Frederick William Faber | Biography

In his day Frederick William Faber was widely known as a convert from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, as a compelling preacher, as the celebrated superior of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in London (the Brompton Oratory), and as a prolific author of Catholic hymns. An effective spokesman for the Roman church, Faber for a considerable period outshone John Henry Newman, whose disciple he had originally been; but he survives today chiefly as a hymnodist whose work has found its way into hymnbooks of all denominations.

Born to an ecclesiastical family in the West Riding of Yorkshire, Faber was educated at Harrow and at Balliol College and University College, Oxford. During his first year at Oxford, 1833, he wrote "The Cherwell Water-lily," which was published with other poems in 1840.

As an Oxford undergraduate commencing his university career in 1833 Faber came under the spell of John Henry Newman and the Tractarian Movement, which Newman liked to date as having begun in that year with John Keble's Assize Sermon. Faber eagerly joined in various Tractarian projects, most notably in work on the Library of the Fathers , for which he translated St. Optatus's work on the Donatist schism. His poem The Knights of St. John won the Newdigate Prize in 1836, the year he graduated with a B.A. from Oxford. He went on to write The Styrian Lake, and Other Poems (1842), Sir Lancelot (1844), and The Rosary (1845). "The Cherwell Water-lily" and "The Styrian Lake" gained Wordsworth's approval and were presumably the poems that prompted Wordsworth to remark in 1842, when Faber accepted an ecclesiastical appointment, that "England loses a poet." Faber was destined to make religion his primary profession and to subordinate his poetical instincts to that calling.

His religious convictions had moved steadily Romeward in the late 1830s and early 1840s, stimulated not only by Tractarianism but also by historical study and by several visits to the Continent, where he closely observed Catholic religious life. He fostered various High Church and Catholic practices in his own church at Elton, Huntingdonshire, and in 1844 his Life of St. Wilfrid, which was thought by many to be excessively pro-Roman, was published. In November of the following year, only two weeks after Newman's submission to Rome, Faber renounced Anglicanism and was received into the Roman Catholic church.

As a Catholic Faber pursued a vigorous career, at first as the superior of a group he formed in honor of St. Wilfrid called "Brothers of the Will of God"; later, after his ordination as a Roman priest in 1847, as a member of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, the religious order introduced into England by Newman. Faber prospered as an Oratorian, and eventually his group was established in London with Faber as superior. The London Oratory, which finally settled into impressive quarters in the Brompton Road in the fashionable Knightsbridge section, attained greater celebrity and popularity than Newman's group in the industrial city of Birmingham. Much of this celebrity was due to Faber's personal influence and to his writings.

Faber wrote various devotional treatises, but his chief fame came from the steady stream of hymns that he produced for Roman Catholics. Although Faber had begun as a poet of the Romantic and Tractarian schools, he felt that his talents should be turned to more practical account than allowed by the private devotional style of Tractarian poetry. He was especially conscious of the fact that hymn-singing, originally associated with Methodism, had by the mid-nineteenth century become established and popular even in the most traditional Anglican parishes, whereas Catholic parishes lacked a body of hymns consonant with Roman theology and devotional practices. Faber set himself to remedy this lack and to provide the Roman church with popular hymns in the Wesleyan poetic and musical style. He succeeded so well that many of the 150 hymns from his pen have gained general currency among all Christians, the most notable examples being "My God, How Wonderful Thou Art" and "Sweet Saviour, Bless Us ere We Go." Even some of his most intensely Catholic hymns have proved adaptable for Protestant purposes, such as his well-known "Faith of Our Fathers," which, with the change of a few words, has become a popular Evangelical hymn. (Faber wrote "Faith of our Fathers! Mary's prayers/Shall win our country back to thee"; the Protestant version reads "Faith of our Fathers! Good men's prayers/Shall win our country all to thee.")

Faber, then, beginning as a Romantic nature poet and developing as a Tractarian devotional one, finally made his mark as the most notable Roman Catholic hymnodist of the nineteenth century.