Whately, RICHARD, Archbishop of Dublin, was born in London, 1st February 1787, the fourth son of Dr Joseph Whately of Nonsuch Park, Surrey, prebendary of Bristol, vicar of Widford, and lecturer at Gresham College. He was sent in due time to a private school at Bristol, whence in 1805 he passed to Oriel College, Oxford. He took a double second-class in 1808, gained the prize for the English essay in 1810, and the year after was elected a fellow of Oriel College. Copleston, Davison, Arnold, Keble, and Hawkins were already fellows, and Newman and Pusey were added later. In his Apologia Newman tells us that Whately opened his mind and taught him how to think and reason. In 1815 he became one of the college tutors, and about this time he wrote for the Encyclopedia Metropolitana what he afterwards expanded into his popular treatises on Logic (1826) and Rhetoric (1828). He had married in 1821, and accepted the living of Halesworth in Suffolk, and he had already given the world the first proof of his peculiar wit in Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (1819)—an ingenious attempt to reduce to an absurdity Hume's position that no testimony is sufficient to prove a miracle. In 1822 he delivered the Bampton Lectures at Oxford, on the Use and Abuse of Party Feeling in Religion. In 1825 he was appointed Principal of St Alban's Hall, and in 1829 was appointed professor of Political Economy, but had only given a few lectures when in 1831 he was made Archbishop of Dublin.
A Liberal in religion and in politics, Whately may be counted one of the founders of the Broad Church party. Broadly rational in temper, sober and impartial, he was a resolute opponent of the Tractarian movement, but to the Evangelicals he seemed little better than a Latitudinarian, for he supported Catholic emancipation and concurrent endowment, and laboured long, but in vain, to establish a system of unsectarian religious instruction. Still worse, he was more than suspected of holding unsound views on predestination, future punishment, and the Sabbath question, and of being somewhat Sabellian on the nature and attributes of Christ. His caustic wit, abrupt manners, and fearless outspokenness brought him no little unpopularity, but the sterling honesty of his nature, his charity, justice, and sagacity gained him many friendships of unusual permanence and warmth, and conquered for him the respect of all men. One of the deepest things in his nature was a strong sense of duty, but for which indeed he would never have accepted the archbishopric, for he was within the truth when he termed the appointment 'a call to the helm of a crazy ship in a storm.' He died 8th October 1863.
Whately, though a strong logician, was devoid of the speculative faculty, hence his theological writings lack that kind of value which is the most enduring. But his acute intellect enlightened every subject that he touched, and his powers of exposition and illustration have hardly ever been surpassed. Of his books may be named Essays on some of the Peculiarities of the Christian Religion (1825), Essays on some of the Difficulties in the Writings of St Paul (1828), Thoughts on the Sabbath (1830), Christian Evidences (1837), Essays on some of the Dangers to Christian Faith (1839), The Kingdom of Christ Delineated (1841), and his edition of Bacon's Essays, with annotations not unworthy of the text (1856), as well as Paley's Evidences and Moral Philosophy. A list of his writings is appended to the New York edition of his General View of Christianity (1860). See the rambling Memoirs by W. J. Fitzpatrick (2 vols. 1864), and the more authoritative Life and Correspondence by Miss E. Jane Whately (2 vols. 1866).