Born, at Alderly, Cheshire, 13 Dec. 1815. Educated at Rugby, 1829–34. Matric., Balliol Coll., Oxford, 30 Nov. 1833; Scholar, 1833–38; Ireland Scholar, 1837; Newdigate Prize, 1837; B.A., 1837; Fellow of Univ. Coll., 1838–51; Latin Essay Prize, 1839; Ellerton Theol. Prize, 1840; M.A., 1840; Ordained Deacon, 1839; Priest, 1841; Select Preacher, Oxford Univ., 1845–46, 1872–73. Sec. Oxford Univ. Commission, 1850–52. Canon of Canterbury Cathedral, 1851–58. Travelled widely on Continent and in Palestine. Contrib., to “Quarterly Rev.,” 1850–73; to “Edinburgh Rev.,” 1850–81; to “Fraser’s Mag.,” 1865–80; to “Macmillan’s Mag.,” 1860–81; to “Good Words,” 1861–81; to “Contemporary Review,” 1866–75; to “Nineteenth Century,” 1878–80; Chaplain to Prince Consort, 1854–61. Exam. Chaplain to Bishop of London, 1854–64. Regius Prof. of Eccles. Hist., Oxford, 1856–64. B.D. and D.D., Oxford, 1858. Canon of Ch. Ch., Oxford, 1858–64. Mem. of Hebdomadal Council, Oxford, 1860–64. Deputy Clerk of Closet, and Hon. Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen and Prince of Wales, 1863. Married Lady Augusta Bruce, 23 Dec. 1863. Dean of Westminister, 1864. Hon. LL.D., Camb., 1864. Hon. Fellow of Univ. Coll., Oxford, 1864–81. To Moscow, for marriage of Duke of Edinburgh, 1874. Lord Rector St. Andrews Univ., 1875. Visited U.S.A., 1878. Died at Westminster, 18 July, 1881. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: [exclusive of separate sermons]: “The Gypsies,” 1837; “Do States, like Individuals inevitably tend … to decay?” 1840; “Life and Correspondence of T. Arnold” (2 vols.), 1844 (3rd edn. same year); “Sermons and Essays on the Apostolical Age,” 1847; “The Study of Modern History,” 1854; “Historical Memorials of Canterbury,” 1855 (2nd edn. same year); “The Reformation,” 1856; “Sinai and Palestine,” 1856 (3rd edn. same year); “Three Introductory Lectures on the Study of Ecclesiastical History,” 1857; “The Unity of Evangelical and Apostolical Teaching,” 1859; “Freedom and Labour,” 1860; “Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church,” 1861; “Sermons preached before … the Prince of Wales during his tour in the East,” 1863; “The Bible, its Form and its Substance,” 1863; “Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church” (3 pts.), 1863–76; “A Letter to the Lord Bishop of London,” 1863; “The South African Controversy,” 1867; “An Address on the Connection of Church and State,” 1868 (2nd edn. same year); “Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey,” 1868; (2nd edn. same year); “The Three Irish Churches,” 1869; “Essays,” 1870; “The Athanasian Creed” (from “Contemp. Rev.”), 1871; “The National Thanksgiving,” 1872; “Lectures on the History of the Church of Scotland,” 1872; “The Early Christianity of Northumbria” (from “Good Words”), 1875; “Inaugural Address at St. Andrews,” 1875; “Addresses and Sermons delivered at St. Andrews,” 1877; “Addresses and Sermons delivered during a visit to the United States,” 1879; “Memoirs of Edward and Catherine Stanley,” 1879; “Christian Institutions,” 1881. Posthumous: “Sermons on Special Occasions,” 1882; “Sermons for Children,” 1887; “Letters and Verses,” ed. by R. E. Prothero, 1895. He edited: T. Arnold’s “Miscellaneous Works,” 1845; “Addresses and Charges of E. Stanley, Bishop of Norwich,” 1851; T. Arnold’s “Travelling Journals,” 1852; “The Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians” (2 vols.), 1855; “The Utrecht Psalter: Reports,” 1874; S. Greg’s “A Layman’s Legacy,” 1877; Bishop Thirlwall’s “Letters to a Friend,” 1881. Life: By R. E. Prothero and Dean Bradley, 1893.

