Thomas Langdon

Thomas (Langdon (1755-1824) was originally from Devon. He attended Bristol Academy, after which he worked a short time as an assistant to Daniel Turner at Abingdon before assuming the pastorate of the Baptist church at Leeds in 1782. He remained there the rest of his life, operating a school for most of those years. He was influenced theologically by Andrew Fuller and Robert Hall, the latter his friend and fellow student at Bristol in the late 1770s. He published a sermon on church constitution and terms of communion in 1790 and wrote a circular letter for the Yorkshire association in the summer of 1791. In March 1790 Langdon received an invitation from the Rev. J. Biggs, Baptist minister at Swift’s Alley, Dublin, to preach for the Dublin General Evangelical Society, the object of which was “to prevail upon, and defray the expenses of, such ministers as should be approved, to make visits to that country, to preach under their directions, whenever it should be thought practicable, either in town or country, with the hope of stirring up the people to regard their immortal interests.” In November 1790, after Biggs’s sudden death, the church at Swift’s-Alley sent a letter by William Allen to Langdon asking him to become their pastor, but Langdon declined. He was an ardent abolitionist and political reformer in the late 1780s and early 1790s, serving on the Yorkshire committee of Dissenters for the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts as well as assisting William Wilberforce in sending petitions from northern England to parliament in 1791 to protest the continuation of the slave trade. Langdon published The Obligations of Christians to Support a Conversation Becoming the Gospel in 1795. He was also a bookseller during much of the 1790s, and during 1795-1797 served as the distribution agent in Leeds for Benjamin Flower’s newspaper, the Cambridge Intelligencer. Langdon would also be instrumental in the formation of the Northern Education Society in 1804. See Mary Langdon, A Brief Memoir of the Rev. Thomas Langdon, Baptist Minister, of Leeds (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1837), 21, 23, 44-47; F. W. Beckwith, “The First Leeds Baptist Church,” Baptist Quarterly 6 (1932-1933), 72-82; Roger Hayden, Continuity and Change: Evangelical Calvinism among Eighteenth-Century Baptist Ministers trained at Bristol Academy, 1690–1791 (London: Baptist Historical Society, for Roger Hayden, 2006), 237.