Theologian, was the son of Mr. Ward, formerly director of the Bank of England and member for the City. The son was educated at Winchester College, and at Christ Church, Oxford, and took his degree in 1834. He obtained a fellowship at Balliol, where he remained for some years as mathematical tutor. Mr. Ward plunged with zeal into the Tractarian Movement inaugurated by Newman and Pusey, and in 1844 published a remarkable work, “The Ideal of a Christian Church Considered in Comparison with its Existing Practice.” It commented on the Reformation in a hostile spirit, and was condemned by convocation by 776 votes against 386. Mr. Ward was further degraded from his M.A. degree. Shortly afterwards he seceded to the Church of Rome. Ward was for many years editor of the Dublin Review, and lectured on theology at St. Edmund’s College, Herts. A collection of his able “Essays on the Philosophy of Theism,” written in opposition to J. S. Mill, was published in 1884.

Personal

  He had many stories of our dear old friend, which would have amused you, showing that he was on his death-bed what he had been throughout life, the same grotesque mixture of deep devotional feeling, with a levity of expression which scandalized those who did not understand him, as if, having been forced into seriousness for a minute or two, the pent-up animal spirits must have their fling, and kick up their heels a little! Manning, he told us, used to pull awfully long faces at the French novels he found on the shelves of the Fat Friend’s study; and then the Fat Friend began to reason with him that novels and the opera were his way of getting his amusement, just as “you get yours by going down to the House of Commons and hearing ‘debates.’” I prefer Carlotta Patti, and Trebelli to all your great statesmen and orators.

  How Mr. Ward, being what he was, and beginning as he did, should have ended as he did, will be a matter of speculation to many. How a man with such justifiable confidence in his own intellectual power and professing, moreover, to trust so largely in the Shechinah of his individual conscience—“that image of God in the soul, that witness to God and to the law of God in man”—should have been the servant of so many successive masters, and at last, wearied out, should have submitted himself unreservedly to the one whom he had learned to regard as Infallible, has the puzzle of an apparent contradiction. How, delighting as he did, with exceeding delight, in dramatic literature and performances, a man of so much geniality and so humorous should have resolutely closed his eyes to the ever-changing drama of life throughout the centuries, is not easy to understand; yet perhaps therein partly lay the explanation of his life. Man, the whole man, with all his powers, must dedicate himself to the service of life, if he would avoid error and attain his highest.

  There were curious gaps in Ward’s character, both moral and intellectual. He was very affectionate and felt coldness, but he did not feel deaths. He asked naturally, without finding an answer, why we should have any special affection for relations. His notion of patriotism did not include any admiration for the fatherland. It was limited to special grief at national vices and special pleasure in national virtues. His intellect—which, though he thought little of it, he truly declared to be, in certain directions, almost infinite—was curiously capricious, and he never emancipated himself from its caprices. He understood pure mathematics and indulged his detestation of applied mathematics; he was a great dialectician, but he indulged his distaste for history. One effect was that he had to take his facts at second-hand, in a way which astonished Bonamy Price; another, that he had to discuss much without any clear view of the facts.

  There was something to smile at in his person, and in some of his ways—his unbusiness-like habits, his joyousness of manner, his racy stories; but few more powerful intellects passed through Oxford in his time, and he has justified his University reputation by his distinction since, both as a Roman Catholic theologian and professor, and as a profound metaphysical thinker, the equal antagonist on their own ground of J. Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. But his intellect at that time was as remarkable for its defects as for its powers. He used to divide his friends, and thinking people in general, into those who had facts and did not know what to do with them, and those who had in perfection the logical faculties, but wanted the facts to reason upon. He belonged himself to the latter class. He had, not unnaturally, boundless confidence in his argumentative powers; they were subtle, piercing, nimble, never at a loss, and they included a power of exposition which, if it was not always succinct and lively, was always weighty and impressive. Premises in his hands were not long in bringing forth their conclusions; and if abstractions always corresponded exactly to their concrete embodiments, and ideals were fulfilled in realities, no one could point out more perspicuously and decisively the practical judgments of them which reason must sanction.

