Henry Rogers (congregationalist)

Henry Rogers (1806–1877) was an English nonconformist minister and man of letters, known as a Christian apologist.

He was third son of Thomas Rogers, a surgeon of St Albans, where he was born on 18 October 1806. He was educated at private schools and by his father, of congregationalist views. In his seventeenth year he was apprenticed to a surgeon at Milton-next-Sittingbourne, Kent; reading John Howe's The Redeemer's Tears wept over Lost Souls diverted his attention from surgery to theology. After study at Highbury College, Middlesex, he entered the congregationalist ministry in June 1829.

His first duty was that of assistant pastor of the church at Poole, Dorset. In 1832 he returned to Highbury College as lecturer on rhetoric and logic. In 1836 he was appointed to the chair of English language and literature at University College, London, which in 1839 he exchanged for that of English literature and language, mathematics and mental philosophy in Spring Hill College, Birmingham. That post he held for nearly twenty years. An incurable throat problem compelled him to abandon preaching.

In 1858 he succeeded to the presidency of the Lancashire Independent College, with which he held the chair of theology until 1871. His health failing, he retired to Silverdale, Morecambe Bay; in 1873 he moved to Pennal Tower, Machynlleth, where he died on 20 August 1877. His remains were interred in St. Luke's Churchyard, Cheetham Hill, Manchester.

In 1826 Rogers published a volume of verse, 'Poems Miscellaneous and Sacred;' and at Poole he began to write for the nonconformist periodical press. On his return to London he contributed introductory essays to editions of Joseph Truman's 'Discourse of Natural and Moral Impotency,' the works of Jonathan Edwards, Jeremy Taylor (1834–35), and Edmund Burke (1836–37) and Robert Boyle's 'Treatises on the High Veneration Man's Intellect owes to God, on Things above Reason, and on the Style of the Holy Scriptures.' In 1836 he issued his first major work, 'The Life and Character of John Howe'(London), of which later editions appeared in 1863; 1874; and 1879.

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