Knollys, Hanserd

Knollys, Hanserd, an eminent English Baptist minister, was born in Chalkwell, Lincolnshire, in 1598. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, and after his graduation was ordained as a deacon, and then as a presbyter of the Church of England, and was presented by the bishop of Lincoln with the living at Humberstone. About 1632, beginning to doubt the lawfulness of conformity to the Church of England, he resigned his living, but continued to preach several years longer. In 1636 he was arrested for preaching the Gospel, and thrown into prison; but his keeper, being conscience-stricken, connived at his escape, and he came over to America early in 1638. He arrived at Boston, Mass., a persecuted fugitive, in a state of utter destitution, and was obliged to work daily at manual labor for his subsistence. At first he met with a cold reception in Boston, which was then in a ferment on the question of Antinomianism, and suspicious of all new-comers; but, being invited to preach in Dover, N. H., he went thither, and in 1638 founded the first church in that place. He returned to England in 1641, where he spent the next fifty years of his life. during that .most agitated period of English history, and died Sept. 19,1691. Mr. Knollys was an able minister, a most accomplished teacher of youth, a bold pioneer of religious liberty, a man of large public spirit, and pre-eminently great in the purity of his character. He published a little work on the Rudiments of Hebrew Grammar (1648, 12mo); also Flaming Fire in Zion (1646, 4to); and his Autobiography in 1672, which was brought down to his death by Wm. Kiffin (1692, 8vo; 1813, 12mo). See Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, 6:1. (J. L. S.)