Thomas Gibbons (359)

Thomas Gibbons (31 May 1720–22 February 1785) was a minister and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1775. Born in Suffolk County, England to an Independant minister and his wife, Gibbons was brought up in the English dissenter community, which separated themselves from the Church of England. Sent to grammar school and then the dissenting academy at Deptford, he was ordained in 1743 as minister of the Independent church at Haberdashers’ Hall. The next year the Congregational Fund and the King’s Head Society elected him tutor in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric at the Mile End dissenting academy. He began lecturing at various institutions, such as the meeting-house at Monkwell, Pinner’s Hall, and Little St. Helen’s. He earned his M.A. in 1760 after raising funds for the College of New Jersey, and his D.D. in 1764 from Aberdeen University. Gibbons was an influential member of the evangelical dissent movement of the eighteenth century and a leader of the London Independent Ministers. He campaigned to dissolve the legal obligation dissenting ministers faced to follow the Thirty-Nine Articles. Gibbons was also a good friend of Isaac Watts, famed hymn-writer and fellow dissenter, and composed Watt’s first biography. He wrote forty-four other publications, mainly sermons and religious verse. His diary offers a glimpse into the life of an industrious eighteenth-century minister, constantly attending banquets and transacting business. He lived like this until suffering a stroke in his local coffeehouse and dying in his home five days thereafter. (DNB)