WHATELY, RICHARD (1787-1863), English logician and theological writer, archbishop of Dublin, was born in London on Feb. 1, 1787. He was educated at a private school near Bristol, and at Oriel College, Oxford. In 1811 he was elected fellow of Oriel, and in 1814 took orders. During his residence at Oxford he wrote his Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte, a very clever jeu d'esprit directed against excessive scepticism as applied to the Gospel history. After his marriage in 1821 he settled in Oxford, and in 1822 was appointed Bampton lecturer. The lec tures, On the Use and Abuse of Party Spirit in Matters of Re ligion, were published in the same year. In August 1823 he re moved to Halesworth in Suffolk, but in 1825, having been ap pointed principal of St. Alban Hall, he returned to Oxford. His treatise on Logic (1826), originally contributed to the Encyclo paedia Metropolitan, gave a great impetus to the study of logic throughout Great Britain. A similar treatise on Rhetoric, also contributed to the Encyclopaedia, appeared in 1828. In 1829 Whately became professor of political economy at Oxford, but lectured only for two years, as he was appointed archbishop of Dublin in 1831. One of his first acts was to endow a chair of political economy in Trinity College out of his private purse.
In 1837 he wrote his well-known handbook of Christian Evi dences, which was translated during his lifetime into more than a dozen languages. At a later period he also wrote, in a similar form, Easy Lessons on Reasoning, on Morals, on Mind and on the British Constitution. Among his other works may be mentioned Charges and Tracts (1836), Essays on Some of the Dangers to Christian Faith (1839), The Kingdom of Christ (1841). He also
edited Bacon's Essays, Paley's Evidences and Paley's Moral Phil osophy. His cherished scheme of unsectarian religious instruction was defeated by the opposition of the new Catholic archbishop of Dublin, and Whately felt himself constrained to withdraw from the Education Board. From the beginning Whately was a keen sighted observer of the condition of Ireland question, and gave much offence by openly supporting the state endowment of the Catholic clergy as a measure of justice. During the terrible years of 1846 and 1847 the archbishop and his family were unwearied in their efforts to alleviate the miseries of the people. Whately died on Oct. 8, 1863.
Whately may be said to have continued the typical Christian ity of the 18th century—that of the theologians who went out to fight the Rationalists with their own weapons. It was to Whately essentially a belief in certain matters of fact, to be accepted or rejected after an examination of "evidences." Hence his en deavour always is to convince the logical faculty, and his Chris tianity inevitably appears as a thing of the intellect rather than of the heart. Whately's qualities are exhibited at their best in his Logic, which is, as it were, the quintessence of the views which he afterwards applied to different subjects. He wrote nothing better than the luminous Appendix to the work on Ambiguous Terms.
In 1864 his daughter published Miscellaneous Remains from his commonplace book and in 1866 his Life and Correspondence in two volumes. The Anecdotal Memoirs of Archbishop Whately, by W. J. Fitzpatrick (1864), enliven the picture.