BOOKS.

THE LATE BISHOP HAMPDEN.*

THE modest title of this volume fitly describes its character. It is not a thoroughly satisfactory biography of Dr. Hampden, and indeed such a work could scarcely be written by a daughter's hand, but it contains some interesting memorials of a wise and good man. Five-and-thirty years ago Hampden was the best abused clergyman in England. The " Tractites," as Archbishop Whately called them, denounced him as a heretic, and the unmeaning cry was loudly echoed by Evangelicals who had never read a word of his writings. In these days, when theological rancour, if not less bitter, is more restrained, it is difficult to understand the meaning of so rabid an assault upon a divine who believed, as any one may see who reads his University sermons, in every important dogma of the Christian faith that is cherished by

the most rigidly orthodox of Protestants. No doubt Dr. Hampden's firm attitude against the Oxford party made him peculiarly offensive to men who were drifting rapidly to Roman- ism, but it is not so clear why he was denounced by Evangelical Churchmen. One thing, however, is evident,—his writings were condemned without being understood, and in many cases without having been read. When Archbishop Howley remon- etrated in the House of Lords against Hampden's appointment as Regius Professor of Divinity, he made no charge against him of false doctrine, but preferred the miserable plea that Dr. Hampden was opposed by the great majority of the University. In a letter which is only an extract, but which occupies fourteen pages of the memoir, Dr. Hampden demands from the Archbishop of Canter- bury a distinct statement of the charges brought against him, and he especially desires him to say whether he had ever read his writ- ings. We do not find that this reasonable request was granted, and Archdeacon Hare, who had no friendship or even acquaintance with H ampden, does not hesitate to declare that of the thousands who rushed to sign addresses against him, "it is too plain that hardly any one has studied Dr. Hampden's writings with the view of forming his decision." Tbe persecution of Hampden in 1836 for lectures he had delivered four years previously, and the episcopal attack upon him in 1847, when Lord John Russell named him to the Queen for the See of Hereford, were both conducted with con- siderable malice and without argument ; but it is a striking proof' how a really honest man will live down opposition, that the Heads

• Some Memorials of Bev. Dickson Hampden, Bishop of Hereford. Edited by his Daughter, Henrietta Hampden. London: Longmans. 1871. of Houses in Oxford who had submitted the vote of censure to the Oxford Convocation, addressed the professor upon his proposed appointment to Hereford in warm terms of congratulation. "We.

are not only satisfied," said these gentlemen, at the conclusion of_ their address, "that your religious belief is sound, but we look. forward with confidence in your endeavours to preach the Gospel of Christ in its integrity." It is curious, too, that before this time the University had stultified its own decision, having established a Board of Examiners in Theology, with the Regius Professor at. its head :—

"By this step," says Miss Hampden, "the University placed itself in. a somewhat anomalous position ; for the same authority which had framed one statute to exclude the Regius Professor of Divinity from passing judgment on the orthodoxy of 'Select Preachers,' had by another- statute placed him at the head of the Examiners in Divinity."

The controversies in which Dr. Hampden was involved, and which. must have greatly embittered his life, have passed into oblivion, and are not likely to be revived by the publication of this volume.. Theposition held by the late Bishop of Hereford as a contro- versialist and theologian is well known to the students of his essay on Christianity and of his Bampton Lectures; what he was as a man is pourtrayed in this memoir for the first time. The picture is not unpleasing, but it lacks colour. If, as we doubt not, the writer has made the best use of her materials, the materials. must have been scanty. He was born in Barbadoes in 1793, and "was descended from a junior branch of the same stock as the patriot John Hampden." When five years old, he was sent to England, and placed under the care of a clergyman, with whom he remained until 1811, when he entered as a Commoner at Oriel. College, Oxford, where he found associates in Whately and Arnold. Two years later he gained a double-first, and soon afterwards the- prize for the Latin essay. In 1814 he was elected a Fellow of his College. Hampden was always a shy, reserved man, more ready to conceal than to display his knowledge, and Bishop Hinds attri- butes it to his disposition that in after years he never once spoke in the House of Lords :— " In the earlier part of his life," he writes, "this habit may have been in the way of his obtaining the more rapid advancement, as his talents, learning, and sterling character deserved. When the Professorship of Hebrew was conferred on Pusey, he observed to me quietly, should have much liked the appointment.' I named what he said to a common friend, who had some influence, and would certainly have exerted it to. procure the appointment for him. The reply was, never knew that Hampden understood Hebrew. If he will keep his light under a bushel, how are his friends to know anything about it.?"

Another friend of Hampden's relates one or two amusing instances of his bashfulness as a young man. The two collegians went to the Lakes, taking with them an introduction to Southey, but on, reaching Greta Hall "Hampden's repugnance to anything verging on the aggressive was too much for him, and on looking round after I had rapped at the door, I saw him skipping over the bushes and strawberry-beds, and making his way to the garden- gate." The writer adds, and the incident is worth recording, that Southey liked his modesty, sent a kindly note to Hampden,. and offered to breakfast with the tourists on the following morning. And here is a pleasant picture from the same pen :— "I was at Oriel for my probationary year as Fellow from 1816 to. 1817, and Hampden, who had early and wisely entered on married life,. was resident on his year of grace. We often met in that year, and 11 remember spending a day with him at Farringdon, where he had a. curacy, I being the first of his Oriel brethren who had seen either his bride or himself since the marriage. What a happy, merry pair they were ! It was a small house, with a very ' wee ' sitting-room, and the breakfast-table had to be thrust close into the fireplace, and to make. my cup and plate admissible, the tea-pot—not the tea-kettle !—had to be forced into the grate, and the tea-cups filled from it. When hearts. are light and true, a small matter makes much mirth."

