“You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir!”
–Martin Joseph Routh (1755-1854), President of Magdalene College, Oxford, for 63 years
Notable and Quotable
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“You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir!”
–Martin Joseph Routh (1755-1854), President of Magdalene College, Oxford, for 63 years
The Oxford College pronounced “Maudlin” is written without the final “e” – Cambridge retains it. – or was that the deliberate mistake to highlight the need for verification, in which case may I claim the prize?
Dr Routh is one of those near-forgotten yet quite remarkable figures in Anglican history.
In his book, [i]Fathers and Anglicans[/i], Canon Arthur Middleton writes of Routh that he is
“without doubt one of the most interesting and remarkable figures that has ever appeared in Oxford. Thomas Mozley spoke of him as ‘the greatest name in patristic theology at Oxford – indeed a name in Europe’.”
In his [i]magnum opus[/i], [i]Reliquiae Sacra[/i], Routh gathered and edited the remains of the Fathers of the second and third centuries of whose works only fragments survive, taking as his limit the first Council of Nicaea.
Interesting to note on this day after the commemoration of the Consecration of Samuel Seabury that the twenty-eight year old Routh advised the envoys of the Anglican Church in America not to accept episcopal orders from the Church of Denmark because of lack of historic episcopal succession, directing them instead to the Scottish Episcopal Church for the creation of an American episcopate.
All his achievements aside, can you just imagine what it was like to have been born during the reign of George II and to have died well into the reign of Queen Victoria, having lived through all of the dizzying events of the latter half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, from the middle of the period of the Enlightenment clear through the emergence of the “modern” world in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars?