WARD, WILLIAM GEORGE: English Roman Catholic; b. in London Mar. 21, 1812;. d. at Hampstead, London, July 6, 1882. He was educated at Christ Church and Lincoln College, Oxford (B.A.,1834), and was elected fellow of Balliol, where he also acted as lecturer in mathematics.and logic. He took orders in the Church of England, and though he was at this time a pronounced latitudinarian, his combination of a severely logical mind with deep personal piety convinced him that there was no middle way between submission to ecclesiastical authority and absolute rationalism. It was at this period that he came under the sway of Tractarianism (q.v.), and he went far beyond the attack of J. H. Newman (q.v.) on the natural meaning of the Thirty-Nine Articles in Tract Ninety, Ward's own position being set forth in A Few Words in Support of No. xe. and A Few More Words in Support of No. xc. (both Oxford, 1841). The result was loss of his lectureships and tutorial position at Balliol, though he was appointed junior bursar in 1841 and senior bursar in the following year. Meanwhile his trend was more and more toward the Roman church, and in 1844 he published at Oxford, in reply to William Palmer, his Ideal of a Christian Church considered in Comparison with existing Practice, lauding the Roman communion as an almost perfect embodiment of Christianity, and by his comparisons with non-Roman communions incurring the extreme displeasure of English churchmen of all types. Declining to disavow the book either in whole or in parts specified as contrary to the Thirty-Nine Articles, Ward was formally censured by the vicechancellor and by the convocation of the University of Oxford and on Feb. 13, 1845, was degraded, a proceeding regarding the legality of which there was much room for doubt. Notwithstanding this doubt, Ward resigned his fellowship and on Sept. 5 of the same year was received into the Roman Catholie Church. In 1846 he removed to Ware, and from 1851 to 1858 was lecturer in moral philosophy in St. Edmund's College, his lectures being designed not only to meet the needs of his students, but also to prepare the way for a systematic monograph On Nature and Grace, although only the philosophical introduction was ever published (London, 1860). After residing for three years on one of his estates in the Isle of Wight, he returned to Ware in 1861, and from 1863 to 1878 was editor of The Dublin Review, which he transformed from a moribund condition to a powerful organ against all that savored of religious latitudinarianism, lending all his strength to the defense of Ultramontanism (q.v.). In its columns he supported the encyclical Quanta curs

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and the Syllabus errorum, and in his abhorrence of all that was not connected with the Roman church, he opposed the scheme of Cardinal Newman for the erection of a Roman Catholic hall at Oxford, while with equal energy he used his influence in behalf of the choice of H. E. Manning (q.v.) as archbishop of Westminster to succeed N. P. S. Wiseman (q.v.). His latter years were passed chiefly on his estate Weston Manor, Freshwater, Isle of Wight. The chief works of Ward, besides those already noted, were The Relation of Intellectual Power to Man's True Perfection (London, 1862), The Author ity of Doctrinal Decisions which are not Definitions of Faith (1866; essays reprinted from The Dublin Review), De infallibilitatis extensions theses qutedam qutestiones (1869), Essays on Devotional and Scrip tural Subjects (1879), Essays on the Church's Doc trinal Authority (1880; both volumes almost en tirely consisting of reprints from The Dublin Review), and Essays on the Philosophy of Theism (ed. W. Ward, 2 vols., 1884; also reprinted from the same periodical).

Bibliography: The two books of highest importance ere Wilfrid Ward's William George Ward and the Oxford Movement, London, 1889, and William George Ward and the Catholic Revival, ib., 1893. The literature under Tractarianism should be consulted, especially the works of Browns and Motley; also that under Jowett, Benjamin; Pusey, Edward Bouverie; and Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn.