[10] So who was Charles Haddon Spurgeon?

City Road Baptist Church, Bristol

The Revd Charles Haddon Spurgeon visited Bristol on Wednesday 11th, September 1861 for the purpose of opening the City Road Chapel. The riotous behavior of the crowd on this occasion had a disastrous effect on Mr.Spurgeon's nerves. It was an all ticket occasion, but the demand for tickets was considerable. When the doors were opened there was a tremendous rush. In a few minutes every seat was occupied and afterwards the passages were blocked up by the crowd. The noise was almost too great for anything to be heard. The building was crowded, and thousands were outside, numbers of them keeping up a persistent knocking for admission, and urging the preacher to speak to them out of doors. The service began but it was impossible to proceed.   Spurgeon said "I wish I had the strength I had a few years ago; but I have preached ten times a week; I am thoroughly knocked out; I am getting old before I am young". Further violent interruptions followed; but by some means, after a very short address, the preacher contrived to escape. Spurgeon had visited Bristol first in 1856, an event noted in the local press, but by 1861 such was his fame that he was mobbed by crowds of people. (Pike's biography of Spurgeon, Vol. 3 pages 1-2 )  Just as Robert Hall dominated the first half of the nineteenth century, so Charles Spurgeon dominated the second.  So, who was he?

In 1850, when the President of the Cambridgeshire Village Preachers Association was James Vintner, known locally as the "Bishop", he had invited a newcomer to St. Andrews Street Baptist Church, Cambridge to go out to the village of Teversham to accompany the visiting preacher. The young man, as they walked out to the village, turned the conversation to the service which they were going to share, expressing the hope that his companion James Vintner would be mightily sustained in his preaching. Vintner expressed his surprise since he was not going to preach. He was accompanying his young friend who was going to take the service, and if he did not intend to do so, they had better turn back. The young man turned over in his mind just exactly what the "Bishop" had said to him. "He just asked me to go over to Teversham for a young man was to preach there who was not much used to services and very likely would be glad of company," Spurgeon recalled.  He decided to do his best; chose as his text a Sunday-School address based on "Unto you therefore which believe He is precious"; and offered a silent prayer that God would give him words to speak.

Spurgeon later described his experience. "How long or short it was I cannot now remember. It was not half such a task as I had feared it would be, but I was glad to see my way to a fair conclusion and to give out the last hymn. To my own delight I had not broken down, nor stopped in the middle, nor been destitute of ideas ... I made a finish and took up the hymnbook, when to my astonishment a woman's voice exclaimed, 'Bless your dear heart, how old are you?' I solemnly replied, 'You must wait till the service is over before making any such inquiries. Let us now sing.’ “  The lad standing by the fireplace in the cottage, in a short jacket with a full turned down collar, was not quite sixteen, but destined to become the pulpit orator of the century - though at that moment neither he nor they could know that.

Preaching was his whole life - and he wished for nothing else. Within weeks of the Teversham visit, Spurgeon could be found regularly preaching the Gospel in fields or cottages around Cambridge. "I must have been a singular looking youth on wet evenings. During the last year of my stay in Cambridge, when I had given up my office as usher [in a school], I was wont to sally forth every night in the week except Saturday, and to walk three, five, or perhaps eight miles out and back on my preaching excursions, and when it rained I dressed myself in waterproof, leggings and a mackintosh coat and a hat with a waterproof covering, and carried a dark lantern to show me the way across the fields. I had many adventures." Spurgeon never tired of open air preaching, and thought it would be a good antidote to sleepy chapel congregations.

 Spurgeon was born into the family of Pastor John Spurgeon, a Congregational minister, on June 19th, 1834, in Kelvedon Essex, the first of ten children. His mother was a woman of extraordinary piety and prayer, and Spurgeon always acknowledged just how much he owed to her. He grew up in the atmosphere of the Evangelical faith. He was largely brought up by his grandparents, his grandfather also being a Congregational Pastor.

He describes his own conversion in classical puritan terms; it was the language of his home and the literature he read as a child. But he was still in confusion when faced by his own sinfulness. One Sunday snow prevented him accompanying his father from Colchester to Tollesbury, so he went to the local Primitive Methodist chapel, searching for the way of salvation.

