Philip Furneaux

Philip Furneaux (1726–1783) was an English independent minister.

Furneaux was born in December 1726 at Totnes, Devon. At the grammar school there he formed a lifelong friendship with Benjamin Kennicott. In 1742 or 1743 he came to London to study for the dissenting ministry under David Jennings, at the dissenting academy in Wellclose Square. He appears to have remained at the academy till 1749, probably assisting Jennings, whose Hebrew Antiquities he later edited (1766).

After ordination he became (1749) assistant to Henry Read, minister of the presbyterian congregation at St. Thomas's, Southwark. On the resignation of Roger Pickering, around 1752, he became in addition one of the two preachers of the Sunday evening lecture at Salters' Hall. Retaining this lectureship, in 1753 he succeeded Moses Lowman in the pastorate of the independent congregation at Clapham. Despite hesitant delivery in preaching, he drew a large congregation.

He received the degree of D.D. on 3 August 1767, from Marischal College, Aberdeen. From October 1769 to January 1775 he was relieved of the afternoon service on his lecture evenings by Samuel Morton Savage, D.D. As a member of the Coward Trust he had much to do with the revised plan of education adopted by the trustees on Philip Doddridge's death. He was also from 1766 to 1778 a trustee of Daniel Williams's foundations.

Furneaux was known for his work on behalf of the rights of nonconformists. His name is associated with the progress of the ‘sheriff's case,’ a legal case before the courts in the period 1754 to 1767. It arose out of an expedient adopted in 1748 by the Corporation of London to raise money for building the Mansion House, by fining nonconformists who declined to qualify for the office of Sheriff of London in accordance with the Sacramental Test Act. In 1754, three nonconformists resisted this imposition. The case reached the House of Lords in 1767, and in February of that year was decided in favour of the nonconformists; and it was on this occasion that Lord Mansfield delivered the speech in which occurs the remark that the ‘dissenters' way of worship’ is not only lawful but ‘established.’ This speech was reported, without notes, by Furneaux with assistance from another hearer, Samuel Wilton, D.D., independent minister of the Weighhouse, Eastcheap. Mansfield, who revised the report, found in it only ta few small errors.

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