Quotes:Collier, Jeremy

Zirkoff, Boris

Collier, Jeremy. English nonjuring divine, b. at Stow-with-Quy, Cambridgeshire, Sept. 23, 1650; d. April 26, 1726. Educated at Ipswich free school, and Caius Coll., Cambridge. Appointed to rectory of Ampton, 1679, and lecturer of Gray’s Inn, 1685. Was imprisoned twice during the revolution for loyalty to James II. In 1696, for his boldness in granting absolution on the scaffold to Sir John Friend and Sir Wm. Parkyns, who had attempted to assassinate William, he was obliged to flee, and for the rest of his life continued under sentence of outlawry. Returning to London after the storm had blown over, he published in 1697 the first volume of his Essays upon Several Moral Subjects, to which a second was added in 1705, and a third in 1709; it ran through at least seven editions. In 1698 he produced his famous Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, in which he vigorously attacked the alleged moral looseness of the contemporary stage. This resulted in a ten-year controversy. From 1701 to 1721, Collier was engaged in the writing of his Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical, and Poetical Dictionary, based upon Louis Moréri’s Dictionnaire historique, and in the compiling of the two volumes folio of his Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, etc. (1708-14). In 1712, George Hickes was the only survivor of the nonjuring bishops, and in the next year Collier was consecrated. He had a share in an attempt made towards union with the Greek Church. His last work was a volume of Practical Discourses, 1725.

Source: Boris de Zirkoff, «H. P. Blavatsky Collected Writings», vol. 8, p. 424