PEARSON, EDWARD, D.D., a learned divine of the English Church, was descended from the famous Dr John Pearson, Bishop of Chester, and was born at Norwich on the 7th November, 1756. He was educated at Sidney College, Cambridge, of which he afterwards became fellow and tutor. No sooner had he been appointed rector of Remptstone in Nottinghamshire in 1796, than he began a career of great professional activity. His zeal was manifested with marked effect in the inculcation of practical re-
ligion. He preached numerous sermons on special occasions, edited prayer-books and catechisms, and wrote tracts and discourses for the special enlightenment of the lower classes. Nor were his faculties less willingly exerted against schismatics. He published Three Plain Reasons against Separating from the Established Church, Three Plain Reasons for Infant Baptism, and An Admonition against Lay-Preaching. But it was for his bold attack on supposed heresies among the Anglican hierarchy that Dr Pearson was chiefly famous. In 1800 and 1801 successively he attacked the theoretical and the practical part of Paley's Moral and Political Philosophy; and in 1802 he published Remarks on the Controversy between the Arminian and the Calvinistic Ministers of the Church of England. He assailed the Calvinism of the evangelical party in the person of Overton of York in 1802, and of Simeon of Cambridge in 1810. His death happened in 1811, three years after he had been elected master of Sidney College, Cambridge. (See A Brief Memoir of the Life, Writings, and Correspondence of the Rev. Ed. Pearson, D.D., by W. P. Hunt, 1845, to which is appended a complete list of the author's writings.)