EDWARD KING, as teacher, pastor, bishop and acclaimed saint, through his personalinfluence and holiness of life, radically challenged and changed the character andface of the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion. Besides all otherhigh qualifications he had a gift of empathy and sympathy so extraordinary that itwas said to amount to 'nothing less than a form of genius'. Ordained in 1854, Kingwas chaplain and then Principal of the newly created Theological College at Cuddesdon.He subsequently spent twelve years in Oxford as Regius Professor of Pastoral Theology,and the remainder of his life, from 1885, in Lincoln as the much-loved Bishop. EdwardKing virtually invented pastoral theology as a serious subject in the Anglican Church.He was concerned to train a clergy who were pastorally, theologically and professionallycompetent in a way seldom seen before. As a bishop he exercised his ministry amongthe needy and the vulnerable, through an apostolic witness to the ordinary laityof the diocese. In his teaching, his personal and pastoral ministry and most conspicuouslyhis lengthy episcopate, he embodied and communicated that gospel, life-affirming,tradition which in turn speaks so powerfully to the needs of the world in any age.