"I had heard of the Primitive Methodists how they sang so loudly that they made peoples’ heads ache," he wrote, "but that did not matter to me. I wanted to know how I might be saved and if they could tell me that I did not care how much they made my head ache. The minister did not come that morning; he was snowed up I suppose. At last a very thin looking man, a shoemaker or tailor or something of that sort, went up into the pulpit to preach. The preaching was crude enough, but it had power in it. The text was 'Look unto me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth'." Spurgeon recalls the sermon went something like this:

"My dear friends, this is a very simple text indeed. It says 'Look'. Now lookin' don't take a deal of pains. It ain't liftin your foot or your finger; it is just 'Look'. Well, a man needn't go to college to learn to look. You may be the biggest fool, and yet you can look. A man needn't be worth a thousand a year to be able to look. Anyone can look, even a child can look. But then the text says 'Look unto me'. 
"Ay," he said in a broad Essex dialect, "many on ye are lookin' to yourselves, but its no use lookin' there. Some look to God the Father. No - look to Him by-and-by. Jesus Christ says, 'Look unto Me'. Some on ye say we must wait for the Spirit's working. You have no business with that just now. Look to CHRIST. The text says, Look unto Me ..."

Then, very much to the young Spurgeon’s surprise the thin preacher looked straight at him and said: "Young man, you look very miserable, and you always will be miserable; miserable in life and miserable in death if you don't obey my text, but if you obey now, this moment, you will be saved. Young man, look to Jesus Christ, look. You have nothing to do but to look and live."

Spurgeon comments "I looked until I could have almost looked my eyes away. There and then the cloud was gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun, and I could have risen that instant and sung with the most enthusiastic of them, of the precious Blood of Christ and the simple faith which looks alone to him."  He returned home, and at the close of the day told his father what had happened. It was the beginning of a new life which God would bless mightily.

It is commonly believed that Spurgeon was an uneducated boy from East Anglia, who all his life had no interest in things academic. Certainly Spurgeon believed learning was best accomplished by doing: a principle he never tired of elaborating at the Pastor's college in later years.  Spurgeon went to Cambridge to join Edward Leeding, who had been his classical tutor at his Colchester school, to be an Usher in Leeding’s school in Upper Park Street. We are not surprised then, to find a few years later, Spurgeon established an evening school in the rooms under the Metropolitan Tabernacle. The classes were open to all. Tutors engaged for the Pastor's College during the day, gladly stayed on to teach in this school. The courses included reading and writing, literature, mathematics and the various sciences, as well as Pitman's shorthand. The lessons were free, and paid for by Spurgeon himself.
Spurgeon was the 'boy preacher' who transformed the old Waterbeach Baptist church, a few miles from Cambridge.

Appointed pastor, aged 17, he was paid a salary of £45 per yearA deacon said of the boy preacher, 'He talked amazingly, like a man a hundred years old in experience'. The congregations were soon bursting at the seams of the thatched chapel, hundreds coming to hear the boy preacher, with many being soundly converted. Inevitably his fame began to spread, even to the metropolis. On the last Sunday in November, 1853, the lad with the turn-down collar and short jacket made his way in to the chapel to begin the morning service. He turned to select the hymn in the pulpit hymn book. On the hymnbook there was a letter bearing a London postmark. It was unusual and he opened it with curiosity. It contained a formal invitation to occupy the pulpit at New Park Street, London. Spurgeon thought the letter was a mistake and passed it to one of his friends. His elderly deacon read it, not surprised but sad. "Had it been Cottenham or St. Ives or Huntingdon I should not have wondered at all," he said, "but going to London is rather a great step from this little place."

Though not yet twenty, Spurgeon was soon pulling Londoners in. The big, gloomy old chapel, home of tradition and cobwebs, pitched between a brewery on one side and a vinegar distillery on the other, in a back street of the city, was soon thronged with eager worshippers and often by pressmen eager for copy about the new London sensation, the 'boy preacher'. Men and women of all types from the highest to the lowest came to hear him, many having had no connection with the Christian church before. Unlike other popular preachers of the day he did not steal other preachers' congregations, he appealed direct to the person in the street. 

