The Church of Ireland has had the bad habit of neglecting some of the greatest figures from its history. Amongst these has been the early nineteenth-century Bishop of Limerick John Jebb (1775–1833). Now, however, Alan R. Acheson has stepped forward to rescue the prelate from his semi-oblivion. Although Acheson modestly claims that his book does ‘not constitute a definitive biography of Jebb’ (p. xviii), the twelve essays which comprise it paint a very full picture of the man, based largely on a close study of Jebb's own writings, especially his hitherto unpublished papers, housed in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. The majority of the essays deal with Jebb's life and ministry: they examine his family and friends (essay 1); his time as a country parson, first in Swanlinbar, Co Cavan, then in the diocese of Cashel (essay 2); his episcopate (essays 6, 9 and 10); and, in essay 12, what Acheson terms ‘the astonishing last year of Jebb's life’ (p. xviii).

The six essays show Jebb to be of interest in his own right. Nonetheless, there are also several other reasons to study him. One is historical. As Acheson observes: ‘Jebb's intensive involvement with public affairs … affords valuable insight into [early nineteenth-century] Ireland and its people’ (p. xvii); and it is this topic which Acheson addresses in his seventh essay, ‘Jebb and the State of Ireland’. More particularly, Jebb's life is significant for the light it casts on the history of the Church of Ireland in the period. Of particular importance in this respect is the three-hour long speech which Jebb addressed to the House of Lords, 10 June 1824, in which he strenuously defended the Irish Church against its critics. Acheson analyses this speech in his eighth essay.

Another reason why Jebb is significant lies in the major contribution which he made to the theological and spiritual identity of Anglicanism. Together with his mentor, the Dublin-based lay theologian Alexander Knox (1757–1831), Jebb was one of the first writers to use the term ‘Anglican’ in the modern sense; but, also, with Knox, Jebb set out a theory of what Anglicanism means. The clearest expression of this theory appeared in an addendum to Jebb's Sermons on Subjects Chiefly Practical (1815), titled An Appendix relating to the Character of the Church of England, as distinguished both from other branches of the Reformation, and from the modern Church of Rome. The Appendix held that the Church of England (as Jebb termed it) was guided in matters of faith by the rule or ‘canon’ of the fifth-century Gallic monk Vincent of Lerins: that doctrinal truth is to be determined by reference to that which has been believed and taught ‘always, everywhere, and by all’. Following this rule, the Appendix asserted, the Church of England steered a middle path between Roman Catholicism, which was accused of adding to the faith of the early church, and Protestantism, which was charged with departing from it.

Acheson discusses Jebb's Anglicanism in his third essay. The fourth continues the same theme by examining Jebb's relationship with high churchmen and evangelicals, the latter both English and Irish. The two essays also look at the relationship between Jebb and the Oxford Movement, a point to which we will return below. Essay 5 explores the theme of Jebb and heart-religion, especially in relation to Methodism, which remained a movement within the Church of Ireland up until 1817. Essay 11 discusses the impact of Jebb and his writings on the fledgling Protestant Episcopal Church in America.

Acheson's book is an excellent introduction to the life and thought of a much-neglected figure. There are points over which one might quibble. For example, in his discussion of heart-religion, Acheson might have given a little more background to this phenomenon; he might also have spoken in somewhat more detail about Jebb's links with the Cambridge Platonists. They are mentioned, but only in passing (p. 68), whereas Jebb's published writings show clear spiritual and theological affinities with those whom both he and Knox constantly extol as ‘our Platonists’ (Jebb to Knox, letter, 17 November 1806). Acheson might likewise have made rather more than he does of Jebb's relationship to Romanticism. In the Introduction, he speaks of Jebb as expressing the spirit of the Romantic Age (p. xiv), and one would have liked to see this point developed.