  I remember well the first time that I saw your father—it was, I think, at the second or third meeting of the Society. He came into the room along with Manning, and the marked contrast between them added to the impressiveness. I remember thinking that I had never seen a face that seemed so clearly to indicate a strongly developed sensuous nature, and yet was at the same time so intellectual as your father’s. I do not mean merely that it expressed intellectual faculty…. I mean rather the predominance of the intellectual life, of concern (as Matthew Arnold says) for the “things of the mind.” I did not then know your father’s writings at all; and though from what I had heard of him I expected to find him an effective defender of the Catholic position, I certainly did not anticipate that I should come—as after two or three meetings I did come—to place him in the very first rank of our members, as judged from the point of view of the Society in respect of their aptitudes for furthering its aim. The aim of the Society was, by frank and close debate and unreserved communication of dissent and objection, to attain—not agreement, which was of course beyond hope—but a diminution of mutual misunderstanding. For this kind of discussion your father’s gifts were very remarkable. The only other member of the Society who in my recollection rivals him is—curiously enough—Huxley.

  As a quick-witted dialectician, thoroughly acquainted with all the weak points of his antagonist’s case, I have not met with Dr. Ward’s match. And it all seemed to come so easily to him; searching questions, incisive, not to say pungent, replies, and trains of subtle argumentation, were poured forth, which, while sometimes passing into earnest and serious exposition, would also, when lighter topics came to the front, be accompanied by an air of genial good-humour, as if the whole business were rather a good joke. But it was no joke to reply efficiently…. He was before all things a chivalrous English gentleman; I would say a philosophical and theological Quixote, if it were not that our associations with the name of the knight of LaMancha are mainly derived from his adventures, and not from the noble directness and simplicity of mind which led to those misfortunes.

  There was a flavour of comedy in Mr. Ward’s view of himself, in his almost dogmatic definitions of his own ignorance and limitations and incapacities, and in his equally dogmatic self-confidence, which it would have been bad art and worse taste to keep out of view. A large element in the engaging side of the man was the gusto with which he laughed at himself and the frankness with which he took all his friends into his confidence on that head…. Few people ever enjoyed a laugh at themselves as did William George Ward. Certainly in all my experience of life I have never come across another person who found a far greater spring of amusement in analysing, proclaiming to the world, and even caricaturing, his own want of knowledge, his own want of courage, and the child-like incapacities which he discerned or fancied he discerned in himself, than he ever found in doing the same disservice for anyone else. In his judgments of others he was the personification of wise and charitable agnosticism. In his judgments of himself he was not half agnostic enough. He supposed that his knowledge of his own weaknesses was absolute, whereas hardly any man knows accurately, and certainly Mr. Ward did not know at all accurately, where his weaknesses ended and suddenly passed into unique strength.

  Mr. Ward’s Catholic life, so far as his intellectual work is concerned, divides itself naturally into the period of his teaching at St. Edmund’s, his writings (especially his writings in this Review) on the controversy which culminated at the time of the Vatican Council, and his philosophical and metaphysical polemic against such men as Professor Huxley, John Stuart Mill, and Dr. Alexander Bain. It is when analysing these latter controversies that our author displays the striking clearness of his style. To master such subjects at all is no light task. But to state the various sides to a long and intricate controversy upon abstruse questions of speculative philosophy, and to do so with even-handed justice and temper, and at the same time with such limpid clearness that the whole reads like a simple narrative of facts, is an achievement so considerable that it raises its author far above the average level of English descriptive and analytical biographers.

  For the next ten years, from 1835 to 1845 he was certainly the greatest conversationalist and (excepting always Newman) the greatest centre of intellectual life of that description in Oxford. There was no subject he was not ready to discuss, from politics and moral and metaphysical philosophy to music of every description, from Haydn down to the last opera, even more than theology. I ought, however, to except two subjects, history and poetry; he believed as little in history as Sir R. Walpole’s famous dictum implies—“Don’t read me history, for that I know is false”—and he hated all poetry, except as embodied in the hymns and ritual of the Roman Church. In fact, he was the prince of talkers, perhaps the last of the great conversationalists since Coleridge. This would have been recognised everywhere, though no doubt it was more strongly felt in Balliol than in the rest of the University. It was the few who lived with him familiarly, whether as pupils or afterwards in the common room, who most appreciated his power, though large allowance was made even by them for his insatiable passion for paradox.

General

  Since Mr. Ward laid down the office of Editor, he published two volumes of articles selected from his contributions to the [Dublin] Review. To the second of these, which is entitled, “Essays on the Church’s Doctrinal Authority,” he prefixed a preliminary Essay which may be described as an intellectual history and analysis of the sixteen years of his Editorship. He has traced very accurately the condition of opinion and the tendency of thought among Catholics before the year 1862, and the successive controversies in which he was involved down to the year 1873. The whole Essay is a summing up of his own words and acts, and a calm and candid justification of the whole polemical attitude in which he habitually lived…. He was supposed to be full of self-assertion and intolerance; exaggerated and extreme both in thought and language. Perhaps few men have ever been more docile to the Church, to traditionary judgments, and to the authority of theologians; few more fearful of novelties, of his own want of various learning, and of his liability to err. It was with these dangers before him, that Mr. Ward incessantly laboured in three distinct fields. First in Philosophy, without which the intellectual conception of Theology can have no sound and precise foundation; secondly, in the relation between Religion and Politics, including the office of the Civil Power and the Civil Princedom of the Sovereign Pontiff; Thirdly, on Catholic Education, especially in its higher form. It would be impossible to give any adequate idea of these incessant labours without a history which would fill volumes, and an analysis which would require a full statement of every thesis, together with the objections of opponents and the detailed answer to each.

