Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/411

HALL 391 There his precocity assumed the exceptional form of an intense interest in metaphysics, partly perhaps on account of the restricted character of his father s library; and before he was nine years of age he had read and re-read Jonathan Edward.s s Treatise on the Will and Butler s Analogy. This incessant study at such an early period of life seems, how ever, to have had an injurious influence on his health, and may have been partly the cause of the disease from which he experienced such suffering in after life, and symptoms of whose existence began at this time to manifest them selves. Occasionally he was already troubled with intense pain in the back, and after he left Mr Simmons s school his appearance was so sickly as to awaken fears of the presence of consumption. In order therefore to obtain the benefit of a change of air, he stayed for some time 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 Nor thampton conducted by the Rev. John Ryland, where he remained a year and a half, and " made 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 pre paration of students for the Baptist ministry. Here the self-possession which had enabled him in his twelfth year to address unfalteringly various audiences of grown-up people seems to have strangely forsaken him ; for when, in accordance with the arrangements of the academy, his turn came to deliver an address in the vestry of Broadmead Chapel, he broke down on two separate occasions and was unable to finish his discourse. On the 13th 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, Aberdeen, where he took the degree of master of arta in March 1785. At the university he was without a rival of his own standing in any of the classes, distinguishing himself alike in classics, philosophy, and mathematics. He there formed the acquaintance of Mackintosh (afterwards Sir James), who, though a year his junior in age, was a year his senior as a student, and who be came attached to him "because he could not help it." 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. The interest of their conversation seems to have lain more in the difference than the agreement of their opinions; but their controversies, so far from causing any even temporary estrangement, tended only to cement more closely their friendship and to deepen in each the respect for the mental and moral qualities of the other. During the vacation between his last two sessions at Aberdeen, Hall acted as assistant pastor to Dr Evans at Broadmead Chapel, Bristol, and three months after leaving the university he was appointed classical tutor in the Bristol academy, an office which he held for more than five years. Even at this period his extraordinary eloquence had excited an interest beyond the bounds of the denomination to which he belonged, and when he preached the chapel was gene rally crowded to excess, the audience including many persons of intellectual tastes. It would appear, however, that, in th.e case of Mr Fuller, Dr Ryland, and other theo logical authorities, his exuberant intellectual energy and his outspoken expression of tolerance for certain aspects of Socinianism caused trembling to be greatly mingled with their admiration; and ultimately, suspicions in regard to his orthodoxy having in 1789 led to a misunderstanding with his colleague and a part of the congregation, he in July 1790 accepted an invitation to make trial of a congre gation at Cambridge, of which he became pastor in July of the following year. From a statement of his opinions contained in a letter to the congregation which he left, it would appear that, while a firm believer in the proper divinity of Christ, he had at this time disowned the cardinal principles of Calvinism the federal headship of Adam, and the doctrine of absolute election and reprobation ; and that he was so far a materialist as to " hold that man s thinking powers and faculties are the result of a certain organization of matter, and that after death he ceases to be conscious till the resurrection." It was during his Cambridge ministry, which extended over a period of fifteen years, that his oratory was most brilliant and most immediately powerful. At Cambridge the intellectual character of a large part of the audience supplied a stimulus which was wanting at Leicester and Bristol, but besides this his physical powers were then at their best, and were still un affected by the constant pain which already so severely tested his powers of endurance and rendered the discharge of his duties such a marvellous triumph of will. Above all it was not till near the close of this period that his intellectual pathway was crossed by the shadow of mental derangement, and an element of weakness and uncertainty introduced into his career which for some time clouded the horizon of his hopes and perhaps placed a permanent check on his highest form of intellectual enterprise. While at Cambridge he gave to the world some of the more important of the few and small publications which, although those who were his constant hearers have affirmed that several of his imperfectly reported sermons convey a juster impres sion of the usual character of his oratory, are the only correct and properly authenticated records of his style of thought and composition. His first published compositions had a political origin. In 1791 appeared Christianity con sistent with the Love of Freedom, in which he defended the political conduct of dissenters against the attacks of the Rev. John Clayton, minister of Weighhouse, and gave eloquent expression to his hopes of great political and social ameliora tions as destined to result nearly or remotely from the sub version of old ideas and institutions in the maelstrom of the French Revolution. In 1793 he expounded his politi cal sentiments in a powerful and more extended pamphlet entitled an Apology for the Freedom of the Press, which at once obtained an extensive circulation, and doubtless to some extent aided in the formation of that public opinion which has given birth in England to the present remarkable era of gradual and unswerving political progress. On account, however, of certain asperities into which the warmth of his feelings had betrayed him, and his conviction that he had treated his subject in too superficial a manner, he refused to permit the publication of the pamphlet beyond the third edition, until the references of political opponents and the circulation of copies without his sanction induced him in 1821 to prepare a new edition, from which he omitted the attack on Bishop Horsley, and to which he prefixed an advertisement stating that his political opinions had under gone no substantial change. His other publications while at Cambridge were three sermons On Modern Infidelity (1801), Reflections on War (1802), and Sentiments proper to the present Crisis (1803). From his first attack of insanity, which occurred in November 1804, he recovered so speedily that he was able to resume his duties in April 1805, but a more severe recurrence of the malady rendered it advisable for him on his second recovery to resign his pastoral office, which he did in March 1806. On leaving Cambridge he paid a visit to his relatives in Leicestershire, and then for some

time resided at Enderby, preaching occasionally in some of