William Bell

William Bell (1731 – 29 September 1816) was a Church of England minister who engaged with vigour in some of the theological controversies of his day. He is remembered as a writer on theological matters and as a benefactor of Cambridge University and of other causes.

Life William Bell was born in Greenwich, a town growing in prosperity and importance due to the expansion in size and professionalism of the British Royal Navy during the early eighteenth century. His father was also called William Bell. The son was educated at a private classical school, Greenwich School and then, on 29 May 1749, commenced his university-level studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge. and he was elected a fellow of Magdalene College the same year. one of the younger sisters of the new king, George III. He accordingly moved to join the staff at the Princess's recently acquired manor at Gunnersbury House. and sources imply that Bell's ecclesiastical functions were well remunerated. A condition was that none of the scholars thus funded should be elected from King's College or Trinity Hall.

William Bell died on 29 September 1829. He was still a prebendary at Westminster Abbey, and he died aged 85 at the home that went with the job in Little Dean's Yard, Westminster.

Controversy Much of what Bell wrote was considered contentious by contemporaries. The publication that resonated most widely appeared in 1780 (with a second edition in 1781) and was entitled An attempt to ascertain and illustrate the authority, nature, and design of the institute of Christ commonly called the communion of the Lord's supper. At 40 pages in length, the treatise itself, which was dedicated to Princess Amelia, may have been construed as brief, but it was backed by notes and appendices and notes to the appendices, which were in places polemical in character.

The purpose of the treatise was to assert the exclusively scriptural foundation of church beliefs. Treading boldly where others might have been content to avoid or finesse the arguments, Bell's treatise strongly refuted the doctrine of Transubstantiation. A note with the appendices attacked Bishop William Warburton, whose own writings indicated an approach closer to what would later come to be identified as Anglo-Catholicism. As fundamentalist partisans piled in on both sides, theological differences became increasingly shrill, and Bell found himself attacked by Lewis Bagot, by now Dean of Christ Church at Oxford, for advancing "Socinian doctrines utterly inconsistent with the teachings of the Church of England." Bell responded by issuing a new edition of his treatise in 1790, now with a supplement repeating his basic contentions with more passion than ever.