Aitken, William Hay Macdowall Hunter

AITKEN, WILLIAM HAY MACDOWALL HUNTER: Church of England; b. at Liverpool Sept. 21, 1841. He was educated at Wadham College, Oxford (B.A., 1865, M.A., 1867). He was presented to the curacy of St. Jude’s, Mildmay Park, London, in 1865, and was ordained priest in the following year. From 1871 to 1875 he was incumbent of Christ Church, Liverpool, but resigned to become a mission preacher. The next year he founded, in memory of his father, Rev. Robert Aitken, the Aitken Memorial Mission Fund, of which he was chosen general superintendent, and which later developed into the Church Parochial Missionary Society. He twice visited the United States on mission tours, first in 1886, when the noonday services for business men at Trinity Church, New York, were begun, and again in 1895-96. Since 1900 he has been canon residentiary of Norwich Cathedral. Two years later he was a member of the Fulham Conference on auricular confession. He has been a member of the Victoria Institute since 1876. In theology he is a liberal Evangelical, but has never been closely identified with any party. He adheres strongly to the doctrines of grace, although he repudiates Calvinism. While not an opponent of higher criticism in itself, he exercises a prudent conservatism in accepting its conclusions. In his eschatology he is an advocate of the theory of conditional immortality. His writings include: Mission Sermons (3 vols., London, 1875-76); Newness of Life (1877); What is your Life? (1879); The School of Grace (1879); God’s Everlasting Yea (1881); The Glory of the Gospel (1882); The Highway of Holiness (1883); Around the Cross (1884); The Revealer Revealed (1885); The Love of the Father (1887); Eastertide (1889); Temptation and Toil (1895); The Romance of Christian Work and Experience (1898); The Doctrine of Baptism (1900); The Divine Ordinance of Prayer (1902); and Life, Light, and Love: Studies on the First Epistle of St. John (1905).