He was educated for the ministry at Homerton, and settled as a congregationalist minister at Square Chapel, Halifax, in 1829.
After a sojourn of some years in the south of England he returned to Halifax, and made public manifestation of his new views in some lectures on the Atonement (1849) at Northgate End, of which he became minister in January 1854 on the death of William Turner.
Through his first wife (d. September 1857), the elder daughter of Riley Kitson, of Halifax, he had acquired considerable property.
Through life he adhered to the Paley type of teleology, and his unitarianism was cast in a scriptural mould.
'A Review of Trinitarianism, chiefly as it appears in the writings of Bull, Waterland, Sherlock, Howe, Newman, Coleridge, Wallis, and Wardlaw,’ Lond.