Francis Webb

Francis Webb (1735–1815) was a  General Baptist minister and writer from Taunton. He studied under Caleb Ashworth in 1753 and Thomas Amory at Taunton. His first ministry was at the General Baptist church in Honiton, after which he came to the church in St Paul’s Alley, London, assisting Joseph Burroughs. He succeeded Burroughs in 1761, but resigned in 1766, taking a secular position that paid a large sum of money for that day. In 1777 he retired to Dorset to purse a literary career. He was a firm supporter of the American cause. He was also an ardent supporter of the French Revolution and an early sympathizer of Napoleon (later changed), assisting in the Peace of Amiens. Webb inclined toward Arianism, but not the Socinianism of some of the General Baptists. His religious beliefs are detailed in Poems on Wisdom, on the Deity, on Genius (1790), and he defended religious liberty in An Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Kell, with an Ode on Fortitude (1789). Late in life in lived at Yeovil and joined the Unitarian meeting there, serving as a member of the Western Unitarian Society in 1814. His last work was Panharmonicon (1815), which embraces the harmony of the divine intelligence manifested in creation.