Born, at Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, 15 Sept. 1813. Family removed to Derby, 1815. At Grantham Grammar School, 1822–28. Matric. Oriel Coll., Oxford, 1 July 1830; B.A., 1834; English Essay Prize, 1835; M.A., 1838: Fellow of Magdalen Coll., 1840–56; B.D., 1846; D.D., 1871. Intimacy with Pusey at Oxford. Contrib. to “British Critic,” and “Guardian.” Part editor of “Christian Remembrancer,” 1845–55. Rector of Old Shoreham, Sussex, 1856–78. Married Amelia Ogle, July 1856. Bampton Lecturer, Oxford, 1865; Select Preacher, 1869. Canon of Worcester, 1869–71. Regius Prof. of Divinity, Oxford, and Canon of Ch. Ch., 1871–78. Died, at Shoreham, 4 Jan. 1878. Works: “The Influence of Ancient Oracles,” 1836; “Observations on the Propositions to be submitted to Convocation” (anon.), 1845; “A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination,” 1855; “The Primitive Doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration,” 1856; “A Review of the Baptismal Controversy,” 1862; “Subscription to the Articles,” 1863; “Eight Lectures on Miracles,” 1865; “Observations on the Colonial Church Question,” 1867; “The Roman Council,” 1870 [1869]; “The Principle of Causation,” 1872; “Sermons preached before the University of Oxford,” 1876; “Ruling Ideas in Early Ages,” 1877; Posthumous: “Essays Historical and Theological,” ed. by his sister, 1878; “The Theory of Development” (from “Christian Remembrancer”), 1878; “Sermons, Parochial and Occasional,” 1879; “Lectures, and other Theological Papers,” 1883; “Letters,” ed. by his sister, with life 1885 [1884].

Personal

  Among Dr. Mozley’s youthful characteristics were simplicity of habits, warm but undemonstrative affections, sincerity of thought, an almost stern purity of mind, carelessness of worldly advancement or distinction, and a deliberate desire to attach himself to a worthy object of life…. He was fond of his friends and of society, conscious of his own powers, without valuing himself on them, and ready and liberal in his appreciation of others. But partly from the modesty of a man who had before him a high standard of excellence, partly because he could not easily do himself justice in spoken words, partly because it was a kind of serious amusement to him to observe and ponder, he did not talk much in company. If he spoke, he seemed to speak because there was something which ought to be said, and nobody else to say it; expressing himself in short and even abrupt sentences and well-chosen words, which showed even a critical or eager interest in what was going on; but, when this was done falling back into his normal state of amused or inquiring attention, like a man who has discharged a duty and is glad to have done with it. He was not an artist or a writer of poems, but he had a keen and somewhat analytical appreciation of what was beautiful to the eye or ear, whether severe or florid, and his writings show that his sense of things was as vigorous in point of humour and poetry as in point of philosophy. Pomp he respectfully appreciated, as on proper occasions a fitting instrument for the adornment of truth, and he was fully aware that a battle of principle may occasionally have to be fought on a point of detail. But he was quite superior to the triviality which agitates itself about prettinesses, the pomposity which feels itself exalted by being part of a ceremonial, or the captiousness which finds occasion for petty quarrel. Of cant or pretentiousness he was intolerant, of unction implacable perhaps to a fault, so that those who did not know him might imagine him dry. He had not the special excellences or the defects of a great preacher, and, with all his power of thought and imagery, could scarcely, I think, have become one, even had his delivery been better than it was. He was wholly genuine.

  From infancy his mind busied itself with grave thoughts, which took such hold of him that he was from the first ready to be their champion. It is told of him that in the nursery he did battle for free will against his nurse, who, led away by a popular curate, had adopted fatalistic opinions. The controversial spirit, by which is meant not partisanship, but the willingness to combat for what he believed to be great truths, went with him through life. The thoughts and interests with which he began it, he held to its close, whatever variation in form and colour they might be forced to assume. The strong grip of great truths—intense tenacity of thought and of affection—that was James Mozley’s main characteristic from first to last.

  He was always critical of his own work as though he had an ideal he had never reached. He had to be persuaded into the due amount of satisfaction. His real lasting pleasure in his friends’ praise was because it came from them.

  So much of Dr. Mozley’s power depended upon his self-restraint, that he himself is almost impenetrable. If his intimate letters had been entirely held back we would have hardly known him at all. As it is, perhaps the first impression is that he is very hard to know. He tells us much less both of himself and of others than the author of “Reminiscences of Oriel.” From one point of view this reserve is attractive. Few thoughtful persons of the present century have solved Carlyle’s problem of consuming their own smoke so completely.

General

  They [Bampton Lectures] are an example, and a very fine one, of a mode of theological writing which is characteristic of the Church of England, and almost peculiar to it. The distinguishing features of it are a combination of intense seriousness with a self-restrained, severe calmness, and of very vigorous and wide-ranging reasoning on the realities of the case with the least amount of care about artificial symmetry or scholastic completeness. Admirers of the Roman style call it cold, indefinite, wanting in dogmatic coherence, comprehensiveness, and grandeur. Admirers of the German style find little to praise in a cautious bit-by-bit method, content with the tests which have most affinity with common sense, incredulous of exhaustive theories, leaving a large margin for the unaccountable or the unexplained. But it has its merits, one of them being that, dealing very solidly and very acutely with large and real matters of experience, the interest of such writings endures as the starting-point and foundation for future work…. It is marked throughout with the most serious and earnest conviction, but it is without a single word, from first to last, of asperity or insinuation against opponents; and this, not from any deficiency of feeling as to the importance of the issue, but from a deliberate and resolutely maintained self-control, and from an overruling ever-present sense of the duty, on themes like these, of a more than judicial calmness.

