Life
He was born in Stratford-le-Bow, Middlesex, and baptised on 6 November 1575. He was educated at Felsted, St. Paul's School, Eton College, and King's College, Cambridge. He graduated B.A. in 1598 and M.A. in 1601.
Before moving to London, he was a Fellow and lecturer at Cambridge, where he caused a near-riot by his advocacy of Ramism over the traditional methods of Aristotle. (This story about Gouge, who lectured on logic, is related in Wilbur Samuel Howell's Logic and Rhetoric in England 1500-1700 (1956) as an account from Samuel Clarke, and is not reliably dated.)
At Blackfriars, he was initially assistant to Stephen Egerton (c.1554-1622), taking over as lecturer.
He proposed an early dispensational scheme. He took an interest in Sir Henry Finch's Calling of the Jews, and published it under his own name; this led to a spell of imprisonment in 1621, since the publication displeased James I of England.
Already nearly 70 years old, he attended the Westminster Assembly regularly, and was made chairman in 1644 of the committee set up to draft the Westminster Confession. The other original members of the committee were John Arrowsmith, Cornelius Burges, Jeremiah Burroughs, Thomas Gataker, Thomas Goodwin, Joshua Hoyle, Thomas Temple, and Richard Vines He also acted as an Assessor.
Read more about this topic: William Gouge
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)
“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Through the certain prospect of death, a precious, sweet- smelling drop of levity might be mixed into every life—but now you strange pharmacist-souls have turned it into a foul-tasting drop of poison through which all life is made repulsive.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)