[1][4] The elder James Stillingfleet, a Fellow of Merton College until 1767, was prominent in Oxford as a leading evangelical: he led Methodist prayer meetings, associated with Richard Hill and was a contact of John Newton who mentioned him to Alexander Clunie in 1766.
[8][11] Stillingfleet became a close friend of Joseph Milner, who taught at Hull Grammar School from 1767, and was curate at North Ferriby from 1768.
A third in the group of close friends was William Richardson of York (1745–1821):[12] he was a pupil at St Bees School of John James (1729–1785), ordained in 1768 by Robert Hay Drummond to a curacy at Kirbymoorside.
[13][14] Milner's The History of the Church of Christ became a standard work and was a product of the early years of the 1770s when he had become a convinced evangelical and lost friends in Hull.
He was a pupil of Milner at Hull Grammar School, and went on to Clare College, Cambridge in 1791, associating with followers of Charles Simeon, and graduating B.A.
[8] Thomas Adam, parish priest at Wintringham for half a century, ran a "Parson's Club" and associated with Stillingfleet and his friends.
[13][20] A slim volume of diary entries from these Works, entitled Private Thoughts on Religion, became a religious classic.
[13][23] John Henry Overton, writing in 1881, called Private Thoughts a "once popular devotional book", but also "of no small merit", characterising Stillingfleet as Adam's "pious and accomplished biographer" who revived interest in William Law.
[8] William Taylor How was a friend of Thomas Gray, a graduate and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and died in 1777.