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 Edward King was
born in 1829, son of a clergyman. He was educated at home by his father and
a private tutor, and when he was 19, he went to Oxford and entered Oriel
College, the headquarters, as it were, of the Oxford (or Tractarian, or
Anglo-Catholic) Movement. Academically, he was at best an average student.
In 1854 he was ordained and made curate of Wheatley, a village near Oxford.
There he began to be known as a remarkably effective pastor and counsellor.
In 1862-3 he was appointed Principal of Cuddesdon, a recently founded (1854)
theological college near Oxford. He served there for ten years, and under
his pastorship the college became a worshipping community, where individual
and communal spiritual life flourished. On the academic side, students at
Cuddesdon read about the problems of pastoral work, not in contemporary
manuals, but in the writings of Ambrose, Basil, and Gregory the Great. They
read the sermons of Chrysostom, Augustine, and Bernard. But King insisted
that preaching could never be effective or worthwhile unless it was rooted
in a life of prayer and of love for one's parishioners. A priest must pray
regularly for every member of his parish, individually and by name. He must
call on every member once every two months, and must get to know them well
enough to understand their problems and know where they stood in need of
prayer. He said:
Christ lives in his saints. We know his life in them. St Paul prayed to know
the Power of the Resurrection, though he knew the fact.
If you are to preach, you must make up your minds that you are sent, and
sent by God.
Without the gift of love, you will never be a preacher.
Nothing anonymous will ever persuade--the faith and conduct of the preacher
give life and power to his message. Thus preaching is different from mere
feeling. You may teach mathematics or geography without being fully
convinced. But in delivering the Gospel message, if it is to be a living
life-giving message, there must be in the preacher a sense of message and
the desire to deliver it.
However, he did not fall, or permit his students to fall, into the trap of
supposing that a Christian ought to strive to have no interests other than
religious ones. He said:
It is not necessary to be always thinking directly of God. Indeed, it is not
possible. Sometimes, of course, we ought to, and can do this, but at other
times we must give our minds to what we are doing, even if it is playing and
amusement. We may, of course, commit the chief periods of our time and of
our occupation to God by a short prayer, as we do before and after meals,
and before reading the Bible. So also before any study, and after any study,
and such a word of prayer to bless our games that they may be innocent and
refreshing to us, and those with whom we play. In this way we can carry out
the words "I have set God always before me," and adopt the motto, "Laborare
est orare (to work is to pray)". A brief prayer is also possible during work
and play, but in the main you should be satisfied with commending your work
or play to God, and then yourself into it heartily.
King transformed the school, and the lives of those attending it, not so
much by the content of his speeches as by his own life and personality. He
seemed to make those around him aware of the presence and love of God. One
of his students wrote afterwards of King's influence as follows:
It was light he carried with him--light that shone through Him--light that
flowed from him. The room was lit into which he entered. It was as if we had
fallen under a streak of sunlight, that flickered, and danced, and laughed,
and turned all to color and gold. ...
The whole place was alive with him. His look, his voice, his gaiety, his
beauty, his charm, his holiness, filled it and possessed it. There was an
air about it, a tone in it, a quality, a delicacy, a depth, which were his
creation.... All was human, natural, and free.
If this were an isolated quotation, we might be inclined to dismiss it as
indicating an over-susceptibility on the part of the student. However, it
seems to state the impression that King made on many of those he met.
In 1885, he was appointed Bishop of Lincoln, succeeding Christopher
Wordsworth (nephew of the poet William Wordsworth, and himself the author of
several hymns that are still in general use). He noted with satisfaction
that it was the original home of John Wesley, whom he greatly admired. As a
bishop-pastor, he was outstandingly effective. One writer of his day called
him "the most loved man in Lincolnshire." The private letters of his
contemporaries contain many testimonies to his personal holiness and to his
loving concern for others. He sought out those whom the Church had failed to
reach, and spoke with them about the Good News of God's love declared in
Jesus Christ. Whenever possible, he did the work of a prison chaplain,
speaking with everyone from pickpockets to murderers. In 1887 a young
fisherman from Grimsby killed his sweetheart in a jealous quarrel, and was
sentenced to hang. The prison chaplain was at a loss what to say to him, and
King took over. He spoke to the young man, instructed him in Christian
belief, preached to him the Good news of salvation in Christ, and reconciled
him with God. (He also waged a vigorous but unsuccessful campaign to have
the sentence commuted.)
On one occasion he was caught up in the controversies of his day. Different
parties within the Church had come to regard various ceremonial usages as a
mark of where the user stood theologically, and in 1887 Bishop King was
denounced as celebrating the Liturgy with practices not permitted by the
directives in the Book of Common Prayer and elsewhere governing Anglican
worship. Specifically, the charges were
(1) having lighted candles on the altar;
(2) facing "eastward" (that is, toward the altar and with his
Back to the congregation) during most prayers; (3) mixing a little water
with the wine in the chalice (done chiefly because the ancients--Jews,
Greeks, and Romans alike--regularly diluted their wine with water just
before drinking it, but also understood by many as a symbol of human nature
being incorporated into the Divine Nature as we are united with Christ
through the Sacrament); (4) using the Agnus Dei ("O Lamb of God, who takest
away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us") as a hymn just before the
receiving of the Holy Communion (this hymn is traditional, but had been
omitted from the Book of Common Prayer in 1549 because Cranmer transferred
the Gloria to a position at the end of the service, and the words of the
Agnus Dei are included in the Gloria, so that it seemed repetitious to have
them both within a few minutes of each other); (5) making the sign of the
Cross when blessing the congregation; and (6) making a ceremony of cleansing
the Communion vessels after the service. None of these practices is
particularly controversial today, but they were then thought by some to be
signs of inclination to the views--and the company--of the Pope. King was
tried by a Church Court presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The
decision of the Court forbade some of these practices, but permitted others
while specifying that they had no theological significance. Thus, lighted
candles were to be permitted on the altar, but only when needed for purposes
of illumination. The Times wrote of the judgement:
The Ritualists are to have their way in the chief practices Impugned--the
other party are diligently assured that there is no such significance as has
hitherto been supposed in such practices. The Ritualists...are given the
shells they have been fighting for, and the Evangelicals are consoled with
the gravest assurances that there were no kernels inside them.
It is ironic that King appears in reference works chiefly as the defendent
in the Lincoln Trial, since most of those who knew him would have regarded
this as a brief and peripheral episode in a life devoted chiefly to
preaching and exemplifying the Good News of the Kingdom of God.
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