Mrs. Eddy Mentioned Them November 22, 1958 Issue

Richard Whateley, 1787–1863

[Mentioned in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 304]

Richard Whateley's first claim to distinction was his winning of the prize for the English Essay at Oxford. Previous to this, he was known to his tutor and to his friends for perpetually "chopping logic with himself," as he called it, which described his habit of taking some notion and following it out to its minute ramification.

In 1811 Whateley was elected Fellow of Oriel College, oxford, and the following year took his Master of Arts degree. With the exception of a three-year period, he spent the next twenty years at Oxford and was employed both as a private and as a public tutor. He was a stimulating teacher, having the ability to draw out the mind of his pupils. Oxford appointed Whateley to give the Bampton lectures in 1822 and three years later elected him principal of St. Alban Hall and made him a Doctor of Divinity. In 1829 he was named professor of political economy.

These years at Oxford marked the beginning of his literary career. His treatise on "Logic" was originally written as articles for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. He was the author of two series of "Easy Lessons": one to make the principles of political economy comprehensible to the unlearned and the other to give them a comprehensive view of the religion they professed. To a friend he wrote: "We say in conformity with our own powers of thought, that God is everywhere and always, but ... an Eternal and Omniscient Being has no relation to time: His name is I AM: An Eternal Now does ever last."

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