George Horne (1 November 1730 – 17 January 1792) was an English churchman, academic, writer, and university administrator.
Early years
Horne was born at Otham near Maidstone, in Kent, the eldest surviving son of the Reverend Samuel Horne (1693-1768), rector of the parish, and his wife Anne (1697-1787), youngest daughter of Bowyer Hendley. He attended Maidstone Grammar School alongside his cousin and lifelong friend William Stevens, son of his father's sister Margaret, and from there went in 1746 to University College, Oxford (BA 1749; MA 1752; DD 1764). Three contemporaries at the college were also friends for life: Charles Jenkinson later first Earl of Liverpool, William Jones of Nayland. and John Moore, later Archbishop of Canterbury. His two younger brothers were also Oxford graduates and clergymen, Samuel Horne (1733 – about 1772) becoming an Oxford academic while William Horne (1740 – 1821) succeeded their father as rector of Otham.
Academic career
In 1749 Horne became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, of which college he was elected President on 27 January 1768. As an influential college head, he served as vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford from 1776 until 1780. At the university, he fought against any relaxation of the law that required entrants to subscribe to the beliefs of the Church of England. Thereafter his religious duties were performed at Magdalen until 1771, when the prime minister Lord North appointed him to the Royal Household as chaplain in ordinary to King George III, a position he held until 1781. and later, when bishop, thought Wesley should not be forbidden to preach in his diocese.
Though impressed by the earlier writings of William Law, he later complained that he saw him 'falling from the heaven of Christianity into the sink and complication of Paganism, Quakerism, and Socinianism, mixed up with chemistry and astrology by a possessed cobbler.' In this 'sink', he included the views of Emanuel Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme.
Despite criticising the plan of Benjamin Kennicott and some of his colleagues to collate a new text of the Hebrew Bible from manuscripts, in order to prepare for a new translation into English, the two became friends.
He was also friendly with Samuel Johnson who with James Boswell came to tea at Magdalen, where they discussed producing a new edition of the Lives by Izaak Walton, and Boswell later wrote warmly of Horne's character and abilities.
Though he enjoyed reading Edward Gibbon and admired his scholarship, he recorded his distaste for Gibbon's continual belittling of the Jewish and Christian tradition.
- A Fair, Candid, and Impartial Statement of the Case between Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Hutchinson (anon.) 1753.
- An Apology for certain Gentlemen in the University of Oxford, aspersed in a late anonymous pamphlet 1756. The anonymous pamphlet was called 'A Word to the Hutchinsonians'.
- Cautions to the Readers of Mr. Law, and, with very few varieties, to the Readers of Baron Swedenborg 1758, to which was added A Letter to a Lady on the subject of Jacob Behmen's Writings.
- A View of Mr. Kennicott's Method of Correcting the Hebrew Text 1760.
- Considerations on the Life and Death of St. John the Baptist 1769, an expansion of a sermon preached by him on St. John the Baptist's day 1755, from the open-air pulpit in the quadrangle of Magdalen College.
- Commentary on the Psalms, 1771. His best known work, the 'Commentary' is partly exegetical and partly devotional, proceeding on the principle that most of the Psalms are more or less Messianic, and cannot be properly understood except in those terms. Richard Mant transferred Horne's preface almost verbatim to his annotated Book of Common Prayer. Hannah More, another of Horne's friends, admired it.
- A Letter to Dr. Adam Smith (anon), 1777. An attack on Adam Smith's life of David Hume, attempting to refute Hume's contempt for Christian belief.
- Letters on Infidelity 1784, addressed to his cousin William Stevens. In addition to his bête noire David Hume, these attacked other Enlightenment rationalists such as Voltaire and d'Alembert. They had three daughters: Felicia Elizabetha (1770–1829) who in 1791 married the Reverend Robert Selby Hele; Maria (1773–1852) unmarried; and Sarah (1775–1853), a pupil of Hannah More,
Aged 62, he died at Bath, Somerset on 17 January 1792