Samuel Wilberforce

Samuel Wilberforce (7 September 1805 – 19 July 1873) was an English bishop and the son of William Wilberforce.

Quotes

• Is it on your grandmother’s or grandfather’s side that you are descended from an ape?
  • To Thomas Henry Huxley, debating Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. [1]

• A resolution to attend theatres or operas is an absolute disqualification for Holy Orders.
  • Quoted in Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), p. 74

• Shabby, word-eating, pocket-picketing, sacrilegious villains.
  • Of the Whig party.
  • Quoted in Arthur Burns, "Wilberforce, Samuel (1805–1873)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004

• Modern liberalism: a heartless steam engine.
  • Quoted in Arthur Burns, "Wilberforce, Samuel (1805–1873)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004

Quotes about Samuel Wilberforce

Wilberforce by Lewis Carroll

• He was the first of the Bishops of the Victorian age to show what the duties of a bishop were. He may truly be said to have recast the whole idea of the Episcopate, and to have successfully raised the tone of clerical life.
  • Sabine Baring-Gould, The Church Revival (1914), p. 175

• I do not quite like hearing you, for you make me cry.
  • Charles James Blomfield, quoted in Arthur Burns, "Wilberforce, Samuel (1805–1873)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004

• The bench of Bishops has in its time contributed much to the eloquence, as well as to the appearance and dignity of the Upper House. During the last half century its most noted orator was Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and Winchester, whose eloquence was of a very high order and, like his character, suggested the great ecclesiastical statesman rather than the divine. He leaped into fame by a speech on the Corn Laws in June, 1846, of which his biographer says that it ought to have been heard rather than read.
  • Lord Curzon, Modern Parliamentary Eloquence: The Rede Lecture, delivered before the University of Cambridge, November 6, 1913 (1914), p. 59

• The Bishop was the Holy Terror of his time; he shows up on the wrong side of every dispute.
  • Florence Becker Lennon, The Life of Lewis Carroll (1962), p. 73

• I admired and liked him most before he became a Bishop, and before he leant so much to those High Church views which did harm.
  • Queen Victoria, Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 2, p. 264