Stillingfleet

Stillingfleet, EDWARD, a learned English divine, was born at Cranborne in Dorsetshire on 17th April 1635. There and at Ringwood he received his early education, at thirteen entered St John's College, Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1652, and the year after obtained a fellowship. For some years after leaving college he was occupied as a private family tutor; and in 1657 he was presented to the rectory of Sutton in Bedfordshire. In 1659 appeared his Irenicum, or the Divine Right of Particular Forms of Church Government examined, a noble catholic-spirited attempt to find a mean as a basis of union for the divided church. His views savoured somewhat more of latitudinarianism than could be pleasant to the High Church party, and indeed Stillingfleet himself afterwards thought fit to modify them. His Origines Sacrae, or the Truth and Divine Authority of the Scriptures (1662), a creditable contribution to the Apologetics of the day, was followed by his Rational Account of the Grounds of the Protestant Religion (1664), a defence of the Church of England from the charge of schism in its separation from that of Rome. These works were received with great favour, and quickly led to rich preferment. In 1665 the Earl of Southampton presented him to the rectory of St Andrews, Holborn; he was also appointed preacher at the Rolls Chapel, and shortly after lecturer at the Temple, and Chaplain in Ordinary to Charles II. In 1670 he became Canon Residentiary, in 1678 Dean, of St Paul's. In the Court of Ecclesiastical Commission instituted by James II. Stillingfleet declined to act; and after the Revolution of 1688 he was raised to the bishopric of Worcester. He died at Westminster on 27th March 1699, and was buried in Worcester Cathedral. So handsome in person as to have been popularly called 'the beauty of holiness,' he had, Burnet tells us, a reserved and haughty temper. But he was courteous and temperate in debate, and he had the rare merit for a theologian of being capable of appreciating the courtesy of an opponent. Thus, in the controversy that grew out of his Mischiefs of Separation (1680), he candidly confessed himself overcome by the answer of John Howe, who, he said, wrote 'more like a gentleman than a divine, without any mixture of rancour.' Other works were his Origines Britannicæ, or Antiquities of the British Churches (1685), and a defence of the doctrine of the Trinity (1697). His collected works, with Life by Dr Timothy Godwin, were published in 1710 (6 vols. folio); a supplementary volume of Miscellanies, edited by his son, in 1735. See Tulloch's Rational Theology in the Seventeenth Century (vol. ii. 1872).