the 3rd of February, 1610. From a passing notice of A. à Wood, and an
incidental allusion in his own works, he may be presumed to have
passed some time at Cambridge, though with what views, or at what
period of his life, is uncertain. He was ordained Presbyter by Dr.
Morton, when Bishop of Durham, who was, it will be recollected, the
sagacious prelate by whom the frauds of the boy of Bilson were
detected. In the year 1634, Webster was curate of Kildwick in Craven,
and while in that cure the scene occurred which he has so vividly
sketched in the passage after quoted, and which supplied the hint, and
laid the foundation, for the work which has perpetuated his fame. How
long he continued in this cure we know not: but, if one authority may
be relied on, he was Master of the Free Grammar School at Clitheroe in
1643. To this foundation he may be considered as a great benefactor,
for, from information supplied from a manuscript source, I find that
he recovered for its use, with considerable trouble and no small
personal charge, an income of about £60. per annum, which had been
given to the school, but was illegally diverted and withheld. From
this period there is a blank in his biography for about ten years.
Most probably his life was rambling and desultory. He speaks of
himself as having been about that time a chaplain in the army. His
first two works, published in 1653 and 1654, "The Saints' Guide," and
"The Judgment Set and the Books Opened,"[24] show that in the
interval he had deserted the Established Church, and, probably, after
some of those restless fluctuations of belief to which men of his
ardent temperament are subject, settled at last in a wilder sort of
Independency, which he eulogizes as "unmanacling the simple and pure
light of the Gospel from the chains and fetters of cold and dead
formality, and of restrictive and compulsory power." His language in
these two works is more assimilated to that of the Seekers or Quakers,
which it resembles in the cloudy mysteriousness of its phraseology,