Firmin was an original member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners (1691), and was very active in the enforcement of fines for the repression of profane swearing.
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He never departed from the communion of the church of England, but put a Sabellian sense on the public forms.
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Early in 1676 he started a workhouse in Little Britain, for the employment of the poor in the linen manufacture;’ he built new premises expressly for it.
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To Robert Frampton, the nonjuring bishop of Gloucester, Firmin remarked, ‘I hope you will not be a nonconformist in your old age.’ Frampton retorted that Firmin himself was ‘a nonconformist to all Christendom besides a few lowsy sectarys in Poland.’ On the Protestant exodus from Ireland in 1688–9 Firmin was the principal commissioner for the relief of the refugees; more than £56,000 went through his hands, and eight of the Protestant hierarchy of Ireland addressed to him a joint letter of thanks.
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John Tillotson Archbishop of Canterbury and a friend of Firmin, who had lectured on the Socinian controversy at St. Lawrence, Jewry, in 1679–80, felt himself compelled by ‘calumnies’ to publish the lectures in 1693.
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