Josiah Pratt

PRATT, Josiah. b. Birmingham, 21 December 1768: d. London, 10 October 1844. He was the son of a manufacturer, brought up in a pious evangelical household. He was destined to continue in the business, but received his father’s permission to become a minister of religion. He was educated at a school near Birmingham, and then at St Edmund Hall, Oxford (1789-92), followed by ordination (deacon 1792, priest 1795). After a curacy at Bewdley, Worcestershire, he moved to London in 1795 to become an assistant at St John’s Chapel, Bedford Row. He founded a periodical, the Christian Observer, and edited its first numbers in 1802. Later that year he became the Secretary of the Church Missionary...