Horne, George
1730-1792

Bishop of Norwich 1790-1792. Graduating from University College, Oxford in 1749, and ordained in in 1753, he obtained his DD in 1764, became President of Magdalen College in 1768 and was Vice-Chancellor from 1776 to 1780. From 1781 he was Dean of Canterbury. A Hutchinsonian, he championed revealed as against natural religion. Like John Wesley, he admired and followed William Law's devotional rules, but rejected his mysticism. In 1762 Wesley wrote a letter protesting at Horne's misrepresentation of his teaching in a University Sermon on 'Works wrought through Faith', but later commended his commentary on the Psalms (1776) as 'the best that ever was wrote'. Horne was of a magnanimous nature. He deplored the expulsion of the six Methodist students from St Edmund Hall, Oxford in 1768, forgave Wesley's plagiarism of his work and as bishop refused to hinder him from preaching in the parish church at Diss in 1790. He died at Bath on 17 January 1792.

Sources
  • W.K.Lowther Clarke, Eighteenth Century Piety (1944) pp.102-6
  • W.R. Ward, Georgian Oxford: university politics in the eighteenth century (1958)
  • Gerald R. Cragg (ed.), The Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion and Certain Related Open Letters(Works of John Wesley, Bicentennial Edition, Oxford, ), vol. 11 pp.437-58
  • Oxford DNB

See also

Entry written by: JAV
Category: Person
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