Born, at Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire, July 1637. Scholar of Winchester Coll., Sept. 1651; admitted, Jan. 1652. Fellow of New Coll., Oxford, 1656–66. To Hart Hall, Oxford, 1656; to New Coll., 1657; B.A., 3 May 1661; M.A., 21 Jan. 1665; Tutor of New Coll., 1661. Ordained 1661 [or 1662]. Rector of Little Easton, Essex, 1663–65. Domestic Chaplain to Bishop of Winchester, and Rector of St. John-in-the-Soke, 1665. Fellow of Winchester Coll., 8 Dec. 1666. Rector of Brightstone (or Brixton), I. of W., 1667–69. Prebendary of Winchester, 1669. Rector of East Woodhay, Hampshire, 1669–72. Lived at Winchester, 1672–79. Travelled on Continent, 1675. D.D., Oxford, 1679. To the Hague, as Chaplain to Mary Princess of Orange, 1679–80. Returned to Winchester, 1680; appointed Chaplain to King. With Lord Dartmouth to Tangier, as Chaplain, Aug. 1683. Returned to England, April 1684. Bishop of Bath and Wells, Nov. 1684; compelled to resign, as a Nonjuror, April 1691. For rest of life under patronage of Lord Weymouth. Crown pension, 1704. Died, at Longleat, 19 March 1711. Buried at Frome Selwood. Works: “Manual of Prayers” (anon.), 1674 (another edn., with “Hymns,” 1695); Funeral Sermon for Lady Margaret Mainard, 1682; “Sermon preached at Whitehall,” 1685; “An Exposition on the Church Catechism; or, Practice of Divine Love” (anon.), 1685 (another edn., with “Directions for Prayers,” 1686); “Pastoral Letter,” 1688; “Prayers for the use of all persons who come to Bath for cure” (anon.), 1692; “A Letter to the Author of a ‘Sermon preached at the Funeral of her late Majesty’” (anon.), 1695 (another edn., called “A Dutifull Letter,” 1703); “The Royal Sufferer” (under initials: T. K.; attributed to Ken), 1699; “Expostulatoria,” 1711. Collected Works: ed. by Hawkins (4 vols.), 1721. Life: by Dean Plumptre, revised edn., 1890.

Personal

  Oddsfish! who shall have Bath and Wells, but the little fellow who would not give poor Nelly a lodging?

  He had a very edifying way of preaching: but it was more apt to move the passions, than to instruct. So that his sermons were rather beautiful than solid: yet his way in them was very taking.

  When he was afflicted with the colic, to which he was very subject, he frequently amused himself with writing verses. Hence some of his pious poems are entitled “Anodynes, or the Alleviation of Pain.” There is a prosaic flatness in his heroic poem called “Edmund;” but some of his Hymns, and other compositions, have more of the spirit of poetry, and give us an idea of that devotion which animated the author.

  At the time of his retirement Bishop Ken lived upon the bounty of Lord Weymouth, who allowed him £80 per annum, in lieu of property valued at about £700, and which Ken transferred to his patron, retaining only his books and musical instruments. It is recorded of him that he kept with him, as his immediate personal property, “his lute,” and a Greek Testament, together with a favorite but “sorry” horse. The Testament was said to open, of its own accord, at the 15th chapter of 1st Corinthians. His preaching was not that of a Boanerges, but of a Barnabas. He aimed to secure his hearers, rather than to stun them. And Dryden’s portrait of a “Good Parson” is enlarged from Chaucer’s (supposed) character of Wiclif in the “Canterbury Tales,” and is considered by excellent critics to have been Ken’s own picture.

  It seems probable that that memorable day on which Ken read his protest from his throne in the cathedral was his last appearance in the church which he loved so dearly until, many years afterwards, he perhaps appeared there in another character, and with very different feelings. It was followed soon afterwards, we must believe, by his departure from his palace. There must have been partings, of which we have no record, from the cathedral clergy, with whom, though they did not follow his example, he had always been on the friendliest terms; from the poor, who had been his Sunday guests; from the boys, whom he had catechised and confirmed, and to whom he had administered their first Communion. And now all was over. Those six happy years—happy as far as his work in his diocese was concerned—had come to an end; and he left his home, not knowing what the future had in store for him, full of anxious forebodings for himself, for his flock, and for the Church at large.

