WARD, WILLIAM GEORGE. - Theologian converted from Anglicanism, b. in London on 21 March 1812, d. at Hampstead on 6 July 1882.
In 1838 he took part in the Oxford Movement, coming under the influence of Newman and fully approving the famous tract XC. From that moment he was a convinced defender of the Tractarian principles. The university authorities themselves were alarmed by this, so that in 1841 he was deprived of his teaching post at Balliol College.
From 1841 to 1843, in a series of articles in the British Critic, he maintained the necessity of a progressive assimilation of Catholic doctrine by the Anglican Church, and in The Ideal of a Christian Church considered in comparison with existing practice (Oxford 1844) he presented the Catholic Church as the incarnation of the true Christian idea. Invited to retract the book, he refused and on 13 Feb. 1845 was deprived of his university degrees: on 5 Sept. he entered, together with his wife, the Catholic Church.
He taught ethics for a year at Old Hall and from 1852 to 1858 dogmatic theology at St. Edmund's College. To this period belongs a comprehensive treatise on theology entitled: On Nature and Grace, of which only the first book was published. In 1858, having left the chair of theology, he wrote in the Dublin Review, of which he also became editor in 1863. He was a strong opponent of liberalism, represented at that time in England by Sir John Acton, by Döllinger in Germany and by Montalembert, Lacordaire and Lamennais in France. On the question of pontifical infallibility he defended extreme ideas with excessive vehemence: thus, rather than attracting, he drove people away from Catholicism. After the death of Card. Wiseman, he exerted all his influence in Rome to have Manning appointed to the see of Westminster. But however narrow he was in his theological positions, he was equally broad and moderate in his philosophical positions, qualities he demonstrated especially as a co-founding member, together with James Knowles (1869), and then as president (1870) of the Metaphysical Society. He therefore defended the philosophical foundations of the faith better than the faith itself. He spent his last years at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, where Tennyson was his neighbor and close friend.
He wrote a great deal; principal works: The relation of intellectual power to man's true perfection (London 1858), reprinted in Essay on religion and literature (ibid. 1867); The authority of doctrinal decisions which are not definitions of faith (ibid. 1866); De infallibilitatis extensione theses quasdam et quaestiones theologorum iudicio subict G. G. W. (ibid. 1869); The condemnation of Pope Honorius: an essay (ibid. 1879); Essay in the Church's doctrinal authority (ibid. 1880).
Bibliography4 works
Giacomo de Bivort de La Saudée