Chapter 4
RENEWAL AND ADVANCE
The closing decades of the eighteenth century were times of political revolution and religious revival for Baptists in the British Isles and America. Liberty, both religious and political, was never far from Baptist minds during this period. It was a time of spiritual renewal and significant growth for the Baptists as well, as they not only experienced expansion within the English-speaking world but also became pioneers in the modern missionary movement through men like George Liele in Jamaica and William Carey in India.
Baptists Seeking Freedom
In New England, Isaac Backus led the fight for religious freedom against the hegemony of the Congregationalist state church. Backus was convinced that “religion must at all times be a matter between God and individuals,” for “true religion is a voluntary obedience unto God.” Hence, he asked his Congregationalist opponents, “Since religion is ever a matter between God and individuals, how can any man become a member of a religious society without his own consent?” A state church cannot be a true church because it forces people to belong to it against their wills. Yet Backus was also convinced of Christianity’s vital importance to society. Arguing from Jesus’ statements about his disciples being the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world” (Matt 5:13–14), Backus maintained that “religion is as necessary for the well-being of human society as salt is to preserve from putrefaction or as light is to direct our way.” Civil government needed to have distinct limits in its authority over the churches so the latter might have the freedom to so preach the Scriptures that individuals would be genuinely converted and, once converted, become good citizens. In this interface of church and state, “civil rulers ought to be men fearing God, and hating covetousness, and to be terrors to evil doers, and a praise to them who do well; and as ministers ought to pray for rulers, and to teach the people to be subject to them; so there may be and ought to be a sweet harmony between them.” There is little doubt that Backus saw Christianity as key to America’s future. His goal, in Joe Coker’s words, was “to stop government control over religion, but to still allow religion to have a continued influence over the government.”
Final victory in the cause for which Backus struggled was not achieved within his lifetime. In 1818, twelve years after his death, the New England Baptists, led by John Leland, submitted a petition to the Connecticut legislature calling for religious freedom not only for all Protestants but for “infidels” also, echoing a phrase from Roger Williams. It was another fifteen years, however, before the last New England state, Massachusetts, finally disestablished the Congregational churches.
The struggle for religious liberty in Virginia in the closing decades of the eighteenth century was attended by more violence than there had ever been in New England. Here it was the Episcopal (Anglican) Church that resisted the Baptists.
The Dream of James Ireland
One night I dreamed I was taken prisoner by a man mounted on a red horse, who carried me over two mountains, there being a considerable distance between them. . . . I was then led into an old field, where several buildings were erected on our right, but in none of them was I to reside. I was conducted some distance into the field, and deposited in a little old open house, wherein I entered to remain a prisoner until by prayer and supplication, and other necessary methods, I was to be relieved and delivered therefrom.
. . . I journeyed again, and traveled through beautiful walks, gentle and delectable risings, rocky and cold valleys, sometimes in water and sometimes on land, until I came to a beautiful building above, called my Father’s house; and then I awoke. But the impression it made upon my mind was a lasting one, nor could it be eradicated therefrom.
. . . It being then a persecuting time in our then colony of Virginia, and particularly so against the society with whom I soon after joined. I knew that the man on the red horse, spoken of in Revelation 6:4 denoted persecution, but in what character, I should suffer, I knew not then, though I had the woeful experience of it afterwards.
A host of Virginia’s Baptist preachers met with more than 160 physical attacks between 1760 and 1780. John Afferman was so cruelly beaten that he was unable to work; David Barrow was seized by twenty men, dunked in water, and nearly drowned; James Ireland was imprisoned and nearly blown up in a murder attempt; David Thomas was once attacked while preaching and physically dragged out of the meetinghouse while on another occasion an attempt was made to shoot him, but the gun was wrenched out of the assailant’s hand by a bystander; John Waller was seized while leading a congregation in worship, his head smashed against the ground more than once, and finally he was horsewhipped with twenty lashes. Like these other Baptist preachers, Waller was, in the words of Jon Butler, “a feisty and resolute preacher.” Before dying in 1802, he baptized more than 2,000 persons, participated in the ordination of twenty-seven preachers, and planted at least eighteen Baptist congregations all over Virginia.
Despite such mob violence, arrest, and derision, Virginia Baptists succeeded in their struggle for religious freedom. In part this had to do with their repeated argument that they were “loyal and quiet subjects,” whose religious views were no threat to the state. They made this point time and again in petitioning campaigns they orchestrated. Their plight was also taken up by James Madison, the future fourth president of the United States, who was horrified when he heard of the imprisonment of “5 or 6 well meaning men” in 1774, one of whom may have been James Ireland, “for publishing their religious sentiments which in the main are very orthodox.” Two years later Madison redrafted an article in Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, which effectively guaranteed freedom of religion, though its “cool Enlightenment-style definition of religion,” as Jon Butler puts it, was hardly to the taste of the Baptists of Virginia.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights, Article 16
That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.
In both Virginia and New England, John Leland played a critical role in the fight for religious freedom. As a young man Leland was deeply influenced by Elhanan Winchester to embrace Christianity before the latter became a Universalist. Leland began his ministry in 1775 in Virginia. He saw firsthand the problems of a state church that sought to impose itself upon the consciences of men and women. As he came to argue, “Whenever men fly to the law or sword to protect their system of religion, and force it upon others, it is evident that they have something in their system that will not bear the light, and stand upon the basis of truth.” He developed an unlikely friendship with Thomas Jefferson and also with James Madison. In 1784, Leland and other Baptists allied with Madison to defeat passage of a General Assessment bill that would have provided tax support to religion but allowed citizens to designate their taxes to the denomination of their choice. Patrick Henry and George Washington, as well as Episcopalians and most Presbyterians, supported the bill; Madison, Jefferson, and the Baptists opposed it.
