It is usual in our day, with the Dissenting academies, to receive no one as student for the ministry who has not previously qualified himself by membership with the church which commends him. The practice appears to have been more liberal in Watts’ day. He was never a member of the church at Southampton, but in the third year of his residence with Mr. Rowe he united himself with the church of his tutor, as he enters it in his memoranda, “I was admitted to Mr. T. Rowe’s church December, 1693.” This church also, like so many of the Independent churches in the city, had a very honourable ancestry—as we have previously said, it then held its meetings in Girdlers’ Hall, Basinghall Street; after the death of Mr. Rowe it removed to Haberdashers’ Hall, but the church itself appears to have originated with the eminent William Strong, M.A., still held in honour by the lovers of old Puritan literature for his folio on the Covenants. He was a fellow of Katherine Hall, Cambridge, and rector of More Crichel, in Dorsetshire. This living during the Civil Wars he was compelled by the Cavaliers to relinquish, and, coming to London, he became minister of the church assembling in Westminster Abbey, and subsequently in the House of Lords. It is singular that thus both the ministers of the congregation in Girdlers’ Hall were originally pastors of the church in Westminster Abbey. Mr. Strong died in 1654, and was buried in the Abbey church, but upon the restoration his remains had, with those of Cromwell, Blake, and Pym, the honour of exhumation. Still, in the church when Watts became a member of it, lingered some of the old elements which first composed it; perhaps the most conspicuous of these was Major-General Goffe, the well-known name of one of the judges of Charles I.