Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/417

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
D.N.B. 1912–1921

acted as dean, being also curate at St. Sepulchre's church, until 1877, when his mother died, and he returned home as curate until his father's death (1880).

At that moment the evangelical party in the Church of England was planning the erection of Ridley Hall at Cambridge as a theological college for ordinands: Moule accepted the principalship, and held it for nineteen years. He married in 1881 Harriot Mary, daughter of the Rev. C. Boileau Elliott, F.R.S., rector of Tattingstone, Suffolk, by whom he had two daughters. This was a period of great happiness and influence: his wife was in whole-hearted sympathy with his aims; he won the devoted allegiance of colleagues and pupils; he preached regularly at Trinity church, and often before the university; inspired and guided many religious movements in the university; spoke often at Keswick conventions and Church Congresses, and published numerous books. In 1899 he was elected Norrisian professor of divinity, and, while professor, was brought into close touch with the leaders of other sections of the Church by taking part in a round table conference on the doctrine of the Holy Communion, impressing them much by his spirituality, and being impressed by them.

In 1901 Moule was appointed to the see of Durham. As a bishop, his strength lay in his personal and spiritual appeal; he was in touch with clergy and laity alike, with quick sympathy for all suffering, with charity to those who differed from him, an enthusiastic leader in all missionary effort and in preventive and rescue work. Rather un-English in temperament—of French ancestry on his father's side, of Welsh on his mother's—he was naturally timid and high-strung, but his whole life was one of persistent development in power. He became fearless in asserting the truth, unruffled in the face of difficulty and sorrow, deepened and even brightened by the sorrows of later life, when he lost a daughter and his wife. But, while growing in power and in toleration, he remained unchangingly within the limits of the faith as he had learned it in his father's house. He wrote much—treatises theological, devotional, exegetical, biographies, poems, hymns—notably, Outlines of Christian Doctrine (1889), Thoughts on Christian Sanctity (1885), Veni Creator (1890), Charles Simeon (1892), Christus Consolator (1915), Philippian, Colossian, and Ephesian Studies (1897–1900). His writings form the most spiritual and scholarly expression in his generation of the Christian faith as held by evangelical churchmen, proud of the Reformers, and holding that their teaching is ‘the most loyal in proportion and emphasis to the New Testament standard’. He died at Cambridge 8 May 1920.

[Bishop Handley Moule's Memories of a Vicarage, 1913; J. B. Harford, Letters and Poems of Bishop Moule, 1921; J. B. Harford and F. C. Macdonald, Handley C. G. Moule, Bishop of Durham. A biography (with bibliography), 1922.]

W. L.


MOULTON, JAMES HOPE (1863–1917), classical and Iranian scholar and student of Zoroastrianism, the elder son of the Rev. William Fiddian Moulton [q.v.], head master of the Leys School, Cambridge, by his wife, Hannah, daughter of the Rev. Samuel Hope, was born at Richmond, Surrey, 11 October 1863. His father was one of four brothers, all eminent, the best known being John Fletcher Moulton, Lord Moulton [q.v.]. He was educated at the Leys School, and at King's College, Cambridge, of which he was a fellow from 1888 to 1894. Several lines of Methodist ancestry blended in him, and he entered the Wesleyan ministry in 1886, being appointed assistant to his father at the Leys. In 1890 he married Eliza Keeling Osborn, granddaughter of Dr. George Osborn [q.v.]. He had two sons (the elder fell in action in 1916) and two daughters. He left Cambridge in 1902 on his appointment as New Testament tutor at the Wesleyan College, Didsbury, Manchester. In 1908 he was appointed Greenwood professor of Hellenistic Greek and Indo-European philology in the university of Manchester. After his wife's death in 1915, he went to India specially to lecture to the Parsees on Zoroastrianism, and to qualify himself to write a volume, which was posthumously published (1917) under the title The Treasure of the Magi. He left India in March 1917 and joined Dr. Rendel Harris at Port Said. Their ship was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. Moulton ‘played a hero's part in the boat’, died from exhaustion on 7 April, and was buried by his friend at sea.

Moulton's interests were wide, but his best work was done on the Greek of the New Testament and on Zoroastrianism. To the former he was drawn by the fact that his father, who had translated Winer's Grammar of New Testament Greek, had chosen his son to collaborate with him in the writing of a new and independent work under that title. Nothing had been done when the father died in 1898, and the whole responsibility fell on the son. He was himself spared only to see the

391