  In person Ken was short and slender, with dark eyes and hair. His expression was winning. He wore no hair on his face and no wig, allowing his thin hair to grow long at the sides of his head. In manner he was courteous, and in disposition affectionate, tender, and compassionate. Though he was learned, there is no ground for ranking him with the most learned men of the time; he was accomplished, having a knowledge of French, Italian, and Spanish, and was a musician and a poet. He was an eloquent and energetic preacher. In speech and action he was guided by conscience rather than by local reasoning; his conscience was tender and his feelings sensitive. By nature he seemed to have been quick-tempered, but was always ready to ask pardon of any whom he had offended. In the cause of right he was outspoken and courageous. Liberal, unselfish, and unostentatious, he gave largely though his means were small.

General

  The simple and touching devoutness of many of Bishop Kenn’s lyrical effusions has been unregarded, because of the ungraceful contrivances and heavy movement of his narrative…. We shall hardly find, in all ecclesiastical history, a greener spot than the later years of this courageous and affectionate pastor; persecuted alternately by both parties, and driven from his station in his declining age; yet singing on, with unabated cheerfulness, to the last. His poems are not popular, nor, probably, ever will be, for reasons already touched upon; but whoever in earnest loves his three well-known hymns, and knows how to value such unaffected strains of poetical devotion, will find his account, in turning over his four volumes, half narrative, and half lyric, and all avowedly on sacred subjects: the narrative often cumbrous, and the lyric verse not seldom languid and redundant: yet all breathing such an angelic spirit, interspersed with such pure and bright touches of poetry, that such a reader as we have supposed will scarcely find it in his heart to criticise them.

  Ken’s faults in poetry arose from his rejecting his own feelings of simplicity and nature, and proposing to himself a model of false imagery and affected diction. Always intent on this artificial model, he sacrificed his native good sense; turned from what is simple, sublime, and pathetic; shut his eyes to all that is most interesting in rural scenery and external nature; and even in addressing Heaven under the intense feelings of devotion, appears affected and artificial…. If he had only followed his own native feelings, he would have been an interesting, if not pathetic or sublime, poet.

  Bishop Ken’s works are still much esteemed, particularly his Manual of Prayers.

  He was a man of parts and learning, of quick sensibility and stainless virtue. His elaborate works have long been forgotten; but his morning and evening hymns are still repeated daily in thousands of dwellings. Though, like most of his order, zealous for monarchy, he was no sycophant.

  If at any time men of tender consciences, in their aspirations after some ideal perfection, be tempted to swerve from their obedience to the Church of England, let them study the writings of humble, simple-hearted, steadfast Bishop Ken, (steadfast, because humble and simple-hearted), and they will find solid arguments to preserve them from “widening her deplorable divisions,” and inspire them with his own firm resolves to “continue steadfast in her bosom, and improve all those helps to true piety, all those means of grace, all those incentives to the love of God,” which He has mercifully afforded to them in her communion.

  What Christian bosom but warms with a glow of loving veneration at the name of the heavenly-minded author of those sweet lyrics of the Church, the Morning Hymn and the Evening Hymn! They have been for nearly two centuries familiar to the lips of the infants of the flock as to the hoary-headed elders of the congregation, and yet they tire not—they never can tire—for they are in their sublime simplicity suited to the comprehensions and adapted to the wants of all, from the youngest to the most mature, from the highest to the lowest. The hearts of rich and poor, the learned and the ignorant, alike swell for a moment as the successive appeals, so full of the fervour and the poetry of prayer, thrill from the ear to the soul.

