Henry Grove

Henry Grove (4 January 1684 – 27 February 1738) was an English nonconformist minister, theologian, and dissenting tutor.

He was born at Taunton, Somerset, on 4 January 1684. His grandfather was the ejected vicar of Pinhoe, Devon, whose son, a Taunton upholsterer, married a sister of John Rowe, ejected from a lectureship at Westminster Abbey; Henry was the youngest of fourteen children, most of whom died young. Grounded in classics at the Taunton grammar school, he proceeded at the age of fourteen (1698) to the Taunton dissenting academy. Here he went through a course of philosophy and divinity under Matthew Warren. The text-books were David Derodon, Franco Burgersdyck, and Eustachius de Saint-Paul; Grove devoted himself to Jean Leclerc, Richard Cumberland, and John Locke. In 1703, he moved to London to study under his cousin Thomas Rowe, in whose academy he remained two years. Rowe was a Cartesian; Grove became a disciple of Isaac Newton. He studied Hebrew, and formed his style of preaching on Richard Lucas and John Howe. With Isaac Watts he began a close friendship, which survived many differences of opinion.

In 1705 Grove returned to Somerset, where his preaching attracted attention. He married, and probably settled for a short time at Ilchester. Warren died on 14 June 1706. The Somerset presbyterians met to arrange for carrying on the Taunton Academy, and appointed Grove, in his twenty-third year, tutor in ethics and pneumatology. He lived at Taunton, and took charge of the neighbouring congregations of Hull Bishop's and West Hatch, with James Strong.

...
Wikipedia