Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 38.djvu/23

 :: " from the exceptions of Dr. Thomas Burgess, bishop of St. Davids, and the Rev. Richard Grier,’ London, 1822, 8vo.
 * 1)   ‘A Letter to the Catholic Clergy of the Midland District’ [on ‘a certain new Creed or Formulary published in this District, called Roman Catholic Principles in reference to God and the Country’], London, 1823, 8vo. The treatise referred to was written by the Benedictine father,  [q. v.]
 * 2) ‘Strictures on the Poet Laureate's [i.e. Robert Southey's] Book of the Church,’ London, 1824, 8vo.
 * 3) ‘A Parting Word to the Rev. Richard Grier, D.D. … With a Brief Notice of Dr. Samuel Parr's posthumous Letter to Dr. Milner,’ London, 1825.

Some papers by him are in the ‘Catholic Gentleman's Magazine,’ and the ‘Catholicon;’ and many in the ‘Orthodox Journal.’

His portrait has been engraved by Radclyffe, from a portrait at St. Mary's College, Oscott.



MILNER, JOSEPH (1744–1797), divine, was born at Quarry Hill, then in the neighbourhood, now in the midst of Leeds, on 2 Jan. 1744, and was baptised in Leeds parish church. He was educated at Leeds grammar school. An attack of the measles when he was three years old left him permanently delicate; but he early developed great precocity and a wonderfully retentive memory. His father was poor, but through the pecuniary help of friends he was sent to Catharine Hall, Cambridge, where he was appointed chapel clerk. He had little taste for mathematics, and the classical tripos was not then founded. But he achieved the respectable position of third senior optime, and thus qualified himself to compete for the chancellor's medals for classical proficiency, the second of which he won in 1766 in an unusually strong competition. He then went to Thorp Arch, near Tadcaster, Yorkshire, as assistant in a school kept by Christopher Atkinson, the vicar of the parish, received holy orders, and became Atkinson's curate. At Thorp Arch he contracted a lifelong friendship with the son of the vicar, Myles Atkinson, who subsequently became a leader of the evangelical party and vicar of St. Paul's, Leeds. While yet in deacon's orders he left Thorp Arch to become head-master of the grammar school at Hull, which greatly improved under his direction, and he was in 1768 elected afternoon lecturer at Holy Trinity, or the High Church, in that town. He was now in a position to assist his family, and he paid for the education of his brother [q. v.] In 1770 he became an ardent disciple of the rising evangelical school, and incurred the disfavour which then attached to those who were suspected of ‘methodism.’ He lost most of the rich members of his congregation at the High Church, but the poor flocked to hear him. He also undertook the charge of North Ferriby, a village on the Humber, about nine miles from Hull, where he officiated first as curate and then as vicar for seventeen years. At North Ferriby many Hull merchants had country seats, and among them he was long unpopular. But after seven or eight years opposition ceased both at Hull and Ferriby, and for the last twenty years of his life he was a great moral power in both places. Largely owing to him Hull became a centre of evangelicalism. His chief friends were the Rev. James Stillingfleet of Hotham, at whose rectory he wrote a great part of his ‘Church History,’ and the Rev. William Richardson of York, who both shared his own religious views. In 1792 he had a severe attack of fever, from the effects of which he never fully recovered. In 1797 the mayor and corporation offered him the living of Holy Trinity, mainly through the efforts of William Wilberforce, M.P. for Yorkshire. The corporation also voted him 40l. a year to keep a second usher at his school. On his journey to York for institution he caught a cold, which ended his life in a few weeks (15 Nov. 1797). He was buried in Holy Trinity Church, and a monument to his memory was erected in it.

As a writer Milner is chiefly known in connection with ‘The History of the Church of Christ’ which bears his name, though the literary history of that work is a curious medley. The excellent and somewhat novel idea of the book is no doubt exclusively his. He was painfully struck by the fact that most church histories were in reality little more than records of the errors and disputes of Christians, and thus too often played into the hands of unbelievers. Perhaps the recent publication of Gibbon's ‘Decline and Fall’ (first volume, 1776) strengthened this feeling. Rh