Whately, Richard

Related Category: Protestant Christianity: Biographies

(hwāt´lē), 1787–1863, English prelate and writer. Fellow and tutor of Oriel College, Oxford, he published a witty work aimed at extreme skeptics, Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (1819). In 1822 he gave the Bampton Lectures at Oxford entitled The Use and Abuse of Party Feeling in Matters of Religion. As archbishop of Dublin (from 1831) he worked to free religious instruction from sectarianism and urged state endowment of the Roman Catholic clergy. He was an influential supporter of the Broad Church party. Among his many works are Elements of Logic (1826) and Elements of Rhetoric (1828).

See his Life and Correspondence, ed. by his daughter, E. J. Whately (1866); memoirs by W. J. Fitzpatrick (2 vol., 1864).