When Jefferson, well known for his Deism, was elected president of the United States in 1801, numerous evangelicals were horrified. The New Divinity preacher Nathanael Emmons, for instance, preached a sermon on 2 Kings 17:21 implicitly comparing Jefferson to the wicked Jeroboam. Baptists in both America and Britain saw things differently. Baptists in Danbury, Connecticut, wrote to Jefferson, congratulating him on his election and telling him, “Our sentiments are uniformly on the side of religious liberty: that Religion is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals, that no man ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account of his religious opinions, [and] that the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbor.” Leland persuaded the women of his congregation in Cheshire, Massachusetts, to manufacture a mammoth cheese weighing 1,230 pounds as a token of their support for Jefferson. Leland then transported the cheese by wagon and sloop to Washington to present it to Jefferson on New Year’s Day 1802. Leland preached all along the way and, at the invitation of Jefferson, preached before the House and the Senate on the verse, “Behold a greater than Solomon is here.”
In England violent persecution of the Baptists technically ceased with the Act of Toleration. However, the Corporation and Test Acts, parts of the Clarendon Code that restricted political and military office to Anglicans, were still in force, and occasionally violence broke out against Baptists and other Dissenters. During Christmas 1792, for example, the Baptist meetinghouse in Guilsborough, near Northampton, was burned to the ground by incendiaries hostile to Baptists. A year and a half later, on May 18, 1794, James Hinton, pastor of New Road Baptist Church in Oxford, made a visit with a few companions to the nearby village of Woodstock to preach in a private home. A few minutes after Hinton began preaching, a mob of some 300–400 people appeared, many of them armed with bludgeons and stones. Storming the house, they violently attacked Hinton and his companions, who had to defend themselves from repeated blows to their heads. Not content with driving Hinton and his companions out of Woodstock, the mob pursued them, hurling insults and howling for blood. One of Hinton’s companions, a Mr. Barnard, was knocked to the ground a dozen times in a row, the mob giving him time to rise on each occasion so as to have the brutal pleasure of knocking him down again. Deaf to his cries for mercy, the mob eventually dumped his bludgeoned body into a ditch and left him for dead. Hinton later discovered him and another of his companions, senseless and covered in blood.
In England the great Baptist champion of religious liberty was Robert Robinson, who was converted through the preaching of George Whitefield in the 1750s. After a short career as a Methodist preacher, Robinson went on to build a thriving work at St. Andrew’s Street Baptist Church, Cambridge, where he became known as one of the finest preachers in England. Although he was roundly criticized for venturing into the realm of politics as a minister, Robinson used his Cambridge pulpit and the press to promote the view that a truly virtuous government protects an individual’s security and liberty, guards the rights of individual conscience, and “renders justice cheap to the poor, easy to the illiterate, accessible to all.” While the duty of Christians was to support a good government, to suppose that Christians were never to resist the tyranny of wicked rulers was a misreading of Scripture, particularly Romans 13. “Never was right of resistance more clearly ascertained,” Robinson maintained in A Political Catechism (1782), and “passive obedience and non-resistance more fully exploded in any nation than in ours at the revolution [of 1688].”
Robinson’s passion for liberty led him to build friendships with a variety of political and theological figures and authors like the Socinian Joseph Priestley. To what extent these friendships began to refashion Robinson’s own theological convictions or whether it was a result of what the nineteenth-century hymnologist Samuel Duffield called Robinson’s “intense and almost morbid devotion” to liberty, by the 1780s Robinson railed against the use of creeds. When an elderly minister in his congregation applied to the Particular Baptist Fund, which had been set up in London in the early eighteenth century to help prospective ministers as well as aged ones, he was told that unless he affirmed a statement of Christian orthodoxy that began with affirmation of the Trinity, he could expect no financial aid. Robinson was vehement in his denunciation of this requirement to affirm a creed, what he regarded as “a tyranny over men’s consciences.” He wrote to Mary Hays, who was one of his protégés and is today considered an early feminist author, that such a requirement was “absolute nonsense” and an “awful impiety!” In his church, he told Hays, “We all hold inviolably the perfection of Scripture without human additions.” Of course, the Baptist leaders in London who managed the Particular Baptist Fund were thoroughly convinced that the doctrine of the Trinity was to be found in the Scriptures and, as such, was certainly not a “human addition.” Moreover, they were of the same mind as Robinson’s contemporary, Andrew Fuller, who argued that Robinson’s interpretation of the right of private judgment was inconsistent with the practice of the early church: a “community must entirely renounce the name of a Christian church,” Fuller maintained, if it cannot “withdraw from an individual whose principles they consider as false and injurious.”
The American Revolution
The relationship between church and state came to a head during the American Revolution. When Robert MacGregor, pastor of Woolwich Baptist Church, Kent, reflected in 1772 on the relationship that existed between the Particular Baptists and the British government for much of that century, he declared with some measure of pride that his denomination had been consistently characterized by appreciative support for the government of the land. “We may glory in our loyalty,” he stated, “for I never yet heard a single Baptist being concerned in any tumult, rebellion, or civil commotion, against the present royal family,” that is the House of Hanover, the dynasty established by George I. Yet by the close of the American Revolution eleven years later, a dramatic shift had occurred in the political attitude of many Baptists toward their government. The London Baptist John Rippon, for instance, reopened correspondence with James Manning of Providence, Rhode Island, after the American Revolution came to a close in 1783, assuring Manning that all of the Baptist ministers in London save two “and most of our brethren in the country, were on the side of the Americans in the late dispute.” A number of Baptist ministers in the British Isles were vocal in their support of America. Rees David, pastor of Saint Mary’s Baptist Church in Norwich, preached a fiery sermon in the winter of 1781 against the British war effort, predicting, “God will call us to an account, and make us smart for every drop of innocent blood, which we have shed in this war.” A year later David was still fulminating about the war “as cruel and unjust” as well as citing the British army’s “converting places of worship into play-houses” and the “burning [of] public libraries and whole towns” as evidence of his assertion.
Excerpt from Joshua Toulmin, The American War Lamented (1776)
Unhappy nation! The treasure of which is employed, and whose inhabitants are sent to the field of battle, to support the impious glory of ambition. . . . [T]he pleasing intercourses of relative life are intercepted—the wife sits at home solitary and pensive, in anxious fears for the life of her beloved partner—the tender, aged parent, is full of thought and concern for an amiable son—friends are torn from friends . . . they, whom their country commands to arm for the battle, go forth to meet the arrows of death, or to breath out slaughter against their own race. . . . What promiscuous carnage! What mangled limbs! What hideous cries! Fields covered with ghastly corpses! Green pastures crimsoned with human gore!
