visitation of each of his 550 parishes, entering each church, and inspecting each church school. His most notable public efforts were a sermon to the British Association in 1887, an address to the Church Congress at Manchester in 1888, a reply to Cardinal Vaughan's assertion of Roman Catholic claims in the Manchester diocese in 1894, and a speech on church schools in the House of Lords in 1902. He retired from Manchester in 1903, and died at Poundisford Park, near Taunton, 9 April 1915.
The life story of Bishop Moorhouse, as of other churchmen his contemporaries, is that of his reaction to the religious and political movements of the age. Self-taught, unfettered by the conventions of public-school education, Moorhouse enjoyed to the full the atmosphere of controversy. He was a born debater. His reading, which was extensive both in continental and English literature, scientific and metaphysical as well as theological, was steadily maintained throughout life. It was assiduously employed to confirm his clergy and congregations in the reality of the supernatural world and its intimate connexion with the natural. Had he accepted the offer of a fellowship made by his college in 1861 he might have founded at Cambridge a school of progressive orthodoxy, a valuable rival to the Hegelian Tractarianism of Oxford. He lived, however, for the work which was under his hand, keeping up his studies but giving the first place to practical activity. The unquestionable depth and sincerity of his faith contributed to deliver his biblical criticism from the suspicion of being masked infidelity. Two characteristic utterances mark his relation to his age: ‘In opposing and denouncing the dictum of an arrogant science that the supernatural is impossible, there is no need to deny any of its well-established facts, or to oppose any of its logical and well-founded arguments’ [The Teaching of Christ, 1891], and ‘Let everything be sacrificed to Truth’ [Hulsean Lectures, 1865].
[Bishop Moorhouse's sermons and lectures; Edith C. Rickards, Bishop Moorhouse, 1920; personal knowledge.]
MORANT, Sir ROBERT LAURIE (1863–1920), civil servant, the only son of Robert Morant, decorative artist, of Bond Street and Hampstead, by his wife, Helen, daughter of the Rev. Henry Lea Berry, head master of Mill Hill School, was born at Manaton Lodge, Hampstead, 7 April 1863. He was educated at Winchester and at New College, Oxford, where, in straitened circumstances, he lived an exceptionally studious and abstemious life, his sole athletic diversion being boxing, in which he excelled. He took a first class in the final honour school of theology in 1885. He then taught for a short time at Temple Grove preparatory school. In November 1886 he went to Siam as tutor to King Chulalongkorn's nephews, and subsequently became tutor to the Crown Prince and laid the foundations of a system of public education in Siam which is still associated with his name. He exercised great and independent influence and became the object of much jealousy, which led to his retirement from the Siamese service in 1894. On his return to England he went to live at Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel, and took part in its social and educational work.
In 1895 Morant entered the Education Department as assistant director of special inquiries and reports, contributing to the series of volumes edited by (Sir) Michael Sadler valuable reports, among which may be mentioned those on the French system of higher primary schools (1896–1897) and on the national organization of education in Switzerland (1898). In November 1899 he became private secretary to Sir John Eldon Gorst [q.v.], the elder, who was vice-president of the Committee of Council on Education; and in 1902 he was appointed assistant private secretary to the eighth Duke of Devonshire [q.v.], lord president of the Council. This gave Morant his opportunity. His achievement, as a relatively junior officer, in mobilizing and marshalling the political, municipal, and educational forces of the country for the not unhazardous enterprise of constructing an orderly and comprehensive system of public education out of incoherent and antagonistic elements, is one of the romances of the civil service. The passing of the Education Act of 1902 was largely due to his vision, courage, and ingenuity. His promotion, in November 1902, to be acting secretary of the Board of Education, and in April 1903 to the substantive post of permanent secretary, was not only appropriate but inevitable.
Although its operation was for some years embarrassed by denominational controversy and by attempts to modify the settlement effected by it in respect of voluntary schools, the Act of 1902 afforded a broad foundation for subsequent administrative and legislative development; and the organization of English education, in the spheres both of the central and local authorities, was transformed by Morant's
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