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Evening Star, Issue 12603, 7 September 1905, Page 4

To-dat is the centenary of the birth of Dr Samuel Wilberforoe, the faA ftirfmij. moos Bishop of Oxford (and subsequently of Winchester), popularly known as “ Soapy Sam." Bishop Wilberforce was born on September 7, 1805, and died on Joly 19, 1873, being thrown from his horse and killed on the spot while riding with the late Earl Granville near Abinger, in Surrey. For more than a quarter of a century he was the most conspicuous and influential prelate of the Church of England, and was specially distinguished as a speaker in the House of Lords, where his duels with Lord Chancellor Westbury were one of the parliamentary features of the “sixties.” Curiously enough. Lord Westbury died the day after his old antagonst. It is said that the Bishop was once asked in all innocence by a stranger in a railway carriage “Why the Bishop of Oxford was called ‘ Soapy Sam.’ ” “ Well,” he replied, “ I don’t really know, “ but I suspect it is because he is continually “ getting into hot water and always coming “out with clean hands.” Be dearly loved a controversy, and his methods in this respect were not always remarkable for scrupulous fairness. His participation in the tumult caused by the appearance' of Darwin’s epoch-marking work was a case in point. He was a great man, however—or at least a great Churchman—and had the chief share in the work of reforming and modernising the ideal and practice of the Anglican episcopate. Throe generations of Wilberforoes have attained fame. “ Soapy Sam” was a son of William Wilborforce, celebrated for the part he took in the abolition of the slave trade; while the family tradition is maintained by present Bishop of Chichester and Archdeacon Basil Wilberforce, sons of the prelate who was born a hundred years ago to-day.