without any prejudice to opponents or any undue bias to friends. His moderation in tone made him at times suspected of a want of strength. Bishop Wilberforce spoke of his speech at the Mansion House for a church society as ‘like himself, good, gentle, loving, and weak’ (Life, ii. 248).
Sumner ‘decidedly repudiated’ the Bampton lectures of Dr. Hampden, but he declined to participate in the action of several of the bishops in protesting against the doctor's appointment to the see of Hereford, and his first public act, as primate, was to take the leading place in the consecration of Hampden. His second action was to preside at the opening of St. Augustine's College at Canterbury, which had recently been purchased and restored by Alexander James Beresford-Hope [q. v.] as a college for missionary clergy. By these acts he illustrated the impartiality of his attitude to the two great parties in the church of England.
During the period from 1847 to 1851 the church of England was rent in twain by the disputes over the refusal of Dr. Phillpotts, bishop of Exeter, to institute the Rev. George Cornelius Gorham [q. v.] to the vicarage of Brampford-Speke in Devonshire, on the ground that his views on baptismal regeneration were not in agreement with those of the English church. The case came before the privy council, when the archbishops of Canterbury and York concurred in the judgment by which it was ‘determined that a clergyman of the church of England need not believe in baptismal regeneration.’ This judgment led to the secession from the church of many of the leading members, both lay and clerical, of the high-church party, and it provoked the publication by the bishop of Exeter of his celebrated letter to the archbishop, which went through twenty-one editions. In this vigorous protest the bishop remonstrated against the action of the primate in supporting heresy in the church, and declined any further communion with him, but announced his intention of praying for him as ‘an affectionate friend for nearly thirty years, and your now afflicted servant.’
The archbishop was a consistent opponent of the bill for removing Jewish disabilities, and of that for legalising marriage with a deceased wife's sister. He supported the proposals for a compromise on the vexed question of church rates, and was favourable to the passing of the divorce bill, but resisted all measures for altering the language of the prayer-book. On 12 Nov. 1852 convocation met for the first time for 135 years for the despatch of business. The upper house was under his presidency.
The archbishop was taken ill in May 1861, but recovered. He was one of the commissioners at the opening of the exhibition on 1 May 1862, and the fatigue of the proceedings proved too great a strain for his enfeebled frame. He died at Addington on 6 Sept. 1862. A kindly message was sent to him on his deathbed by Dr. Phillpotts, and warmly reciprocated (Sumner, Life of Bishop Sumner, pp. 333–4). He was buried with extreme simplicity in Addington churchyard on 12 Sept. The archbishop, two daughters, and some other relatives are interred at the north-east corner of the churchyard. His wife died at the Manor House, Wandsworth, on 22 March 1829. Two sons and several daughters survived him.
Sumner's works comprise:
- ‘Apostolical Preaching considered in an Examination of St. Paul's Epistles,’ 1815 (anonymous); it was reissued, with the author's name, in 1817, after being corrected and enlarged, and passed into a ninth edition in 1850. A French translation from that edition was published at Paris in 1856.
On 4 Aug. 1815 Sumner won the second prize, amounting to 400l., of John Burnett (1729–1784) [q. v.], for a dissertation on the Deity. It was entitled:
- ‘A Treatise on the Records of the Creation and the Moral Attributes of the Creator’ (1816, 2 vols.), and seven editions of it were sold. He rested his principal evidence of the existence of the Creator upon the credibility of the Mosaic records of the creation, and accepted the conclusions of geological science as understood in 1815 (Gent. Mag. 1815, ii. 155; Quarterly Review, xvi. 37–69). Sir Charles Lyell afterwards appealed to it in proof that revelation and geology are not necessarily discordant forces.
- ‘A Series of Sermons on the Christian Faith and Character,’ 1821; 9th edit. 1837.
- ‘The Evidence of Christianity derived from its Nature and Reception,’ 1824, in which he contended that the Christian religion would not have preserved its vitality had it not been introduced by divine authority; a new edition, prompted by the appearance of ‘Essays and Reviews,’ came out in 1861.
- ‘Sermons on the principal Festivals of the Church, with three Sermons on Good Friday,’ 1827; 4th edit. 1831.
- ‘Four Sermons on Subjects relating to the Christian Ministry,’ 1828; reissued in 1850 as an appendix to the ninth edition of ‘Apostolical Preaching.’
- ‘Christian Charity: its Obligations and Objects,’ 1841.
Between 1831 and 1851 Sumner issued a series of volumes of ‘Practical Expositions’ on the four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the epistles in the New Testament.
