Tayler, JOHN JAMES, an eminent Unitarian divine, was born at Newington Butts, August 15, 1797, son of a minister in London, next at Nottingham. He studied at Manchester New College (which was located at York 1803-40), at Glasgow University, and again at York, was ordained to Mosely Street Chapel at Manchester in 1821, and became professor of Ecclesiastical History in 1840 on the return of the college to Manchester. He spent a year (1834-35) in study at Göttingen and Bonn, removed with his college to London in 1853, becoming principal as well as professor, was joint-minister with James Martineau of Little Portland Street Chapel (1858-60), and died 28th May 1869. He wrote much for the Prospective Review, which passed in 1855 into the National Review, and made way in 1864 for the Theological Review, a list of as many as 102 books, discourses, and articles being appended to the collection of his Letters, edited by J. Hamilton Thom (2 vols. 1872).
Of the books the chief were A Retrospect of the Religious Life of England (1845), which Martineau styles 'the most charming of ecclesiastical histories'; Christian Aspects of Faith and Duty (1851); and An Attempt to ascertain the Character of the Fourth Gospel (1867).