Yorkshire seminary, seminary at Newport Pagnel Baptist academies, seminaries in Wales SECT. II. Review of Seminaries. Religion of the baptists, quakers, and methodists Decision of character produced by Dr. Priestley Establishment of the missionary society Village preaching, religion of the independents Of the independents, of the methodists Life of Dr. Benson, John Mason Dr. Chandler, Dr. Lardner, Dr. Langford Dr. Furneaux, Job Orton, Dr. Price Dr. Fordyce, Dr. Priestley, Dr. Guyse Dr. Wilton, Thos. Strange, Samuel Brewer Isaac Toms, Dr. Gill, Robert Robinson John Ryland, Dr. Stennett, Samuel Pearce The authors regret that they have been prevented by the unex- gion in II. 457 TO THE BINDER. The two first sheets of the third volume must be taken from the end CHAP. VIII. LIVES OF EMINENT PERSONS AMONG THE DISSENTERS. SECTION II. LIVES OF EMINENT CHRISTIANS WHO WERE NOT MINISTERS. THIS SIR JOHN HARTOPP. HIS celebrated baronet was born about the year 1637. His father was one of the first English gentlemen honoured with the new title. He married the daughter of Charles Fleetwood, esq. but was, in 1711, deprived of this lady, whom Dr. Watts describes in her funeral sermon as a woman of eminent religion. From the same writer we learn, that sir John "joined the independent church over which Dr. Owen presided, and continued an honourable member, under successive pastors, to the day of his death." Boldly patronising the despised cause of the dissenters, amidst the fiercest persecutions, he was a devout and diligent attendant on their public worship, till the infirmities of years confined him to his private and domestic devotions. He frequently instructed his family by reading to them the discourses which he had written from the lips of the first preachers in his early days; and to him we owe many of those which are contained in the folio volume of sermons and tracts by Dr. Owen, with whom he maintained the most endeared friendship. Elected by the freeholders of Leicestershire, as their representative in parliament, he displayed a most ardent zeal for the religious and civil liberties of his country, and became a strenuous advocate for the bill which was to have excluded James the second from the throne. For this reason the whole weight of the court was employed to prevent his reelection; but the Hartoppians, as they were called, prevailed, and he was thrice returned member for the county. This popular patriot and pillar of the dissent lived to the advanced age of eighty-five, and terminated his labours on the first of April, 1722. Dr. Watts, who had entitled Lady Hartopp's funeral sermon "The last enemy conquered," published one for the baronet in the form of a treatise, on "The Happiness of separate Spirits." The character which the preacher gives his deceased friend, claims a place in this memoir. "When I name sir John Hartopp, all who knew him will agree that I name a gentleman, a scholar, and a Christian. He shone with eminence among persons of birth and title, while his obliging deportment rendered him easy of access to all his inferiors, and the delight of all his friends. He had a taste for universal learning; mathematics were a favourite study with him in his youth, and even in his old age he maintained his acquaintance with the heavenly bodies. But the Book of God was his chief study, his divinest delight. The Bible lay open before him day and night. Desirous of seeing what the Spirit of God said to men in the original languages, he commenced some acquaintance with the Hebrew, when he was more than fifty years old, and kept his youthful know. ledge of the Greek. He took pleasure in the doc |