Thomas Brand (minister)

Thomas Brand (1635–1691) was an English nonconformist minister and divine.

Life

Brand was the son of the rector of Leaden Roothing, Essex. He was educated at Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, and Merton College, Oxford. There he studied law, and later entered the Temple.

An acquaintance with Samuel Annesley led Brand to decide to join the ministry. He entered the family of the Lady Dowager Roberts of Glassenbury, Kent, the education of whose four children he superintended. He caused the whole of his salary to be devoted to charity. He soon preached twice every Sunday, and frequently a third time in the evening, at a place two miles distant. He established weekly lectures at several places, and monthly fasts. On the death of the Rev. Mr. Poyntel of Staplehurst, he left Lady Roberts, went to Staplehurst, and was ordained. About two years later he married a widow, by whom he had several children, who all died young.

He continued at Staplehurst till driven away by persecution. After wanderings he settled near London. He built many meeting-houses, and contributed to their ministers' salaries. He gave away thousands of catechisms and other books, and reprinted twenty thousand of Joseph Alleine's Treatise on Conversion to be given away, altering the title to a Guide to Heaven. He and his friends sold bibles under cost price to all who desired them, provided they did not sell them again. Brand supported children of poor parents, and put them to trades. Jabez Earle, minister of the presbyterian congregation in Hanover Street, London, was one of his protégés. Brand said he ‘would not sell his estate because it was entailed, but he would squeeze it as long as he lived.’

Brand died 1 December 1691, and was buried in Bunhill Fields.

gollark: Across machines. Sanely.
gollark: I don't know of anything which can do shared memory.
gollark: Possibly not what you want, being a shell tool and all.
gollark: > GNU parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. A job can be a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables. A job can also be a command that reads from a pipe. GNU parallel can then split the input and pipe it into commands in parallel.
gollark: GNU parallel?

References

    "Brand, Thomas" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.

    Attribution

     This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Brand, Thomas". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.

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