Personal

  I came up to Oxford a hard reader and a passionate High Churchman—two years of residence left me idle and irreligious. Partly from ill-health, partly from disgust at my college, I had cut myself off from society within or without it. I rebelled doggedly against the systems around me. I would not work, because work was the Oxford virtue…. That sermon on work was like a revelation to me. “If you cannot or will not work at the work which Oxford gives you, at any rate work at something.” I took up my old boy-dreams,—history—I think I have been a steady worker ever since. And so in religion, it was not so much a creed that you taught me as fairness. You were liberal, you pointed forward, you believed in a future as other “liberals” did, but you were not like them, unjust to the present or the past. I found that old vague reverence of mine for personal goodness which alone remained to me, widened in your teaching into a live catholicity. I used to think as I left your lecture-room of how many different faiths and persons you had spoken, and how you had revealed and taught me to love the good that was in them all.

  Stanley, when disposed to be friendly, was very delightful and attractive. And I think that what made him so was not his brilliancy and resource and knowledge, but the sense that he was sincerely longing to be in sympathy with every one for whom he could feel respect. It was the basis of a very grand character; but Stanley had intellectual defects, like his physical defects as to music, or smell, or colour, or capacity for mathematical ideas, which crippled his capacity for the sympathy he wished to spread all round him. One of these defects is indicated in what his critics say of his aversion to metaphysics and dogmatic statements. They were to his mind like the glass which the fly walks on and cannot penetrate: when he came to them his mind “would not bite.” Another defect seemed to me always his incapacity for the spiritual and unearthly side of religion; the side which is so strong in the people whom he opposed, Newman and Keble, and, in a lower way, the Evangelicals…. He was a very earnest preacher of religious morality, though he was blind to some important parts of it, and was driven by his religious partizanship to exaggerate some other parts—as in his grotesque and vehement efforts to claim admiration for the eighteenth century type of religion, and indignation at criticisms upon it.

  We must not let our friends die, and I trust Stanley will long live among us. I have never known a better man—his very weaknesses arising from the best motives.

  When the tomb in Westminster Abbey closed in July over all that was mortal of its great Dean, the shock was felt wherever our language is spoken. A unique life, one of which all the English race could be proud, had ended. The longing to know more, to know all that could be known of it, has come out more strongly than in any instance probably within living memory, and justly so, for he had touched so many sides of our life, and each side with such effect, had been so near the throne and the workshop, so faithful and so simple in his relations with every class, so clear and brave in upholding his own beliefs, so tolerant of those of all other men, if only they were real and in earnest.

  It was perhaps as much as by anything by his readiness to associate with the Presbyterian clergy in Scotland, and to fraternise with the representatives of all sects in England, and indeed throughout the world—it was perhaps by this as much as by anything that the late Dean Stanley became the most famous English ecclesiastic of his day. He despised in this fashion prejudices still lingering in his Church, and the obloquy which was the consequence of despising them, and it was counted to him for righteousness and common sense. When they build his sepulchre in Westminster, they should write upon it for one thing “Here lies one who supposed that other Christians than those belonging to the Church of England might be saved, and who never doubted and therefore never said that there might be ‘some devout persons among the Dissenters’.”… As regards his worth to the Church and to the world, to speak plainly, it seems to me that he was not first of all an amiable, pure, noble, highly gifted and wonderfully accomplished man, and then a Church dignitary of liberal or advanced theological views; but he was first of all a Churchman of that description, and secondly he was all that you pleased to say, all that can be said or imagined, of a Christian and a gentleman. He indeed valued goodness more than any creed—no man perhaps ever valued goodness more than he.

  His special attraction, from a social point of view, was his unique simplicity. We seem forced to commemorate it even in mentioning him. However suitable was his position as Dean of the great Abbey in which he took so lively an interest, it is impossible to speak of him now in any other way, than as Arthur Stanley. At times it seemed as if his position as a Church dignitary took to himself the aspect of a certain masquerade. I remember well the half-comic air with which he said, “I should so much have liked to ask the Pope his opinions about himself” (in recounting an interview with him, if I remember right), and there was something inexpressibly engaging in the playfulness with which he added, “I can’t quite fancy thinking myself infallible;” and then came a humorous little pause, as if he was just asking himself whether, after all, that might not be compassed, and he concluded much more decidedly. “But certainly I can’t conceive thinking all the Deans of Westminster infallible.”

