Vincent Cane, in which the oneness and beauty of Roman Catholicism are contrasted with the confusion and multiplicity of Protestant sects. At Clarendon’s request Owen answered this in 1662 in his Animadversions; and so great was its success that he was offered preferment if he would conform. Owen’s condition for making terms was liberty to all who agree in doctrine with the Church of England; nothing therefore came of the negotiation.
In 1663 he was invited by the Congregational churches in Boston, New England, to become their minister, but declined. The Conventicle and Five Mile Acts drove him to London; and in 1666, after the Fire, he, like other leading Nonconformist ministers, fitted up a room for public service and gathered a congregation, composed chiefly of the old Commonwealth officers. Meanwhile he was incessantly writing; and in 1667 he published his Catechism, which led to a proposal, “more acute than diplomatic,” from Baxter for union. Various papers passed, and after a year the attempt was closed by the following laconical note from Owen: “I am still a well-wisher to these mathematics.” It was now, too, that he published the first part of his vast work upon the Epistle to the Hebrews, together with his exposition of Psalm 130 and his searching book on Indwelling Sin.
In 1669 Owen wrote a spirited remonstrance to the Congregationalists in New England, who, under the influence of Presbyterianism, had shown themselves persecutors. At home, too, he was busy in the same cause. In 1670 Samuel Parker’s Ecclesiastical Polity attacked the Nonconformists in a style of clumsy intolerance. Owen answered him (Truth and Innocence Vindicated); Parker replied with personalities as to Owen’s connexion with Wallingford House. Then Andrew Marvell with banter and satire finally disposed of Parker in The Rehearsal Transposed. Owen himself produced a tract On the Trinity (1669), and Christian Love and Peace (1672).
At the revival of the Conventicle Acts in 1670, Owen was appointed to draw up a paper of reasons which was submitted to the House of Lords in protest. In this or the following year Harvard College invited him to become its president; he received similar invitations from some of the Dutch universities.
When Charles issued his Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, Owen drew up an address of thanks. This indulgence gave the dissenters an opportunity for increasing their churches and services, and Owen was one of the first preachers at the weekly lectures which the Independents and Presbyterians jointly held at Princes’ Hall in Broad Street. He was held in high respect by a large number of the nobility (one of the many things which point to the fact that Congregationalism was by no means the creed of the poor and insignificant), and during 1674 both Charles and James held prolonged conversations with him in which they assured him of their good wishes to the dissenters. Charles gave him 1000 guineas to relieve those upon whom the severe laws had chiefly pressed, and he was even able to procure the release of John Bunyan, whose preaching he ardently admired. In 1674 Owen was attacked by William Sherlock, dean of St Paul’s, whom he easily vanquished, and from this time until 1680 he was engaged upon his ministry and the writing of religious works. The chief of these were On Apostasy (1676), a sad account of religion under the Restoration; On the Holy Spirit (1677–1678) and The Doctrine of Justification (1677). In 1680, however, Stillingfleet having on May 11 preached his sermon on “The Mischief of Separation,” Owen defended the Nonconformists from the charge of schism in his Brief Vindication. Baxter and Howe also answered Stillingfleet, who replied in The Unreasonableness of Separation. Owen again answered this, and then left the controversy to a swarm of eager combatants. From this time to his death he was occupied with continual writing, disturbed only by suffering from stone and asthma, and by an absurd charge of being concerned in the Rye House Plot. His most important work was his Treatise on Evangelical Churches, in which were contained his latest views regarding church government. He died at Ealing on the 24th of August 1683, just twenty-one years after he had gone out with so many others on St Bartholomew’s day in 1662, and was buried on the 4th of September in Bunhill Fields.
For engraved portraits of Owen see first edition of S. Palmer’s Nonconformists’ Memorial and Vertue’s Sermons and Tracts (1721). The chief authorities for the life are Owen’s Works; W. Orme’s Memoirs of Owen; A. Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses; R. Baxter’s Life; D. Neal’s History of the Puritans; T. Edwards’s Gangraena; and the various histories of the Independents. See also The Golden Book of John Owen, a collection of extracts prefaced by a study of his life and age, by James Moffatt (London, 1904).
OWEN, SIR RICHARD (1804–1892), English biologist, was
born at Lancaster on the 20th of July 1804, and received his
early education at the grammar school of that town. In 1820
he was apprenticed to a local surgeon and apothecary, and in
1824 he proceeded as a medical student to the university of
Edinburgh. He left the university in the following year, and
completed his medical course in St Bartholomew’s Hospital,
London, where he came under the influence of the eminent
surgeon, John Abernethy. He then contemplated the usual
professional career; but his bent was evidently in the direction
of anatomical research, and he was induced by Abernethy to
accept the position of assistant to William Clift, conservator
of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. This congenial
occupation soon led him to abandon his intention of medical
practice, and his life henceforth was devoted to purely scientific
labours. He prepared an important series of catalogues of the
Hunterian collection in the Royal College of Surgeons; and in
the course of this work he acquired the unrivalled knowledge
of comparative anatomy which enabled him to enrich all departments
of the science, and specially facilitated his researches
on the remains of extinct animals. In 1836 he was appointed
Hunterian professor in the Royal College of Surgeons, and in
1849 he succeeded Clift as conservator. He held the latter
office until 1856, when he became superintendent of the natural
history department of the British Museum. He then devoted
much of his energies to a great scheme for a National Museum
of Natural History, which eventually resulted in the removal
of the natural history collections of the British Museum to
a new building at South Kensington, the British Museum
(Natural History). He retained office until the completion of
this work in 1884, when he received the distinction of K.C.B.,
and thenceforward lived quietly in retirement at Sheen
Lodge, Richmond Park, until his death on the 18th of December
1892.
While occupied with the cataloguing of the Hunterian collection, Owen did not confine his attention to the preparations before him, but also seized every opportunity of dissecting fresh subjects. He was especially favoured with the privilege of investigating the animals which died in the Zoological Society’s gardens; and when that society began to publish scientific proceedings in 1831, he was the most voluminous contributor of anatomical papers. His first notable publication, however, was his Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus (London, 1832), which was soon recognized as a classic. Henceforth he continued to make important contributions to every department of comparative anatomy and zoology for a period of over fifty years. In the sponges Owen was the first to describe the now well-known “Venus’s flower basket” or Euplectella (1841, 1857). Among Entozoa his most noteworthy discovery was that of Trichina spiralis (1835), the parasite infesting the muscles of man in the disease now termed trichinosis (see also, however, the article on Paget, Sir James). Of Brachiopoda he made very special studies, which much advanced knowledge and settled the classification which has long been adopted. Among Mollusca, he not only described the pearly nautilus, but also Spirula (1850) and other Cephalopoda, both living and extinct; and it was he who proposed the universally-accepted subdivision of this class into the two orders of Dibranchiata and Tetrabranchiata (1832). The problematical Arthropod Limulus was also the subject of a special memoir by him in 1873.
Owen’s technical descriptions of the Vertebrata were still more numerous and extensive than those of the invertebrate
