Religious Life
Newcomen is purported to have been more than a lay preacher as he was a teaching elder in the local Baptist church. He continued to business as a lay preacher, due almost certainly to the fact that the church could not afford to pay him as a full-time elder. His father had been one of a group who brought the well-known Puritan John Flavel to Dartmouth. Later one of Newcomen's business contacts in London, Edward Wallin, was another Baptist minister who had connections with the well known Dr. John Gill of Horsleydown, Southwark. Newcomen's connection with the Baptist church at Bromsgrove materially aided the spread of his steam engine.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Newcomen
Famous quotes containing the words religious and/or life:
“If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it. And no period of time can be happier or more prosperous, than those in which it is never regarded or heard of.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Through the certain prospect of death, a precious, sweet- smelling drop of levity might be mixed into every life—but now you strange pharmacist-souls have turned it into a foul-tasting drop of poison through which all life is made repulsive.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)