KEITH, GEORGE, about 1640-1715; b. Aberdeen, Scotland; educated for the Presbyterian ministry at the university there. He adopted Quaker principles about 1664, and was subsequently associated with both Robert Barclay and George Fox in Public discussions for the defense of the sect. In 1682 he taught a Quaker school, and In 1684 was imprisoned in Newgate for preaching without license and for refusing to take an oath. Not long after this he came to America and became surveyor-general of East Jersey. Subsequently, for a short time, be was master of a Quaker school in Philadelphia. In 1690 he visited New England as a Quaker preacher, where lie fell into religious disputation with Cotton and Increase Mather. On returning to Phila delphia he became involved in difficulties with his own sect upon doctrinal points, and was denounced as an apostate by William Penn. After this he organized a new sect of Christian (or Baptist) Quakers, contemptuously called by his opponents " Keithians."
liis next step was to enter the church of England, by which he was appointed a missionary to the members of the sect which he had founded and to the Quakers generally. From 1702 to 1705 he was engaged in this employment, traveling through the northern colonies in America, and preaching wherever he could gain a hearing. Hundreds of Quakers are said to have been baptized by him as a sign that they had renounced their former faith. He returned to England in 1706, and was appointed rector of Edburton in Sussex, where he died. He was a man of wide learning, and wrote extensively, first in favor of, then in opposition to, Quakerism, and published two volumes, giving an account of his travels and experiences in America. He was also the author of A New _theory of Longitude (1709).