"I am sorry such words should come from the mouth and pen of a dignified clergyman of the Church of England. Alas! how is she fallen! or, at least, in what danger must her tottering ark be, when such unhallowed hands are stretched out to support it! Well may I bear patiently to be styled a blasphemer, and a setter forth of strange doctrines, when my dear Lord Jesus is thus traduced, and when those who pretend to preach in His name urge this example to patronise licentiousness and excess!" A more lengthy and less temperate critique by Whitefield will be mentioned shortly. Meanwhile, a reply was published by the Rev. Robert Seagrave, M.A., in an octavo pamphlet of 32 pages, with the title, "An Answer to the Reverend Dr. Trapp's four Sermons against Mr. Whitefield, shewing the Sin and Folly of being Angry over-much." The title-page also bore the following text from the Apocrypha: "He was made to reprove our thoughts. He is grievous unto us even to behold; for His life is not like other men's; His ways are of another fashion (Wisdom ii. 14, 15)." This pamphlet passed through two editions in the year 1739. Mr. Seagrave was born on November 22, 1693, at Twyford, in Leicestershire, where his father was vicar from 1687 to 1720. At the age of seventeen, he was admitted sizar of Clare Hall, Cambridge, where he subsequently took the degrees of B.A. and M.A.[205] He heartily sympathised with Whitefield; and failing to obtain a church, or, perhaps, not desiring to be the minister of one, he became, in 1739, a sort of extra parochial clergyman, and occupied the Lorimers' or Leather-Cutters' Hall, situated at the north end of Basinghall Street. This hall, for at least forty years, had been used as a dissenting meeting-house, first by the Particular Baptists, and next by a Society of Independents. Here, in 1706, the celebrated Dr. Daniel Neal was ordained, and officiated as minister, until his increasing congregation rendered it necessary to remove to a larger meeting-house in Jewin Street.[206] [205] Seagrave's Hymns, republished, with Preface, by Daniel Sedgwick, 1860. [206] Wilson's "Dissenting Churches," vol. ii., p. 559. For some years, Mr. Seagrave preached in Lorimers' Hall with much success. "He was a good minister of Jesus Christ, a workman who needed not to be ashamed. He was a man of eminent piety, great humility, and remarkable zeal and diligence, and very exemplary in the whole of his conversation. Besides his Answer to Dr. Trapp, he was the author of "Observations upon the Conduct of the Clergy in Relation to the Thirty-Nine Articles, with an Essay towards a Real Protestant Establishment;" also "A Letter to the People of England;"[207] and likewise "Hymns for Christian Worship, 1742." He was also the author of about half a dozen other pamphlets, tracts, and sermons. [207] _Evangelical Magazine_, 1814, p. 304.