High Church Prophet

Though he never attained the highest office in the Church of England, Samuel Horsley was the ablest bishop on the bench in the late eighteenth century. He was a scientist, parliamentarian, and man of letters, as well as a leading theologian and diocesan administrator; while his venomous opposition to popular politics at the time of the French Revolution earned him the label `Grand Mufti'. LF. C. Mather's scholarly and perceptive biography provides a portrait of Horsley and the Church of England in an age of intellectual, social, and political revolution. He establishes Horsley as a high churchman, who bridged the gap between the Tory fanaticism of Atterbury and Sacheverell and the apostolic vision of the Tractarians. High Church Prophet challenges belief in the predominance of latitudinarianism in the eighteenth-century church, and throws new light on the workings of church-state relations.