Church, RICHARD WILLIAM

Church, RICHARD WILLIAM, Dean of St Paul's from 1871, was born at Lisbon, 25th April 1815. He took an Oxford first-class from Wadham (1836), and was elected fellow of Oriel (1838). From 1853 he held the rectory of Whatley, near Frome. In 1854 he published his scholarly Essays and Reviews. His university sermons (1876-78) in a volume entitled Human Life and its Conditions (1878), the series of St Paul's and Oxford sermons in The Gifts of Civilisation (1880), and the five St Paul's sermons forming The Discipline of the Christian Character (1885), are profound contributions to religious thought. Other works are his Life of St Anselm (1871), an amplification of two essays in his first volume; The Beginnings of the Middle Ages (1877), an introduction to the series of 'Epochs of Modern History'; Dante: an Essay, with a translation of the De Monarchia by his only son, F. J. Church, a young man of rare promise, who died in 1888; Spenser (1879), and Bacon (1884), two of the best books in the series of 'English Men of Letters.' His occasional essays or lectures on such subjects as Montaigne, Brittany, Cassiodorus, the sacred poetry of early religions, the Pensées of Pascal and