- ‘Scripture Mistaken the Ground of Protestants and Common Plea of all new Reformers against the ancient Catholicke Religion of England,’ Antwerp, 1655, 8vo. Dr. Henry Ferne, afterwards bishop of Chester, published an answer to this book in 1660.
- ‘Questions propounded for resolution of unlearned Pretenders in Matters of Religion, to the doctors of the Prelatical Pretended Reform'd Church of England,’ Paris, 1657, 8vo.
- ‘Scisme Unmask't; or a late Conference betwixt Mr. Peter Gunning and Mr. John Pierson, Ministers, on the one part, and two Disputants of the Roman Profession on the other; wherein is defined, both what Schisme is, and to whom it belongs,’ Paris, 1658. The two catholic disputants were Spencer and John Lenthall, M.D. (Dodd, Church Hist. iii. 312). The paper printed at the end of the conference was republished by Obadiah Walker and John Massey, under the title of ‘The Schism of the Church of England, &c., demonstrated in four Arguments formerly propos'd to Dr. Gunning and Dr. Pearson, the late bishops of Ely and Chester, by two Catholic Disputants in a celebrated conference upon that point,’ Oxford, 1688, 4to. This reprint elicited ‘The Reformation of the Church of England Justified’ (anon.), Cambridge, 1688, 4to, by William Saywell [q. v.], master of Jesus College, Cambridge. Spencer is also credited with a book against the atheists entitled ‘Either God or Nothing,’ of which no copy has been traced.
1630, 4to.
[De Backer's Bibl. des Ecrivains de la Compagnie de Jésus; Florus Anglo-Bavaricus, p. 52; Foley's Records, ii. 194, vii. 726; Jones's Popery Tracts, p. 485; Oliver's Jesuit Collections, p. 195; Southwell's Bibl. Scriptorum Soc. Jesu, p. 504.]
SPENCER, JOHN, D.D. (1630–1693), master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and author of 'De Legibus Hebræorum,' was a native of Bocton, near Bleane, Kent, where he was baptised on 31 Oct. 1630 (Lewis, Antiquities of Feversham, p. 87). He was educated at the King's School, Canterbury, became king's scholar there, and was admitted to a scholarship of Archbishop Parker's foundation in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on 25 March 1645. He graduated B.A. in 1648, M.A. in 1652, B.D. in 1659, and D.D. in 1665. He was chosen a fellow of his college about 1655. After taking holy orders he became a university preacher, served the cures first of St. Giles and then of St. Benedict, Cambridge, and on 23 July 1667 was instituted to the rectory of Landbeach, Cambridgeshire, which he resigned in 1683 in favour of his nephew and curate, William Spencer. On 3 Aug. 1667 he was unanimously elected master of Corpus Christi College, and he governed that society 'with great prudence and reputation' for twenty-six years. He contributed verses to the Cambridge University Collection on the death of Henrietta Maria, queen dowager, 1669. He was appointed a prebendary in the first stall at Ely in February 1671-2, and served the office of vice-chancellor of the university in the academical year 1673-4, during which he delivered a speech addressed to the Duke of Monmouth on his installation as chancellor of the university (cf. Hearne's appendix to Vindiciæ Antiq. Oxon. Thomæ Caii, p. 86; Biogr. Brit.) He was admitted, on the presentation of the king, to the archdeaconry of Sudbury in the church of Norwich on 5 Sept. 1677; and was instituted to the deanery of Ely on 9 Sept. 1677. He died on 27 May 1693, and was buried in the college chapel, where a monument with a Latin inscription was erected to his memory. He was a great benefactor to the college, He married Hannah, daughter of Isaac Puller of Hertford, and sister of Timothy Puller [q. v.] She died in 1674, leaving one daughter (Elizabeth) and one son (John).
Spencer was an erudite theologian and Hebraist, and to him belongs the honour of being the first to trace the connection between the rites of the Hebrew religion and those practised by kindred Semitic races. In 1669 he published a 'Dissertatio de Urin. et Thummin' (Cambridge, 8vo), in which he referred those mystic emblems to an Egyptian origin. The tract was republished in the following year, and afterwards, in 1744, by Blasius Ugolinus in 'Thesaurus Antiquitatum.' This was the prelude to a more extensive work. In 1685 appeared Spencer's chief publication, his 'De Legibus Hebræorum, Ritualibus et earum Rationibus libri tres' (Cambridge, 1685, fol.; The Hague, 1686, 4to, libri quattuor). In this work, which included the earlier treatise on Urim and Thummin, Spencer deserted the time-honoured paths traced by commentators, and 'may justly be said to have laid the foundations of the science of comparative religion. In its special subject, in spite of certain defects, it still remains by far the most important book on the religious antiquities of the Hebrews' (Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 1894, Pref. p. vi). The remarkable nature of Spencer's achievement is enhanced when, it is remembered that oriental studies were then in their infancy, and that he was compelled to derive nearly all his data from classical writers of Greece
