 When a young man he left the Church of England, of which his father was a minister, and became a Catholic, joining the Dominican Order at Rome, where he passed his noviceship in the convent of Saints John and Paul on the Caelian Hill, then occupied by the English Dominicans.After his religious profession (1696) he was sent to Naples to the Dominican school of St. Thomas, where he displayed unusual mental ability.Upon the completion of his studies he was sent to the Flemish university of Louvain, where for nearly thirty years he taught philosophy, theology, Sacred Scripture and church history in the College of St. Thomas, established in 1697 for the Dominicans of England through the bequest of Cardinal Thomas Howard, O.P.