George Hickes - Writings

Writings

Today Hickes is remembered chiefly for his pioneering work in linguistics and Anglo-Saxon languages. His chief writings in this vein are the Institutiones Grammaticae Anglo-Saxonicae et Moeso-Gothicae (1689), and the celebrated Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus (1703-1705).

His earliest writings, which were anonymous, were suggested by contemporary events in Scotland: the execution of James Mitchell on a charge of having attempted to murder Archbishop James Sharp, and that of John Kid and John King, Presbyterian ministers, for high treason and rebellion (Ravillac Redivivus, 1678; The Spirit of Popery speaking out of the Mouths of Phanatical Protestants, 1680). In his Jovian (an answer to Samuel Johnson's Julian the Apostate, 1682), he endeavoured to show that the Roman empire was not hereditary, and that the Christians under Julian had recognized the duty of passive obedience.

Hickes also made contributions to Anglican theology. His two treatises, one Of the Christian Priesthood and the other Of the Dignity of the Episcopal Order, originally published in 1707, have been more than once reprinted, and form three volumes of the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (1847). Bishop Hoadly attacked the high-church views of Hickes in his "Preservative Against the Principles of the Nonjurors" and in his famous 1717 sermon "The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ." Hickes can therefore be said to have offered the provocation that set off the Bangorian Controversy.

In 1705 and 1710 were published Collections of Controversial Letters, in 1711 a collection of Sermons, and in 1726 a volume of Posthumous Discourses. Other treatises, such as the Apologetical Vindication of the Church of England, are to be met with in Edmund Gibson's Preservative against Popery. There is a manuscript in the Bodleian Library which sketches his life to the year 1689, and many of his letters are extant in various collections. A posthumous publication of his The Constitution of the Catholick Church and the Nature and Consequences of Schism (1716) gave rise to the Bangorian controversy.