  He enjoyed argument and paradox, was a remorseless antagonist, with a mischievous delight in making listeners stare. He scorned timidity and half-way opinions. He laid on his colors with the palette knife, and did little to blend the tones afterward. For him, a thing was so, or was not so; and if so, it was very much so, quite absolutely so always. He indulged himself in what has been called “inverted hypocrisy,” and showed himself in the worst lights the facts would admit of. So far from putting all his goods in the shop window, he would rather display a bare counter and close his shutters if he had not a complete stock. Always mirthful and genial when most in earnest, he never lost his temper, and would transfix you with a syllogism while retaining an angelic and infantine smile. He cared nothing for facts apart from principles, and ranked meaningless historic details with village gossip.

  If we take into account only the necessarily restricted number of men who have taken up a carefully thought out and permanent position in these difficult, complex, still largely problematical questions; and if we pass over among them such men as Father Knox in England, and Drs. Scheeben, and Von Schäzler, and Father Schneemann in Germany, perhaps also Père Ramière in France, of whom at least the first four were, on their own admission, learners on these points from your father—it will be seen how quite exceptional was the length to which he carried his theory. Take his “De Infallibilitatis Extensione” (1869) and its seventeen Theses. According to his own admission there, the very Theologians and Roman Congregations to whom he wanted to attribute quasi infallible authority, refused to endorse thesis after thesis of his. Take again his attitude on the ex Cathedrâ character of the Syllabus. He first obliges every Catholic to accept it sub mortali; he next takes off this obligation; he finally re-imposes it. Take, finally, the Vatican definition. He never made any secret of how much he cared for the question as to the Object, the range of Infallibility, and how little comparatively for that as to its Subject, its organ; of how backward he thought, on the first question, the opinions of the large majority of the Bishops of the Council; and how disappointed he was that the Council, whilst giving a most moderate definition as to the Subject, left the question of the Object exactly where it was before your father began insisting that it was the great Catholic question of the age.

  The acute collision between the two extreme parties in the eventful years preceding the Vatican Council, the comparative disappearance of both since then, and the subsequent renewal, in a more permanent form, of the combination of Ultramontanism with the endeavour to find a modus vivendi with modern thought and modern political conditions, make undoubtedly a turning-point in the history of contemporary Christian thought. In the events surrounding this crisis Mr. W. G. Ward took, both directly and indirectly, an active share. He represented in politics and theology the unqualified opposition to the extremes of Liberal Catholicism against which Pius IX’s pontificate was a constant protest; and in philosophy his tendency was towards the fusion of Ultramontane loyalty, with a sympathetic assimilation of all that is valuable in contemporary thought, as the best means of purging it of what is dangerous. The history, then, of this crisis is naturally given in the story of his life.

  W. G. Ward, commonly called “Ideal” Ward from his famous, very ill-written, very ill-digested, but important “Ideal of a Christian Church,” which was the alarm-bell for the flight to Rome, was a curiously constituted person of whom something has been said in reference to Clough. He had little connection with pure letters, and after his secession to Rome and his succession to a large fortune he finally devoted himself to metaphysics of a kind. His acuteness was great, and he had a scholastic subtlety and logical deftness which made him very formidable to the loose thinkers and reasoners of Utilitarianism and anti-Supernaturalism.

  W. G. Ward lived, but only to prove by his “Ideal of a Christian Church” that the power of writing good English was not among his endowments.

  His crusade was carried on chiefly in the “Dublin Review,” which he raised from decadence and edited with conspicuous success from 1863 to 1878. In its pages he defended the encyclical “Quanta Cura” and “Syllabus Errorum” of 1864, and led the extreme wing of the ultramontane party in the controversy on papal infallibility. He speculated freely on the extent of infallibility, and reduced the interpretative functions of the “schola theologorum” to a minimum. His startling conclusions he enunciated with the serenity of a philosopher and defended with the vehemence of a fanatic.