the above act, a number of parishes distinct from each other, and called Peculiars, in the county of Sussex, with small districts in other dioceses, particularly London, which, belonging in some form to the archbishop, acknowledge no inferior episcopal authority. The diocese of the archbishop of York consists of the county of York, except that portion of it included in the new diocese of Ripon, the whole county of Nottingham, with some detached districts. Exact knowledge of the diocesan division of the country is of general importance as a guide to the depositaries of wills of parties deceased. But all wills which dispose of property in the public funds must be proved in the Prerogative Court of the archbishop of Canterbury; and in cases of intestacy, letters of administration must be obtained in the same court; for the Bank of England acknowledges no other probates or letters of administration.

Lives of all the archbishops and bishops of England and Wales are to be found in an old book entitled De Præsulibus Angliæ Commentarius. It is a work of great research and distinguished merit. The author was Francis Godwin, or Goodwin, bishop of Llandaff, and it was first published in 1616. A new edition of it, or rather the matter of which it consists, translated and recast, with a continuation to the present time, would form a useful addition to our literature. There is also an octavo volume, published in 1720, by John le Neve, containing live of all the Protestant archbishops, but written in a dry and uninteresting manner. Of particular lives there are many, by Strype and others; many of the persons who have held this high dignity having been distinguished by eminent personal qualities, as well as by the exalted station they have occupied.

St. Andrew's is to Scotland what Canterbury is to England; and while the episcopal form and order of the churcn existed in that country, it was the seat of the archbishop, though till 1470, when the pope granted him the title of archbishop, he was known only as the Episcopus Maximus Scotia. In 1491 the bishop of Glasgow obtained the title of archbishop, and had three bishops placed as suffragans under him. Until about 1466 the archbishop of York claimed metropolitan jurisdiction over the bishops in Scotland.

In Ireland there are two archbishoprics, Armagh and Dublin. The archbishoprics of Tuam and Cashel were reduced to bishoprics by the act 3 & 4 Will. IV. c. 37. Catalogues of the archbishops of Ireland and Scotland may be found in that useful book for ready reference the Political Register, by Robert Beatson, Esq., of which there are two editions.

To enumerate all the prelates throughout Christendom to whom the rank and office of archbishop belong would extend this article to an unreasonable length. The principle exists in all Catholic countries, that there shall be certain bishops who have a superiority over the rest, forming the persons next in dignity to the great pastor pastorum of the church, the pope. The extent of the provinces belonging to each varies, for these ecclesiastical distributions of kingdoms were not made with foresight, and on a regular plan, but followed the accidents which attended the early fortunes of the Christian doctrine. In Germany, some of the archbishops attained no small portion of political independence and power. Three of them, viz. those of Treves, Cologne, and Mainz, were electors of the empire. In France, under the old regime, there were eighteen archbishoprics, all of which, except Cambray, are said to have been founded in the second, third, and fourth centuries; the foundation of the archbishopric of Cambray was referred to the sixth century. The number of bishops in France was one hundred and four. The French have a very large and splendid work, entitled Gallia Christiana, containing an ample history of each province, and of the several subordinate sees comprehended in it, and also of the

The Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States is composed of one archbishop, fifteen bishops, and five coadjutors. The first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States was consecrated in 1790. Bishops in partibus.-This is an elliptical phrase, and is to be supplied with the word Infidelium. These are bishops who have no actual see, but who are consecrated as if they had, under the fiction that they are bishops in succession to those who were the actual bishops in cities where Christianity once flourished. Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, and the northern coast of Africa, present many of these extinct sees, some of them the most ancient and most interesting in the history of Christianity. When a Christian missionary is to be sent forth in the character of a bishop into a country imperfectly Christianized, and where the converts are not brought into any regular church order, the pope does not consecrate the missionary as the bishop of that country in which his services are required, but as the bishop of one of the extinct sees, who is supposed to have left his diocese and to be travelling in those parts. So, when England had broken off from the Roman Catholic Church, and yet continued its own unbroken series of bishops in the recognised English sees, it was, for Roman Catholic ecclesiastical affairs, divided into districts,' over each of which a bishop has been placed, who is a bishop in partibus. When, in the time of King Charles I., Dr. Richard Smith was sent by the pope into England in the character of bishop, he came as bishop of Chalcedon. The London District is superintended by a bishop who is styled the Bishop of Olena; the Eastern District by the Bishop of Ariopolis; the Western District by the Bishop of Pella; the Central District by the Bishop of Cambysopolis; the Lancashire District by the Bishop of Tloa; the