The strongest critique of British policy in America, however, came from the pen of the Welsh Baptist Caleb Evans in his various responses to the Methodist leader John Wesley, who defended the British government in his widely read A Calm Address to Our American Colonies (1775). In his pamphlet debate with Wesley and then with his lieutenant John Fletcher, Evans essentially agreed with the Americans’ argument that taxation without representation is nothing less than slavery. For Evans, whose political views had been profoundly shaped by his reading of the political philosopher John Locke, “the people, and the people only, are the source of power,” a political perspective that was in some ways akin to his Congregationalism.
In America the only significant Baptist figure who opposed the revolution was the Welsh Baptist immigrant Morgan Edwards, who was kept under house arrest at his farm in Newark, Delaware, for most of the war. Some Baptist leaders, like John Gano (who, according to an oft-repeated myth, baptized George Washington by immersion at either Valley Forge or in the Potomac), David Jones, and Silas Mercer served as chaplains with the revolutionary forces. Other Baptist pastors used their position in society to advance the cause of the Revolution. In 1775, Oliver Hart traveled itinerantly in an effort to convince Loyalists of the Patriot cause. In March 1776, he was one of several ministers from the Charleston area who sent a resolution to the South Carolina Congress declaring their “hope yet to see hunted liberty sit Regent on the throne, and flourish more than ever.” Not surprisingly, when the British took Charleston four years later, Hart had to flee the city with little more than the clothes on his back. Most of his personal possessions and papers fell into British hands, and the Baptist meetinghouse was commandeered to serve as a warehouse to store salt beef.
Regrettably, the American Revolution produced a deadening effect on spirituality. The reasons for this are at least threefold. For a decade or so after the revolution, political issues rather than spiritual issues continued to dominate the minds of people. The absence of a significant number of husbands and fathers for lengthy periods of time during the fighting led to a breakdown of family piety. And the employment of French troops as allies of America in the war introduced into the United States levels of atheistic and deistic thinking unknown heretofore. As a result, spiritual decline marked many of the denominational bodies in the northern United States immediately after 1783. Had Baptist growth in the northern states between 1770 and 1780, for example, been in keeping with the rate of growth from 1740 to 1770, Baptists would have numbered around 41,400. This would have been 56 percent more than their actual figure of 26,620. Clearly the war was not conducive to spiritual prosperity.
The Fight Against the Slave Trade
The slave trade was another great political and moral issue for Baptists in this era. In 1789, Isaac Backus made an extensive preaching trip to Virginia and North Carolina. He was there for five months with the aim of cementing relations between northern and southern Baptists. He must have noticed the differing regional attitudes toward slavery. Like many New England Baptists, Backus detested the institution. However, also like many of them, he felt no call to rebuke his slave-holding brethren or to attack the system. He genuinely hoped this wickedness would wither away under the providence of God. Generally speaking, the Baptists Backus met in the South, though they were interested in saving the souls of slaves, had no interest in discussing an end to slavery. For example, Backus attended a Baptist Association meeting in Virginia that discussed questions like the following: “What should be done when a man slave was owned by one master and his wife by another, and one was carried to such a distance as never to be likely to see the other in this world? Whether they must continue single or not?” Surely the institution of slavery was itself responsible for the moral dilemma posed by such questions.
Despite differing Baptist views on the subject, several other Christian communities in this period came to oppose slavery and the trade that supported it. Most Quaker communities on both sides of the Atlantic by 1760 or so were practicing church discipline against members who participated in the slave trade. In the next decade John Wesley and the British Methodists were also drawn firmly into the antislavery camp; Wesley henceforth abominated the slave trade as “that execrable sum of all villainies.” From the 1780s onward, Anglican evangelicals such as John Newton and especially William Wilberforce became identified with opposition to the slave trade. During this same period a number of key English Baptists exhibited a growing revulsion at their nation’s slave trading.
Not surprisingly, Robert Robinson spoke against slavery in a sermon preached in February 1788, arguing that after the apostolic era “Christians understood that the liberating of slaves was a part of Christianity, not indeed expressed in the direct words of a statute, but naturally and necessarily contained in the doctrines and precepts of it: in the precepts which equalized all, and in the first principle of all doctrines, the equal love of God to all mankind.” A few months after Robinson’s sermon in Cambridge, a meeting of church representatives of the Western Association expressed their “deepest abhorrence of the slave trade” and urged the pastors and “members of all our churches, to unite in promoting, to the utmost of our power, every scheme that is or may be proposed, to procure the abolition of a traffic so unjust, inhuman, and disgraceful.” Four years later missions pioneer William Carey urged his fellow Baptists to give up using sugar, due to the fact that it had been produced by slave labor in the West Indies and so cleanse their “hands of blood.”
Arguably one of the best sermons against the slave trade preached by an English Baptist during this era was Abraham Booth’s Commerce in the Human Species, and the Enslaving of Innocent Persons, Inimical to the Laws of Moses and the Gospel of Christ (1792). Thomas Clarkson, a key abolitionist, considered it one of the most important documents in the early stages of the antislavery movement. The son of a Nottinghamshire farmer, Booth became a stocking weaver in his teens. He had no formal schooling and was compelled to teach himself to read and to write. His early Christian life was spent among the General Baptists, but by 1768 he had undergone a complete revolution in his soteriology and had become a Calvinist. Commerce in the Human Species opened with the assertion that every human being is bound “to adore our Almighty Maker, to confide in the Lord Redeemer, and to exercise genuine benevolence toward all mankind.” Booth went on to emphasize that Christianity is intimately tied up with “the exercise of moral justice, of benevolence, and of humanity,” and on this basis, and not that of promoting civil and political liberty, he was prepared to take a public stand against the slave trade.
