Robert Hall (minister)

He was sent to stay 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 Northampton run by John Ryland, where he remained a year and a half, and "hath great progress in Latin and Greek".

Here his earlier confidence seems to have deserted him; when, in accordance with the arrangements of the academy, his turn came to deliver an address in the vestry of Broadmead chapel, be broke down on two separate occasions and was unable to finish.

On 13 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, University of Aberdeen, where he took the degree of master of arts in March 1785.

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.

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 generally crowded to excess, the audience including many intellectuals.

As a result of suspicions in regard to his orthodoxy, he accepted an invitation to make trial of a congregation at St Andrew's Street Baptist Chapel Cambridge, of which he became pastor in July 1791.

From the contents of 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; 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".