Anthony Terill was an English Catholic theologian and Jesuit.

His mother was Catholic but his father was Protestant. In his fifteenth year, he was converted to Catholicism and left England, taking the alias Terill (previously Bonville). He studied for about three years at the English College of St. Omer, and then began his studies for the priesthood at the English College, Rome, where he was ordained on 16 March 1687.

Two months later he entered the Jesuit novitiate

Novitiate

Novitiate, alt. noviciate, is the period of training and preparation that a novice monastic or member of a religious order undergoes prior to taking vows in order to discern whether they are called to the religious life....

 at St. Andrea. After his noviceship he was successively penitentiary

Penitentiary

Penitentiary may refer to:* Prison or penitentiary, a correctional facility* Apostolic Penitentiary, a tribunal of mercy, responsible for issues relating to the forgiveness of sins in the Roman Catholic Church* Penitentiary...

 at Loreto

Loreto (AN)

Loreto is a hilltown and comune of the Italian province of Ancona, in the Marche. It is mostly famous as the seat of the Basilica della Santa Casa, a popular Catholic pilgrimage site.-Location:...

, professor of philosophy at Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, professor of philosophy and scholastic theology at Parma

Parma

Parma is a city in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna famous for its ham, its cheese, its architecture and the fine countryside around it. This is the home of the University of Parma, one of the oldest universities in the world....

, director of theological studies and professor of theology and mathematics at the English College, Liège

Liège

Liège is a major city and municipality of Belgium located in the province of Liège, of which it is the economic capital, in Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium....

, and for three years rector of the same college where he died with a reputation for "extraordinary piety, talent, learning, and prudence".

Works

He wrote Conclusiones philosophicæ (Parma, 1657), Problema mathematico-philosophicum de termino magnitudinis se virium in animalibus (Parma, 1660), Fundamentum totius theologiæ moralis, seu tractatus de conscientia probabili(Liège, 1668), and Regula morum, which was published shortly after his death (Liège, 1677). His reputation as a moral theologian was established by these last two works. In the Fundamentum he ably defended the doctrine of probabilism and in the Regula morum refuted the objections brought against his first work by the Dominican Concina, the Jesuit Miguel de Elizalde (1617-1678) and other exponents of the Rigorist School. Amort speaks of him as "eruditissimum et probabilistarum antsignanum".