There is a noticeable mis-reading of Knox's remarks about St Cyprian on p. 67. Acheson writes of ‘Knox's caveat that Cyprian's position on both the supremacy of the pope and transubstantiation were “just two points of real difficulty.”‘ In fact what Knox says is the opposite, that Cyprian gives ‘deep satisfaction’ on both these issues, which Knox holds to be the main points of difference between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism (Knox to Jebb, letter, 29 May 1809). Also, on p. 44, there is a quotation from F.R. Bolton, which Acheson describes as ‘ambiguous’: ‘that Knox (and by implication Jebb) “loved that which identified the Anglican Communion with the Church Universal rather than that which distinguished her as a separate establishment.”‘ The judgment is not, however, Bolton's, but that of Knox's closest friends; the words come, slightly modified, from a memorial tablet erected in Knox's honour at St Anne's, Dawson Street, Dublin, where Knox is buried. Likewise with regard to Knox, Acheson's statement that much of his ‘thinking on theological issues was shared, not with High Churchmen, but with Evangelical laity’ (p. 47) needs to be nuanced. There is no doubt that, in terms of spirituality, Knox exemplified a ‘heart-religion’ similar to that of such figures as Hannah More (1745–1833) and Daniel Parken (1785–1812). But the evidence shows clearly that Knox distanced himself from them in terms of theology. For instance, having failed to win over Parken to what Knox described to Jebb as ‘our way of thinking’ (Letter, 16 December 1811), Knox refused to write for the Eclectic Review, which Parken edited. The situation with Hannah More was similar: Knox addressed to her a whole series of virtual tracts, in which he sought to convert her to his high church theological views (see, for example, Jebb's letter to Knox, 23 June 1806).

Perhaps the most interesting part of Acheson's book is his evaluation of the nature of Jebb's Anglicanism. Noting that this is ‘complex to assess’ (p. 43), Acheson nonetheless maintains that, despite numerous assertions to the contrary, Jebb was not a pioneer of the Oxford Movement. ‘[T]he claim has minimal validity’, he declares (p. xvi). Yet he might at least have examined the possibility of an indirect influence of Jebb on the Tractarians through those who were their mutual acquaintances. The most notable of these were Martin Routh (1755–1854), the President of Magdalen College; Charles Atmore Ogilvie of Balliol (1793–1873), and William Palmer of Worcester (1803–85). Acheson mentions all three, but the likelihood of Jebb being connected through them to the Tractarians is not discussed. Nonetheless, at least in the case of Palmer, such a connection may be posited. Trained for ordination under Jebb in Limerick, Palmer subsequently moved to Oxford, where his Origines Liturgicae (1832) brought him to the attention of the future Tractarians, notably Newman, who consulted him for the preparation of The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833). Thus, as Peter Nockles states in his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on Palmer: ‘Palmer seems to have had a direct hand in Newman's own education in high churchmanship.’ If this is so, may Jebb not be seen as playing an indirect role in Newman's formation as an Anglo-Catholic?

Even if Jebb had no influence on the Oxford Movement, he is nonetheless cited as an authority in the Tracts for the Times, as Acheson acknowledges. But more than this, Jebb, like Knox, is distinguished by three particular characteristics which especially mark him out as a pioneer of Tractarianism. The first is what one might describe as the ‘Romantic’ element in his thought, by which I mean the place he gave to feeling and experience. Although less so than generally supposed, eighteenth-century high churchmanship was spiritually arid; what Knox and Jebb did was infuse high church theology with warmth and vitality. The same process characterizes the Oxford Movement, which Sheridan Gilley has so aptly termed ‘the churching of Romanticism’.

The second facet of Jebb's thought which marks him out as a pioneer of the Tractarians is the normative role which he gave to what he so often termed the consensus partum. For Jebb, as for Knox, the hallmark of Anglicanism was ‘submission to the voice of Christian antiquity’ (‘Appendix’, p. 361). The same position distinguishes the Tractarians from earlier high churchmen, as Peter Nockles has amply demonstrated in his Oxford Movement in Context (1994). While earlier high churchmen appealed to the patristic witness to bolster the teaching of the Church of England, the Tractarians submitted that teaching to the judgment of the Fathers.

Third, Jebb, again like Knox, took a positive and eirenic attitude towards Roman Catholicism. One may see this from the use which he made of Roman Catholic authors throughout his writings, although perhaps the strongest expression of it appears in his account of a clash over Catholicism with the Evangelical doyen Charles Simeon (1759–1836), related in a letter to Knox dated 27 June 1815. This positive attitude also came to characterize the Tractarians, as R.H. Greenfield has shown in his 1956 Oxford DPhil thesis ‘The Attitude of the Tractarians to the Roman Catholic Church, 1833–1850’.

One must thus, I believe, assert a stronger link between Jebb and the Tractarians than Acheson does, although he is without doubt right to maintain that Jebb was a precursor of the nineteenth-century Anglican renaissance seen as something larger than simply the Tractarian movement. As Acheson declares of Knox and Jebb: ‘They might indeed be hailed as pioneers of the modern Anglican Church’ (p. 42). It is, above all, on account of his ‘pioneer’ status that Jebb should be better known than he is. Alan Acheson's book will go a long way to making him more greatly appreciated for the significance of his life and work.