  We have here a mind instinct with the best temper of Butler’s school, living and active in mature vigor in presence of the questions of our own day: and the influence of such a mind is likely to perpetuate that temper, as the writings of the master seem now to fail to do, because those who are excited about questions of the day, and feel rightly that they have an importance not of the day only, are yet unable to recognise the same questions as they appeared to a different generation. It is seldom that an author with so vigorous a personality as Dr. Mozley’s can be so adequately characterized by referring him to a particular school. He is too thoughtful a writer to allow us to suppose that he has learnt nothing except what he learnt from Butler: still more unjust would it be to describe him as merely an old-fashioned Churchman. But that intellectual self-restraint which is one of the best and most constant features of the school has been exercised by him in the repression of those opinions which are individual with him, and not direct outgrowths of the Anglican spirit or the Butlerian method.

  It is not often that a collection of miscellaneous writings bears throughout so genuine and strong an impress of the writer’s personality. Dr. Mozley led a retired life, and only in the latter portion of it came to be widely known; but he seems to have made a deep impression upon those who were brought into personal contact with him, and this impression will be shared by all who become acquainted with him through these pages. Even without the help of the affectionate and appreciative sketch which opens the volumes it would be impossible not to arrive at the conclusion that the author was a very able, a very sincere, and a very honest man; a man equally strong in his convictions, tenacious in his grasp, and independent in arriving at his conclusions…. His strongest intellectual bent was in the line of metaphysical enquiry; when dealing with philosophical principles his grasp was always vigorous. Combined with his marked analytic faculty was a cognate disposition to study the workings of human character, a disposition in his case so strong that the habit of searching beneath the external act for the hidden motive amounted almost to an instinct. We are told that he habitually speculated on the character of all with whom he came in contact, a fact which accounts for the distinctive merits and distinctive defects of the volumes before us.

  Since the day, now nearly five and thirty years ago, when the Rev. J. H. Newman left the Church of England, there has not arisen within it any so solid and powerful theological teacher as James B. Mozley, the late Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford. A teacher I call him, though it was by the pen, rather than by the living voice, that he taught his fellow-men. Looking back over the long interval that has elapsed since that great crisis, among the many able preachers and teachers in the Church of England, no one appears with a mind so massive and so profound as his. His voice, indeed, was seldom heard from the pulpit, or in any public place; he took little or no outward part in the movements of ecclesiastical affairs; yet from the retirement of his study he furnished his Church and his country with a body of thought larger and more substantive, he produced more work that will be a permanent possession, than any other contemporary teacher of the Church to which he belonged.

  One cannot read Mozley’s writings without feeling some surprise that a man of such gifts did not exercise a greater influence during his lifetime. From 1871 until his death, he was Regius Professor of Divinity in Oxford, and his biographer tells that he possessed every qualification for the post except the faculty of popular teaching. But why should a man who was almost equally gifted with ratiocinative and imaginative powers have been destitute of the faculty of popular teaching? We can only account for it on the supposition that he did not possess the power of awakening enthusiasm. He possessed himself, as his writings show, the power of being stirred to enthusiasm by high thoughts, but he may have wanted the power of taking his hearers into his sympathy. A certain intellectual hauteur seemed to have kept him apart from the mass of men, and prevented him either from leading a party, or gathering disciples around him. A reserved, distant tone is perceptible in all his writings. This is visible in his language, whether he is speaking of God, or his fellow-men. He wrote an essay on Luther, in which he shows an almost personal aversion to the reformer, and a strange want of appreciation of his greatness. But it was just what he most disliked in Luther that he himself most wanted. Had his religion and his humanity been of a somewhat less reserved and distant character, had he possessed a greater stock of homely sympathies, he would have assuredly gained a wider personal recognition while he was still living to enjoy it. The two large volumes of Essays, which were published after his death, raised his reputation as a writer and as a thinker, but in some respects they disappointed those who had been accustomed to regard him as a rare example of an impartial religious thinker. They contain passages of great beauty, and they show how versatile he was; but, in some of his historical estimates, he manifests a narrow-minded prejudice, an unfair animus, such as we expect in writers of the level of Dean Hook.

  Mozley treated hackneyed themes with the vigour and freshness which can only be attained by a genuine thinker; he is never a mere retailer of the commonplaces of others…. We can hardly turn over a page of what Mozley has written without meeting with some striking thought, and we are everywhere conscious of the perfect good faith and sincerity which animated him. But we cannot fail also to be reminded not unfrequently of the fact that he generally presented himself as an advocate, though a perfectly sincere advocate, and not as a judge or a philosopher. Hence he not uncommonly states questionable propositions as if they admitted of no question; and, in pushing on a vigorous front attack, he is not always aware that he has uncovered his flank.

  As exhibited in his works the theology of Canon Mozley is fragmentary. It is not seen as a system well proportioned, each part fitly adjusted to every other. This characteristic is due, however, simply to the fact that his published writings relate in the main to a few particular doctrines. His views in reference to doctrines not thus considered can be gathered only crumb by crumb, by inference and suggestion.

  I am surprised that you do not appreciate J. Mozley, a different animal genetically, I should say, from Tom, though like them both. And surely, as to style, Jem had both imagination and acuteness, two strong gifts, though he had but little humour, and was apt to analyze too much.

  A very acute and striking theological writer as well as critic.

  Although his manner of delivery was somewhat lifeless and uninteresting owing to weakness of voice, the matter of his professorial lectures were excellent, and one of his best works consisted of a course delivered to graduates, mostly themselves engaged in tuition, and entitled “Ruling Ideas in early Ages, and their relation to the Old Testament Faith.”