Like John the Baptist, and Bourdaloue, and Knox, he was a faithful spiritual monitor and adviser during all his days at court. “I must go in and hear Ken tell me my faults,” the king used to say at chapel time. The “good little man” (as he called the bishop) never lost the favor of the dissipated monarch. As Macaulay says, “Of all the prelates, he liked Ken the best.”
Under James, the Papist, Ken was a loyal subject, though once arrested as one of the “seven bishops” for his opposition to the king's religion, and he kept his oath of allegiance so firmly that it cost him his place. William III. deprived him of his bishopric, and he retired in poverty to a home kindly offered him by Lord Viscount Weymouth in Longleat, near Frome, in Somersetshire, where he spent a serene and beloved old age. He died æt. seventy-four, March 17, 1711 (N.S.), and was 34 / 14 carried to his grave, according to his request, by “six of the poorest men in the parish.”
His great doxology is the refrain or final stanza of each of his three long hymns, “Morning,” “Evening” and “Midnight,” printed in a Prayer Manual for the use of the students of Winchester College. The “Evening Hymn” drew scenic inspiration, it is told, from the lovely view in Horningsham Park at “Heaven's Gate Hill,” while walking to and from church.
Another four-line doxology, adopted probably from Dr. Hatfield (1807–1883), is almost entirely superseded by Ken's stanza, being of even more pronounced credal character.
To God the Father, God the Son,
And God the Spirit, Three in One.
Be honor, praise and glory given
By all on earth and all in heaven.
The Methodist Hymnal prints a collection of ten doxologies, two by Watts, one by Charles Wesley, one by John Wesley, one by William Goode, one by Edwin F. Hatfield, one attributed to “Tate and Brady,” one by Robert Hawkes, and the one by Ken above noted. These are all technically and intentionally doxologies. To give a history of doxologies in the general sense of the word would carry one through every Christian age and language and end with a concordance of the Book of Psalms.