Hugh Farmer

Hugh Farmer (20 January 1714, – 5 February 1787) was an English Dissenter and theologian.

He was educated at the Dissenting Academy in Northampton under Philip Doddridge, and became pastor of a congregation at Walthamstow, Essex. In 1701 he became preacher and one of the Tuesday lecturers at Salters' Hall, London. He was a believer in miracles, but wrote against the existence of supernatural evil. He viewed the devil as allegorical.

Life A younger son of William and Mary Farmer, he was born on 20 January 1714 at the Isle Gate farm in a Shropshire hamlet called the Isle, within the parish of St. Chad, Shrewsbury. His mother was a daughter of Hugh Owen of Bronycludwr, Merionethshire, one of the nonconformists of 1662. Farmer was at school at Llanegryn, Merionethshire, and then under Charles Owen, at Warrington. In 1731 he entered the dissenting academy run by Philip Doddridge at Northampton; to his tutor's preaching and his reading of the sermons of Joseph Boyse he attributed his religious impressions. On leaving the academy (1736) he became assistant to David Some of Market Harborough (d. May 1737).

Early in 1737 he took charge of a struggling congregation at Walthamstow, founded by Samuel Slater, a minister ejected from St. James's, Bury St Edmunds. He at first lodged in London, only five miles away, but was then received into the family of William Snell, a chancery solicitor, and friend of Doddridge. Farmer made an increase in the congregation. In July, Doddridge, who had been asked to find a minister for the independent congregation at Taunton, applied to Farmer, who declined the overture; he explained that he was not Calvinistic enough for Taunton, the liberal element in the congregation having seceded with Thomas Amory. At Walthamstow was William Coward (died 1738), a benefactor to dissenting causes. Thomas Belsham was invited to succeed him, but declined.

Works Farmer published:

The Duty of Thanksgiving, &c. 1746, (a sermon, 9 October, on the battle of Culloden). Inquiry into the Nature and Design of our Lord's Temptation in the Wilderness (1761). This went through three editions in Farmer's lifetime; the fourth (1805) was edited by Jeremiah Joyce; a fifth appeared in 1822. John Mason of Cheshunt (According to his biographer "...[from] Dorking, Surrey[, John Mason moved]...) in July 1746 ... as minister ... of a congregation at ... Cheshunt" were printed:

'A Reply' to John Fell, on the General Prevalence; and nine extracts from 'An Essay on the Case of Balaam,’ from a transcript made by Michael Dodson.

Farmer's will instructed his executors, on pain of losing their legacies, to burn all his manuscripts; he had nearly completed a volume on the demonology of the ancients. He supplied Samuel Palmer with some details of Hugh Owen for the Nonconformist's Memorial (1775). Six of his letters to Isaac Toms of Hadleigh, Suffolk, are printed with the 'Memoirs.'