At some time during his ‘teens Richard Lower left the church of his fathers – the Church of England – and joined a Congregationalist chapel. In view of his lines on the death of Thomas Susan, it seems a reasonable guess that his old Alfriston schoolmaster influenced his conversion to Nonconformism; but it would, nevertheless, have been strange if an intelligent, book-reading, thoughtful son of an artisan in the last decade of the 18^th century had NOT been one of the many thousands who reacted against the Established Church as an institution filled with abuses but empty of spirituality. Something like a third of Church of England parishes had no incumbent, yet some Anglican clergy drew the tithes of two, three or even more benefices. The great clergy – the bishops and others with influence – were often very rich whilst many parishes were left solely to the care of curates whose stipends were often so small that they were almost as poor as most of their parishioners. When many of the clergy were the younger sons of landed gentry, established by family patronage in comfortable ecclesiastical sinecures with little or no regard to the spiritual welfare of their “flocks”, it is not surprising that many members of the latter rebelled against them.

The most famous name in the great upsurge of a renewed belief in individual faith, free of priests and prelates, was, of course, John Wesley. Soon hundreds of lay preachers were expounding his beliefs, or something akin to them. Religion was personal. Salvation was open to every individual whose soul was born into a vision of God. God must be approached directly, not through the intervention of anyone else. The Congregationalists further believed that where people came together to worship as a chapel, their affairs were solely their own concern and could not and should not be influenced by any outside or higher body.

One great Congregationalist preacher was George Gilbert of Heathfield, the village where the River Cuckmere rises on the sandstone ridge running north-west from Hastings. Like Wesley, he preached far and wide, wherever he could, in open fields if need be, when no roof could be found to give him shelter. Many of the landed gentry around Heathfield demanded that his employer, Sir George Willot (later Lord Heathfield) should sack him, but Sir George rejects the demands. Instead he helped Gilbert to build a chapel in Heathfield in 1769. Very soon its fifty seats were proving inadequate to accommodate all those who came to worship in it and in 1782 the chapel was enlarged. That same year his congregation raised enough money to guarantee Gilbert a stipend of £28 so that he could devote all his energies to preaching without financial worries. Six years later the Congregational Fund Board added another £6 per annum to this stipend and in 1808 the congregation of the Heathfield Independent Chapel again collected money – this time over £1,000 – for the building of yet a larger place of worship. Richard Lower was part of that congregation. In it, some ten years earlier, he had discovered his future wife.