Abraham Booth on the Slave Trade
The slave trade is . . . an effectual bar to the propagation of Christianity among [the Africans]. . . . Zeal for the honor of Christ and love to our fellow-creatures ought therefore to inspire us with ardent prayer that the horrid impediment may be removed and that Christ may be glorified among them. Nor ought we to pray merely that God would abolish the infamous commerce in man on the shores of Africa, but also for the gradual emancipation of oppressed Negroes in the West India islands, that the slavery of innocent persons may cease to exist and sink under the detestation of all Europe. For what must the enslaved Africans in those islands think of Christians, of Christianity, and of Christ under the tuition of their oppressors? . . .
Let your ardent and frequent prayers be accompanied with prudent, peaceable, and steady efforts in order to procure the total abolition of that criminal traffic and of the cruel slavery consequent upon it. . . . As it is our design at this time to make a collection for promoting the general design of that worthy society, which has existed for some years in this metropolis, in order to effect the abolition of the slave trade, I would earnestly exhort you to make a liberal contribution for their assistance. The members of that benevolent society have done worthily. They deserve the assistance and the thanks of every friend to moral justice and to humanity. Let us therefore endeavor to strengthen their hands and to promote the righteous cause in which they are united.
After examining various Old Testament texts regarding slavery, Booth asked why only white Europeans possessed the right to enslave black Africans. Surely it was not because the whites were Christians and the blacks were pagans. Christianity was “the religion of truth and of justice, of benevolence and of peace.” The slave trade, on the other hand, was “unjust and cruel, barbarous and savage.” Booth seemed to be hinting here at the racist basis of the British slave trade—blacks could be enslaved because they were deemed inferior to whites. But, Booth asserted, blacks are fully human and therefore have all “the rights of humanity” common to the human species. If slavery were legitimate, it would not at all be unlawful for blacks to raid London, Bristol, and Liverpool, the three main English ports that had grown rich from the traffic in human beings, and enslave free Britons. By thus imaginatively turning the tables, Booth wanted his hearers to put themselves in the shoes of the Africans and develop a heart of benevolence toward them. From Booth’s perspective the slave trade was especially inimical to the ethical teaching of Christ because Christians were to love their enemies and do good to them that hate them (Luke 6:27). “If our sovereign Lord requires benevolence and active love to our enemies,” surely, Booth reasoned, he cannot require any less to those who are not our enemies, which would certainly include the Africans, who are unknown to the slave traders prior to their being enslaved.
Caleb Evans once said with regard to God’s kingdom, “When we pray for the advancement of this kingdom, if we are not willing to do all we can to advance it, our prayers cannot be genuine, they are hypocritical.” The prayers and “prudent, peaceable, and steady efforts” of the Baptists, along with those of other abolitionists, to effect the abolition of the slave trade finally bore fruit in 1807, when a motion to abolish British involvement in the slave trade passed in the House of Commons with an overwhelming 283 out of 299 members of Parliament voting to end the practice.
Three African-American Baptist Leaders
About two years before the outbreak of the American Revolution, a slave in Georgia by the name of George Liele was converted. Given his freedom shortly afterward, he was ordained in 1775 and went on to plant a work in Savannah, Georgia, which claims to be the oldest African-American Baptist church. With the defeat of the British cause, however, Liele and his family were in danger of being re-enslaved. Liele decided to relocate to Jamaica as an indentured servant, where he formed a small congregation in 1783. Liele was able to follow his calling as a preacher, and within seven years he saw around 500 conversions under his preaching, with 300 of those converts joining his church. Ten years later he had secured enough funds, about £400 from other Loyalists, to build the first Dissenting chapel on the island, Windward Road Chapel. By the time William Carey and his family set sail for India in 1793, Liele had been laboring as a missionary for a decade. He should, therefore, probably be considered the first Baptist missionary, though some historians of mission would demur, since a “missionary,” by definition, is sent out by a church. Technically, Liele had not been sent out by a church. Nevertheless, by 1814, Liele’s ministry had produced a rich harvest, some 8,000 Baptists in numerous chapels throughout the island.
Excerpt from George Liele, “The Covenant of the Anabaptist Church [of Jamaica]”
I. We are of the Anabaptist persuasion, because we believe it agreeable to the Scriptures. Matt 3:1–3; 2 Cor 6:14–18. . . .
III. We hold to be baptized in a river, or in a place where there is much water, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Matt 3:13, 16–17; Mark 16:15–16; Matt 28:19. . . .
V. We hold to the ordinance of washing one another’s feet. Jn 13:2–7. . . .
VII. We hold to pray over the sick, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. Jas 5:14–15.
Among those impacted by Leile’s preaching in Georgia were Andrew Bryan and David George. After Leile left for Jamaica, Bryan, who had been baptized by Liele, assumed the leadership of the Georgia congregation. The church flourished under his powerful preaching; by 1802, the church had some 850 members. As for David George, his master left him and a number of other slaves to fend for themselves during the revolution, which prompted George and his family to flee to British-occupied Savannah, where he was given his freedom. When a British defeat seemed imminent in 1782, George and his family left the American South and joined the exodus of British loyalists to Nova Scotia.
George and his family spent ten years, from 1782 to 1792, in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, where he established a Particular Baptist Church. As knowledge of his preaching abilities spread throughout Nova Scotia and then New Brunswick, he began to receive invitations to preach farther and farther afield. In 1792, George, his family, and much of his congregation left the Canadian Maritimes to settle in West Africa. A company had been founded in England a few years earlier to establish a settlement in Sierra Leone, which would introduce European culture and Christianity to Africa and be a place where whites and blacks could live as equals. Similar to his experience in Nova Scotia, George played a vital role in the establishment of a Particular Baptist witness in this colony, which was called Freetown. Unhappily, the Sierra Leonean Baptists did not develop after George’s death in 1810. In the final two decades of the twentieth century, his spiritual descendants numbered only about 825 in eleven congregations.
The French Revolution and the English Baptists
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Thus did William Wordsworth—the English writer whose poetry is central to the canon of British Romanticism—describe the headiness of the early days of the French Revolution, which promised liberty but ended in bloodshed through tyranny and war. Wordsworth’s naïve enthusiasm for what was happening in France was shared by a number of sectors of English society, including Baptists. For instance, Joseph Kinghorn, the pastor of Saint Mary’s Baptist Church, Norwich, wrote to his father, David Kinghorn, in August 1789, the month after the storming of the Bastille: “I rejoice with all my heart at the destruction of that most infamous place the Bastille.” Another Norwich Particular Baptist minister, Mark Wilks, began a sermon exactly a year later with the provocative statement, “Jesus Christ was a Revolutionist.” He went on to inform his congregation that the French Revolution “is of God and that no power exists or can exist, by which it can be overthrown.”
