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Carlyle's hero may say, "I will be king"; but the Christian saint must say "Nolo episcopari." If the great paradox of Christianity means anything, it means this that we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in dry places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man who feels himself unfit to wear it.
The appeals which in spite of this one sees addressed at intervals to the Irish leaders to abandon their attitude of Nolo episcopari and take Ministerial office, for which some, at any rate, of their number have by their ability been conspicuously fitted, is to ignore the fundamental protest on which this self-denying ordnance depends.
My curiosity would not refrain asking him one question, i. e., whether in reality he had any desire to obtain the crown? He smiled, and said, "No more than an ecclesiastic hath to the miter, when he cries Nolo episcopari." Indeed, he seemed to express some contempt at the question, and presently turned away. A venerable spirit appeared next, whom I found to be the great historian Livy.
Lloyd urged his own merits and his claims to the bishopric of Oxford as merely 'frank, and free from affectation of the traditional nolo episcopari. Both Peel and Lord Liverpool appear to have had a much stronger sense than most of their predecessors of the responsibilities attaching to Church patronage and of the duty of administering it in the public interest, and in this respect they were broadly distinguished from Lord Eldon.
Let me here note that the Catholic bishop at Goa and elsewhere is expected to die at his post, and that there is an over-worldly look in this Protestant form of the 'nolo episcopari. East of the cathedral, and uncompromisingly 'Oriented' to the north, stands the unfinished shell of a Wesleyan chapel, suggesting that caricature which has intruded itself into the shadow of York Minster.
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