WHATELY, RICHARD: Archbishop of Dublin; b. in London Feb. 1, 1787; d. in Dublin Oct. 1, 1863. He matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1805, was graduated B.A. in 1808, and took orders in due course. He was fellow of Oriel from 1811 till his marriage in 1821, and then held the living of Halea-

worth, Suffolk, till 1825, when he re- Life and turned to Oxford as principal of St. Character. Albans Hall. In 1829 he was ap-

pointed Drummond professor of political economy at Oxford, but resigned two years later to become archbishop of Dublin. He was consecrated Oct. 23, 1831, and enthroned the same day.

As a child Whitely was delicate and precocious, exhibiting phenomenal powers of arithmetical computation. Attendance at a school near Bristol from the age of ten strengthened his body and gave him wider intellectual interests than he had found previously in his father's library and garden, so that he entered Oxford with nothing strikingly abnormal about him: He made a few friends at Oxford, but only a few, and set conventions at scorn to a degree that made him notorious. So he went through life singularly independent and self-contained, rough and brusk in manner, outspoken, rashly regardless of popular opinions or prejudices. His biting wit spared neither friend nor foe, and his great powers of argumentation were exercised with more assiduity than judgment. He was master of a lucid expression, and as a thinker and scholar was acute and versatile, though not profound, and hampered by striking limitations. It is said he read a few favorite authors-Aristotle, Thucydides, Bacon, Shakespeare, Butler, Warburton, Adam Smith, Crabbe, Scott-and no others. For nature, music, and art, as well as for historic antiquity, he had no sense whatever. Consequently he found only.fatigue in travel, and avoided it as far as possible. He never learned German, and read French with difficulty.

Yet, if he thus exemplified English insularity, it should be added that he represented the type in no unworthy manner. As duties came to him he performed them well. At Oxford he proved himself a good teacher, knowing how to discover and develop the dormant capacities of his pupils, and in a short time he raised St. Albans Hall from very low estate and made it a chosen home of reading men. He was a faithful parish priest. As archbishop he was scrupulously conscientious in the performance of his ordinary duties, and he grappled courageously and with fair success with the extraordinary difficulties of

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his position. Personally unpopular, not liked as a preacher, harassed by political considerations and racial differences, he yet won his way

Career as by his impartial and kindly spirit toArchbishop. ward the Roman Catholics by vigorous efforts continued for twenty years in behalf of popular education and the higher education at Trinity College, of which he was ex officio visitor, by his services in stemming the tide toward Rome, and by his interest in and self-sacrificing labor for all that tended to make Ireland better in body and soul. As primate of Ireland he sat in the house of lords and made many speeches noticeable for their independence, advocating a revision of the liturgy and the Authorized Version of the Bible, the abrogation of the prohibition to marry a deceased wife's sister, and the emancipation of Jews and Roman Catholics. His study of political economy led him to oppose the extension of the English system of outdoor relief to Ireland, even in the time of the potato famine, in which extremity he worked manfully to alleviate distress. He favored a gradual rather than a sudden emancipation of slaves, and in advocating the abolition of all legal punishment except such as was unmistakably deterrent in character, he showed himself in advance even of the early twentieth century. His efforts in this direction contributed much to the abolition of transportation.

His theology, always more or less under suspicion of heterodoxy, has been characterized as rational supernaturalism. He started with the assumption of a special revelation which makes known what reason can not discover, and it is then the function of reason to interpret revelation. The incarnation was a fact and an extraordinary act of revelation to make divinity more intelligible and to give a pattern of human perfection. The death of Christ was sacrificial, but was not necessary,

Theology though it is the only ground of our and salvation. The kingdom of Christ is

Writings. a society, whose members may at the same time belong to other societies. Thus the problem of Church and State is solved. Christ has himself given the plan for the society's government, but the execution of the plan lies with the society. The essentials of Christianity are of universal importance; the minor matters are only relatively important. There is no such thing as apostolic succession in the sense of its securing the transmission of the Holy Spirit and the efficacy of the sacraments; the true apostolic succession is the maintenance of apostolic principles. He was strong ly opposed to Calvinism, and in his writings ever quietly fought against tractarianism. The Sabbath, he taught, was done away with by the abrogation of the Mosaic law, for Christ himself broke the Sab bath and left it to the Church to fix the day and its observance, precisely as in the case of other festivals.

Whately wrote much, but nothing of permanent value, and little that outlived himself. His first book was Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buorcaparte (London, 1819), in which he aimed to reduce to absurdity Hume's doctrine concerning miracles. It is witty and brilliant rather than sound, and is not free from suspicion of unfairness, since Hume had expressly put outside of his general principles

cases in which greater improbability is involved in skepticism than in belief. For once Whately had popular prejudice on his side, and the book went through more than twelve editions during his lifetime, being reprinted as late as 1886 in Henry Morley's Universal Library (vol. xliii., London, 1886). The Use and Abuse of Party Feeling in Matters of Religion (Oxford, 1822) was the Bampton lectures for 1822. The Elements of Logic (London, 1826), and Elements of Rhetoric (1828), originally written as articles for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitarta, were for a time much used as text-books (9th ed. of the Logic, 1850; 7th ed. of the Rhetoric, 1840). Neither work can be called original or epoch-making, but both were admirably arranged and expressed, and the Logic revived the study of the discipline at Oxford. The Oxford lectures on political economy were published at London in 1831. Other noteworthy books were The Errors of Romanism Traced to their Origin in Human Nature (1830; 5th ed., 1856; abridged edition by his daughter, E. J. Whately, London, 1878) and an edition of Bacon's Essays with notes (1856).

Bibliography: Miss E. J. Whately, Life and Correspondence of Richard Whately, 2 vols., London, 1866, new ed., 1875; W. J. Fitzpatrick, Memoirs of Richard Whately, 2 vols., ib. 1884; E. W. Whately, Personal and Family Glimpses of Remarkable People, ib. 1889; J. H. Overton, The Church in England, ii. 31112, ib. 1897; E. Stock, The English Church in the 19th Century, ib. 1910; DNB, lx. 423-429, where reference is made to scattering notices.