Robert Hall Jr., probably the most famous Baptist preacher in the early nineteenth century, was equally enthralled by what was taking place in France. In a famous tract that went through a number of pirated editions, Christianity Consistent with a Love of Freedom (1791), Hall stated, “Events have taken place of late, and revolutions have been effected, which, had they been foretold a very few years ago, would have been viewed as visionary and extravagant; and their influence is yet far from being spent. . . . The empire of darkness and of despotism has been smitten with a stroke which has sounded through the universe.”
William Steadman on the Danger of Politics for Ministers
Politics is a subject, which, a few years ago, engrossed no small attention, and did no small injury both to ministers and people, by employing too much of their time and thoughts, as well as by exciting an improper party spirit. . . . I do not wish you to be wholly ignorant of the political state of your country, as you are a citizen as well as a preacher; but do not, I beseech you, let politics engross so much of your thoughts, or your conversation, as to cause the duties of the citizen to interfere with those of the preacher.
Such sentiments proved to be utterly naïve and uninformed. In 1793 and 1794 the Revolution descended into a vortex of unspeakable violence and totalitarian terror. During this period, known to history as the Reign of Terror, at least 300,000 were arrested with some 17,000 people being executed by the guillotine. Many others died in prison or were simply killed without the benefit of a trial. French revolutionary armies sought to spread the ideals of the Revolution to neighboring nations. What they exported though was unprecedented levels of destruction and warfare to the rest of Europe and so plunged the continent into a war that lasted until 1815. Not surprisingly, Baptists like Kinghorn and Hall became increasingly critical of what was taking place in France. By April 1798, Kinghorn was convinced that “all those notions of liberty which the French Revolution very generally raised a few years ago are at an end, they [that is, the rulers of France] are the tyrants not the deliverers of men.”
Hall’s views likewise were transformed. In a sermon entitled Modern Infidelity Considered, with Respect to Its Influence on Society (1800), a work that made Hall a celebrity in England, he spoke of divine revelation having undergone “a total eclipse” in France, “while atheism, performing on a darkened theatre its strange and fearful tragedy, confounded the first elements of society, blended every age, rank, and sex in indiscriminate proscription and massacre, and convulsed all Europe to its centre.” Hall was now convinced that at the root of the sanguinary violence of the Revolution—what he rightly described as “atrocities . . . committed with a wanton levity and brutal merriment”—lay in the skepticism and rationalism of les philosophes, men like Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot. “Settle it therefore in your minds, as a maxim,” he told his hearers, “that atheism”—he was referring to the rationalism of les philosophes—“is an inhuman, bloody, ferocious system . . . : its first object is to dethrone God, its next to destroy man.” In another sermon preached two years later titled Reflections on War (1802), Hall expressed the opinion that the French Revolution was also in part God’s judgment on the French nation for their brutal persecution in the previous century of the Huguenots, French believers who shared Hall’s Calvinistic worldview.
Andrew Fuller and Fullerism
Just as John Gill had been the dominant theologian in many transatlantic Baptist communities during the middle decades of the eighteenth century, so Andrew Fuller was the leading Baptist thinker during the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Charles Haddon Spurgeon did not hesitate to describe Fuller as “the greatest theologian” of his century, and for a good portion of the nineteenth century, while American Baptist historian A. H. Newman noted that “his influence on American Baptists” was “incalculable.” Fuller became the chief proponent of a theological trajectory that came to dominate British Particular Baptist life and strongly influenced Baptists in America.
Born and raised in East Anglia, a historic Puritan stronghold, Fuller sat under the ministry of John Eve at Soham, Cambridgeshire. According to Fuller, Eve’s theology was “tinged with false Calvinism,” for he “had little or nothing to say to the unconverted.” Nevertheless, in the late 1760s, Fuller began to experience strong conviction of sin, which resulted in his conversion in November 1769. He was baptized in April 1770 and joined the Soham church. Over the next few years, the church clearly saw that Fuller possessed definite ministerial gifts. Eve left the church in 1771 for another pastorate, and Fuller, who was self-taught when it came to theology and who had been preaching in the church for a couple of years, was formally inducted as pastor in the spring of 1775. The church consisted of forty-seven members and met for worship in a rented barn.
Fuller’s pastorate at Soham, which lasted until 1782 when he moved to pastor the Baptist work in Kettering, Northamptonshire, was a decisive period for the shaping of his theological outlook. During these seven years Fuller began a lifelong study of the works of the New England theologian Jonathan Edwards, his chief theological mentor after the Scriptures. Also during this period he made the acquaintance of Robert Hall Sr., John Ryland Jr., and John Sutcliff, who later became his closest ministerial friends and colleagues. Finally, while pastoring at Soham, Fuller decisively rejected hyper-Calvinism and drew up a defense of his own theological position in The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, though the first edition of this book was not published until 1785.
Due to the fact that John Eve’s preaching was essentially the only homiletical model Fuller had ever known, he initially preached like Eve and failed to urge the unconverted to come to Christ. Increasingly though, he was dissatisfied with this approach to preaching and evangelism. He began to sense that his “preaching was anti-scriptural and defective in many respects.” Robert Hall Sr., pastor of the Particular Baptist cause in Arnsby, Leicestershire, suggested that he read Jonathan Edwards’s classic work on divine sovereignty and human responsibility, A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of the Freedom of Will (1754). The Arnsby pastor was convinced that this work would help clarify some of Fuller’s thinking about the inability of sinful men and women to obey God.
