Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/96

86 OWEN vice-chancellor in September 1652. In 1651, October 24, after Worcester, he preached the thanksgiving sermon before Parliament. In October 1653 he was one of several ministers whom Cromwell, probably to sound their views, summoned to a consultation as to church union. In December in the same year he had the honour of D.D. conferred upon him by his university. In the Parliament of 1654 he sat, but only for a short time, as member for Oxford university, and, with Baxter, was placed on the committee for settling the " fundamentals " necessary for the toleration promised in the Instrument of Government. He was, too, one of the Triers, and appears to have behaved with kindness and moderation in that capacity. As vice-chancellor he acted with readiness and spirit when a general rising in the west seemed imminent in 1655; his adherence to Cromwell, however, was by no means slavish, for he drew up, at the request of Desborough and Pride, a petition against his receiving the kingship (see Ludlow s Memoirs, ed. 1751, p. 224). During the years 1654-58 his chief controversial works were Divina Justitia, The Perseverance of Saints (against Goodwin), and Vindidse. Evangelicx (against the Socinians). In 1658 he took a leading part in the conference which drew up the Savoy Declaration. Baxter declares that at the death of Cromwell Owen joined the Wallingford House party. This, though supported by the fact that under the Restoration he had among his congregation a large number of these officers, Owen himself utterly denied. He appears, however, to have assisted in the restoration of the Rump Parliament, and, when Monk began his march into England, Owen, in the name of the Independent churches, to whom Monk was supposed to belong, and who were keenly anxious as to his intentions, wrote to dissuade him from the enter prise. In March 1660, the Presbyterian party being upper most, Owen was deprived of his deanery, which was given back to Reynolds. He retired to Stadham, where he wrote various controversial and theological works, in especial the laborious Theologoumena Pantodapa, a history of the rise and progress of theology. In 1661 was published the celebrated Fiat Lux, a work in which the oneness and beauty of Roman Catholicism are contrasted with the confusion and multiplicity of Protestant sects. At Clarendon s request Owen answered this in 1662 in his Animadversions ; and this led of course to a prolonged controversy. Clarendon now offered Owen perferment if he would conform. Owen s condition for making terms was liberty to all who agree in doctrine with the Church of England ; nothing therefore came of the negotiation. In 1663 he was invited by the Congregational churches in Boston, New England, to become their minister, but declined. The Conventicle and Five Mile Acts soon drove him to London; and in 1666, after the Fire, he, as did other leading Nonconformist ministers, fitted up a room for public service and gathered a congregation, composed chiefly of the old Commonwealth officers. Meanwhile he was incessantly writing; and in 1667 he published his Catechism, which led to a proposal from Baxter for union. Various papers passed, and after a year the attempt was closed by the following laconical note from Owen : " I am still a well-wisher to these mathematics." It was now, too, that he published the first part of his vast work upon the Epistle to the Hebrews. In 1669 Owen wrote a spirited remonstrance to the Congregationalists in New England, who, under the influ ence of Presbyterianism, had shown themselves perse cutors. At home, too, he was busy in the same cause. In 1670 Parker attacked the Nonconformists in his own style of clumsy intolerance. Owen answered him ; Parker repeated his attack ; Marvell wrote The Rehearsal Trans- prosed; and Parker is remembered by this alone. At the revival of the Conventicle Acts in 1670, Owen was appointed to draw up a paper of reasons which was submitted to the House of Lords in protest. In this or the following year Harvard university invited him to become their president ; he received similar invitations from some of the Dutch universities. When Charles issued his Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, Owen drew up an address of thanks. This indulg ence gave the dissenters an opportunity for increasing their churches and services, and Owen was one of the first preachers at the weekly lectures which the Independents and Presbyterians jointly held in Plummer s Hall. He was held in high respect by a large number of the nobility (one of the many things which point to the fact that Congregationalism was by no means the creed of the poor and insignificant), and during 1674 both Charles and James held prolonged conversations with him in which they assured him of their good wishes to the dissenters. Charles gave him 1000 guineas to relieve those upon whom the severe laws had chiefly pressed. In 1674 Owen was attacked by one Dr Sherlock, whom he easily vanquished, and from this time until 1680 he was engaged upon his ministry and the writing of religious works. In 1680, however, Stillingfleet having on May 11 preached his sermon on "The Mischief of Separation," Owen defended the Nonconformists from the charge of schism in his Brief Vindication. Baxter and Howe also answered Stillingfleet, who replied in The Unreasonableness of Separation. Owen again answered this, and then left the controversy to a swarm of eager combatants. From this time to his death he was occupied with continual writing, disturbed only by an absurd charge of being concerned in the Rye House Plot. His most important work was his Treatise on Evangelical Churches, in which were contained his latest views regarding church government. During his life he issued more than eighty separate publications, many of them of great size. Of these a list may be found in Orme s Memoirs of Owen. For somo years before his death Owen had suffered greatly from stone and asthma. He died quietly, though after great pain, at Ealing, on August 24, 1683, and was buried on September 4th in Bunhill Fields, being followed to the grave by a large procession of persons of distinction. " In younger age a most comely and majestic form ; but in the latter stages of life, depressed by constant infirmities, emaciated with frequent diseases, and above all crushed under the weight of intense and unremitting studies, it became an incommodious mansion for the vigorous exer tions of the spirit in the service of its God." For engraved portraits of Owen see first edition of Palmer s Non conformists Memorial and Vertue s Sermons and Tracts, 1721. The chief authorities for the life are Owen s Works ; Orme s Memoirs of Owen ; Wood s Athcnae Oxonicnses ; Baxter s Life ; Real s History of the Puritans ; Edwards s Gangrsena ; and the various histories of the Independents. (0. A.) OWEN, ROBERT (1771-1858), philanthropist, and founder of English socialism, was born at the village of Newtown, Montgomeryshire, in North Wales. His father had a small business in Newtown as saddler and ironmonger, and there young Owen received all his school education, which terminated at the age of nine. At ten he went to Stamford, where he served in a draper s shop for three or four years, and, after a short experience of work in a London shop, removed to Manchester. His success at Manchester was very rapid. When only nineteen years of age he became manager of a cotton mill, in which five hundred people were employed, and by his administrative intelligence, energy, industry, and steadiness soon made it one of the very best establishments of the kind in Great Britain. In this factory Owen used the first bags of