  It has been said that by his three hymns—the Morning, Evening, and the less known Midnight Hymn—he has conferred a greater benefit upon posterity than if he had founded three hospitals. It had always been his devout and earnest wish that the saints of God might praise God in words of his; and that wish has been abundantly granted. His other poems, though they are always beautiful in sentiment and often bright in language, are practically dead. They are poems of a saint, but of one who did not possess “the vision and the faculty divine” of the poet. But it was not in vain that he, like another displaced bishop to whom he compares himself—St. Gregory of Nazianzus—devoted to sacred song what he calls “the small dolorous remnant of my days.” There is a value in the thoughts which he expressed apart from the too prosaic verse in which he enshrined them, and they brought him the most powerful anodynes for his many sorrows…. He is perhaps the loveliest figure in an age full of moral catastrophe, and there is no reward which he could have more desired than the one which God has granted to him—that as for the past two centuries so for many a generation yet to come, it is in his words that in many an English home the outgoings of the morning and evening shall praise God.

  Poetry more absolutely sincere, more high-minded than Bishop Ken’s, does not exist. But heaviness of style, prolixity, want of charm and of variety, has sunk most of his work irretrievably.

  The last two years have witnessed a remarkable revival of the slumbering interest which has always existed in the story of one who was certainly among the greatest the Church of England has ever produced.

  As early as 1711 Dryden’s description of the poor parson of a town, from Chaucer, was appropriated to Ken (Preface to Expostularia), and a panegyric was written on him in English and Latin verse by the laureate, Joshua Perkins. Bowles’s “Life” in 1830 revived the reverence felt for him, which was further heightened by the high church movement at Oxford. J. H. Newman, in No. lxxv. of “Tracts for the Times,” published in June 1836, drew out a form of service for 21 March, the day of Ken’s burial; Isaac Williams celebrated him in his “Lyra Apostolica,” No. cxiii., and his “Cathedral,” p. 58; and Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) wrote verses on his tomb. In 1848 a memorial window was set up in Frome parish church by the Marchioness of Bath; in 1867 his bust was placed in the shire-hall at Taunton; and in 1885 a window was set up to his memory in Wells Cathedral, and a commemorative service was held on the 29 June, the anniversary of the trial of the “Seven Bishops.”

  If this were a hagiology there would be much to be said about the saintly character of Bishop Ken; or if it were a critique on poetry the writer of the most popular hymns in the English language might claim a high place; but as a prose writer Ken holds a very subordinate position.

  Poetry was indeed, in a sense, the pursuit of his life. “Hymnotheo,” a poem based upon the story of St. John and the Robber, told by Clement of Alexandria, is certainly “an idealised autobiography.” The unnamed youth, St. John’s catechumen, who after relapsing into a wild lawless life, was won back by the self-devoting love of the aged apostle, is called by Ken “Hymnotheo,” a name the significance of which is obvious. The story is a mere thread on which are strung verses and episodes, some of them curiously incongruous…. It hardly need be said that Ken’s poetry as a whole must be regarded not as an achievement, but as an occupation, an “employment.”… More than once he alludes to his custom to write “new hymns every day”—two a day, if we take him literally…. From such a rate of production nothing excellent could be hoped. The mass of his verse is only interesting for what it reveals of the man; his editor, Hawkins, merely exaggerates a truth when he says that “these composures” “contain the full Beams of his God-enamour’d Soul.” The portrait they paint is poor and faulty, but it is authentic…. In one essential part of the poetic faculty Ken was deficient—the eye, the heart, for Nature…. The mass of Ken’s verse is entombed in four forgotten volumes; his three hymns live on the lips and in the heart of thousands.

  Probably no other verse is so often sung by Christians of all denominations as this brief outburst of praise and gratitude; and yet the glad devotion expressed in any of the numerous adaptations never fails to kindle an audience. Originally written as the closing stanzas of “Awake my soul, and with the sun,” the author, Bishop Ken, derived so much benefit from the use of it in his morning devotions that he added it to his now equally famous evening hymn, “Glory to Thee, my God, this night.” It was the habit of this saintly sufferer to accompany his ever cheerful voice with the lute which penetrated beyond his prison walls; and the oft-repeated song of praise, which was soon taken up by his religious sympathisers listening without, has gone on singing itself into the hearts of Christians until the fragment has very nearly approached the hymn universal. During revivals it is sometimes the custom to sing it after every conversion. Once at Sheffield, England, under Billy Dawson, they sang it thirty-five times in one evening. It is frequently the last articulate sound that is heard from the lips of the dying, and it is not less frequently the expression of intense gratitude of the living in the moments when life throbs and swells most exultantly in the breast.