Robert Hall (minister)

The Rev. Robert Hall (2 May 1764 – 21 February 1831) was an English Baptist minister.

He was born at Arnesby near Leicester, where his father Robert Hall was pastor of a Baptist congregation. Robert was the youngest of a family of fourteen. While still at the same school his passion for books absorbed most of his time, and in summer he used to go to the churchyard after school with a volume, and read till nightfall, making out the meaning of the more difficult words with the help of a pocket dictionary. From his sixth to his eleventh year he attended the school of Mr Simmons at Wigston, a village four miles from Arnesby. There he showed an intense interest in metaphysics; and before he was nine he had read and re-read Jonathan Edwards's Treatise on the Will and Butler's Analogy.

This incessant study at such an early period of life seems to have affected his health. After he left Mr Simmons's school his appearance was so sickly as to awaken fears of the presence of phthisis. He was sent to stay in the house of a gentleman near Kettering, who with an impropriety which Hall himself afterwards referred to as "egregious", prevailed upon the boy of eleven to give occasional addresses at prayer meetings. As his health seemed rapidly to recover, he was sent to a school at Northampton run by John Ryland, where he remained a year and a half, and "hath great progress in Latin and Greek". On leaving school he for some time studied divinity under the direction of his father and in October 1778 he entered the Bristol academy for the preparation of students for the Baptist ministry. Here his earlier confidence seems to have deserted him; when, in accordance with the arrangements of the academy, his turn came to deliver an address in the vestry of Broadmead chapel, be broke down on two separate occasions and was unable to finish.

On 13 August 1780, he was set apart to the ministry, but he still continued his studies at the academy; and in 1781, in accordance with the provisions of an exhibition which he held, he entered King's College, University of Aberdeen, where he took the degree of master of arts in March 1785. He had no rival in any of the classes, distinguishing himself alike in classics, philosophy and mathematics. He there formed the acquaintance of James Mackintosh, who, though a year younger, was a year his senior as a student. While they remained at Aberdeen the two were inseparable, reading together the best Greek authors, especially Plato, and discussing, either during their walks by the sea-shore and the banks of the Don or in their rooms until early morning, the most perplexed questions in philosophy and religion.

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