Charles Burton (theologian)


Charles Burton was an English clergyman and writer.

Life

Burton was born in 1793 at Rhodes Hall, Middleton, Lancashire, the seat of his father Daniel Burton, a cotton manufacturer, of whom he was the youngest son. He was educated at the University of Glasgow and St John's College, Cambridge, where he graduated LL.B. in 1822. In 1829 he was incorporated B.C.L. at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 14 October, and received the degree of D.C.L. on the following day.
His family were Wesleyans, and he was for a time a Methodist minister, but was ordained in the Church of England in 1816. The church of All Saints, Manchester was built by him at a cost of £18,000 and consecrated in 1820, when he became rector, after serving for a short time as curate of St James's in the same town. Most of the church was destroyed by fire on 6 February 1850.
Burton was a botanist, and his discovery in Anglesey of a plant new to science led to his election as Fellow of the Linnean Society. While on a visit at Western Lodge, Durham, he was attacked by typhus fever, and died after three weeks' illness on 6 September 1866.

Works

His theological views, in the face of the geological controversies set off by Charles Lyell, were conservative but not literalist about the Biblical account. He followed William Paley, and the gap theory of Thomas Chalmers and John Bird Sumner.
His writings are: