One of the leading rational Dissenters of his day, the Welshman Richard Price was born on 23 February 1723 at Llangeinor, Glamorgan, the son of Rice Price, a strict Presbyterian teacher and minister. Educated at a succession of Dissenting academies until 1744, he became the house chaplain to a wealthy Stoke Newington businessman. Financially independent through several inheritances, Price settled as minister at Newington Green in 1758, remaining there for nearly thirty years and also preaching at the Gravel Pit Chapel, Hackney, from 1770 to 1791.

A philosopher as well as mathematician, Price in his A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties of Morals (1758) argues chiefly that actions were in themselves right or wrong and that the simple ideas of right and wrong could be perceived immediately by the intuitive power of the understanding. He also conducted an elaborate correspondence with his friend and fellow Dissenter Joseph Priestley on the question of freedom...