In the Charitable Donations (Ireland) Act (7 & 8 Vict. c. 97) the Roman Catholic prelates are designated for the first time since the Reformation by their episcopal titles. They had been referred to in the bill, when first brought in, as "any person in the said church [of Rome] of any higher rank or order," &c.; and, on the proposition of the government, this was altered to "any archbishop or bishop, or other person in holy orders, of the Church of Rome." In December, 1844, a royal commission was issued constituting the Board of Charitable Bequests in Ireland, and the two Roman Catholic archbishops and bishop who are appointed members of the Board are styled "Most Reverend " and "Right Reverend," and are given precedency according to their episcopal rank.

The English bishops who have been sent to Nova Scotia, to Quebec, and to the East and West Indies, have been named from the countries placed under their spiritual superintendency, or from the city which contains their residence and the cathedral church.

Suffragan bishops.-In England, every bishop is, in certain views of his character and position, regarded as a suffragan of the archbishop in whose province he is. But suffragan bishops are rather to be understood as bishops in partibus who were admitted by the English bishops before the Reformation to assist them in the performance of the duties of their office. When a bishop filled some high office of state, the assistance of a suffragan was almost essential, and was probably usually conceded by the pope, to whom such matters belonged, when asked for. A catalogue of persons who have been suffragan bishops in England was made by Wharton, a great ecclesiastical antiquary, and is printed in an appendix to a Dissertation on Bishops in partibus, published in 1784 by another distinguished church-antiquary, Dr. Samuel Pegge.

At the Reformation provision was made for a body of suffragans. A suffragan, in the more ordinary sense of the term, is a kind of titular bishop, a person appointed to assist the bishop in the discharge of episcopal duties. The act 26 Henry VIII. c. 14, authorizes each archbishop and bishop to name a suffragan, which is to be done in this manner : he is to present the names of two clerks to the king, one of whom the king is to select. He was no longer to be named from some extinct see, but from some town within the realm. Six and twenty places are named as the seats (nominally) of the suffragan bishops. They were these which follow:Thetford, Marlborough, Grantham, Ipswich, Bedford, Hull, Colchester, Leicester, Huntingdon, Dover, Gloucester, Cambridge, Guildford, Shrewsbury, Pereth, Southampton, Bristol, Berwick, Taunton, Penrith, St. Germains, Shaftsbury, Bridgewater, and the Molton, Nottingham, Isle of Wight. This was before the establishment of the six new bishoprics. But every bishop within his province is sometimes spoken of as a suffragan of the archbishop, being originally, in fact, little more. Questions have been raised respecting the origin of the word suffragan, which is by some supposed to be connected with suffrages or votes, as if the bishops were the voters in ecclesiastical assemblies; but more probably, if connected with suffrages at all, the term has a reference to their claiming to vote in the election of the archbishop. A great question respecting the right of election of an archbishop of Canterbury, between the suffragans of his province and the canons of Canterbury, arose in the time of King John, and is a principal occurrence in the contest which he waged with the pope and the church.

Very few persons were nominated suffragan bishops under the act Hen. VIII. c. 14. One, whose name was Robert Pursglove, who had been an abbot, and who was a friend to education, was suffragan bishop of Hull. He founded the Grammar School of Tideswell in Derbyshire. He died in 1579, and lies interred in the church of Tideswell, under a sump

tuous tomb, on which is his effigy in the episcopal costume, with a long rhyming inscription presenting an account, curious as being contemporary, of the places at which he received his education, and the ecclesiastical offices which in succession he filled,

Boy-bishop.-In the cathedral and other greater churches, it was usual on St. Nicholas-day to elect a child, usually one of the children of the choir, bishop, and to invest him with the robes and other insignia of the episcopal office; and he continued from that day (Dec. 6) to the feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec. 28) to practise a kind of mimicry of the cere monies in which the bishop usually officiated, more for the amusement than to the edification of the people. The cus tom, strange as it was, existed in the churches on the Continent as well as in England. It may be traced to a remote period. It was countenanced by the great ecclesiastics themselves, and in their foundation they sometimes even made provision for these ceremonies. This was the case with the archbishop of York in the reign of Henry VII., when he founded his college at Rotherham, Little can be said in favour of such exhibitions, but that they served to abate the dreariness of mid-winter. Much may be found collected on this subject in Ellis's edition of Brand's 'Popular Antiquities,' vol. i. pp. 328-336. The custom was finally suppressed by a procla mation of Henry VIII. in 1542.