  The personal charm of Dean Stanley, in public and in private, was something which everybody felt who came into the slightest association with him. Indeed, it seems, as we have intimated, to have been felt even by those who never saw him, and who knew him only through his books and by the public record of his life. It was the charm of simple truthfulness, of perfect manliness, of a true sympathy with all forms of healthy human action, and of a perpetual picturesqueness, which was enhanced by the interesting positions which he held, but was independent of them, and had its real being in his personality itself. If he had been the humblest country parson instead of being Dean of Westminster, he would have carried about the same charm in his smaller world. It was associated with his physical frame, his small stature, his keen eye, his rapid movement, his expressive voice. The very absence of bodily vigor made the spiritual presence more distinct. And the perfect unity of the outer and inner, the public and the private life, at once precluded any chance of disappointment in those who, having been attracted by his work came by and by to know him personally, and at the same time gave to those whose only knowledge of him was from his writings and his public services the right to feel that they did really know him as he was.

  The death of the Dean of Westminster is not so much the loss of an ecclesiastic, as the disappearance of a whole region of life, which none but himself is likely ever to supply,—the region, I mean, in which all that is really beautiful and noble in the world received a generous and delicate spiritual appreciation, without the smallest regard to any of those straight ecclesiastical or dogmatic conditions usually required for spiritual appreciation. In Dean Stanley the human sympathies were very bright and deep, while the grasp of abstract truth was comparatively feeble.

  If I were to put in one word what struck me as perhaps the leading characteristic of Dean Stanley, and what made him so dear to many, I should say it was not his charity, though his charity was large—for charity has in it sometimes, perhaps often, a savor of superiority,—it was not his toleration,—for toleration, I think, is apt to make a concession of what should be simply recognized as a natural right,—but it was rather, as it seems to me, the wonderful many-sidedness of his sympathies…. I think no man ever lived who was so pleasant to so many people. We visited him as we visit a clearer sky and a warmer climate…. I think the one leading characteristic of Dean Stanley,—and I say it to his praise—was the amount of human nature there was in him. So sweet, so gracious, so cheerful, so illuminating, was it that there could not have been too much of it. It brought him nearer to all mankind, it recognized and called out the humanity that was in the other man. His sympathies were so wide that they could not be confined by the boundaries of the land in which he was born: they crossed the channel and they crossed the ocean.

  That Monday was a wonderful day. There was everyone in the abbey, all the great and eminent men of all parties and schools in England, round his coffin. It was all very orderly and impressive and just as he would have had it. And then by degrees I began to feel what I had lost and how much I had lived in him and how I had unconsciously referred to him on all kinds of points, and how many difficulties vanished when I thought “Oh, I will see Stanley next week and then I will ask him.” It is quite curious that since his death hardly a day has passed, but something has turned up in the paper, or the Bible, or a book, to make me say before I recollected he was gone, “Oh, I will ask Stanley about this.”

  As a speaker,… Dean Stanley was by no means fluent. He spoke slowly and hesitatingly. He often paused to find the right word. He often deviated into the most unadorned and colloquial English. And yet, though I have heard him speak at many gatherings which differed as widely from each other as a feast of the little choristers at Westminster differs from an agitated assembly of hostile ecclesiastics, I never heard him utter one word which was unworthy of him, or make one speech which did not leave behind it a sense of charm and satisfaction. The topics were always opposite; the observations were never commonplace; the sentiments were always noble and sincere…. He constantly preached old sermons on old themes…. Often, however, his sermons on the same text were so altered by additions and omissions that they were hardly recognizable. They were written over and under, within and without, on one side of the page and on both sides. Mysterious marks and counter-marks, in pencil or in red ink, indicated what portions were, on any particular occasion, to be used or to be omitted. Sometimes two sermons were rolled into one; sometimes one sermon was expanded into two. The result, so far as the manuscript was concerned, was often a chaos, rendered yet more chaotic by the handwriting which few but the Dean’s intimate friends could discipher, and which often led to the most grotesque misprints. Constantly, and especially of late years, he lost his way amongst these combined passages of variously turn-coated addresses, and he would pause to turn over loose pages until he resumed the manuscript at the intended point. In these cases, too, the junctura was sometimes anything but levis. Hence those who only heard him preach an old or rehabilitated sermon were unable to judge of his powers, for the difference of manner with which he preached old and new matter was very noticeable.

