# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Moorhouse, James

​MOORHOUSE, JAMES (1826–1915), bishop of Melbourne and afterwards of Manchester, the only son of James Moorhouse, who was master cutler in 1840, by his wife, Jane Frances, only daughter of Captain Richard Bowman, of Whitehaven, was born at Sheffield 19 November 1826. He was educated at a private school and at St. John's College, Cambridge, and was ordained in 1853. After serving curacies at St. Neot's (1853–1855), at Sheffield (1855–1859), and at Hornsey (1859–1861), he was appointed perpetual curate of St. John's, Fitzroy Square, London, in 1862, and vicar of St. James's, Paddington, in 1868. In 1874 he was made chaplain in ordinary to the Queen and prebendary of St. Paul's. He married in 1861 Mary Lydia, daughter of the Rev. Thomas Sale [q.v.], vicar of Sheffield. There were no children of the marriage.
In 1876 Moorhouse was consecrated bishop of Melbourne, where his episcopate was signalized by the building of a cathedral, and by his presiding over the synod in Sydney which framed the constitution of the Church in Australia. Even more memorable were his brilliant lectures, historical, philosophical, and theological, which drew audiences of some four thousand people. By these lectures, and by undaunted courage in conflict with impurity, injustice, and violence, Moorhouse contributed greatly to the recovery of Melbourne society from the demoralizing effects of the gold-fever. By unwearied journeys, during five months in each year, to distant out-stations, he stimulated the religious life of settlers, and set the type of the colonial episcopate.
From Melbourne Moorhouse was called to the see of Manchester in 1886. Besides the ordinary activities of a very extensive diocese, to which he devoted himself wholeheartedly, he undertook a personal ​visitation of each of his 550 parishes, entering each church, and inspecting each church school. His most notable public efforts were a sermon to the British Association in 1887, an address to the Church Congress at Manchester in 1888, a reply to Cardinal Vaughan's assertion of Roman Catholic claims in the Manchester diocese in 1894, and a speech on church schools in the House of Lords in 1902. He retired from Manchester in 1903, and died at Poundisford Park, near Taunton, 9 April 1915.
The life story of Bishop Moorhouse, as of other churchmen his contemporaries, is that of his reaction to the religious and political movements of the age. Self-taught, unfettered by the conventions of public-school education, Moorhouse enjoyed to the full the atmosphere of controversy. He was a born debater. His reading, which was extensive both in continental and English literature, scientific and metaphysical as well as theological, was steadily maintained throughout life. It was assiduously employed to confirm his clergy and congregations in the reality of the supernatural world and its intimate connexion with the natural. Had he accepted the offer of a fellowship made by his college in 1861 he might have founded at Cambridge a school of progressive orthodoxy, a valuable rival to the Hegelian Tractarianism of Oxford. He lived, however, for the work which was under his hand, keeping up his studies but giving the first place to practical activity. The unquestionable depth and sincerity of his faith contributed to deliver his biblical criticism from the suspicion of being masked infidelity. Two characteristic utterances mark his relation to his age: ‘In opposing and denouncing the dictum of an arrogant science that the supernatural is impossible, there is no need to deny any of its well-established facts, or to oppose any of its logical and well-founded arguments’ [The Teaching of Christ, 1891], and ‘Let everything be sacrificed to Truth’ [Hulsean Lectures, 1865].
[Bishop Moorhouse's sermons and lectures; Edith C. Rickards, Bishop Moorhouse, 1920; personal knowledge.]
E. A. K.