templated retiring from the university. But the appointment of Dr. Arnold in 1841 to the chair of modern history reconciled him to his position. To his lectures Stanley looked for the infusion of new life into a decaying professorial system, the restoration of a healthier tone in university life, the destruction of the barriers which then separated religious from secular learning. His hopes were disappointed by the sudden death of Arnold on 12 June 1842. The event was described by Stanley as the greatest calamity that had happened to him, and almost the greatest that could befall him. To the task of writing Arnold's life he devoted his utmost energies. His ‘Life and Correspondence of Dr. Arnold’ (published on 31 May 1844) was in some respects the work of Stanley's life. It gave him an assured position not only in Oxford, but in the wider world of letters.
In 1843 he had been ordained priest and appointed a college tutor. The university was still convulsed by a series of religious struggles, towards which he took up a consistent position. He advocated the toleration of divergent views, and opposed alike the degradation of W. G. Ward in 1845 and the agitation against Dr. Hampden, who was appointed to the bishopric of Hereford in 1847. Without sympathising with the views of either, he insisted on the injustice of the indiscriminating clamour with which evangelicals assailed the one and high churchmen the other. Meanwhile, in the midst of literary labours and ecclesiastical conflicts, he steadily pursued his tutorial duties. His efforts met with unprecedented success. Giving his time and his best self to the undergraduates, he fired his pupils with his own enthusiasms; his colleagues were stimulated by his example, and the college rapidly rose to a high position in the university. In October 1845 he was appointed select preacher, and preached a course of four sermons, beginning in February 1846 and ending on 31 Jan. 1847. The sermons were published in November 1847, with additions and appendices, under the title of ‘Sermons on the Apostolical Age.’ They were preached at a crisis in Stanley's career, and at a point of transition between the old and the new Oxford. They marked his divergence from the views of both ecclesiastical parties; they acknowledged obligations to Arnold and German theologians; they championed the cause of free inquiry as applied to Biblical studies. From this time he was an object of suspicion to both evangelicals and high churchmen, who politically identified him with the party of reform, theologically with the German rationalists. On 6 Sept. 1849 Stanley's father, the bishop of Norwich, died; on 13 Aug. of the same year his younger brother, Captain Charles Stanley, R.E., and on 13 March 1850 his elder brother, Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., also died. He was now the sole prop and stay of his mother and his two sisters, and by his succession to a small estate was obliged to resign his fellowship at the university. Immediately after his father's death he had been offered the deanery of Carlisle, vacated by the appointment of Dr. Hinds to the see of Norwich. This offer he refused; but now, deprived of his home at Oxford, and desirous of providing one for his mother and sisters, he was not prepared to refuse any independent post. In July 1851 Stanley accepted a canonry at Canterbury, and left Oxford. The five succeeding years were a period of great literary activity. Before accepting the canonry Stanley had been appointed secretary of the Oxford University commission (July 1850). The report of the commission, which was mainly his work, was issued in May 1852. Thereupon he started on a tour in Egypt and the Holy Land, which produced his ‘Sinai and Palestine’ (published March 1856), perhaps the most widely popular of his writings. His ‘Commentary on the Epistles to the Corinthians’ (published June 1855) was a companion work to Jowett's ‘Commentary on the Epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans.’ On the picturesque, historical, and personal side it is valuable; but doctrinally it is weak, and in scholarship and accuracy it is deficient. Stanley wisely accepted the criticism of Dr. Lightfoot, afterwards bishop of Durham, in the ‘Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology’ (iii. 81–121), that critical notes were not his vocation. In his ‘Memorials of Canterbury’ (published December 1854) he found full scope for his gifts of dramatic, pictorial narrative. To make others share in his enthusiasms for the historical associations of the cathedral and the city was one side of his ideal of the duties of a canon. Another side of that ideal is illustrated in his ‘Canterbury Sermons’ (published March 1859), in which he endeavours to enforce the practical side of religion; to make it a life rather than a creed; to set forth its truths, not to attack its errors.
In December 1856 Stanley was appointed professor of ecclesiastical history at Oxford. To the chair was attached a canonry at Christ Church; the appointment, therefore, though he was not installed as canon till March 1858, required his removal from Canterbury and return to the university. At
