Career
He became a Brownist, and because of religious persecutions was compelled to leave England. He lived in straitened circumstances at Amsterdam; in 1593 he had to work as a porter for a bookseller. In 1596 he was appointed teacher of the independent church where Francis Johnson was minister in Amsterdam.
All was not going well with the church, however; Ainsworth and Johnson found themselves disagreeing on many points, especially in their ideas of what the power of the church ought to be. In 1610 Ainsworth and his followers withdrew, but they seemed to have won a lawsuit giving them possession of the church building. Ainsworth was both an apologist of early Congregationalism and a distinguished scholar of rabbinical and Oriental literature.
