Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/475

 STANLEY 451 and more comprehensive spirit of Christianity throughout the land." Of his mother her son not only spoke, after her death in 1862, as "the guardian genius" that "had nursed his very mind and heart," but described her as "gifted with a spiritual insight which belonged to that larger sphere of religion which is above and beyond the passing controversies of the day." Arthur was their third child. His elder brother, Owen, died in 1850 at Sydney, after concluding, as commander of the "Kattlesnake" frigate, the survey of the Coral Sea. His sister Mary, well known for her work in the hospitals at Scutari and among the poor in London, died in 1880. Arthur was a child of highly sensitive organization and precocious intel- lectual activity. His boyish letters, journals, and poems were singularly like in their characteristic points to his later writings. But his extreme shyness and silence gave no promise of the social gifts which afterwards added so largely to his influence. At the age of fourteen his health, at one time alarmingly delicate, so far improved as to warrant his parents in sending him to Rugby, where Dr Arnold had been recently appointed head master. He remained at Rugby from 1829 to 1834, and of all Arnold's pupils may be said to have been the one who most fully responded to^the influence of his master's teaching and character. In 1834 he became an undergraduate of Balliol College, Oxford, having obtained a scholarship in the pre- vious year. Among his tutors at Balliol was Mr Tait, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, and among his junior fellow scholars Benjamin Jowett, afterwards professor of Greek and master of Balliol. Arthur Stanley, after obtain- ing the Ireland scholarship and Newdigate prize for a remarkable English poem (on the Gipsies), was placed in the first class in 1837. In 1839, after a period of residence and study at Oxford, he was elected fellow of University College, and in the same year was admitted to holy orders. In 1840 he left England for a prolonged tour in Greece and Italy, and on his return settled at Oxford, where he resided from October 1841 for the next ten years, being actively engaged during term time as tutor of his college. He very shortly became an influential element in univer- sity life. His personal relations to his pupils were of a singularly close and affectionate nature, and the charm of his social gifts and genial character won him friends on all sides. His literary reputation was early established by the profound impression made by his Life of Arnold, whose sudden death had occurred in 1842, and whose biography, published in 1844, at once secured for its young author a high place among English writers. In 1845 he was appointed select preacher, and published in 1847 a volume of Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age, which not only laid the foundation of his fame as a preacher, but also marked his future position as a theologian. In university politics, which at that time wore mainly the form of theological controversy, he from the first took the place which he always retained of an uncompromising advocate of comprehension and toleration. As an undergraduate he had entirely sympathized with Dr Arnold in resenting the agitation led by, but not confined to, the High Church party in 1836 against the appointment of Dr Hampden to the regius professorship of divinity. As a young M.A., during the long-continued agitation which followed the publication in 1841 of Tract No. 90, and which ended in the withdrawal of the present Cardinal Newman from the English Church, he u : ;od all his influence to protect from formal condemnation the leaders and tenets of the "Tractarian" party. In 1847 he did his utmost to resist the movement set on foot at Oxford against Dr Hampden's appointment to the bishopric of Hereford. Finally, in 1850, in an article published in the Edinburgh Revieiv in defence of the "Gorham judgment," which had secured the position in the English Church of the Evangelical clergy, he asserted two principles which he maintained to the end of his life, first, " that the so-called supremacy of the crown in religious matters was in reality nothing else than the supremacy of law," and, secondly, "that the Church of England, by the very condition of its being, was not Highj or Low, but Broad, and had always included, and been meant to include, opposite and contradictory opinions on points even more important than those at present under discussion." It was not only in theological but in academical matters that his sympathies were on the liberal side. Though on many points of essentially conservative tendencies, he was greatly interested in university reform, and towards the end of his residence at Oxford acted as secretary to the royal commission appointed in 1850 to report on and to suggest improvements in the administrative and educa- tional system of the university. Of the important changes in both these respects which, in the face of much opposi- tion at the university, were carried out in due time under the sanction of parliament by an executive commission, Stanley, who took the principal share in drafting the report printed in 1852, was a strenuous advocate. These changes included the transference of the initiative ia university legislation from the sole authority of the heads of houses to an elected and representative body, the open- ing of college fellowships and scholarships to competition by the removal of local and other restrictions, the non- enforcement at matriculation of subscription to the Thirty- nine Articles, and various steps taken to increase the usefulness and influence of the professoriate. Before the report was issued, Stanley, who had lost his father in 1849, and both his brothers, Captain Stanley mentioned above, and Charles, secretary to the governor of Van Diemen's Land, within a few months of the same date, was appointed to a canonry in Canterbury cathedral. He held the office from 1851 till his return to Oxford. During his residence at Canterbury he published his Memoir of his father Bishop Stanley (1851), and completed his Commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians (1855). In the winter and spring of 1852-53 he made the tour in Egypt and the Holy Land, the result of which was his well -known volume on Sinai and Palestine, first published in 1856. In 1857 he travelled in Russia, and collected much of the materials for his subsequent Lectures on the Greek Church, published in 1861. His Memorials of Canterbury, published in 1855, displayed the full maturity of his power of dealing with the events, scenes, and characters of past history which had marked him from childhood. Towards the close of the same period he accepted the office of examining chaplain to Dr Tait, his former tutor at Balliol and afterwards successor to Arnold at Rugby, on his transference from the deanery of Carlisl>- to the see of London. At the close of 1856 Stanley was appointed by the crown to the professorship of ecclesiastical history, a post which, with the canonry at Christ Church attached to the office, he held till 1863. In the first of three inaugural lectures the new professor announced his intention of beginning his treatment of the subject with '' the first dawn of the history of the church," the call of Abraham ; and the first two volumes of his History of the Jewish Church, published in 1863 and 1865, consist of the substance of lectures delivered by him in his capacity as professor. In 1861 he published the volume on the Greek Church already referred to. His second residence at Oxford was marked by the same power of winning per- sonal influence which had distinguished him as a college tutor, and by the efforts which he made, in his wider sphere as professor, to bring together in social intercourse