To a naturally strong intellect Hampden added indomitable perseverance, and it was early evident to those who knew him. best that he would be a distinguished man. He was ordained priest in 1817, and took several curacies before his path in life became settled. In 1827 he published his Essay on the Philosophi- cal Evidence of Christianity, in the following year a volume of Parochial Sermons, and in 1829 he returned to Oxford and was appointed Examiner for the B.A. degree. He took private pupils. as well as a tutorship in his own college, and in 1832, having been, appointed Bampton Lecturer, delivered a series of discourses on, "The Scholastic Philosophy considered in its Relation to Christian Theology,"—lectures which, strange to say, considering the lack of eloquence in the speaker and the abstruse nature of the iubject, attracted very large congregations. It is interesting to read that while writing these lectures, "his young children were often playing noisily round him." Not long afterwards Hampden was appointed Principal of St. Mary's Hall, which seems at that time to have sadly needed a vigorous head. We are told that the dis- cipline was deplorable, the funds embarrassed, the chapel in almost a ruinous condition.

"He laboured unceasingly in the instruction of the members, giving lectures himself in all departments. At his own expense the chapel was restored, and made fit for divine service ; the Principal's lodgings (as the residence is called in Oxford) were rebuilt ; other parts of the building were restored and beautified, at the cost of at least £4,000. He took the greatest pleasure and interest in watching the improvements, both within and without ; he loved to see things gradu- ally taking shape and order. 'I wish to leave everything better than I find it,' he was used to say."

Honours fell rapidly on Hampden, for in 1834 he was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy, and in 1836 Regius Professor of Divinity. He was now forty-three years old, and up to this time his course had been a smooth one. The storm was presently to burst upon him. Dr. Hampden had opposed the innovations of the High-Church party, and he had advocated the claims of Dis- senters and the abolition of University tests. No wonder, then, that he was denounced as a teacher of false doctrine. Four years had passed since the delivery of the Bampton Lectures, yet now for the first time those lectures were discovered to contain principles which tended to subvert "the whole fabric and reality of Christian truth." Remembering the University appointments bestowed on Dr. Hampden between 1832 and 1836, the reader will agree with Dr. Arnold that the charge instituted in the latter year was in effect an admission of previous supineness on the part of the eighty-one graduates, fellows, and tutors who signed the declaration against him :—

" Was there ever," Arnold wrote at the time, "an accusation involving its unhappy promoters in such a dilemma of infamy ? Compromisers of mischievous principles in 1832, 1833, 1834, and 1835—or slanderers of a good and most Christian man in 1836—disqualified for the office of religious instructors, upon their own showing, by four years of either dullness or indifference, during which they could not understand or did not notice what was'mischievous,'—or else by one month of audacious and unprincipled calumny !"

In spite of this rabid attack, Hampden held his way calmly, but he felt it deeply notwithstanding :—

" He could not walk down the High Street without passing many .whom he had been accustomed to greet in a friendly manner, who, without one note of warning, had set themselves to act against him to the utmost of their ability. The very notoriety that was thus forced upon him was painful to one of his sensitive disposition. An outspoken friend said to him, 'Abuse you ? Of course they will, if you are worth abusing,' adding, with quiet humour, I with they would abuse me.' Another dear old friend wrote to him, They have tried to blow you out, but have only made you blaze."

A few pleasing anecdotes are related of Dr. Hampden's residence Ewelme, the living attached to the Regius Professorship, where he spent, says his daughter, the happiest portion of his life. "There his intercourse with his parishioners, both rich and poor, and with his neighbours, was a long summer-day of goodwill and kindly feeling," and we are told how the older people who found "writing hard to read" would go to him to have their family letters read to them.

In 1847, upon the nomination of Hampden to the see of Here- ford, the attack of 1836 was renewed, and " thousands " of clergy- men, according to the estimate of Archdeacon Hare, "rushed forward with blind, reckless impetuosity, to do what they could to condemn and crush a brother." On the other hand, some of the best men in the country expressed their sympathy at this crisis, and even the Bishop of Oxford, who had pub- licly opposed the appointment, was constrained to acknowledge the soundness of Hampden's faith, and of the views put forth by him in the Bampton Lectures. The vigorous but vain attempts made to set aside the election served but to add to the reputation of the new bishop, and from the date of his consecration to that of his death, a period of twenty years, Hampden was allowed to fulfil his episcopal duties in peace. Although his tastes inclined him to intellectual pursuits (he owned once that it was his ear- nest desire to leave a name in literature), he threw all the energy of his nature into the active duties of his position, and proved that learning need be no impediment to the usefulness even of a bishop.

More might be said about these memorials, for they touch upon many topics which awaken as keen an interest now as they did twenty years ago. The lesson taught by Hampden's life is also as much needed as ever. The intolerance of ecclesiastics who deemed God's truth as narrow as their own souls was exercised to the utter- most against a sincere Christian and a brave man. A quarter of a century ago Hampden was pronounced a heretic ; no one, at least no Protestant, thinks of him as a heretic now, and no one, even in Convocation, would dare to say, as his High-Church enemies said long ago, that his principles were opposed to the faith of the Gospel, or to the articles and creeds of the Church of England. Yet the man never recanted, never changed one article of his belief, never faltered in his stand against what he deemed to be error. He died as he had lived, and takes his place without question among the orthodox divines of the Church of England'. The fact that men like Tillotson and Hampden have been accused of heresy in their lifetime, and numbered after their deaths with faithful Christians and Churchmen, should surely teach both clergy and laity the wisdom of exercising, above all other gifts, the most excellent gift of charity.