Fuller also immersed himself in the works of John Bunyan and John Gill’s A Body of Doctrinal Divinity. Fuller found much that was helpful in Gill’s systematic work but was deeply troubled by the evident differences between Gill and Bunyan. Both were ardent Calvinists, but whereas Bunyan recommended “the free offer of salvation to sinners without distinction,” Gill did not. Initially Fuller wrongly concluded that though Bunyan was “a great and good man,” he was not as clear as Gill regarding the gospel. However, as Fuller studied the writings of other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors, in particular those of the Puritan theologian John Owen, he noted that they too “dealt . . . in free invitations to sinners to come to Christ and be saved.” In other words, Fuller discerned that with regard to preaching there was a definite difference not only between Bunyan and Gill but more broadly between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Calvinism and that of the early eighteenth century. This was the crucible in which The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation was written.
A preliminary draft of the work was written by 1778, and what was roughly the final form of the treatise was completed by 1781. Two editions of the book were published in Fuller’s lifetime. The first edition, published in Northampton in 1785, was subtitled The Obligations of Men Fully to Credit, and Cordially to Approve, Whatever God Makes Known, Wherein Is Considered the Nature of Faith in Christ, and the Duty of Those Where the Gospel Comes in That Matter. The second edition, which appeared in 1801, was more simply subtitled The Duty of Sinners to Believe in Jesus Christ, a subtitle that well expressed the overall theme of the book. The first and second editions had substantial differences, which Fuller freely admitted and which primarily related to the doctrine of particular redemption. The work’s major theme, however, remained unaltered: “Faith in Christ is the duty of all men who hear, or have opportunity to hear, the gospel.” This epoch-making book sought to be faithful to the central emphases of historic Calvinism while at the same time attempting to leave preachers with no alternative but to drive home to their hearers the universal obligations of repentance and faith.
The critical role played by Fuller in the controversy about the free offer of the gospel did not preclude his engaging in other vital areas of theological debate. Over a period of thirty years, he wrote definitive responses to Socinianism, Deism, Universalism, Antinomianism, and Sandemanianism (which promoted an intellectualist view of saving faith). He also penned the Memoirs of the Rev. Samuel Pearce (1800), which recounted the life of his close friend, Samuel Pearce of Birmingham, who died at age thirty-three. In some ways modeled after Jonathan Edwards’s memoir of David Brainerd, it told of one whom Fuller regarded as a model of evangelical spirituality. Through the medium of Fuller’s book, Pearce’s extraordinary passion for Christ—which led to his being labeled the “seraphic Pearce” by contemporaries—had a powerful impact on his generation.
Gillites and Fullerites
Forty years ago [1820s] large bodies of our people were in a state of ferment and agitation, in consequence of some modifications of their old Calvinistic creed, as displayed in the writings of the late Andrew Fuller, of Kettering, England. This famous man maintained that the atonement of Christ was general in its nature, but particular in its application, in opposition to our old divines, who held that Christ died for the elect only. He also made a distinction between the natural and moral inability of men.
Dr. John Gill, of London, was, in his day, one of the most distinguished divines among the English Baptists, and as he was a noted advocate for the old system of a limited atonement, the terms “Gillites” and “Fullerites” were often applied to the parties in this discussion. Those who espoused the views of Mr. Fuller were denominated Arminians by the Gillite men, while they, in their turn, styled their opponents Hyper-Calvinists. Both parties claimed to be orthodox and evangelical, and differed but little on any other points except those which have been named. On election, the Trinity, etc., they all agreed.
In the age when this discussion arose among the American Baptists, as none of the modern subjects of agitation had been introduced into their churches, the speculative opinions thus briefly described, for a number of years were the occasion of unhappy debates and contentions in many locations.
Samuel Pearce’s Sermon on the British Naval Victory over the French at the Battle of the Nile and the Repulse of a French Invasion Fleet off the Coast of Ireland (1798)
Should any one expect that I shall introduce the destruction of our foes, by the late victories gained off the coasts of Egypt and Ireland, as the object of pleasure and gratitude, he will be disappointed. The man who can take pleasure at the destruction of his fellow men, is a cannibal at heart; and for him New Zealand [where natives accepted cannibalism as a part of warfare] is a more fit habitation than civilized Europe . . . but to the heart of him who calls himself a disciple of the merciful Jesus, let such pleasure be an everlasting stranger. Since in that sacred volume, which I revere as the fair gift of heaven to man, I am taught, that “of one blood God hath made all nations” [Acts 17:26], it is impossible for me not to regard every man as my brother, and to consider, that national differences ought not to excite personal animosities.
But though we dare not rejoice at the misery of others, we ought to be thankful for the security we enjoy ourselves. It is well known that France has long meditated and threatened a descent upon our coasts, and an invasion of our country. Proposals to this purpose have been made in her assemblies, and she has actually attempted to ensure success to her designs against us, by her efforts to gain possession of Ireland, our sister kingdom. Had she succeeded in establishing her power there, where she might have victualled her fleets, and recruited her armies, England, in all probability, would have become an easy prey.
But God, the great guardian of our isle, has mercifully prevented the accomplishment of her first object. Ireland is not yet a department of France.
The Baptist Missionary Society and William Carey
Fuller’s Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation led directly to his wholehearted involvement in the formation in October 1792 of what came to be known as the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) and the subsequent sending of the society’s most famous missionary, William Carey, to India in 1793. Fuller served as the secretary of this society until his death in 1815. The work of the society consumed an enormous amount of Fuller’s time as he regularly toured the country, representing the BMS and raising funds. On average he was away from home three months of the year. Between 1798 and 1813, moreover, he made five lengthy trips to Scotland for the mission as well as undertaking journeys to Wales and Ireland (1804). He also carried on an extensive correspondence on the mission’s behalf. Fuller’s commitment to the BMS was not only rooted in his missionary theology but also in his deep friendship with Carey. Fuller later compared the sending of Carey to India to lowering him into a deep gold mine. Fuller and his close friends Sutcliff and Ryland pledged themselves to “hold the ropes” as long as Carey lived.
