Frederic William Farrar

Frederic William Farrar (1831-1903) was a Church of England clergyman and widely read author, born in Bombay to missionary parents. He served as archdeacon of Westminster from 1883 and as Dean of Canterbury from 1895 until his death, and reached a large public with books such as the school story Eric, or Little by Little (1858). His Westminster Abbey sermons published as Eternal Hope (1878), which questioned the traditional doctrine of everlasting punishment, set off a major controversy, and he replied to critics, including E. B. Pusey, in Mercy and Judgment (1881). Farrar urged a "larger hope" for humanity after death while declining to affirm dogmatic universalism.

Five sermons preached in Westminster Abbey in late 1877 by Canon Farrar — and the greatest sensation Victorian eschatology ever produced. Farrar did not assert dogmatic universalism, but his demolition of the popular hell — its mistranslated proof-texts, its moral monstrosity — and his proclamation of an 'eternal hope' beyond death electrified England, provoked Pusey's massive reply, and made the wider hope respectable in the establishment's own pulpit.

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Farrar's considered answer to Pusey's 'What Is of Faith as to Everlasting Punishment?' — 'a few last words on Christian eschatology' that are in fact a substantial patristic and historical treatise. Reviewing the fathers, the councils, and the history of the doctrine, Farrar defends the legitimacy of the larger hope within the church's tradition. With Eternal Hope it frames the great Anglican controversy over hell at its height.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)