Renn Dickson Hampden
Encyclopedia
Renn Dickson Hampden was an English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 Anglican clergyman whose selection as Bishop of Hereford
Bishop of Hereford
The Bishop of Hereford is the Ordinary of the Church of England Diocese of Hereford in the Province of Canterbury.The see is in the City of Hereford where the seat is located at the Cathedral Church of Saint Mary and Saint Ethelbert which was founded as a cathedral in 676.The Bishop's residence is...

 formed a minor cause celebre in Victorian religious controversies.

Biography

He was born in Barbados
Barbados
Barbados is an island country in the Lesser Antilles. It is in length and as much as in width, amounting to . It is situated in the western area of the North Atlantic and 100 kilometres east of the Windward Islands and the Caribbean Sea; therein, it is about east of the islands of Saint...

, where his father was colonel of militia, in 1793, and was educated at Oriel College, Oxford.

Having taken his B.A. degree with first-class honours in both classics
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...

 and mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 in 1813, he next year obtained the chancellor's prize for a Latin essay, and shortly afterwards was elected to a fellowship in his college, Keble, Newman and Arnold being among his contemporaries. Having left the university in 1816 he held successively a number of curacies, and in 1827 he published Essays on the Philosophical Evidence of Christianity, followed by a volume of Parochial Sermons illustrative of the Importance of the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ (1828).

His liberal ideas attracted the opposition of the leaders of the new Oxford Movement
Oxford Movement
The Oxford Movement was a movement of High Church Anglicans, eventually developing into Anglo-Catholicism. The movement, whose members were often associated with the University of Oxford, argued for the reinstatement of lost Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy...

. In 1829 he returned to Oxford and was Bampton lecturer
Bampton Lectures
The Bampton Lectures at the University of Oxford, England, were founded by a bequest of John Bampton,. They have taken place since 1780.They were a series of annual lectures; since the turn of the 20th century they have typically been biennial. They continue to concentrate on Christian theological...

 in 1832. Although a charge of Arianism
Arianism
Arianism is the theological teaching attributed to Arius , a Christian presbyter from Alexandria, Egypt, concerning the relationship of the entities of the Trinity and the precise nature of the Son of God as being a subordinate entity to God the Father...

 was brought against him by the Tractarian
Oxford Movement
The Oxford Movement was a movement of High Church Anglicans, eventually developing into Anglo-Catholicism. The movement, whose members were often associated with the University of Oxford, argued for the reinstatement of lost Christian traditions of faith and their inclusion into Anglican liturgy...

 party, he in 1833 passed from a tutorship at Oriel to the principalship of St Mary's Hall
St Mary Hall, Oxford
St Mary Hall was an academic hall of the University of Oxford associated with Oriel College since 1326, but which functioned independently from 1545 to 1902.- History :...

. In 1834 he was appointed White's Professor of Moral Philosophy, and despite much university opposition, Regius Professor of Divinity
Regius Professor of Divinity
The Regius Professorship of Divinity is one of the oldest and most prestigious of the professorships at the University of Oxford and at the University of Cambridge.Both chairs were founded by Henry VIII...

 in 1836.

Upon the publication of his Observations on Religious Dissent in August 1834, in which he defended the right of non-Anglicans to attend Oxford, John Henry Newman responded with the Elucidations. Debate via published works and personal acrimony between the two scholars continued for two years. After the subsidence of the controversy, he published a Lecture on Tradition, which passed through several editions, and a volume on The Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England.

His nomination by Lord John Russell to the vacant see of Hereford in December 1847 was again the signal for organized opposition; and his consecration in March 1848 took place in spite of a remonstrance by many of the bishops, and the resistance of Dr John Merewether, the dean of Hereford, who voted against the election.

As bishop of Hereford Dr Hampden made no change in his long-formed habits of studious seclusion, and though he showed no special ecclesiastical activity or zeal, the diocese certainly prospered in his charge. Among the more important of his later writings were the articles on Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

, Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

 and Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...

, contributed to the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...

, and afterwards reprinted with additions under the title of The Fathers of Greek Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1862). In 1866 he had a paralytic seizure, and died in London on the 23rd of April 1868.

His daughter, Henrietta Hampden, published Some Memorials of R. D. Hampden in 1871.

This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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