Spurgeon was an orator and an elocutionist. He was dramatic to his finger-tips. He not only uttered words, he acted them. He made simple things live; every movement contributed, so that when he preached the whole of his personality was engaged in conveying the message. He was an innovator in the pulpit and in ministerial practice. The Church proposed an induction and ordination for him, but he objected to ordination, claiming that his ministry had been recognized by God and required no further authorization. If the church insisted, he told them he would submit, but
"it will be a submission. I shall endure it as a self-mortification ... but still I would have it understood by all the Church that I endure it as a penance for your sake." Needless to say, there was no further talk of ordination!

His pulpit attire was quite outrageous by the standards of the day. Not for him the long frock coat of black cloth, high stock with a white cravat, completed by a silk top-hat. He wore a short frock coat, almost a jacket, an open vest, turned down collar and small black bow - and his hat was soft felt, almost a Trilby. And of course, his blue, white spotted handkerchief! No need for him to worry, within a decade most of the Free Church ministers dressed as Spurgeon!

Soon New Park Street was not big enough; while extra seating was put in, Sunday services were held in the Exeter Hall. That was only available for a short period. Where to go? Ever the innovator, Spurgeon decided to take each Sunday night the Royal Surrey Gardens - the music-hall which seated ten or twelve thousand people.  “The services of religion are becoming mere entertainment" said the critics, and nobody expected he would fill the building - least of all Spurgeon. But he did! And then there was a human tragedy. The New Park Street church book records it thus:

"Just after our pastor had commenced his prayer a disturbance was caused, as it is supposed, by some evil-disposed persons acting in concert, and the whole congregation was seized with a sudden panic. [The cry went up 'Fire!' and another voice cried 'The gallery is giving way'] This caused a fearful rush to the doors particularly from the galleries. Several persons, either in consequence of their heedless haste, or from extreme pressure of the crowd behind, were thrown down on the steps of the northwest staircase, and were trampled on by the crowd pressing upon them. The lamentable result was that seven persons lost their lives, and twenty-eight were removed to the hospitals, seriously bruised and injured. Our pastor, not being aware that any loss of life had occurred, continued in the pulpit, endeavoring by every means within his power to alleviate the fear of the people, and was successful to a very considerable extent ... This lamentable circumstance produced very serious effects on the nervous system of our pastor. He was entirely prostrated for some days, and compelled to relinquish his preaching engagements. Through the great mercy of our Heavenly Father he was restored so as to be able to occupy the pulpit in our own chapel on Sunday October 31st."

Special funds were raised by the church for the bereaved and injured families, and everything possible was done to comfort the mourners, and after the initial shock was over for Spurgeon, he decided that he would return to the Surrey Gardens, but in the mornings, not the evenings. Again, he broke new ground - successfully. The Hall was too small for the congregations that came from all over London and indeed the country, to hear his message. The services continued till 1859 when its owners decided to have morning concerts which they thought would bring in more money - but in fact led to the bankruptcy of those who organized it. The congregation returned to the Exeter Hall, in the Strand, until a new chapel was built at Newington Butts, on the south [and wrong side] of the River Thames.  Spurgeon was touching all classes in London as an Evangelist. His great mission was to bring people into allegiance to Christ. He was a life-changer: and he stood largely alone in this, in the early years of his London ministry.

Spurgeon venerated the Puritans, and almost worshipped John Calvin. When Spurgeon visited Switzerland, and was invited to preach in the pulpit of John Calvin, he records, "I am not superstitious, but the first time I saw the medal of John Calvin I kissed it, and when the pastors saw my reverence for him they presented me with a magnificent medal." He even submitted to "full canonicals" when he took the service, though to walk in them, he said, would feel like "running in a sack".

"It was John Calvin's cloak," he continues, "and that reconciled me to it very much. I do love that man of God, suffering all his life long, not only enduring persecution from without but a complication of disorders from within, and yet serving his Master with all his heart."

