Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/476

 452 STANLEY the leaders of the divergent and hostile parties between which the residents at the university were mainly divided. Much, however, of his time and efforts was given to religious controversy. From 1860 to 1864 academical and clerical circles were agitated by the storm which followed the publication of Essays and Reviews, a volume to which two of his most valued friends Benjamin Jowett and Mr Temple, the former professor of Greek at Oxford, the latter head master of Rugby and afterwards bishop in succession of Exeter and London had been contributors. For the exceedingly prominent part taken by Stanley in this excit- ing controversy the reader is referred to the second and third of his Essays on Church and State, collected and published in 1870. The result of his action was greatly to alienate the leaders of the High Church party, who had joined a large portion of the clergy in their efforts to procure the formal condemnation of the views advanced in Essays and Reviews. In this and other questions, such as in the growing controversy on the position of Prof. Maurice at King's College, Cambridge, and on that caused by Bishop Colenso's work on the Pentateuch, he had taken up a position which brought him into conflict with a large portion of the religious public. It should be added that in the last year of his professoriate (1863) he had published a Letter to the Bishop of London, strongly advocating a large relaxation of the terms of clerical subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles and Prayer-book. An important Act amending the Act of Uniformity, and carrying out in some degree Stanley's proposals, was passed in the year 1865. In the spring of 1862 Stanley, at the queen's desire, had accompanied the prince of Wales on a tour in Egypt and the Holy Land. During his absence he lost his mother, the heaviest domestic bereavement that had yet befallen him. His sense of his debt towards her has been already indicated. It stands recorded in his volume of Memorials of Edward and Catherine Stanley. Towards the close of the following year he was appointed by the crown to the deanery of Westminster, in succession to Dean Trench, raised to the see of Dublin. In December he married Lady Augusta Bruce, sister of Lord Elgin, then governor-general of India, herself one of the queen's most trusted friends. In January 1864 he entered on the duties of his new post. His tenure of the deanery of Westminster was memor- able in many ways. He recognized from the first two im- portant disqualifications, his indifference to music and his slight knowledge of architecture. On both these subjects he availed himself largely of the aid of others, and threw himself with characteristic energy and entire success into the task of rescuing from neglect, preserving from decay, and commending to the interest of all classes of his countrymen the treasure of historic monuments in which the abbey is so rich. No visitor can pass through the building, now so often thronged with crowds of the work- ing classes, the mere possibility of attracting whom was spoken of before a royal commission so lately as 1841 as quite chimerical, without recognizing the successful result of his indefatigable labours. The monument to the brothers Wesley, the inscription on the gravestone of Liv- ingstone, and the restored altar in her husband's chantry in which he placed the neglected remains of Catherine of Valois, the queen of Henry V., may be named among the innumerable and ubiquitous records of his wide sympathy and historic ardour. Within three years of his appointment he published his Memorials of Westminster Abbey, a work which, although not free from occasional inaccuracies, is a mine of information conveyed in the most picturesque and impressive form. He was a constant preacher, and gave a great impulse to the practice already begun of inviting distinguished preachers to the abbey pulpit, especially to the evening services in the nave, which had been established under his predecessor. It is to him that is largely due the vast increase in the number not of visitors only but of worshippers in the abbey. He began the practice, since continued by others of the abbey clergy, of devoting his Saturday afternoons to conducting parties of working men round the abbey and collegiate buildings. His social and personal influence, already unique of its kind, was enormously increased by his removal to London. His circle of friends was constantly widening, and extended from the queen and royal family to the working men of London and elsewhere, some of whom he inspired with a singular devotion. It included men of every denomina- tion, every class, every part of the United Kingdom, and almost of every nation. He was untiring in literary work, and, though this consisted very largely of occasional papers, lectures, articles in reviews, addresses, and sermons, it in- cluded a third volume of his History of the Jewish Church, a volume on the Church of Scotland, another of Addresses and Sermons preached in America, and an exceedingly important volume, completed within a few months of his death, on Christian Institutions. He was continually engaged in theological controversy, and, if his advocacy of all efforts to promote the social, moral, and religious amelioration of the poorer classes and his chivalrous courage in defending those whom he held to be unjustly denounced won him the warm admiration of many of his countrymen, he undoubtedly incurred much and growing odium in influential circles. Among the causes of offence might be enumerated, not only his vigorous defence of one from whom he greatly differed, Bishop Colenso, but his invitation to the holy communion of all the revisers of the translation of the Bible, including a Unitarian among other Nonconformists, as well as the whole tone and teaching of almost every page of his publications. Still stronger was the feeling caused by his efforts to make the recital of the Athanasian Creed optional instead of imperative in the English Church. In 1874 he spent part of the winter in Russia, whither he and Lady Augusta had gone to take part in the marriage of the duke of Edinburgh. In the spring of 1876, after a long and lingering illness, he lost his wife, the zealous partner of all his social and charitable efforts, and the con- stant cheerer and sympathizer in his many labours and conflicts. It was a terrible blow, and one from which he never entirely recovered. But in 1878 he was deeply inter- ested by a tour in America, and in the following autumn visited for the last time, with his sister, Mary Stanley, who died before the close of the same year, northern Italy and Venice. . In the spring of 1881 he preached funeral sermons in the abbey on Mr Carlyle and Lord Beaconsfield, winding up with the latter a series of Sermons preached on Public Occasions, mainly on the death or funeral of eminent Englishmen, which form a volume singularly characteristic of his special gifts. He saw also the completion of the latest of his volumes, that already mentioned on Christian Institutions, and was in the course of the summer correct- ing for the press a paper on the Westminster Confession, and preaching in the abbey a course of Saturday Lectures on the Beatitudes. On July 10 he was attacked by a sudden illness, which in a few days assumed a more alarm- ing character, and ended fatally on the 18th. The sensa- tion caused by his death was profound and widespread. He was buried in Henry VII. 's chapel, in the same grave as his wife. His pall-bearers comprised representatives of literature, of science, of both Houses of Parliament, of theology, Anglican and Nonconformist, and of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The recumbent monument placed upon the spot, and the windows in the