Thomas Secker, born at Sibthorpe, in Nottinghamshire, in 1693, was educated for a Dissenting minister, but afterwards changed his views, and entered the Church, taking holy orders in Dec. 1722, and was soon afterwards made rector of Houghton-le-Spring. Having been rapidly promoted, he was consecrated Bishop of Bristol in 1735, was translated to Oxford in 1737, was made Dean of St. Paul’s in 1750, and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1758. Many volumes of his sermons and charges were published during his lifetime, and several collected editions of his works have appeared. He died August 3, 1768. A review of his life and character, by Bishop Porteus, appeared in 1797.
| Speak, look, and move with dignity and ease, | |
| Like mitred Secker, you’ll be sure to please. |
When Secker preaches the church is crowded.
As a clergyman Secker had greatly won the attachment of his people. Whiston spoke of him “as an indefatigable pastor,” and Horace Walpole allows that he was “incredibly popular” in his parish. As a bishop he commanded for the most part respect and esteem rather than any warm feeling. That he was generally thought very highly of is indeed very evident. Richard Newton, mentioning his recent death, speaks of him as “that great and excellent prelate.” “Few bishops equal to him,” said Johnson of Connecticut. But with many he was not at all popular. He was criticised as being rather haughty and imperious, and of showing too much of an air of prelatical dignity. That he was especially distant towards his old Nonconformist friends seems to be disproved by the undoubted cordiality of his relations towards Doddridge, Leland, Lardner, and Chandler. He was somewhat stiff, formal, and precise, and often seemed reserved and cold. Porteus acknowledges this, but says that it generally rose from the bodily pain, depression, and fatigue to which he was subject, and that faults were often laid to his charge which did not really belong to his character.
General
| E’en in a bishop I can spy desert; | |
| Secker is decent, Rundel has a heart. |
You will find nowhere, perhaps, a nobler specimen of practical preaching than is to be met with in the sermons of Archbishop Secker.
When occasion calls for it, he is pathetic, animated, nervous; rises to that true sublime which consists not in pomp of diction, but in grandeur of sentiment, expressed with simplicity and strength.
What his discourses wanted of gospel was made up by a tone of fanaticism that he still retained.
A name never to be uttered but with reverence, as the great exemplar of metropolitan strictness, erudition, and dignity.
As a celebrated prelate, Secker follows Tillotson…. Like Tillotson, also, he departed too much from primitive peculiarities of the gospel, though far preferable to most of his Episcopal contemporaries.
A candid, wise, and practical writer; his Charges useful; superior to most in his day.
As a writer Secker is distinguished by his plain good sense. The range of his knowledge was wide and deep. He was a good hebraist, and he wrote excellent Latin. The works which he has left to the Lambeth library are valuable quite as much from his manuscript annotations as for their own worth. Judging by his printed sermons, one would hardly rank him among the great pulpit orators of the English church. But he purposely, his biographer tells us, composed them with studied simplicity, and the reader missed the tall commanding presence, and the good voice and delivery of the preacher.
