PEARSON, JOHN (1612-1686)

This article appears in Volume V21, Page 29 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: PAS-PER

PEARSON, JOHN (1612-1686) , English divine and scholar, was born at

Great

GREAT

Snoring, Norfolk, on the 28th of February 1612. From Eton he passed to Queen's College,

Cambridge

, and was elected a scholar of King's in April 1632, and a fellow in 1634. On taking orders in 1639 he was collated to the Salisbury prebend of Nether-Avon. In 164o he was appointed chaplain to the lord-keeper Finch, by whom he was presented to the living of Thorington in Suffolk. In the Civil War he acted as chaplain to George Goring's forces in the west. In 1654 he was made weekly preacher at St Clement's, Eastcheap, in London. With Peter Gunning he disputed against two Roman Catholics on the subject of schism, a one-sided account of which was printed in Paris by one of the Roman Catholic disputants, under the title Scisme Unmask't (1658). Pearson also argued against the Puritan party, and was much interested in Brian Walton's polyglot Bible. In 1659 he published in London his celebrated Exposition of the Creed, dedicated to his parishioners of St Clement's, Eastcheap, to whom the substance of the

work

WORK

had been preached several years before. In the same year hepublished the Golden Remains of the ever-memorable Mr John Hales of Eton, with an interesting memoir. Soon after the Restoration he was presented by Juxon, bishop of London, to the rectory of St Christopher-le-Stocks; and in 166o he was created

doctor

DOCTOR (Lat. for " teacher ")

of divinity at

Cambridge

, appointed a royal chaplain, prebendary of Ely, archdeacon of Surrey, and master of Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1661 he was appointed Lady Margaret professor of divinity; and on the first day of the ensuing year he was nominated one of the commissioners for the review of the

liturgy

LITURGY (Low Lat. liturgia; Gr. X€Zros, public, and Epyov,
work
- WORK
; )Aetrovpy6s, a public servant)

in the conference held at the Savoy. There he won the esteem of his opponents and high praise from Richard Baxter. On the 14th of April 1662 he was made master of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1667 he was admitted a fellow of the Royal Society. In 1672 he published at Cambridge Vindiciae epistolarum S. Ignatii, in 4to, in answer to Jean Daille. His defence of the authenticity of the letters of Ignatius has been confirmed by J. B. Lightfoot and other

recent

RECENT

scholars. Upon the death of John Wilkins in 1672, Pearson was appointed to the bishopric of Chester. In 1682 his Annales cyprianici were published at Oxford, with John Fell's edition of that father's works. He died at Chester on the 16th of July 1686. His last work, the Two Dissertations on the Succession and Times of the First Bishops of Rome, formed with the Annales Paulini the principal part of his Opera post/mina, edited by

Henry

Dodwell

in 1688.
See the memoir in Biographia Britannica, and another by Edward Churton, prefixed to the edition of Pearson's

Minor

Theological Works (2 vols., Oxford, 1844). Churton also edited almost the whole of the theological writings.

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