Farindon, Anthony

Farindon, Anthony an eminent divine of the Church of England, was born at Sunning, in Berkshire, England, in 1596; was admitted scholar of Trinity College, in Oxford, in 1612, and was elected fellow in 1617. He took his M.A. degree in 1620, and, entering into holy orders, he became a tutor in his college. In 1634, being then B.D., he was called to be vicar of Bray, in Berkshire, and soon was made divinity-reader in the king's chapel at Windsor. During the Civil War he was ejected for conformity to the Church of England, and was reduced to such extremities as to be very near starving. Sir John Robinson, alderman of London, and some of the parishioners of Milk Street, London, invited him to be pastor of St. Mary Msagdalen there, "which invitation he gladly accepted, and preached to the great liking of the royal party. In the year 1657 he published a folio volume of these sermons and dedicated them to his kind patron Robinson, 'as a witness or manifesto,' says he to him, 'of my deep apprehension of your many noble favors, and great charity to me and mine, when the sharpness of the weather and the roughness of the times had blown all from us, and well-nigh left us naked.'" He died at his house in Milk Street in September, 1658. Three posthumous volumes of his sermons (folio) were published (1658-1673) in 1663, a second folio volume of his sermons containing forty, and a third in 1673 containing fifty. He also left in manuscript several memorials of the life of Hales (q.v.) of Eton, his intimate friend. A new edition of his Sermons, with a Life of the Author by F. Jackson, appeared in London in 1849 (4 volumes, 8vo). They afford a "fine specimen of sterling English, and of rich and varied eloquence." See Wood, Athenae Oxonienses; Hook, Ecclesiastical Biography, 5:57; Jackson, Life of Farindon, prefixed to the new edition of his sermons.