  It may be that, in ages to come, those who tell the roll of England’s worthies in the aisles of Westminster may think that Stanley’s name stood higher with his contemporaries than any definite achievement of his could warrant. We cannot correct the judgments of posterity; but we may feel assured that if it had been allowed us to prolong, from generation to generation, some one man’s earthly days, we could hardly have sent any pilgrim across the centuries more wholly welcome than Arthur Stanley, to whatever times are yet to be. For they, like us, would have recognised in him a spectator whose vivid interest seemed to give to this world’s spectacle an added zest; an influence of such a nature as humanity, howsoever it may be perfected, will only prize the more; a life bound up and incorporated with the advance and weal of men; a presence never to be forgotten, and irreplaceable, and beloved.

  The Dean of Westminster he [Carlyle] liked personally, almost loved him indeed, yet he could have wished him anywhere but where he was. “There goes Stanley,” he said one day as we passed the Dean in the park, “boring holes in the bottom of the Church of England!”

  Every great man who has ministered in the Church of Scotland since the days of Knox, has preached from the pulpit of that church. But among them all, never greater nor more lovable man than Stanley.

  It is hardly necessary to point to him as one ready at all times to resist every attempt to narrow the freedom of the individual spirit essential, as he believed, to the existence of the Church of which he was a member; or to his readiness and promptness at every period of his life to espouse the side of those who were exposed to persecution or obloquy. Yet, though plunged, as he felt himself to be, in incessant conflicts, and though always yearning for sympathy and aid, he never harboured a resentful thought, was always ready to recognize the claim to honour, and even to reverence, of those who had felt bound to refuse him their sympathy or co-operation, or had passed the sternest judgments on his own most cherished aims. Of his ceaseless activity, of his readiness to aid by all his powers those who sought his aid, there is still a cloud of witnesses. He never spared himself: his active brain, his kindly heart, gave him no rest. He never turned away from the work for which his special gifts so singularly marked him out. And how many are there still, of those who shared his friendship, who feel that his loss has made life seem different since he was taken from them. Not in any narrow sense, but in many senses, he has had no successor—no one who has exercised the same kind of influence, alike in the circle of those who entered into the controversies which divided the religious world, and those outside that circle.

  One main source of the freshness which pervaded his sermons, his conversation, his travels, and his literary work, was the economy of his strength which he invariably exercised. He had most clearly recognised the extent and the limitations of his powers. In travelling, he required all arrangements to be made for him, steadily refused to see any sight which did not interest him, and consequently was never tired. In society, he never attempted to make conversation, but, talking only on those subjects which aroused his enthusiasm, spoke with a fire that glowed and warmed, yet never burned or left a scar. In preaching, he enforced, and illustrated by concrete application from past or contemporary events, only those moral and spiritual aspects of Christianity which to him were most vital, and hence his sermons were never dry, laboured, or dead, but were always picturesque, interesting, and directly bearing on human life and human conduct. As a man of letters, he only worked as his powers designed him to work, and only wrote as he loved to write, and therefore his writing is never forced, but always natural and always fresh.

  Through life, the senses of smell and taste were utterly unknown to him; once only—in Switzerland—he fancied he smelt the freshness of a pine-wood. “It made the world a paradise,” he said.

  He was thin, he was small, but, like Cæsar, he was not insignificant. Though his features were not strictly handsome, he had a refined, an intellectual, a most interesting countenance. He was endowed with high personal courage and a chivalrous nature, I should like to say a buoyant pluck; and there was an eager sweetness in his address that was very winning. Occasionally he had a dreamy expression. His intellectual alertness a little reminded me of Monsieur Thiers. Arthur was pure-minded and simple-mannered; and though he happened to be curiously indifferent to what is called small talk, his powers of conversation were remarkable. We constantly met, and in divers places, and he was a valued member of every society in which I found him. Arthur was a thoroughly amiable man, and entirely destitute of personal or other vanity. He had the unmistakable air of good-breeding. He was a man of the world and a courtier, in the very best sense of that word; but he was a courtier through circumstances and not by choice.

  He was a great teacher in his own way, and a great thinker, and he held a peculiar position among the Church of England ecclesiastics of his time. He was not so much a force as an influence. He cannot be said to have originated any movement, but he helped to keep many movements in order. He was a charming writer, a most delightful talker, a man who exercised great power over his Church and over the social life of his time. His home in Dean’s Yard, Westminster, gave a welcome to intellect and culture and social reforms from all over the world. He had travelled much, and had made friends everywhere, and it may be said, without exaggeration, that every distinguished man or woman from any country might be met sooner or later under Dean Stanley’s roof. The world lost much by losing him, and with his death it may not unfairly be said that one of the social and literary lights of London went out, not to be relumed.