BISHOPRIĆ is a term equivalent to diocese or see, denoting the whole district through which the bishop's superintendency extends. The final syllable is the Anglo-Saxon pice, region, which entered in like manner into the composition of one or two other words. The word Diocese is from the Greek dioekesis (dioiknois), which literally signifies 'administration.' (See the instances of the use of this word in Dion. Cassius, Index, ed. Reimarus.) In the time of the Emperor Constantine and afterwards the word Diocese was used to signify one of the civil divisions of the Empire. The word See, in French siege, in Italian sedia, signifies' seat,' 'residence,' and is ultimately derived from the Latin sedes,

bishops, as of Antioch, Ephesus, Carthage, Rome, and the like, we are to understand the presbyters who were the pastors of the Christian churches in those cities. While the Christians were few in each city, one pastor would be sufficient to discharge every pastoral duty among them; but when the number increased, or when the pastor became enfeebled, assistance would be required by him, and thus other presbyters would be introduced into the city and church of the pastor, forming a kind of council around him. Again, to account for the origin of dioceses or rural districts which were under the superintendency of the pastors, it was argued that it was the cities which first received Christianity, and that the people in the country places remained for the most part heathens or pagans (so called from pagus, a country village) after the cities were Christianized; but that nevertheless efforts were constantly being made to introduce Christian truth into the villages around the chief cities, and that, whenever favourable opportunities were presented, the chief pastor of the city encouraged the erection of a church, and appointed some presbyter either to reside constantly in or near to it, or to visit it when his services were required, though still residing in the city, and there assisting the chief pastor in his ministrations. The extent of country which thus formed a diocese of the chief pastor would depend, it is supposed. on the civil distributions of the period; that is, the dioceses of the bishops of Smyrna, or any other ancient city, would be the country of which the inhabitants were accustomed to look to the city for the administration of justice, or in general to regard it as the seat of that temporal authority to which they were immediately subject.

All this is represented as having gone on without any infringement on the rights of the chief pastor, of whoin there was a regular series. Lists of them are preserved in many of the more ancient churches, ascending, on what may be regarded sufficient historical testimony, and with few breaks in the continuity, even into the second and first centuries. Bishops are, however, found in churches

for which this high antiquity cannot be claimed. In these cases they are sup posed to be either in countries which did not fully receive Christianity in the very earliest times, or that the bishops or chief pastors delegated a portion of that superior authority which they possessed over the other presbyters to the presbyter settled in one of the churches which was originally subordinate. This is supposed to have been the origin of the distinction among the chief pastors of bishops and archbishops, there being still a slight reservation of superintendency and authority in the original over the newly created chief pastors.

If this view of the origin of the episcopal character and office be correct, it will follow that originally there was no essential difference between the bishop and the presbyter, and also that the duties which belong to the pastor of a Christian congregation were performed by the bishop. But when the increase of the number of Christians rendered assistants necessary, and this became a permanent institution, then the chief pastor would divest himself of those simpler and easier duties, which occasioned nevertheless a great consumption of time, as a matter at once of choice and of necessity. Having to think and to consult for other congregations beside that which was peculiarly his own, and to attend generally to schemes for the protection or extension of Christianity, he would have little time remaining for catechizing, preaching, baptizing, or other ordinary duties; and especially when it was added that he had to attend councils, and even was called to assist and advise the temporal governors in the civil and ordinary affairs of state. When Christianity, instead of being persecuted, was countenanced and encouraged by the temporal authorities, it was soon perceived that the bishop would be a very important auxiliary to the temporal authorities; while in ages when few besides ecclesiastical persons had any share of learning, or what we call mental cultivation, it is manifest that the high offices of state, for the performance of the duties of which much discernment and much information were required, must necessarily be filled by