1855–1934 · English Congregational minister · Yale Lyman Beecher lecturer, 1893
Horton was an English Congregational minister who served Lyndhurst Road Congregational Church in Hampstead for fifty years, and who delivered the Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale in 1893 ↗. Those lectures were published the same year as Verbum Dei, and on page 132 he reaches for a one-line joke about people who would rather not know an uncomfortable truth. He gives the speaker no name, no date and no place — which is exactly why Quote Investigator suggests he may have invented her as a rhetorical device rather than reported her. Everything the quote later became grew out of that unsourced aside.