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Updated: June 4, 2025
This abegnation of self was one great part of his success. And then Mr. Pattison goes on to describe in detail how, governed and possessed by one idea, and by a theory, to oppose which was "moral depravity," he proceeded to establish his intolerable system of discipline, based on dogmatic grounds meddlesome, inquisitorial, petty, cruel over the interior of every household in Geneva.
By Mark Pattison, late Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. London, 1885. Critics have spoken of his learning, but the description is only relatively accurate. Of him, in this respect, we may say, what he said of Erasmus. 'Erasmus, though justly styled by Muretus, eruditus sane vir ac multæ lectionis, was not a learned man in the special sense of the word not an érudit. He was the man of letters.
Doubtless the religious difference envenomed the dispute, but it did not need the "Catholic reaction" to account for such ignoble wrangles in those days. These remains show what a historian of literature we have lost in Mr. Pattison. He was certainly capable of doing much more than the specimens of work which he has left behind; but what he has left is of high value.
I was much at Lincoln in the years before I married, and derived an impression from the life lived there that has never left me. Afterward I saw much less of Mrs. Pattison, who was generally on the Riviera in the winter; but from 1868 to 1872, the Rector, learned, critical, bitter, fastidious, and "Mrs.
It is uncertain if they had ever spoken to each other at Oxford; yet that subtle pervasive intellect which captured for years the critical and skeptical mind of Mark Pattison, and indirectly transformed the Church of England after Newman himself had left it, now, reaching across the world, laid hold on Arnold's son, when Arnold himself was no longer there to fight it.
Later on, in the winters when Mrs. Pattison, threatened with rheumatic gout, disappeared to the Riviera, I came to know a sadder and lonelier Rector. I used to go to tea with him then in his own book-lined sanctum, and we mended the blazing fire between us and talked endlessly.
Pattison he describes as a conservative agnostic or pantheist, meaning by 'conservative' a man who thought it better to preserve old forms. I recollect that Appleton told me when he was here that there was not the slightest obligation on a clergyman of the Church of England to believe in the divinity of Christ, and that many clergymen in the present day, including Pattison, had no such belief.
Pattison smoked, with the after- luncheon coffee and in those days a woman with a cigarette was a rarity in England and sometimes, at a caustic mot of the former's there would break out the Rector's cackling laugh, which was ugly, no doubt, but, when he was amused and at ease, extraordinarily full of mirth. To me he was from the beginning the kindest friend.
A female cousin, who eventually went over to Rome, counted for something among the influences that drove him into 'frantic Puseyism. When the great secession came in 1845 Pattison somehow held back and was saved for a further development.
Pattison, like most of the superior minds then at Oxford, was not only attracted, but thoroughly overmastered by this great tide of thought.
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