A man of good scholarship, sterling character, wide sympathies and tremendous zeal, J. C. Ryle counted it no light thing to be entrusted with organizing and advancing the cause of God and truth in a diocese marked by heavy industry and in a city of world fame.

These are the charges and addresses he delivered to his clergy. As a man of God he gave unfeigned allegiance to the plenary inspiration of Holy Scripture, and linked with that was a determination that the ministers under him should preach it plainly. Useful to any minister, and a window onto what a nineteenth-century bishop thought his job was.