[Thomas Williams attended and spoke at the City Philosophical Society during the years when Faraday and his friend, Benjamin Abbott, were members, though they were not contemporaries: Williams must have been at least 20 years older than Abbott and Faraday. He was a Dissenting minister and, in the 1790s, a fairly prolific writer on theology, the author of—among others— A Vindication of the Calvinist Doctrines of Human Depravity and a two-part rebuttal of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, titled The Age of Infidelity. In the nineteenth century he diversified into commenting on national politics, writing both on the amelioration of the condition of the poor and the folly of radicalism.

As a fellow member of metropolitan self-improvement societies, Williams gives an interesting comparison with Faraday, particularly in terms of their views on auto-didacticism and artisan self-improvement. Williams’ religious tenets, while Dissenting, differed significantly from Sandemanian beliefs; but it is his class politics more than his Calvinism that drives his argument in this lecture. Firmly on the side of popular education and against conservative reaction, Williams is careful to draw a very sharp distinction between his listeners and the poor whose claim to education is in doubt; he reassures his audience that far from stirring up popular revolt, the spread of knowledge through British society will result in a more peaceful nation: ‘the more enlightened are the lower classes, the less have we to apprehend from popular excesses.’ Thus Williams makes a direct connection between the maintenance of the social order in Britain and the spread of popular education—a far more topical and political comment than the members of the essay-circle were prepared to make.

Abbott noted in a memoir that Williams habitually broke or bent the CPS's ban on religious discussion. But Williams claimed in the preface to this lecture that he had respected the CPS's rules in drafting his talk and that the religious material included in the published version had been omitted from the lecture delivered at Dorset Street; accordingly, I have omitted it from the brief extract reprinted here.]