Frederick Denison Maurice grew up in a house where nobody could agree about God. His father, Michael Maurice, was a Unitarian minister, a man who had given up the prospects of an inheritance rather than change his opinions. Then, in 1821, Frederick's mother Priscilla left Unitarianism. One sister went to the Church of England. Another went to the Baptists. Under one roof, in one family, the great questions of the faith were being answered five different ways, and the boy at the centre of it heard every argument.

Years afterward, trying to write his own life and never finishing it, he put down a sentence about that boyhood: "The desire for Unity has haunted me all my life through; I have never been able to substitute any desire for that, or to accept any of the different schemes for satisfying it which men have devised." And then something harder and stranger: that he owed the depth of his belief in the Trinity to that very home, because the word used there to describe the denial of the doctrine was the word that best named what he had been driven, even against himself, to seek.

He went up to Cambridge, took a first in the civil law classes, and then walked away from his degree. To take it he would have had to subscribe the Thirty-Nine Articles, and he was a Dissenter's son who did not yet believe them; he would not, he said, "hang a bribe round his neck to lead his conscience." He wrote for magazines instead. Only in 1830 did he go to Oxford to prepare for ordination, and on 29 March 1831 he was baptised into the Church of England. He was made deacon in 1834 and priest in 1835, and for ten years he was chaplain at Guy's Hospital in London, among the sick and the dying, lecturing the medical students twice a week.

Then came the thing that broke his career in half.

In 1853 Maurice published his Theological Essays, and in it he wrote about the word "eternal." He argued that when Scripture says eternal it does not mean a clock that never stops running; it means something outside of time altogether, belonging to God, who is the same yesterday, today, and for ever. Eternal life, then, is not only something you get later; Christ has already given it. And eternal death is not a furnace with a duration, but the loss of God himself, "the state of being without love, without hope, without God."

To his own students and to a great many clergymen this was rescue. To Richard William Jelf, Principal of King's College London, where Maurice held two professorships, it was heresy, and on 14 July 1853 Jelf wrote asking him to explain himself. Maurice explained himself at length and gave no ground at all: "If yours is the only orthodox sense of it, I have been teaching heresy for seven years to the pupils of your College." He was not, he insisted, a universalist. He said so flatly: "I have deliberately rejected the theory of Universalism." He was arguing about a Greek word and about what everlasting torment implies concerning the character of God, and he would not stop, because he believed the multitudes were "in misery because they feel as if we had no message to them but one of wrath and destruction," and that telling them otherwise was not something he had taken up on his own account but something laid on him by his ordination vow.

On 14 October the Principal laid the whole correspondence before the College Council. At the adjourned meeting on 28 October the Council considered the question; Gladstone, who sat on it, moved that competent theologians be appointed to examine the writings, hoping some agreement might be reached. The amendment failed. Maurice could still have resigned quietly, and everyone would have been spared. He refused. On 7 November he wrote to the Council demanding that they "declare distinctly to the world the grounds on which they dismiss me," that they "declare what Article of our faith condemns my teaching," and that they use no phrases in condemning him which they would themselves reject as loose and vague "if the property or the life of a fellow-citizen were in question." The next day he went public. Both chairs were declared vacant. He resigned his connection with Queen's College too, the college for women he had founded in 1848, so that the quarrel would not touch it.

He was forty-eight, publicly disgraced, and out of his professorships. By February he was planning a college for working men. On 30 October 1854, less than a year after the dismissal, the Working Men's College opened in London with more than a hundred and thirty students and Maurice as its principal, and he served it until he died.

That same October he wrote to his friend Charles Kingsley from Matlock about a man who had attacked them both in print, and set the argument down mid-sentence to say something else entirely. He wrote of God, who breaks in pieces our bars of iron, who lifts us out of "the hell, the eternal torment which I not only believe, but know that we must be saved from, because I have been in it." Then, quietly: "What a weary task it is to be explaining and justifying ourselves. God will explain and justify us, if it is necessary, in His good time; let us ask Him first of all to explain and justify Himself."

He had been in it. That was the whole of the matter. The man they dismissed for softening hell had been inside the thing he was describing, and what he had found on the far side of it was the sentence for which he lost everything: that "there is an abyss of love deeper than the abyss of death."

He died on Easter Monday, 1 April 1872, in London, losing consciousness after pronouncing a blessing with a great effort. His family declined the offer of a funeral in Westminster Abbey, as contrary to his own wishes, and on 5 April he was buried at Highgate in the family vault with his father and mother and sisters. The Abbey put up a bust of him anyway. The Working Men's College is still open.