WARD, WILLIAM GEORGE. — Convert theologian from Anglicanism, b. in London on 21 March 1822, 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 became a convinced defender of Tractarian principles. The same authorities at Oxford were alarmed by this, and in 1841 he was deprived of his teaching position at Balliol College.
From 1841 to 1843, in a series of articles in the British Critic, he argued for the necessity of a gradual 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 embodiment of the true Christian idea. When asked to retract the book, he refused, and on 13 February 1845 he was received into the Catholic Church by the great Oxford divines; on 5 September 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. At this time he composed a major theological treatise entitled *On Nature and Grace*, of which only the first book was published. In 1858, having left his theological chair, he wrote in the *Dublin Review*, of which he later became editor in 1863. He was a strong opponent of liberalism, then represented in England by Sir John Acton, by Döllinger in Germany, and by Montalembert, Lacordaire, and Lamennais in France. On the question of papal infallibility he defended extreme views with excessive vehemence, thereby repelling rather than attracting people to Catholicism. After the death of Cardinal Wiseman, he exerted all his influence in Rome to secure the appointment of Manning to the see of Westminster. While narrow in his theological positions, he was broad and moderate in his philosophical ones, a quality he demonstrated especially as a debating member, together with James Knowles (1869), and later as president (1870) of the Metaphysical Society. He thus defended the philosophical foundations of faith more effectively than faith itself. He spent his last years at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, where his neighbor and close friend was Tennyson.
He wrote extensively; principal works: *The Relation of Intellectual Power to Man’s True Perfection* (London 1865), reprinted in *Essays 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 subicit G. G. W.* (ibid. 1869); *The Condemnation of Pope Honorius: an Essay* (ibid. 1879); *Essay on the Church’s Doctrinal Autonomy* (ibid. 1880).
Giacomo de Bivort de La Saudéle