Raffles, Thomas

Name ID: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q16854223

Born: 1788

Died: 1863

Faith: Congregationalist

Note: Thomas Raffles was a Congregational minister. was born in Princes Street, Spitalfields, London, on 17 May 1788, the only son of William Raffles (1753–1825 ), a Baptist and a solicitor (d. 1825), and his wife, Rachel, née Dunsby (1755–1832). Thomas's sister, Mary (d. 1858), later married the judge James Baldwin Brown (1790–1843). Between 1805 and 1809 he studied at Homerton College under Dr John Pye Smith. He declined a call to Hanover Street, Long Acre, but settled at George Yard Chapel, Hammersmith, and was ordained on 22 June 1809. On the sudden death of Thomas Spencer of Newington Chapel, Liverpool, Raffles was invited to succeed him. He began his Liverpool ministry on 19 April 1812, and moved on 27 May to the new Great George Street Chapel which had been built to accommodate Spencer's swelling congregation... Besides his verse compositions and his translation of Klopstock's Messiah (1814), Raffles published his Memoirs of Thomas Spencer (1813), Letters during a Tour through France, Savoy, etc. (1818), Lectures on Practical Religion (1820), Lectures on the Doctrines of the Gospel (1822), Hear the Church! A Word for All. By a Doctor of Divinity, but not of Oxford (1839—a riposte to Pusey), The Divine Command: a Jubilee Sermon to the London Missionary Society (1844—interesting in that it produced a premillennialist backlash), Internal Evidence of the Inspiration of Scripture (1849), and Independency at St Helens (1856). He edited a new edition of John Brown's Self-Interpreting Bible (1815). (source: ODNB)