Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/646

 and was attracted by the insistence of the Tractarians on the idea of the corporate life of the church and on the importance of self-disciphne, but he was repelled by their dogmatism. In many respects he felt more in sympathy with the views of Arnold, Hampden, and Stanley. He graduated B.A. as 24th wrangler in January 1848, his friend C. B. Scott being two places above him. He then went in for the classical tripos, in which he was bracketed with Scott as first in the first class. In the competition for the chancellor's medals Scott was first and Westcott second. Both were elected fellows of Trinity in 1849. For the three and a half years after his tripos examinations Westcott took private pupils, and threw himself into this work with great zeal. Among his pupils, with many of whom he formed close friendships, were J. B. Lightfoot [q. v.] and E. W. Benson [q. v. Suppl. I], who had come up to Trinity subsequently to himself from King Edward VI's School, Birmingham, and F. J. A. Hort [q. v. Suppl. I]. Outside his teaching work he interested himself in forming with friends a society for investigating alleged supernatural appearances and effects — an anticipation of the 'Psychical Society.' But he soon seems to have concluded that such investigations could lead to no satisfactory or useful result. He found time for some theological reading, and in 1850 obtained the Norrisian prize for an essay 'On the Alleged Historical Contradictions of the Gospels,' and published it in 1851, under the title 'The Elements of the Gospel Harmony.' He was ordained deacon on Trinity Sunday 1851, his fellowship being taken as a title, and priest on the 21st of the following December, in both cases by his old headmaster. Prince Lee, who had now become bishop of Manchester. He had already decided to leave Cambridge, and in Jan. 1852 accepted a post at Harrow. In December of the same year he married. His work at Harrow was to assist Dr. Vaughan, the headmaster, in correcting the sixth-form composition, and occasionally to take the form for him. For some time, too, he had charge of a small boarding-house, and along with it a pupil-room of boys drawn mainly from the headmaster's house and the home-boarders. At the end of 1863 he succeeded to a large boarding-house. For the work of an ordinary form-master he was not well fitted. He did not understand the ordinary boy, and he had some difficulty in maintaining discipline. But on individual boys, of minds and characters more or less responsive to his, he made a deep impression. Happily both in his small house and his large house there were an unusual number of boys of promise. Meanwhile the school — masters and boys alike — increasingly, as time went on, looked up to him as a man of great and varied learning. By using every spare hour during the school terms and the greater part of the holidays for study and writing, Westcott succeeded in producing, while at Harrow, some of his best-known books and making a wide reputation as a biblical critic and theologian. In 1855 appeared his 'General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament during the First Four Centuries'; in 1859 a course of four sermons preached before the University of Cambridge on' Characteristics of the Gospel Miracles'; in 1860 his 'Introduction to the Study of the Gospels,' an enlargement of his early essay entitled 'The Elements of the Gospel Harmony'; in 1864 'The Bible in the Church,' a popular account of the reception of the Old Testament in the Jewish, and of both Old and New in the Christian, Church; in 1866 the 'Gospel of the Resurrection,' an essay in wluch he gave expression to some of bis most characteristic thoughts on the Christian faith and its relation to reason and human life; in 1868, 'A General View of the History of the English Bible,' in which he threw light on many points which had commonly been misunderstood (3rd edit, revised by W. Aldis Wright, 1905). He also wrote many articles for 'Smith's Dictionary of the Bible,' of which the first volume appeared in 1860 and the second and third in 1863, and he was beginning to work at the Johannine writings and to collaborate with Hort in the preparation of a critical text of the New Testament. In 1866 and 1867 he published three articles in the 'Contemporary Review' on 'The Myths of Plato,' 'The Dramatist as Prophet: Æschylus,' and 'Euripides as a Religious Teacher.' These were republished many years later in his 'Essays in the History of Religious Thought in the West' (1891). Further during his last two or three years at Harrow he gave a good deal of time to the study of Robert Browning's poems, and of the works of Comte, and in 1867 pubhshed an article in the 'Contemporary Review' on 'Aspects of Positivism in Relation to Christianity,' which was republished as an Appendix to the 3rd edit, of his 'Gospel of the Resurrection.' In the autumn of 1868, Dr. Magee, who