Arguably, the formation of the BMS, which helped bring about the creation of a host of like-minded missionary societies and thus launched the modern missionary movement, was one of the most significant events in Western Christianity since the Reformation. That its first missionary, Carey, an autodidact whose formal education ended by his early teens, went on to become an inspiration for countless others in the following century is remarkable. Carey’s first seven years in India were extremely difficult: he had no converts; he was forced to take a position as the manager of a new indigo factory in Mudnabatti, around 280 miles north of Calcutta; his wife Dorothy experienced a total mental breakdown after the death of one of their sons, Peter, and was soon completely delusional. During the early days of Dorothy’s insanity, Carey wrote in his diary, “This is indeed the valley of the shadow of death to me. . . . O what would I give for a kind sympathetic friend such as I had in England to whom I might open my heart.” In June 1800, fellow missionary William Ward simply stated in his diary: “Mrs. Carey is stark mad.” Carey biographers have not been kind to Dorothy: she has either been seen as something of a stumbling block in the way of her husband’s calling or generally ignored in the accounts of Carey’s life. When she died in 1807, for example, all that was said of her in the official publication of the BMS was, “Mrs. Carey, after having been ill about a fortnight, died.” Since the 1980s, historians have sought to see her life in more sympathetic terms and view her as a tragic heroine, who unwittingly gave her sanity, and ultimately her life, for Christ and his kingdom.
In 1800, Carey moved to Sermapore and linked up with two other missionaries who had been sent out by the BMS: Ward, a skilled printer who became the best preacher at Serampore, and Joshua Marshman, the administrator and foreign secretary of the Serampore mission. In all of the extant literature and manuscripts of these three men, no trace of mutual jealousy or severe anger can be found. Henry Martyn, an evangelical Anglican and missionary to Persia, said that never were “such men . . . so suited to another and to their work.”
Within a year of establishing the Serampore mission, Carey and his colleagues began to win converts to the faith. The first was Krishna Pal, a Hindu carpenter and longtime seeker after truth. Pal had heard the gospel already from one of the Moravian missionaries who labored in the vicinity of Serampore until 1792, but it made no lasting impression on his mind. On the morning of November 25, 1800, however, while he was washing in the River Hooghly, not far from the Serampore mission, he fell on the slippery bank and dislocated his shoulder. Seeking medical help from the missionaries at Serampore, he also heard the gospel from them. A month or so later, Krishna Pal confessed that he believed “Christ gave his life up for the salvation of sinners” and that he had personally embraced this gospel truth. He subsequently broke caste by eating with the missionaries, and Ward commented, “The door of faith is open to the Gentiles; who shall shut it? The chain of the caste is broken, who shall mend it?” On Sunday, December 28, 1800, a few days after his profession of faith and in the presence of a huge crowd of Europeans, Hindus, and Muslims, Krishna Pal was baptized in the Hooghly River.
Pal was the first of hundreds who were converted through the witness of the Serampore mission over the next three decades. By 1821, more than 1,400 believers—half of them Indians—had been baptized; and Krishna Pal, who died the following year, had become one of the finest preachers of the mission. Carey once described an early sermon of this Indian brother as “fluent, perspicuous, and affectionate, in a very high degree.” Pal became something of an international celebrity among Baptists in the English-speaking world, inspiring many to become foreign missionaries.
Krishna also wrote hymns to express his love, and that of his fellow Bengali believers, for Christ. One of them, translated into English, is still in use. Its first stanza runs thus:
O thou, my soul, forget no more,
The Friend who all thy misery bore;
Let every idol be forgot,
But, O my soul, forget him not.
In its cross-centeredness and emphasis on the cross’s power to deliver from idolatry, this verse is quintessentially evangelical and well captures the heart of why Carey and his colleagues were in India. Heralding the gospel with its message of the crucified Christ, whose death alone delivered from sin and its consequences, was the main passion of Carey and his friends. The Serampore missionaries embraced a holistic mission strategy. In addition to their evangelistic labors, translation work, and printing interests, they were social reformers: they helped abolish such social ills as sati (the self-immolation of a widow on the funeral pyre of her husband) and the prostitution of children in the Hindu temples. They were also educational activists, founding Serampore College in 1818.
Baptist Revival
In 1794, two years after the formation of the BMS, John Rippon published a list of Calvinistic Baptist congregations and ministers in his Baptist Annual Register. Rippon estimated that there were at that time 326 churches in England and 56 in Wales, more than double the number that existed in 1750. He printed another list of churches four years later, according to which the numbers had grown to 361 churches in England and 84 in Wales. Reflecting on these numbers, Rippon wrote, “It is said, that more of our meeting houses have been enlarged, within the last five years, and built within the last fifteen, than had been built and enlarged for thirty years before.” Rippon was not exaggerating. The Particular Baptists had enjoyed steady growth during the last four decades of the eighteenth century but in the final decade of the century saw a truly rapid influx of converts. At the heart of it was Fullerite theology and the passion for missions engendered by the BMS.
From a more personal angle, one can observe the revival that was taking place in the following extracts from the letters of Andrew Fuller. In 1810, Fuller noted in a letter to William Carey, “I preached a sermon to the youth last Lord’s Day from 1 Thess 2:19. I think we must have had nearly one thousand. They came from all quarters. My heart’s desire and prayer for them is that they may be saved.” Fuller was still rejoicing when he wrote to Ryland that same year on December 28: “I hope the Lord is at work among our young people. Our Monday and Friday night meetings are much thronged.” A couple of months later, he told Ryland, “The Friday evening discourses are now, and have been for nearly a year, much thronged, because they have been mostly addressed to persons under some concern about their salvation.” What was happening in Fuller’s church was also occurring in Baptist causes throughout the length and breadth of England and Wales.
As for the General Baptist churches, many of which were largely moribund by the late eighteenth century, a hope of renewal came through the ministry of Dan Taylor of Yorkshire. The preaching of George Whitefield, the Wesley brothers, and above all, William Grimshaw of Haworth, initially shaped Taylor’s faith. By 1763, he had come to Baptist convictions. But when he sought to be baptized by a number of Particular Baptist pastors in West Yorkshire, they all refused because of his rejection of particular redemption. Eventually he found a General Baptist minister in Nottinghamshire who agreed to baptize him in the River Idle in February 1763. Taylor founded the first General Baptist church in Yorkshire at Birchcliffe that year and united himself and the church to the General Baptist denomination. As a denomination, however, the General Baptists firmly resisted Taylor’s attempts to move them back toward a robust orthodoxy. So in 1770, together with a few other General Baptist pastors and churches, Taylor formed the New Connexion of General Baptists. Classical orthodox Christology, evangelical Arminianism, and a Methodist zeal for evangelism characterized this new body of Baptists. While the older General Baptists continued in the path of decline, the New Connexion thrived. When Taylor died in 1816, the number of churches in his denomination had grown to around seventy.
