Lazarus Seaman

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Lazarus Seaman, English Presbyterian and Covenanter (c. 1607 - September 3, 1675), was a member of the Westminster Assembly, where he advocated Presbyterian church government jus divinum, and served as the scribe of the Provincial Assembly of London Ministers. Seaman said, concerning the Shorter Catechism, that the answers were framed not according to the knowledge that a child had but according to the knowledge that a child should have (S.W. Carruthers, B.B. Warfield). He proposed that the Assembly provide "something annexed by way of caution to shew how the proofs are to be applied" but this proposal was declined by the Assembly (Carruthers). He was ejected in 1662 though he had opposed the execution of Charles I. He kept the minutes of the Provincial Assembly in his personal library once it ceased to meet at Sion College just prior to the Restoration. He wrotes Notes on Revelation which were never published. After his death they were purchased by Joseph Hill when his entire library comprising 5,000 volumes was sold by William Cooper at the first modern book auction in England after his death, which took place in November 1676, and ultimately returned to the (now episcopal) library of Sion College (see Thomas M'Crie, Annals of English Presbytery, p. 220; Alfred W. Pollard, Old Picture Books, with other Essays on Bookish Subjects (1902), The First English Book Sale p. 159 ff.). His funeral sermon was preached by William Jenkyn, who said that he:

was an ocean of Theology, and that he had so thoroughly digested the whole body of divinity, that he could upon all occasions discourse upon any point without labour. He was a living body of Divinity, and his tongue as the pen of a ready writer. He was a person of great stability and steadiness in the truth. I am confident that he valued one truth of Christ, above all the wealth of both the Indies.

[Edited on 9-5-2006 by VirginiaHuguenot]