His Life

Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872) was a priest of the Church of England, a teacher, and a founder of institutions, but above all a theologian. His lifelong conviction was that the Kingdom of Christ is neither a hope deferred to the future nor the property of a religious party, but the present truth about every human being.

A divided household

Maurice was born on 29 August 1805 at Normanston, near Lowestoft in Suffolk, the son of Michael Maurice, a Unitarian minister. He grew up in a household divided by religion, as his mother and sisters left their father’s Unitarianism for other forms of faith. The longing for a unity deeper than any party, which runs through all his books, began there.

He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1823 and later moved to Trinity Hall. With his friend John Sterling he was a leading spirit of the Cambridge Conversazione Society, the “Apostles.” As a Dissenter he could not take his degree, which required subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles. He went instead to London and to literary journalism, and for a time edited the Athenaeum.

Into the Church of England

Under the influence of Coleridge, and after long struggle, Maurice came to find in the creeds of the Church not a set of opinions but a witness to God’s own acts. He was baptized into the Church of England in 1831, studied at Exeter College, Oxford, and was ordained in 1834. After a country curacy he became chaplain of Guy’s Hospital in London in 1836.

There he wrote The Kingdom of Christ (1838), first cast as letters to a Quaker. It argued that the Church is not a sect alongside other sects but the witness to a universal society already constituted by God in Christ, and that each of the parties that divided Christians held some truth which only that larger unity could keep safe.

King’s College and Lincoln’s Inn

In 1840 Maurice became professor of English literature and history at King’s College, London, and in 1846 professor of theology as well. In the same year he was appointed chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn, where he preached to lawyers and their families for fourteen years; many of the books in this library began as sermons and lectures in its chapel. His Boyle Lectures of 1845–46 became The Religions of the World.

1848, the year of revolutions, drew him into public life. With John Malcolm Ludlow and Charles Kingsley he began the movement that came to be called Christian Socialism: the paper Politics for the People, the Tracts on Christian Socialism, and working men’s co-operative associations. The same year he helped to found Queen’s College in Harley Street, one of the first colleges for the higher education of women. His sermons on The Lord’s Prayer were preached while thrones were falling across Europe.

Dismissal

In 1853 Maurice published his Theological Essays. In the concluding essay he argued that “eternal” in the New Testament describes the life of God himself, not endless duration, and that eternal life is to know God. The Council of King’s College judged the teaching dangerous and removed him from both his professorships. Tennyson, to whom the book was dedicated, wrote to invite him to the Isle of Wight in the verses “To the Rev. F. D. Maurice.”

Maurice’s answer was to keep teaching. In 1854 he founded the Working Men’s College in London and became its first principal, and the same year he preached and published The Doctrine of Sacrifice. His controversy with Henry Mansel over the limits of religious knowledge produced What is Revelation? (1859).

Last years

In 1860 he left Lincoln’s Inn for the chapel of St Peter’s, Vere Street. In 1866 Cambridge, where as a young Dissenter he had been unable to take his degree, elected him Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy, and from 1870 he was also incumbent of St Edward’s church there. He died in London on 1 April 1872 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Maurice was never the founder of a school, and would have refused to be. But his influence ran through the Christian social movement, through Anglican theology in the century after him, and through many who never read him. The Church of England and the Episcopal Church remember him on 1 April.

Further reading

• Frederick Maurice (ed.), The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, Chiefly Told in His Own Letters, 2 vols (1884).
• A. M. Ramsey, F. D. Maurice and the Conflicts of Modern Theology (1951).