  With Stanley his charm of manner and temper was no small part of his power, and this makes it difficult to dwell on—what he so strongly felt himself—an indecision of character which rendered him almost incapable of holding a positive view on any subject of importance. This, indeed had been Stanley’s characteristic from his earliest years, and it continued through life, showing itself at Rugby, as I have already mentioned, by an absolute devotion to Arnold, and to all his opinions; and afterwards by his singular friendship with Ward, and his union, if not his entire agreement, with Jowett. He had plenty of opinions, but they were always of a negative character; and Dr. Pusey’s view of him was in this respect just, that his object was always to support persons who in their religious belief differed from everybody else…. It is evident that such a person could hardly in the common sense of the word be called a leader; and, indeed, his life was a succession of changes from one leader to another—first, and above all, Arnold, then Ward, and, lastly, Jowett. He had plenty of courage in following them, but I doubt whether anyone, strictly speaking, followed him.

Life of Thomas Arnold, 1844

  When we left college the younger Ware advised us to read the lives of men who had really helped the world. He intimated that this is the best way to find out what religion is and what it is not. He is quite right. To that bit of advice I owe the reading of a good many biographies, worthless as literary books, but in which I found good hints in the great science of living. Foremost among many of these is Stanley’s “Life of Arnold,” which was published, I think, in 1844. This is another of the books which moved its time, and of which you can still trace the ripple on the ocean. We did not think, when we read it, though we should have been wise enough to do so, that the author was to fill and to deserve a place in the world’s regard as large as his beloved teacher’s.

  It is certainly a work of loyal affection, written with a sole object of setting before the world the greatness and goodness of its master, the author modestly effacing himself entirely from the record. To us it certainly bears an appearance of diffuseness and verbosity resulting in part from the extremely minute analysis of Arnold’s conduct and motives in every branch of life, which we are inclined to think, at the present time at least, somewhat superfluous. The arrangement, too, is faulty, the separation of the text of the biography from the very numerous letters published along with it, contributing to deprive the former of its energy and the latter of its interest. The popularity of the work, however, as we have said, has in no way decreased.

  His sorrow, his reverence, his sympathy, found relief in devoting his best energies to that “Life of Arnold,” which has translated his character to the world, and given Arnold a wider influence since his death than he ever attained in his life. Perhaps, of all Stanley’s books, Arnold’s life is still the one by which he is best known, and this, in his reverent love for his master, to whom he owed the building up of his mind, is as he would have wished it to be.

  The book will long remain to the student of the social, religious, and political history of the former half of the nineteenth century a treasury of valuable material, because it portrays in clear outline a central figure round which clustered some of the most remarkable personages and incidents of a stirring and eventful period. Stanley’s book is a large one and deals necessarily with much ephemeral controversy, religious and political, which may possibly not excite any strong interest in the present generation of readers. It is to be feared that these facts may have the effect of concealing from those readers much that is of permanent value in Arnold’s history and performance.

  What I have always considered the most effective biography of the century, Stanley’s “Life of Arnold.”

History of the Jewish Church, 1863–76

  Here is a book on religious matters, which, meant for all the world to read, fulfils the indispensable duty of edifying at the same time that it informs. Here is a clergyman, who, looking at the Bible, sees its contents in their right proportion, and gives to each matter its due prominence. Here is an inquirer, who, treating Scripture history with a perfectly free spirit,—falsifying nothing, sophisticating nothing—treats it so that his freedom leaves the sacred power of that history inviolate. Who that had been reproached with denying to an honest clergyman freedom to speak the truth, who that had been misrepresented as wishing to make religious truth the property of an aristocratic few, while to the multitude is thrown the sop of any convenient fiction, could desire a better opportunity than Dr. Stanley’s book affords for showing what, in religious matters, is the true freedom of a religious speaker, and what the true demand and true right of his hearers?

  These volumes embody the substance of lectures delivered in the chair of ecclesiastical history at Oxford. The work is a popular presentation of the results reached by modern scholarship. It makes no claim to the merits of original research. While the author has used the results of labors like those of Ewald, he has fully acknowledged his indebtedness. The peculiar merits of the book, therefore, are not the merits of an original authority; but rather those of an unusually attractive presentation. Clearness, grace, and fluency of style are most noteworthy characteristics of these admirable and unusually attractive volumes.

