in 1863, being reappointed in 1870, 1877, and 1884, and from the date of his first university sermon in 1863 to the last that he ever preached, on Whitsunday 1890, the power which he wielded from the pulpit of St. Mary's never for a moment wavered, despite the fixity of his principles and the continual change of audience. His gifts as a preacher and thinker received conspicuous illustration in the celebrated ‘Bampton Lectures,’ delivered, under special request and at short notice, in 1866, ‘On the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.’ The published volume has gone into fifteen editions, has been translated into German, and is the text-book on its subject. In these lectures Liddon first proved his powers, both as a Christian advocate and as a trained and equipped expert in theology. They are not characterised by the speculative originality of Mozley or Mansel. But the Christian case has seldom been stated with such insight, learning, or ardour.
From this time until the death of Dr. Pusey (16 Sept. 1882) Liddon played a prominent part in the politics of the university. He was three times elected to the hebdomadal board between 1864 and 1875. In 1870 he proceeded B.D. and D.D., and was created D.C.L. In the same year he was appointed Ireland professor of exegesis, in succession to Dr. Hawkins, a post which involved him in constant and arduous lecturing until his retirement in 1882. In all academical matters he acted in closest concert with Dr. Pusey, and was strongly opposed to the main set of the educational movement which was at that time reshaping the character and redistributing the endowments of the university. He viewed the transformation of Oxford which was finally sealed by the Universities Commission of 1882 as the disestablishing of the church in Oxford, and as an abandonment of its formal attachment to religion. His rooted conservatism as a university politician rendered the movement for the admission of women especially distasteful to him.
Liddon's eminence as a preacher was soon recognised throughout the country. In 1870 he startled the London world by a remarkable series of lectures given in St. James's, Piccadilly, and published as ‘Some Elements of Religion.’ In spite of the abnormal length of each lecture the church was thronged, and the effect on the educated people of the west end of London was profound. In the same year Liddon accepted an offer through Mr. Gladstone of a canonry in St. Paul's Cathedral, and his intimate relations with Oxford were at length interrupted. The crowds that had listened to him at St. James's, Piccadilly, came to hear his first sermon at St. Paul's, and flooded the choir, which alone was then used. On the second Sunday in September 1870 he moved out to a pulpit under the dome, and thus forced the change, which has since become permanent, of using the main body of the cathedral for all services. He found the changes which were to revivify St. Paul's already beginning under Dean Mansel and Canon Gregory. And when, from September 1871, he had the satisfaction of serving under Dean Church, who evoked his devoted loyalty, he threw all his ardour into the revival of the full devotional use of the cathedral. It was in the direction of this devotional development that Liddon's help was of peculiar value. The daily sacrament was restored, together with the midday and evening prayers and the full choral celebration.
His sermons at St. Paul's for twenty years formed a central fact of London life. All ranks and conditions of men were there, of many nations and of all varieties of creeds. Liddon had studied the great school of French oratory, admiring especially Bourdaloue, and of the later preachers the influence of Lacordaire was distinctly discernible. To their example he owed the completeness with which he arranged the framework of his sermons as well as much of the manner and method of his appeals. The matter of the sermon was generally quite simple; it was confined to the elemental doctrines of the faith. The argument was plain, the premisses familiar. He read much, but his central position was unaffected by new discoveries. There was no assimilation of them with the texture of his thought. His mental structure was marked by an intense permanence, and his latest deliverance from the pulpit was in all essentials the same as his first. His acute understanding was set on bringing everything into order, and it fought shy of all that was vague in outline or paradoxical. He was intensely Latin in mental structure; he delighted in calling himself an ecclesiastic. His typical abhorrence was a misty Teutonism. This dislike held him aloof from all philosophies of development. He bent himself in his sermons to exclude originality of idea; he spent himself in the effort simply to prove and to persuade. And to this effort everything in him contributed—his charm of feature, his exquisite intonation, his kindling eye, his quivering pose and gestures, his fiery sarcasm, his rich humour, his delicate knowledge of the heart, and his argumentative skill.
Though constantly touching on the interests of the day, he rarely in the cathedral sermons entered into strictly controversial matter, but he spoke out emphatically from