Yet, for all his love of Calvin and the Puritans, Spurgeon's theology was deeply based in Christian experience and upon the Word of God which shapes that experience. When the boy preacher first preached at New Park Street, he went on record with this bold statement of his position.
‘I am not ashamed to avow myself a Calvinist, although I claim to be a Calvinist according to Calvin than after the modern debased fashion. I do not hesitate to take the name of Baptist. You have here" pointing to the open Baptistery "substantial evidence that I am not ashamed of that ordinance of our Lord Jesus Christ, but if I am asked to say in a word what is my creed, I think I must reply, 'It is Jesus Christ'. My venerated predecessor, Dr. Gill, has left a body of divinity[3 volumes of theology!] admirable and excellent in its way, but the body of divinity to which I would pin and bind myself for ever God helping me, is not his system of divinity or any other human treatise, but Jesus Christ, who is the sum and substance of the Gospel, who is in Himself all theology, the Incarnation of every precious truth, the all-glorious embodiment of the way, the truth and the life."

Spurgeon told his own preachers in training: "Our sermons should be our mental life-blood - the outflow of our intellectual and spiritual vigour; or, to change the figure, they should be diamonds well cut and well set, precious intrinsically and bearing the marks of labour. God forbid that we should offer to the Lord that which cost us nothing." A colleague once put it thus: Spurgeon was 'a true doctor of souls, not a general practitioner, but a specialist in the holy art of representing Christ to his people.'

ROGER HAYDEN

[9] Are Baptists just ‘churches’ or are they ‘a Church’, a denomination even ?

Robert Hall

A copy of an early nineteenth century print, which used to hang in Baptist chapel vestries, was a composite etching of Baptist worthies.  Though they never actually gathered together, since Carey who left for Serampore never returned, the print was a statement of  Baptist leaders at this time.  Alongside Carey it included Fuller, Ryland and Knibb, all advocates of overseas mission; the Downend Baptist essayist John Foster, as well as Joseph Kinghorn, the Norwich minister who believed all Baptist churches should have a closed church membership, and those members only would be recipients of the Lord’s Supper.

In the middle, the only one who is standing, in the midst of his peers, is Robert Hall, an acknowledged ‘prince of preachers’, a vigorous social reformer, and a champion of religious liberty.  He was twice pastor at Broadmead, first as a young student and then pastor from 1785-91, alongside Caleb Evans and James Newton, then as senior pastor from 1826-31.  Hall was primarily a doctrinal preacher on the fundamentals of  Christian faith, but his sermons were deeply rooted in the events of the day.  As The New York Observer once declared:

“The springs of political government have also felt the touch of his unobtrusive but mighty hand.  There is perhaps not a man living...of whom the English politicians stand so much in awe as Robert Hall.  He explains to them the British Constitution , points them to the path of duty, arraigns them before the tribunal of the public, sifts all their proceedings, and dares even to speak against Mr Pitt”.  [ For Hall, see G W Hughes, Robert Hall, Carey Press, 1943, p.84]

An example of this is Hall’s Sentiments Proper to the Present Crisis.  Hall was on visit to Bristol, and had been called upon, unexpectedly to preach a sermon on October 19, 1803, in Broadmead.  The chapel was filled with a large congregation that included many servicemen in uniform.  This special ‘fast day’ service, called nationally as Napoleon stood on the French coast, ready to invade Britain, brought out the best of Hall’s superb oratory, as he concluded: “the intoxication of his [Napoleon’s] greatness is the omen of his fall”.  The sermon became a best seller.  In an earlier sermon [1800], Hall attacked the irreligion which was rooted in the philosophy of the French Revolution.  He contrasted the moral bankruptcy of irreligion and the ethical fruits of Christianity. “Atheism”, said Hall, “is an inhuman, bloody and ferocious system...its first object is to dethrone God, its next to destroy man.”

