Henry Nutcombe Oxenham



Henry Nutcombe Oxenham (15 November 1829 -23 March 1888) was an English ecclesiologist and author.

Life
He was born at Harrow School to William Oxnam and Mary Susanna Carter, where his father William Oxnam was a master, and was baptised at Eton, Buckinghamshire on 8 January 1830, where his uncle was Thomas Thellusson Carter. The family name changed from Oxnam to Oxenham in 1834. From Harrow, Oxenham went to Balliol College, Oxford.

He took Anglican orders in 1854, but became a Roman Catholic in 1857. At first his thoughts turned towards the priesthood, and he spent some time at the London Oratory and at St Edmund's College, Ware. Being unable, however, to surrender his belief in the validity of Anglican orders, he proceeded no further than minor orders in the Roman Church.

In 1863 he made a prolonged visit to Germany, where he studied the language and literature, and formed a close friendship with Döllinger, whose First Age of the Christian Church he translated in 1866. Oxenham was a regular contributor to the Saturday Review. A selection of his essays was published in Short Studies in Ecclesiastical History and Biography (1884), and Short Studies, Ethical and Religious (1885).

He also translated in 1876 the second volume of Bishop Hefele's History of the Councils of the Church, and published several pamphlets on the reunion of Christendom. His Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement (1865) and Catholic Eschatology and Universalism (1876) are standard works.

He died on 23 March 1888 at Kensington, having never married.