  The main difference between the two parts lies in the form into which the material is thrown. In the first period, poetry, metaphor, prophecy, and history seemed to Stanley to be so intermingled that continuous narrative was in great part abandoned. In the second period this difficulty had to a great extent disappeared. Though chronological uncertainties still remained, the substantially historical character of the whole is almost universally admitted, and the sacred history speaks for itself as a continuous narrative. In other respects the aim, the spirit, the charm, and the method of the treatment are the same. There is the same bold, yet reverent, handling of subjects which are peculiarly liable to suffer from repetitions of conventional language, and from traditional methods of treatment. There is the same effort to interpret the Bible, not by our own fancies concerning it, but by what it says of itself; to distinguish between the letter and the spirit; to extinguish “the unnatural war between faith and reason, between human science and divine.”… The two volumes are alike in aim and spirit. They also possess the same distinctive charm—the fascination of a style which is graphic, picturesque, eloquent, and rich in pertinent illustration; the same grouping into vivid pictures of a body of small facts; the same grasp of the critical and salient features in the character of an age or of an individual…. Both volumes are alike in being the work of a moralist who is writing historically.

  It is unquestionably a delightful book, a book which everyone ought to read and from which no one is likely to rise without a great many new and fruitful ideas. The author, however, is always thinking too much of the edification of his hearers, too little of merely representing the facts as they seem to him to have occurred. It is the Bible History seen under a painted window and not by mere white light.

Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey, 1868

  Dean Stanley, the pupil and the biographer of Dr. Arnold, has made some of the most valuable contributions to ecclesiastical history which our time possesses. His “Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey” fascinates the reader by its beauty of style and by the evidences of the loving care with which the author has approached his subject.

  Up to the time when it was written, the tombs and the history of the abbey were comparatively little known, even by scholars so accomplished as the late Dean Milman, who for many years was one of the canons. The thousands who visited it were compelled, by lack of knowledge, to look with a blank and unintelligent eye on many a monument which is now rife with interest. The Dean left no source of information unsearched. He was greatly assisted by the magnificent publication of the abbey registers, with genealogical and other notes by the American antiquary, Colonel Chester…. I think that the extent, variety, and minuteness of literary and historical research which the Dean has compressed into his “Memorials” have never been duly estimated. To write this book, he was obliged to expend a vast amount of time in the study of memoirs, poems and journals belonging to every period of English History.

  He became, as it were, the soul of the Abbey. To follow him through its chapels and transepts was to follow a “Christian Plutarch.” His presence, as he drew out the tales imprisoned in the silent stones, and made each sepulchre surrender its dead, gave to its walls and monuments life and speech and motion. From the buried stones of the original Abbey of Edward the Confessor, to the last addition made by himself, all told the tale of continuous national history. In dealing with the Bible he had endeavored to make it a living book, so that it might the more readily become a Book of Life. In the same spirit, both with voice and pen, he laboured to reanimate the inheritance of the past, to make the Abbey an eloquent memorial of all that was greatest and most famous in national history, to keep alive its powers as the incentive to heroic action, to appeal, through its splendid associations with the past, not only to the care but to the emulation of the present. Nor was it merely with the past history of England that he linked the present life of the nation.

General

  We have embarked on a beautiful book, Arthur Stanley’s “Palestine:” thou wouldst be much interested in it I think. He writes charmingly, seeing things so clearly, and seeing them in their bearings, geographical and otherwise, like a true pupil of Dr. Arnold’s; and there is such a high and thoughtful tone over it all.

  Apart from the beautiful simplicity of his style and the richness of illustrative allusion, the charm of his sermons was very apt to lie in a certain way which he had of treating the events of the day as parts of the history of the world, and making his hearers feel that they and what they were doing belonged as truly to the history of their race, and shared as truly in the care and government of God, as David and his wars, or Socrates and his teachings. As his lectures made all times live with the familiarity of our own day, with its petty interests, grow sacred and inspired by its identification with the great principles of all the ages. With the procession of heroism and faith and bravery and holiness always marching before his eyes, he summoned his congregation in the Abbey or in the village church to join the host. And it was his power of historical imagination that made them for an instant see the procession which he saw, and long to join it at his summons.

  I have said that Dean Stanley was no theologian, and, indeed, had no real hold at all of the significance of abstract thought—no grasp of what I may call the backbone of mental and moral creeds—though he could often appreciate finely the fruits which such creeds bore in actual life, without being aware that it was those systems which had borne them. Indeed, his true liberality of nature, his positive inability to ignore what was good in one whose general belief he either could not share, or positively condemned, was in some measure due to this comparative insignificance of all merely intellectual discussion in his mind. He could not, if he would, have judged the tree of belief by anything but its fruits, and its fruits in the largest sense of the term. And amongst these fruits, he could not, for the life of him, help reckoning almost everything that added to the richness and variety of life,—so that when he came to estimate the value of institutions, he found himself according the most liberal sympathy to every institution which had ennobled the civilisation of any epoch, which had sheltered men of genius and power, which had given a more historic colour to the past, or which had transmitted to the present day germs of great vitality and promise. He had the keenest possible eye for historic effect, which was quite as much at the root of his great comprehensiveness, as his large sympathies with individual goodness and greatness. But what strikes one as a little strange in a man of such a temperament as this, is his gallantry as a champion.

  For the purposes of a student of general history this [“Eastern Church”] is the most useful of Dean Stanley’s works. It not only has to do with a subject of very considerable importance, but it possesses the rare charm of a graceful, scholarly, and eloquent method of treatment. It is one of the few ecclesiastical histories that every genuine student of the Middle Ages will find himself interested in reading.

  Read his funeral sermon on Charles Kingsley, on Sir John Herschel, on your countryman Carlyle, or that preached on the Siege of Paris. Who else in the United Kingdom could have preached them? Read, indeed, any of his published sermons. We may say as Dr. Johnson said of Baxter’s “Read any; they are all good.” Read any, we may add, for they are all characteristic, all stamped with his own impress.

  We can indeed hardly claim for Stanley the title of an original investigator, on any subject, save only the very difficult and interesting one of the geography of Sinai and Palestine. But it would be equally unfair to speak of such popularizations as his “Jewish Church” as though they were slight or easy productions. Crude knowledge must be digested and re-digested before it can enter vitally into the intellectual system of mankind and rightly to assimilate such nutriment may often be as difficult as to collect it. The Englishman, especially, writing, as Stanley did, for two hemispheres and some half-dozen nations, must needs feel that the form in which he gives his results to this enormous public is a matter of no slight concern.

  There is none [“Apostolic Age”] of his many interesting writings which more distinctly indicates the line of thought which he followed throughout. It is instinct with a rare insight into the phenomena of the Apostolic time, and the bearing of these phenomena upon the true interpretation of Christian thought for all time. Like all his historic studies, it presents at once a picture of the past, and a mirror of the future.

  It was inevitable that one who “was always writing something” should sometimes be careless and slipshod, but, as a rule, nothing could be more delightful than his style, and his references are carefully verified and weighed studiously. Stanley was a very voluminous writer; twenty-five years ago the list of his publications already filled many pages of the British Museum Catalogue. Since then his writings have been very numerous, including many contributions to reviews and magazines, besides purely theological studies. This summary does not include his historical works and lectures. At no time could he write on any subject except one which attracted him; he could write only on what he thought and felt; his works are one and all a mirror of himself…. Essentially a popular thinker, Dean Stanley never claimed to be otherwise than a translucent and clear medium of truth in its simplest form. Where doubt had crept into the mind, many found his books a great assistance, and were helped by his vivid and animated words as no cold reasoning could have affected them. Where a profound thinker would have failed from his very depth the works of Stanley contain exactly what the average reader requires and can assimilate. And yet it is not just to characterize the work of Stanley as slight or inferior in its conception or style. While not an original investigator, the literary skill and scholarship of the Dean is shown on every page. His tone is dignified, spirited, and picturesque, lending a charm to all he touches, while perfect simplicity and candor radiates from all his teachings.

  Among his contemporaries, no voice was so constantly raised in the Church of England for charity and peace as that of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. But his influence has neither been restricted to the clergy nor to members of his own church. Over laymen everywhere he has exerted a still more powerful influence, and has spoken with cheerful inspiration to those in every land who cherish the belief in a common Christianity, and the hope that in the future it may have some outward embodiment. To the general characteristics of the leaders of the Broad Church Stanley added the special gift of an historic imagination. It was this, united to the charm of a style of singular purity and poetic beauty, which gave such life and power to his published lectures on the Jewish Church.

