In the same year he commenced his literary career, when Benjamin Davenport and Joseph Johnson published Hazlitt's Sermon on Human Mortality.

[2] Hazlitt's writings at this time included pamphlets entitled The Methodists Vindicated (1771) and Human Authority in Matters of Faith Repugnant to Christianity (1774).

[24] Indeed, the publication of Hazlitt's edition of Priestley's writings was motivated by the need to publish a profitable work, which would make up for the losses that Common Sense incurred.

[26] When Dickinson College was founded in 1783, Hazlitt had the opportunity to become its first principal, in addition to being appointed to a living at Carlisle which brought 400 guineas a year.

[27] During this time Hazlitt delivered lectures on the evidences of Christianity at the University of Pennsylvania, and published popular sermons and tracts, in addition to writing for several local periodicals.

On 19 June 1785, the King's Chapel changed its liturgy, removing references to the Trinity and adopting a new prayer book; in November 1787 it ended its affiliation with the Episcopal Church altogether.

He questioned the Biblical basis for praising the Holy Spirit, and disputed the value of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, as he had done in his writings from the previous decade.

Hazlitt ministered at a dissenting meeting house in the town, for which he received a meagre annual stipend of £30, and ran the local school.

While the Reverend William Hazlitt's intensive tutoring of his son may explain in part the brilliance of the latter's subsequent writings, it was also responsible for his physical and mental breakdown under the strain of his father's expectations.

[35] When the younger Hazlitt left the New College at Hackney after only two years, thereby signalling that he would never follow his father into the Unitarian ministry, the latter was bitterly disappointed.

Here he passed his days, repining, but resigned, in the study of the Bible and the perusal of the Commentators – huge folios, not easily got through, one of which would outlast a winter!

Sitting in the chapel at Wem, with the winter sun raking across the subject's face, the painter described his 64-year-old father as "then in a green old age, with strong-marked features, and scarred with the smallpox", who read an old copy of Shaftesbury's Characteristics as he sat.

[39] Paulin has argued that the younger Hazlitt's reference to Shaftesbury is significant, because it establishes "a deliberate connection between advanced Whig culture and his father in the tiny Unitarian meeting-house in Wem".