fame than the work for which he is most celebrated. And, as historians
should, we must remember some dates. They will at least save us
from advancing the thesis that Stubbs wrote good history because,
as a bishop, he was in touch with life. ¹

Stubbs was born in 1825, the same year as Huxley; Darwin
Origin of Species was published in 1859, Stubbs own Constitutional
History over the years 1874-8; he was bishop of Chester in 1884, and
he died bishop of Oxford in 1901. With his elevation to the episcopate
his historical publications shortly reached their end: his working
career as a historian covered little more than thirty years. ²

Stubbs entered Christ Church in April 1844. He came to a uni-
versity still ecclesiastical in outlook and organisation, a university in
turmoil. Newman resigned his fellowship at Oriel in October 1845
and was received into the Roman Church. The echoes of the religious
controversies, which then reached their climax and had, as Stubbs
said, engrossed 'all the thinking men of the university', ³ reverberated
loudly for a few years until, in the furore created by the first Uni-
versity Commission appointed in August 1850, Oxford forgot religion
to fight reform. But before this, Stubbs had vacated his fellowship at
Trinity on his presentation to the living of Navestock. The Oxford
he knew as a young man was, then, Oxford unreformed: its spirit was
his spirit. Looking back, at a time when the university had already
suffered radical change, while he could see that the disputants of his
early days had been handicapped by their lack of historical training,
Stubbs did not question the importance of the subjects of disputa-
tion. He thought it fitting that his predecessor in the chair of Modern
History, Goldwin Smith, should employ his 'learning, acuteness,
earnestness and eloquence . . . on the behalf of Christian Truth
against philosophic sciolism'. ⁴ A moral purpose underlay his own
historical studies: history must justify the ways of God to man.
'Modern civilization', he said, 'is the work of Christianity and has
inherited nothing from ancient civilization except what Christianity
has gathered up into itself and preserved.' ⁵ Nor did he see any reason
to modify in 1886 the belief he had expressed in 1867 that Modern
History and Natural Science could be equated because each aroused
'a consciousness . . . that we are growing able to justify the Eternal
Wisdom . . . that we are coming to see . . . a hand of justice and
mercy, a hand of progress and order, a kind and wise disposition,
ever leading the world on to the better'. ⁶ Without any sense of in-
congruity, Stubbs the historian dons the mantle of the Hebrew

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