Stanley, ARTHUR PENRHYN, born at the rectory, Alderley, 13th December 1815, the second son and third child of the Rev. Edward Stanley (1779-1849, second son of Sir John Thomas Stanley of Alderley, Bart.), for thirty-two years rector of Alderley, Cheshire, and for twelve bishop of Norwich. The bishop's elder brother was raised to the peerage, under the title of Baron Stanley of Alderley, in 1839. Arthur Stanley was educated at Rugby under Dr Arnold, and at Oxford, where he entered Balliol in 1834, and had Tait (afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury) for tutor. He took the Ireland scholarship and the Newdigate prize poem, and in 1837 a first-class degree. In 1839 he was elected a Fellow of University College and entered holy orders. In 1840 he travelled in the East, and from 1841 to 1851 lived at Oxford and did duty as tutor in his college; in 1845 was appointed select preacher; in 1851 canon of Canterbury; in 1856 professor of Ecclesiastical History, and canon of Christ Church, and in 1863 Dean of Westminster, in succession to Trench, promoted to the archbishopric of Dublin. In 1874 he was elected Lord Rector of the university of St Andrews. A voluminous writer in the periodical press, he was author of the Life of Arnold (1844), Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age (1847), Memoir of Bishop Stanley (1851), Commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians (1855), Memorials of Canterbury (1855), Sinai and Palestine (1856), Historical Memorials of Cambridge (1857), Lectures on the Eastern Church (1861), Sermons preached during a Tour in the East (1863), Lectures on the Jewish Church (1863-65), Memorials of Westminster
Abbey (1866), Essays on Church and State (1870), Lectures on the Scottish Church (1872), Addresses and Sermons delivered at St Andrews (1877), Sermons and Addresses (1878), Memorials of Edward and Catherine Stanley (1879), and Christian Institutions (1881). The outstanding events in Stanley's personal history, after his public life had begun, were his travels in Egypt and Palestine in 1852-53, which suggested his Sinai and Palestine, and those in Russia in 1857, during which he collected the materials for the vivid pictures of the ecclesiastical life and history of Russia which occupy the last four lectures of his Eastern Church; his accompanying the Prince of Wales on his Eastern tour in 1862; his marriage in 1863 to Lady Augusta Bruce (1822-76), of the Elgin family; a second visit to Russia in 1874, when he celebrated the English marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh; and his visit to America in 1878.
Stanley had a keen sense of humour; his talk was bright and abundant, passing easily from grave to gay, wholly free from affectation, gossip, or ill-natured or ill-informed chatter of any sort. Few men, if any, of his generation had a wider and more diversified circle of friends and acquaintances. His large tolerance, charity, and sympathy drew round him, by an irresistible attraction, all but the extreme bigots of ecclesiastical parties. To these he was the object of special aversion. High Church Anglicans in particular could never forgive him for championing Colenso, for preaching in Scottish Presbyterian pulpits, and for administering the holy sacrament in Henry VII.'s chapel to the revisers of the authorised version—one of them being a Unitarian, and several Presbyterians. This action, however, was in perfect accordance with the principle on which he governed the Abbey, recognising it as a great Valhalla, above all sectarian jealousies and divisions, to be used in the interests of religious concord and liberty. Among his last words were these: 'I am humbly trustful that I have sustained before the mind of the nation the extraordinary value of the Abbey, as a religious, national, and liberal institution.' It was his pride to add to its treasures, to enrich and multiply its services, and to throw it freely open to the people, multitudes of whom he, week after week, would conduct through it, explaining to them its history and contents. In his character as a churchman Stanley was pre-eminently representative of the highest culture and the broadest theology of the Church of England. He had inherited from his father the bishop, and had imbibed from Arnold his master, just and liberal ideas as to what a national church should be—comprehensive, intellectually free, charitable, and not aggressive in its relations to nonconformity. The Church of England, he maintained, 'by the very condition of its being, was not high or low, but broad.' Of this breadth he held the connection with the state to be the safeguard. The supremacy of the crown was simply the supremacy of the law, the removal of which would expose the just freedom of theological thought and of clerical action to the dominion of individuals or courts—none the less likely to be oppressive because they would claim to wield, by divine right, a purely spiritual power. In the current sense of the terms, Stanley was both Erastian and Latitudinarian; but only because of his love of liberty, which he felt endangered by the pretensions of sacerdotalism on the one hand and of orthodox dogmatism on the other. Christianity to him was sacred because of its moral and spiritual elements, and the divinely perfect life which embodied these; but for the systematic theology which had grown up around the evangelic records and the apostolic teaching he had little reverence; and