Name William Townsend | Died March 7, 1915 | |
Books The Great Schoolmen of the Middle Ages: An Account of Their Lives, and the Services They Rendered to the Church and the World | ||
William John Townsend (20 January 1835 – 7 March 1915) was a British minister of the Methodist New Connection. He wrote on theology and the history of Methodism, writing biographies of Robert Morrison and Alexander Kilham. He also wrote a book on scholastic philosophy.
Contents
Life
William John Townsend was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the son of Joseph and Mary Townsend. He was educated at Percy Street Academy in Newcastle. He worked in business for several years, before studying at Ranmoor College in Sheffield and becoming a minister of the Methodist New Connection in 1860. He was President of the Methodist New Connection Conference in 1886, and edited the Methodist New Connection from 1893 to 1897.
The Great Schoolmen of the Middle Ages (1881) tried to provide "a fairer and higher estimate of the great Schoolmen" than as "solemn triflers [...] or as mere metaphysical gymnasts", and sketch a "rationale of Scholasticism":
receiving the mass of Church dogma as an act of faith, it was the earnest, persevering laborious effort of the Schoolmen to justify the particulars of that mass of dogma to their reason and understanding [...] They failed, but their failure was really their greatest victory [...] Out of the patient faith, the consecrated lives, the high reasonings, [...] there have come victories of faith, experiences of freedom, attainments of truth, possibilities of facile expression of the noblest subjects, the unrestrained exercise of reason and conscience.