Across the Atlantic the Baptist churches were also experiencing significant growth in what has come to be called the Second Great Awakening. By 1790, there were roughly 68,000 Baptists in America. If we break these figures down state by state, we find that the six largest states for Baptist membership were Virginia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, South Carolina, New York, and Rhode Island. In 1750, the largest concentration of Baptists had been in Rhode Island. Clearly the heaviest concentration was shifting southward, for by 1790, 61 percent of Baptists were in the South. The Regular Baptists had twenty-nine associations and numbered some 57,436 members in 813 congregations. Ten years earlier, in 1780, the Separate Baptists had fifteen associations and numbered 9,881 members in 227 churches. By 1790, the Separate Baptists had declined to 4,022 members in eighty-one churches. The major reason for the decline was that almost half of the Separate Baptist congregations, comprising eleven of their associations, had become Regular Baptists. The great growth of the Regular Baptists thus owed much to the influx of the Separates. With regard to African-American Baptists, there were seven specifically African-American Baptist churches by 1790. The largest of these was the African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, with 250 members, which George Liele founded. But most African-Americans were members of ethnically diverse churches.
Baptist Beginnings in Atlantic Canada
The late eighteenth century was also a period of revival for the fledgling Baptist cause in what became Atlantic Canada. In 1760, Ebenezer Moulton, who played a key role in Isaac Backus’s coming to Baptistic convictions, arrived in Nova Scotia from Massachusetts. Moulton bears the distinction of having been the first Baptist minister to settle and serve in Canada as well as having planted the first indigenous Baptist church in Horton, Nova Scotia, in the Annapolis Valley in 1765. Now Wolfville Baptist Church, it is the oldest Baptist church in Canada. Faster-growing Baptist roots came from a more unlikely source, however. In the 1760s a number of Congregationalists found their way to Nova Scotia in pursuit of religious freedom, among them was Henry Alline, a boy of twelve when his family emigrated.
After experiencing great inner turmoil throughout his early years, Alline underwent a dramatic conversion in his mid-twenties and began to preach in 1776, just as war was breaking out over the rest of the British colonies in North America. As he itinerated throughout Nova Scotia, revival more often than not accompanied his preaching, and he came to be compared to George Whitefield, though Alline’s theological sympathies were Arminian. Alline held to a grueling schedule, traveling on horseback and snowshoe through dense virgin forest or by boat to small settlements. Most of the fledgling congregations he left behind at his early death in 1784 were not committed to Baptist polity, but within a generation they embraced both Calvinism and Baptistic convictions. With only two Canadian churches bearing the name “Baptist” in 1795 (in Horton and Halifax), a veritable explosion in growth occurred over the next quarter century with more than 3,000 members in close to sixty churches by the year 1827.
For Further Study
Brewster, Paul. Andrew Fuller: Model Pastor-Theologian. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2010.
Brown, Raymond. The English Baptists of the Eighteenth Century, chapters 6–7. London: The Baptist Historical Society, 1986.
Butler, Jon. “James Ireland, John Leland, John ‘Swearing Jack’ Waller, and the Baptist Campaign for Religious Freedom in Revolutionary Virginia.” Pages 169–84 in Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation. Edited by Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
Gardner, Robert G. “The Statistics of Early American Baptists: A Second Look,” Baptist History and Heritage 24.4 (October 1989): 29–44.
Goodwin, Daniel C. Into Deep Waters: Evangelical Spirituality and Maritime Calvinistic Baptist Ministers, 1790–1855, chapters 1–4. Montreal, QC/Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010.
Haykin, Michael A. G. Ardent Love to Jesus: English Baptists and the Experience of Revival in the Long Eighteenth Century. Bryntirion, Bridgend, Wales: Bryntirion Press, 2013.
———. The Armies of the Lamb: The Spirituality of Andrew Fuller. Dundas, Ontario: Joshua Press, 2001.
Isaac, Rhys. Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.
McLoughlin, William G. Isaac Backus and the American Pietistic Tradition. Edited by Oscar Handlin. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967.
Najar, Monica. Evangelizing the South: A Social History of Church and State in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Neely, Alan. “Liele, George.” Pages 400–401 in Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions. Edited by Gerald H. Anderson. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1998.
Ragosta, John A. Wellspring of Liberty: How Virginia’s Religious Dissenters Helped Win the American Revolution and Secured Religious Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Smith, Karen. “The Liberty Not to Be a Christian: Robert Robinson (1735–1790) of Cambridge and Freedom of Conscience.” Pages 151–70 in Distinctively Baptist: Essays on Baptist History. A Festschrift in Honor of Walter B. Shurden. Edited by Marc A. Jolley with John D. Pierce. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005.
Questions for Discussion
1 Summarize the contributions of Isaac Backus and John Leland toward the pursuit of religious liberty in America.
2 What role did Robert Robinson serve in the battle for religious liberty in England?
3. Compare and contrast the fight for religious liberty in America and England. What threatens religious liberty today? Should we be prepared to stand for religious liberty as our forebears did? Why or why not?
4. Elucidate the differing Baptist positions concerning the American Revolution. Should these Baptists have gotten involved in politics? Why or why not?
5. How did Baptists respond to the slave trade? What ethical issues are as significant for us today as slavery was for the eighteenth century?
6. Briefly outline the life and ministry of each of the following African-American Baptist leaders: George Liele, Andrew Bryan, and David George.
7. After Andrew Fuller’s death, some historians regarded him and his teaching among the best things that ever happened to the Baptist cause. Would you agree or disagree? Why?
8. How was the Baptist Missionary Society formed? What did it accomplish? How has it influenced us today?
9. Describe William Carey’s life and contributions. What issues does Dorothy Carey’s experience raise for modern missionary couples?
10. What characterized the revival that came to transaltantic Baptist ranks in Britain, America, and Canada at the close of the eighteenth century?