he had none at all for the pretensions and 'mysteries' of the priesthood. The controversies about attitudes, lights, vestments, and the like, which agitated the Anglican Church, could not be lifted, in his opinion, out of the region of 'the infinitely little,' even by the doctrinal relations which exalted them in the eyes of the ritualistic party. The relish with which he traced details of ecclesiastical dress and usage back to their—often homely and simple—historical origins was as exasperating to the ritualist as the energy with which he threw himself into the defence of the theological position of Maurice, of the writers of Essays and Reviews, and of Bishop Colenso was to the ordinary evangelical. While the evangelicals deplored his lack of the 'root of the matter,' the ritualists sneered at him as 'the honorary member of all religions,' and 'the chief Nonconformist in the Church of England.' But Stanley held on his way, urged not only by his love of freedom, but by an innate chivalry of spirit which responded to the appeal of every vilified name, or struggling cause, or forlorn hope, but which was repelled by the self-assertion of the prosperous, the arrogance of the powerful, and the dull self-satisfaction of the conservative traditionalist. Thus, while he refused to let the Pan-Anglican Synod shelter its congress under the great name of the Abbey, he asked Colenso to preach there while under the ban of Convocation; and when Père Hyacinthe broke with the Roman hierarchy, and encountered the ecclesiastical and social ostracism which visited his marriage, he found refuge and countenance for himself and his wife beneath Stanley's roof.
Naturally Stanley's literary work does not entitle him to rank among doctors of dogmatic theology. His one purely theological book was that on the Epistles to the Corinthians; but in it he led the way to that application of fresh and open criticism and of vivid historical illustration to the sacred text in which he has been followed by all the best English exegetes of the present day. He was most at home in historical delineation and exposition. Probably in all his works exact dogmatists might mark here and there a vagueness of definition, and keen critics detect a hasty induction or a historical inaccuracy; but no one could fail to admire the faculty of living reproduction of the past, of picturesquely apposite illustration, of adaptation of every collateral aid and association in producing the one perfect impression he wished to stamp on the memory; or to sympathise with the lofty ideal of human life—the firm faith in the divine righteousness, the scorn of baseness, the love of truth, that brightened every page.
As a preacher from the pulpit of the Abbey Stanley wielded a wide influence. His congregation there was the great multitude that thronged the church whenever it was known he was to preach; and his sermons always conveyed a message of high religious purpose, of peace and reconciliation, and at any public crisis, or after any national loss, enforced, with perfect grace and wise moderation, the proper lesson, or paid the fitting tribute, or pointed the essential moral. Availing himself of the independent position which was his as successor to the Abbots of Westminster, and which laid him under no episcopal jurisdiction, he used to invite friends from the ranks of English nonconformity and of the Scottish Church, and even such an illustrious layman as Max-Müller, to address the congregation that filled the nave at evening service; thus, and by every means in his power, seeking to show his catholicity and his desire to break down walls of separation.
Stanley's position in society was unique. His ancient lineage, his independent and exalted ecclesiastical office, his personal popularity, his alliance with a lady of marked mental ability and social charm, who like himself was a persona grata at the Queen's court, all combined to invest the Deanery with a prestige and influence, as a centre of society, possessed, we may safely say, by no great contemporary house either of the English hierarchy or aristocracy. All that was really best in London society was to be met in Lady Augusta's salon; whatever was freshest and most genuine in literature, science, and art, most distinguished in character, most interesting in any department of life gravitated thither, and was received with warm and gracious welcome. With his wife's death a blight seemed to fall on the Deanery and its master; and during the few years that he survived her his life was obviously wounded too deeply to recover its elasticity, and too grievously stricken by the loss of 'the inseparable partner in every joy and struggle of twelve eventful years' to be able to withstand the attack of sharp disease such as seized him in the summer of 1881. He sank rapidly. Among his farewell words were: 'I always wished to die at Westminster; and there he died, in the Deanery, before midnight on Monday, 18th July. He was buried by the Queen's commands beside his wife in Henry VII.'s chapel. He had left directions, which were duly obeyed, that among his pall-bearers there should be a minister of the Church of Scotland and an English Nonconformist, and that the Abbey on his funeral day should be freely open to the people. A recumbent marble effigy surmounts his tomb.
See the Life and Correspondence, by R. E. Prothero and Dean Bradley (2 vols. 1893); and the Recollections of A. P. Stanley, by Dean Bradley (1883).