John Norris, an English clergyman, born at Collingborne-Kingston, Wiltshire, in 1657, died at Bemerton in 1711. He graduated at Exeter college, Oxford, in 1680, and became a disciple of Malebranche. His first original work, entitled "An Idea of Happiness" (1083), at once gave him a position in the ranks of the Platonic divines of the 17th century. The Rye house plot of 1683 led him to attack the whigs in a treatise entitled "A Murnival of Knaves, or Whiggism Displayed and Burlesqued out of Countenance." Soon afterward he published a Latin work against the theology of the Genevan divines, and in 1691 a treatise against the nonconformists. In 1684 he took orders, and in the same year published a volume entitled "Poems and Discourses," which was followed in 1687 by his "Miscellanies" in prose and verse, which reached a ninth edition in 1730. In 1684 he began a correspondence with Dr. Henry More in regard to some speculative difficulties, which lasted three years, and was published in 1688. In that year he published " The Theory and Regulation of Love." In 1689 he published a treatise on "Reason and Religion," and in 1690 four volumes of "Practical Discourses on the Beatitudes," of which a tenth edition was published in 1724, under the title "Christian Blessedness." In 1692 he attacked the views of the Quakers, and shortly after was made rector of Bemerton near Salisbury. In 1695 he published "Letters concerning the Love of God." The deist John Toland having written a treatise entitled "Christianity not Mysterious," Norris published in 1697 in answer, "An Account of Reason and Faith in relation to the Mysteries of Christianity." In 1701 he published "An Essay toward the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World," of which the second part appeared in 1704; and in 1708 the "Natural Immortality of the Soul".