JOHN

See also:

• JOHN HULSE (1708-1790)

HULSE (1708-1790)  , English divine, was born—the eldest of a family of nineteen—at Middlewich, in Cheshire, in 1708 . Entering St John's College, Cambridge, in 1724, he graduated in 1728; and on taking orders (in 1732) was presented to a small country curacy . His father having died in 1753, Hulse succeeded to his estates in Cheshire, where, owing to feeble health, he lived in retirement till his death in December 1790 . He bequeathed his estates to Cambridge University for the purpose of maintaining two divinity scholars (£3o a year each) at St John's College, of founding a prize for a dissertation, and of instituting the offices of Christian advocate and of Christian preacher or Hulsean lecturer . By a statute in 186o the Hulsean professorship of divinity was substituted for the office of Christian advocate, and the lectureship was considerably modified . The first course of lectures under the benefaction was delivered in 1820 . In 183o the number of annual lectures or sermons was reduced from twenty to eight; after 1861 they were further reduced to a minimum of four . The annual value of the Hulse endowment is between goo and £coo, of which eight-tenths go to the professor of divinity and one-tenth to the prize and lectureship respectively . An account of the Hulsean lectures from 182o to 1894 is given in J . Hunt's Religious Thought in the 19th Century, 332-338; among the lecturers have been Henry Alford (1C41), R . C . Trench (1845), Christopher Wordsworth (1847), Charles Merivale (186,), James Moorhouse (1865), F .

W .

Farrar (187o), F . J . A . Hort (1871), W . Boyd Carpenter (1878) . W . Cunningham (1885), M . Creighton (1893) .