Henry Scott Holland

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Paul's or at the university churches of Oxford and Cambridge, he preached only on urgent reasons; e.g., after the death of Bishop Wilberforce; at the opening of Keble College Chapel (1876) ; on behalf of the memorial to Dr. Pusey; and once, in Christ Church Cathedral, on behalf of the Christ Church mission in Poplar (1889) . Although he was an admirable public speaker he very rarely appeared on the platform or joined committees, or took a public part in religious controversy. But in 1871 he publicly addressed letters to Sir John Coleridge and to the Bishop of London on the Purchas judgment ”

“ But his intense convictions were more definite and pronounced than those of the bishop, especially in the matter of sacramental doctrine. ‘There is in him,’ wrote the bishop, ‘an ardour, a strength of will, a restlessness, a dominant imagination, which makes it impossible for him to give to the young men any tone except exactly his own.’ Liddon's teaching excited suspicion, and, finally, attack. In 1858 C. P. Golightly of Oxford obtained a commission of inquiry into the management of Cuddesdon College ”

“ 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. ”

“ Pusey. The doctor's immense and scattered correspondence involved infinite labour; and Liddon set about his task, on a scale and with an industry rarely given to work of this type. The labour seriously injured his health. He left three volumes practically complete. These, with a fourth by another hand, are now being prepared for publication.
In 1884–5 Liddon was select preacher at both Oxford and Cambridge, and at the latter university again in 1889. In June 1886 he was elected bishop of Edinburgh by a convention of episcopal clergy and laymen, but he declined to accept the charge. ”