Geree, John

, an English divine of the puritan cast, was born in Yorkshire in 1600, and in 1615 entered as a servitor of Magdalen-hall. In 1621 he took his degree of M. A. and being ordained, became minister of Tewkesbury, in Gloucestershire, where he was afterwards silenced by bishop Goodman for objecting to certain ceremonies of the church. In 1641 this suspension was removed by one of the parliamentary committees which took upon them to new-model the church. In 1645 he became by the same interest minister of St. Albans, and about four years afterwards that of St. Faith’s, under St. Paul’s, London. Although a puritan' in matters of the ceremonies and discipline, -he appears soon to have penetrated into the designs of the reformers of his age, and opposed the civil war, aad especiaMy the murder of the king, the barbarity of which is said to have hastened his death. He died at his house in Ivy-lane, Paternoster-row, in February 1649. Wood | gives a long list of sermons and tracts published by this author, against the baptists and independents; one of them is entitled “An exercise, wherein the evil of Health-drinking is by clear and solid arguments convinced,” 1648, 4to. Another, more useful in that age, was his “AstrologoMastix; or, the vanity of judicial astrology,” 1646. He had an elder brother, Stephen, also a puritan divine, who wrote against Dr. Crisp, in the Antinomian controversy. ¹