John Sergeant

John Sergeant was an English Catholic priest, controversialist and theologian, born in 1621. The son of a Lincolnshire yeoman, he studied at St John's College, Cambridge, served as secretary to the Anglican Bishop of Durham, and converted to Catholicism as a result of his reading of the Church Fathers. After ordination in 1650 he taught at the English College in Lisbon, where he also taught philosophy, and for some twenty years he was engaged in controversy with Anglicans such as Edward Stillingfleet and John Tillotson and with fellow Catholics who differed from Thomas White. He opposed Jesuit influence in the English Catholic Church and left more than fifty works. Late in life he wrote three philosophical books, The Method to Science, Solid Philosophy Asserted, which criticised John Locke's Essay, and Transnatural Philosophy, or Metaphysicks. He died in 1707 or 1710.