RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA Ward
WARD, SETH: Church of England bishop of Salisbury; b. at Aspenden (18 m.n.e. of St. Albans), Hertfordshire, Apr. 5, 1617; d. at Knightsbridge, Salisbury, Jan. 6, 1688-89. He was educated at Sidney-Sussex College, Cambridge (B.A. 1636-37), where he became fellow in 1640 and mathematical lecturer in 1643, but in the following year he was deprived of his fellowship by the Puritans for refusing to subscribe the Solemn League and Covenant. He then resided in London, and at Aspenden, pursuing his mathematical studies and acting as a private tutor, until 1649, when, being willing to take the oath of allegiance to the Commonwealth, he was appointed Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford, where he enunciated a clever, though unsuccessful, theory of planetary motion, and where he also became involved in a controversy with Thomas Hobbes (q.v.), the results of his astronomical studies being embodied in his In Ismaelis Bullialdi astronomie philolaice fundamenta inquisitio brevis (Oxford, 1653) and Astronomia geometrica; ubi methodus proponitur qua primariorum planetarum astronomia sive elliptica sive circularis possit geometrice absolvi (1656), and his points of disagreement with Hobbes being contained in his Vindicie academiarum (1654) and Jn Thome Hobbit philosophiam exercitatio epistolica (1656).
At Oxford Ward resided at Wadham College, and about 1649, on the formation of the Philosophical Society of Oxford, he became a member of that body, while he was later one of the original members of the Royal Society. In 1657 Ward was elected principal of Jesus College, Oxford, but was obliged to give place to an appointee of Cromwell; and two years later he was chosen president of Trinity, but was compelled within a year to resign since he did not possess the statutory qualifications. He now retired to London, where Charles II. appointed him vicar of St. Lawrence Jewry and rector of Uplowman, Devonshire, while in 1662 he was rector of St. Breock, Cornwall. He had been precentor of Exeter since 1656, and in 1660 he was made a prebendary, and dean in the year following. In 1662 he was consecrated bishop of Exeter, and five years later was translated to Salisbury, while in 1671 he was appointed chancellor of the Order of the Garter. In 1672 he declined to become the successor of John Cosin (q.v.) in the see of Durham. Both as dean and as bishop Ward strongly opposed dissenters, suppressing their conventicles and ejecting them and their stalls from his cathedral, although, on the other hand, he was very willing to make certain concessions to win them back to the Church. He restored and beautified the cathedrals and palaces of both his sees, and founded several beneficent institutions, such as a college of matrons at Salisbury (1682) for widows of the Exeter and Salisbury clergy.
The chief theological works of Ward, besides many sermons, were Certain Disquisitions and Considerations representing to the Conscience the Unlawfullness of the . . . Solemn League and Covenant (Oxford, 1643; the first edition destroyed by the Puritans, the earliest edition extant being that of 1644), and Philosophical Essay towards an Eviction of the Being and Attributes of .God, the
Immortality of the Souls of Men, and the Truth and Authority of Scripture (1652); and he also edited Samuel Ward’s Dissertatio de baptismatis infantilis vt et efficacia (London, 1653) and Opera nonnulla (1658).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: The primary life is by Walter Pope, London, 1698, on which cf. A. & Wood, Athene Oxoniensis, ed P. Bliss, i. p. clxx., and iii. 588, 1209, iv. 246, 305, 512, and Fasti, ii. 184, 4 vols., 1813-20, and the same writer’s An Appendix to Pope’s Life of Ward, ib., 1697. On the materials for a life of Ward cf. J. E. B. Mayor, in Notes and queries, 2 ser., vii. 269, and for a list of references DNB; lix. 336-340.
WARD, WILLIAM GEORGE: English Roman Catholic; b. in London Mar. 21, 1812; d. at Hampstead, London, July 6, 1882. He was educated at Christ Church and Lincoln College, Oxford (B.A., 1834), and was elected fellow of Balliol, where he also acted as lecturer in mathematics and logic. He took orders in the Church of England, and though he was at this time a pronounced latitudinarian, his combination of a severely logical mind with deep personal piety convinced him that there was no middle way between submission to ecclesiastical authority and absolute rationalism. It was at this period that he came under the sway of Tractarianism (q.v.), and he went far beyond the attack of J. H. Newman (q.v.) on the natural meaning of the Thirty-Nine Articles in Tract Ninety, Ward’s own position being set forth in A Few Words in Support of No. xc. and A Few More Words in Support of No. xc. (both Oxford, 1841). The result was loss of his lectureships and tutorial position at Balliol, though he was appointed junior bursar in 1841 and senior bursar in the following year. Meanwhile his trend was more and more toward the Roman church, and in 1844 he published at Oxford, in reply to William Palmer, his /deal of a Christian Church considered in Comparison with existing Practice, lauding the Roman communion as an almost perfect embodiment of Christianity, and by his comparisons with non-Roman communions incurring the extreme displeasure of English churchmen of all types. Declining to disavow the book either in whole or in parts specified as contrary to the Thirty-Nine Articles, Ward was formally censured by the vicechancellor and by the convocation of the University of Oxford and on Feb. 13, 1845, was degraded, a proceeding regarding the legality of which there was much room for doubt. Notwithstanding this doubt, Ward resigned his fellowship and on Sept. 5 of the same year was received into the Roman Catholie Church. In 1846 he removed to Ware, and from 1851 to 1858 was lecturer in moral philosophy in St. Edmund’s College, his lectures being designed not only to meet the needs of his students, but also to prepare the way for a systematic monograph On Nature and Grace, although only the philosophical introduction was ever published (London, 1860). After residing for three years on one of his estates in the Isle of Wight, he returned to Ware in 1861, and from 1863 to 1878 was editor of The Dublin Review, which he transformed from a moribund condition to a powerful organ against all that savored of religious latitudinarianism, lending all his strength to the defense of Ultramontanism (q.v.). In its columns he supported the encyclical Quanta cura
Ward Warneck