Theophilus Dorrington

Theophilus Dorrington (1654–1715) was a Church of England clergyman. Initially a nonconforming minister, he settled at Wittersham in The Weald, an area with many Dissenters, particularly Baptists. He became a controversialist attacking nonconformity. He also warned that the Grand Tour could create Catholic converts, by aesthetic impressions.

The son of nonconformist parents, Dorrington was educated for the ministry. In 1678 he ran, with three other young nonconformist ministers (Thomas Goodwin, the younger, James Lambert and John Shower), evening lectures at a coffee-house in Exchange Alley, London, which attended by merchants in the City of London. On 13 June 1680 he entered himself as a medical student at Leiden University.

John Williams, the bishop of Chichester, encouraged Dorrington to take be ordained in the Church of England. In 1698 he travelled in Holland and Germany, and in 1699 published an account of his journeys. In November 1698 he was presented by Archbishop Thomas Tenison to the rectory of Wittersham, in Kent. He was awarded a Master of Arts degree at Magdalen College, Oxford on 9 March 1710.

Dorrington died on 30 April 1715 at Wittersham.

Dorrington was a prolific author and controversialist. His publications included:

Dorrington translated from the Latin of Samuel Pufendorf The Divine Feudal Law, London, 1703, which is based on the late work Ius feciale divinum (1695); and a new edition under the variant title A View of the Principles of the Lutheran Churches, London, 1714, which had a second edition in the same year. The subtitle of the first work goes further than Pufendorf's original, and shows that Dorrington was in 1703 angling at the Hanoverian succession, in stressing unity between Anglicans and Lutherans. Some Jacobites took him to be proposing that the Lutheran church of Hanover should join the Church of England.

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