William Burt Pope

1822-1903. Wesleyan divine. Born in Nova Scotia and educated in England, he trained at the Wesleyan Theological Institution at Hoxton and was ordained in 1842. He traveled in several circuits and established a reputation as a linguist and translator of German antirationalist critics. From 1867 to 1886 he was a tutor at Didsbury Wesleyan College, Manchester. In 1875-76 he produced his greatest work, A Compendium of Christian Theology (3 vols.). This, while containing several specifically Wesleyan features, especially a very high doctrine of the ministry and an elaborate exposition of Christian holiness, is dedicated to what Pope called “the old doctrines of the Reformation.” Impeccably orthodox and the most powerful of all Wesleyan essays in dogmatic theology, it undoubtedly held back the impact of destructively critical ideas on English Methodism for several decades. Pope died after a long and painful illness.