It occasionally happens that a thinker or artist who in his own day seemed to accord little with the general trend and who in consequence was either ignored or opposed will appear to a later age to convey a more intelligible and relevant message than did most of his contemporaries. Henry Longueville Mansel, it may be claimed, provides an instance of this, particularly in respect of his famous dispute with F. D. Maurice on the nature of divine revelation. Maurice himself was a man not always well understood or approved, but in retrospect at least he seems more representative of his period than Mansel, who in the eyes of his numerous critics was at once a reactionary and a sceptic.

Born in 1820, Mansel was the eldest son of the then rector of Cosgrove, Northants, and was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and St John's College, Oxford, where his intellectual abilities quickly became evident. Appointed a tutor of his college in 1846, he was ordained priest two years later. In 1855 he was elected Waynflete professor of moral and metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, in which capacity he delivered the B amp ton Lectures for 1858, greatly puzzling his hearers—one elderly don remarked that he ‘never expected to hear atheism preached in the pulpit of the university church’—and giving rise to sharp controversy when, in the following year, the lectures were published under the title, The Limits of Religious Thought Examined. Learned, witty and a gifted writer, Mansel was always a keen polemist, whether resisting university reform or the newest fashion in Oxford philosophy.