  His knowledge of the world and of society, his familiarity with great historical events, his keen eye for the picturesque aspects of human life, whether under secular or religious conditions, his cultivated literary tastes, his wide sympathies, his ability to detect resemblances where others saw only contradictions, to detect a spiritual meaning under the most obscure of ritual observances—these things, combined with the brilliant qualities of his mind, gave to his writings a popularity almost unexampled when we consider the fate of most theological books. As a writer of English, Newman was alone his superior in that clearness and naturalness and exquisite simplicity,—that entire freedom from all straining after effect,—which made Newman the supreme model of English with whom no other writer could compete. But much of Stanley’s power as a writer lay also in the rare finish and charm of his style, which perfectly reflected the man and was therefore in a high degree artistic: it pleased the ear, it compelled the attention, it aroused and stimulated the reader, even if at times it withdrew the mind from the matter to the form—a fault of which Newman never was guilty; but it always conveyed the thought with ease and clearness, and always with something of the grace and fascination which belonged to the man…. To the general reader, as well as to the theological student, no books are more familiar than his “Sinai and Palestine,” his “History of the Jewish Church,” or his “Christian Institutions.” His defects, his limitations, are also well known. His learning was not extensive, nor his scholarship always accurate, nor had he a deep insight into the working of great principles. He had no taste for philosophy or metaphysics; only that which was concrete made any appeal to his imagination.

  Stanley’s social influence, and his influence as a teacher and a preacher, live forever, though indistinguishably blended with those of other good men and Christians. His influence as a theologian and a religious philosopher, never very great, have probably ceased. In that line he made, involuntarily, much noise, but he left not much impression. His best works, it will generally be thought, apart from his “Life of Arnold,” are his historical lectures and his “Sinai and Palestine.” The work last mentioned, which called forth his utmost enthusiasm and gave the fullest scope for the display of his special gift, has perhaps no superior in its kind. Next to it I should venture to place the lectures on the Eastern church, in which he shows to perfection his ardent historical sympathies, his power of appreciating and delineating historical character, his comprehensiveness of view and the picturesque vivacity of his style. These lectures are particularly wholesome reading just now, when abuse is being heaped on the Russian Christians by misguided Christendom. The lectures on the Jewish Church lack a critical basis and strictness of critical treatment altogether. The lecturer too often escapes from a critical difficulty into preaching. He was too much under the dominion of Ewald, who trusts too much to his own arbitrary intuition. Oscillating between orthodoxy and rationalism, accepting miracle, yet desiring to economise it to the utmost, and renouncing supplemental miracles, Stanley is sometimes found struggling with an awkward problem, and struggling in vain.

  Dean Stanley wrote very little verse, and that little does not display high poetic merit. Prose was clearly his natural form of expression, and in the freedom of prose he was much more poetic than when hampered by the fetters of rhyme.

  Stanley neither was, nor, apparently, cared to be exact. He trusted too much to his gift of making things interesting, and had an inadequate conception of the duty he owed to his readers of writing what was true. Other travellers who have followed his footsteps in the East have sometimes found that the scenes he describes, in charming English, are such as are visible only to those whose eyes can penetrate rocks and mountains. This constitutional inaccuracy is a blot upon nearly all his works, and his one permanent contribution to literature will probably prove to be the “Life of Dr. Arnold.”

  The largest part of his literary work was done in the field of ecclesiastical history, a subject naturally congenial to him, and to which he was further drawn by the professorship which he held at Oxford during a time when a great revival of historical studies was in progress. It was work which critics could easily disparage, for there were many small errors scattered through it; and the picturesque method of treatment he employed was apt to pass into scrappiness. He fixed on the points which had a special interest for his own mind as illustrating some trait of personal or national character, or some moral lesson, and passed hastily over other matters of equal or greater importance. Nevertheless his work had some distinctive merits which have not received from professional critics the whole credit they deserved. In all that Stanley wrote one finds a certain largeness and dignity of view. He had a sense of the unity of history, of the constant relation of past and present, of the similarity of human nature in one age and country to human nature in another; and he never failed to dwell upon the permanently valuable truths which history has to teach. Nothing was too small to attract him, because he discovered a meaning in everything, and he was therefore never dull, for even when he moralised he would light up his reflections by some happy anecdote. With this he possessed a keen eye, the eye of a poet, for human character, and a power of sympathy that enabled him to appreciate even those whose principles and policy he disliked.