Joseph Milner

Joseph Milner was born into a poor family at Quarry Hill, a village later swallowed as part of metropolitan Leeds, UK, on 2 January 1744. An attack of the measles at the age of three left him with lingering health issues, but progressed to Leeds grammar school having already shown considerable academic ability. With the help of friends he was sent to Catharine Hall, Cambridge, where he was appointed chapel clerk. Despite a lack of passion for the then existing curriculum ('he had little taste for mathematics, and the classical tripos was not then founded') he achieved the third senior optime, and thus qualified into the competition for the Chancellor's medals for classical proficiency. He won the second of these in 1766. Milner then went as assistant to Rev. Christopher Atkinson's school at Thorp Arch (near Tadcaster): he was deaconed (19 Oct 1766) and then priested (5 June 1768, both by Archbishop of York, Robert Hay Drummond), and became Atkinson's curate. Milne and the rector's son, Myles Atkinson, became lifelong friends, and both of them leading figures in the evangelical party of the Church of England.

While still in deacon's orders, Milne was made head-master of the grammar school at Hull, which he greatly improved. In 1768 he was elected afternoon lecturer at Holy Trinity ('the High Church') in that town. His income secure, he paid for the education of his brother Isaac, so commencing the academic ascent of one of the great minds of the age. By 1770 Milne was known as an ardent evangelical, tarred with the facile accusation of ‘methodism.’ Many of the wealthier members of his congregation at the High Church decamped, 'but the poor flocked to hear him', and he soon added to his duties the charge of North Ferriby, where many Hull merchants had country seats. It must have seemed to the rich that they could not escape the evangelical fervour which they found so distasteful. Milner, however, built a 'great moral power' in both his charges, making Hull part of a Yorkshire which (with his close associates the local MP William Wilberforce, and the ministers James Stillingfleet of Hotham and William Richardson of York) was widely known as a centre for evangelical religion. In 1792 Milner suffered from a severe attack of fever, which left lingering effects. In 1797, he was granted (mainly through the efforts of William Wilberforce) the living of Hull and 40l. a year to keep a second usher at his school. He was not to enjoy it long: on his journey to York for institution he caught a cold, declined rapidly. He died on 15 Nov. 1797 at (Kingston upon) Hull and was buried in Holy Trinity Church: a monument to his memory was erected in the church.

Milner's broader reputation was built in large part on his multi-volume History of the Church of Christ, which he did not live to see completely published. Driven by the evangelical vision of the Church as the Bride of Christ, he sought to re-write the narrative of Church History away from the standard list of 'errors and disputes', a theme much played upon in Gibbon's recently published Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (vol. 1, 1776). Against Gibbon, he had Mosheim's recently translated Ecclesiastical History (transl. 1765), to draw on. ‘The terms “church” and “Christian,”’ he wrote,

in their natural sense respect only good men. Such a succession of pious men in all ages existed, and it will be no contemptible use of such a history as this if it prove that in every age there have been real followers of Christ.

The first three volumes were published in 1794, 1795, and 1797 respectively. His brother Isaac was the following year appointed (suitably, given the influence of Newton's conspectus on Joseph's History) to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge. He was already involved in these first three volumes, and continued the project after Joseph's death. Isaac then published a new and greatly revised edition of vol. i. Vols. ii. and iii (1800), and then bought out volumes iv (1803) and v (1809). In the 1820s John Scott published a new continuation of Milner's ‘Church History’ in three volumes (1826, 1829, and 1831).

The emergent volume--linked as it was to the expansion of British evangelicalism and its transnational voluntarist associations-- had a significant impact across Europe and beyond. It 'justified Evangelicals against ‘the contemptuous infidel, the cavilling Dissenter, the learned High Churchman and the Roman Catholic with his inevitable but searching question, “Where was your religion before Luther”.’ (Walsh 1959) Milner was read in multiple languages across the length and breadth of Europe and its dependencies, and was (Walsh notes) ‘instrumental in converting half a dozen Members of Parliament’. (Walsh 1959) For the consciousness of Italian Protestantism in the West, Milner is a catalytic figure. Vigne refers to the Church History as the ‘earliest and most influential treatment of the Waldenses in nineteenth century England’. Milner portrayed them as the evidence of a continuing line of non-Catholic, apostolic and 'pure' Christianity, which did not rely on the corrupted traditions of men:

Thus largely did the ‘King of Saints’ provide for the instruction of his Church in the darkness of the middle ages. The Waldenses are the middle link, which connects the primitive Christians and Fathers with the reformed; and, by their means, the proof is completely established, that salvation, by the grace of Christ, felt in the heart, and expressed in the life, by the power of the Holy Ghost, has ever existed from the time of the Apostles to this day; and that it is a doctrine marked by the Cross, and distinct from all that religion of mere form or convenience, or of human invention, which calls itself Christians, but which wants the Spirit of Christ. (History, vol. 3., p. 511)

Inevitably, the advance of archival investigation and of source based history brought the 'gentlemanly' history of Milner's time under review. Samuel Roffey Maitland investigated Milner's account of the Waldenses (1832) and pointed out its many flaws. Maitland's Strictures on Milner's Church History (1834) supported the reviving high church party position rather than that of the evangelicals, requiring further editions (e.g. Grantham's edition in 1847) to undergo significant editing before being published.

During his lifetime, Milner also published:

• ‘Gibbon's Account of Christianity considered, with some Strictures on Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion,’ 1781.

• ‘Some Remarkable Passages in the Life of William Howard, who died at North Ferriby on 2 March 1784,’ 1785, a tract which passed through several editions.

• ‘Essays on several Religious Subjects, chiefly tending to illustrate the Scripture Doctrine of the Influence of the Holy Spirit,’ 1789.

• (with the Rev. W. Richardson) ‘Thomas Adam's Posthumous Works,’ 1786.

His ‘Practical Sermons’ appeared postumously, the first (1800) with a memoir by his brother Isaac; the second (1809), edited by the Rev. W. Richardson. Later volumes emerged in 1823 (edited by the Rev. John Fawcett), and 1830 (edited by Edward Bickersteth). In 1855 Milner's Essentials of Christianity, theoretically and practically considered, which had been left by the author in a complete state for publication, and had been revised by his brother, was edited for the Religious Tract Society by Mary Milner, the orphan niece of whom Joseph Milner had taken charge, and writer of her uncle Isaac's ‘Life.’

Sources

Baker, William J. (1973). 'The Historical Method of S. R. Maitland', Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 42.3 (Sept): 275-286.

Gutacker, Paul (2018). 'Joseph Milner and his Editors: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Evangelicals and the Christian Past', Journal of Ecclesiastical History 69.1 (January): 86-104.

Milner, Joseph, Works.

Milner, Isaac, Life of Joseph Milner

Milner, Isaac (ed.), Joseph Milner's Practical Sermons.

Milner, Mary, Life of Dean Milner.

Overton, John Henry, 'Milner, Joseph', Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, vol. 38.

Vigne, Randolph. (2007). “Richard Hill and the Saving of Liberty of Conscience for the Vaudois,” in Richard Bonney and David J. B. Trim (eds.), The Development of Pluralism in Modern Britain and France, Berne: Peter Lang.

Walsh, J. D. (1959). 'Joseph Milner's Evangelical Church History', Journal of Ecclesiastical History 10.2 (October): 174-187.