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John Stoughton

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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JOHN STOUGHTON (1807-1897), English Nonconformist divine, was born at Norwich on the 18th of November 1807. His father was an Episcopalian, his mother a member of the Society of Friends. Stoughton was educated at Norwich Grammar School, and, after an interval of legal study, at Highbury Congregational College. In 1833 he became minister at Windsor, in 1843 at Kensington; in 1856 he was elected chair man of the Congregational Union. From 1872 to 1884 he was professor of historical theology in New College, Hampstead. He died at Ealing on the 24th of October 1897. Stoughton was no controversialist, but did a good deal of sound historical work which was published in Church and State1660-1663 (London, 1862); Ecclesiastical History of England1640-1660 (4 vols., London, 1867-1870); Religion in England under Queen Anne and the Georges (2 vols., 1878); Religion in England from 1800 to 1880 (2 vols., 1884). He contributed an account of Nonconformist modes of celebrating the Lord's Supper to the ritual commission of 1870, arranged a conference on co-operation between Anglicans and dissenters (presided over by Archbishop Tait) in 1876, was one of Dean Stanley's lecturers in Westminster Abbey and a pall-bearer at his funeral. He was elected to the Athenaeum Club in 1874 on the nomination of Matthew Arnold.

Besides the books already mentioned he wrote a number of more popular works, among which Homes and Haunts of Luther (1875), The Italian Reformers (1881), and The Spanish Reformers (1883) are conspicuous. His Recollections of a Long Life (1894) furnish interesting autobiographical material.