Lant Carpenter (September 2, 1780 - April 5/6, 1840) was an English educator and Unitarian minister.
Carpenter was born in Kidderminster, the son of a carpet manufacturer. After some months at a non-conformist academy at Northampton, he transferred to the University of Glasgow and then joined the ministry. After a short time as assistant master at a Unitarian school near Birmingham, in 1802 he was appointed librarian at the Liverpool Athenaeum.
In 1805 he became pastor of a chapel in Exeter, and he became the father of William Benjamin Carpenter. Later he moved to Bristol in (1817). At both Bristol and Exeter he was also engaged in school work, among his Bristol pupils being Harriet and James Martineau, Samuel Greg, and the Westminster Review's John Bowring.
Carpenter did much to broaden the spirit of English Unitarianism. He believed in the essential lawfulness of the creation: this meant that natural causes were the explanation of the world as we find it. The rite of baptism seemed to him a superstition and he substituted for it a form of infant dedication.
His health, undermined by his constant labours, broke down in 1839 and he was ordered to travel. He was drowned, having been washed overboard from the steamer in which he was travelling from Livorno to Marseille.
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