William Jones (ecclesiastic)

William Jones (July 30, 1726 – January 6, 1800), known as William Jones of Nayland, was a British clergyman and author.

He was born at Lowick, Northamptonshire, but was descended from an old Welsh family. One of his ancestors was Colonel John Jones, brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell. He was educated at Charterhouse School and University College, Oxford. There a kindred taste for music, as well as a similarity in regard to other points of character, led to his close intimacy with George Horne, afterwards bishop of Norwich, whom he induced to study Hutchinsonian doctrines.

After obtaining his bachelor's degree in 1749, Jones held various preferments. In 1777 he obtained the perpetual curacy of Nayland, Suffolk, and on Horne's appointment to Norwich became his chaplain, afterwards writing his life. His vicarage became the centre of a High Church "coterie", and Jones himself was a link between the non-jurors and the Oxford Movement. He could write intelligibly on abstruse topics.

In 1756 Jones published his tractate "On the Catholic Doctrine of the Trinity", a statement of the doctrine from the Hutchinsonian point of view, with a succinct and able summary of biblical proofs. This was followed in 1762 by an "Essay on the First Principles of Natural Philosophy", in which he maintained the theories of Hutchinson in opposition to those of Sir Isaac Newton, and in 1781 he dealt with the same subject in "Physiological Disquisitions". Jones was also the originator of the "British Critic" (May 1793).

His collected works, with a life by William Stevens, appeared in 1801, in 12 vols., and were condensed into 6 vols in 1810. A life of Jones, forming pt. 5 of the "Biography of English Divines", was published in 1849.

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*worldcat id|lccn-n84-804072