Although intellectually brilliant, Hall was very much at home with ordinary working class people. War and industrialisation made the period after the Napoleonic wars desperate for such people.  The government of the day pursued a repressive policy against all who tried to organise workers in defence of their basic pay.  An Appeal on the subject of the Framework Knitters’ Fund appeared as an anonymous tract in 1819. Flying in the face of the Combination Acts , it argued for a workers ‘Union’ among the stocking workers of the Midlands area to prevent starvation and raise basic wages.  The workers would contribute to a central fund from which fellow unemployed workers would be paid.   The problem was these workers were already on starvation wages.  To be out of work was even worse, so many workers would accept lower wages, a position which manufacturers exploited to the full to reduce their overheads.  The Appeal sought capital for a proposed central fund.  It would benefit workers by supporting the unemployed and thus remove a cause of low wages.  It would also help by relieving the already over-stretched local parish poor-relief.  Local tradesmen would benefit because the purchasing power of the workers would be increased and debts reduced.

This called down the wrath of William Cobbett, author of Rural Rides, on the scheme, and it was at this point that Robert Hall revealed he had written the pamphlet and replied on behalf of the  workers.  Hall viewed Cobbett as ‘careless of the truth of his representations and indifferent to the consequences’.  Cobbett claimed the employers could not afford to pay the workers more, and the whole scheme would encourage idleness.  Hall was able to reply that already many employers in three counties had recognised the wisdom of the scheme and responded with gifts for the capital of the union.


Hall’s view on the slave trade was that it ‘degrades human beings from the denomination of persons, to that of things...the sale of human flesh is the most atrocious of social crimes’.  He believed the slave trade ‘as the most iniquitous in its origins, most mischievous in its effects, and diametrically opposed to the genius of Christianity and   the British Constitution’.


Hall’s advocacy of Christian ministers being involved in public affairs was published in his An Apology for the Freedom of the Press, published first in 1791 and then again in 1822. Hall claimed Christianity was consistent with a love of freedom.  Ministers should be involved in civil affairs, cherish freedom and work for it, and when it was secured, maintain it.  The Apology demanded universal adult suffrage, annual parliaments, and the independence of the House of Commons from the paralysing control of the rich.  His final plea was for a free press, a free church, and a free state, in which the people governed themselves.


As a Baptist community not everyone would have been as politically active as Robert Hall, but as the nineteenth century progressed, Baptists moved towards a new national understanding of themselves as a community of interdependent local churches.  When the only official census of religion was taken in 1851, there had been a considerable among Baptist Christians.  There were about 366,000 Baptists meeting in 1374 Particular Baptist chapels and 179 General Baptist chapels, with the ‘Old Baptists’ having 93 chapels, whose members were largely Unitarian in belief. 


What had brought this about?  A new vigour in theology and participation in the local community, typified by Hall at home and by Carey and his BMS partners abroad.  There had been a surge in local Baptist itinerant preaching, particularly in villages which previously had had no dissenting church.  In the country as a whole, General and Particular Baptists made common cause through the formation of the Baptist Union of Great Britain in 1812-13.  Slowly at first the new unity found expression in this London based national organisation, where doctrinal distinctive once embodied in denominational Confessions of Faith that had originated in the 17th century, gave way to a shared conviction in sentiments ‘usually denominated  evangelical’.  It really got under way in 1832, when churches from the Particular and the General Baptist traditions, Calvinistic and Arminian found fellowship and strength in facing the common evangelistic challenge of presenting the Gospel  in a growingly prosperous land under Queen Victoria, with an expanding Empire, colonies  and dependencies around the world.


The Victorian age was one of famous preachers, like Robert Hall, with most cities having a dozen or more, each of whom had a considerable influence on community life and local politics.  Baptists were well supplied with such preachers.  They were well-known in their respective communities.  Alexander Mclaren in Manchester, Charles Williams in Accrington, and C M Birrell in Liverpool in the north-west; J P Mursell in Leicester and John T Brown in Northampton in the Midlands; and C H Spurgeon and John Clifford in London; and Richard Glover in Bristol were typical of the denomination in this century.  Through such leaders Baptists were more and more perceived to be a Church, a denomination, on an equal standing with other Free Churches, and together, part and parcel of the wider Christian community in England.  Those of an earlier generation would have been surprised just how close Baptists had come to being a denomination, among other denominations.  In fact some Victorian Baptists did not like this new shape to Baptist life, and withdrew to form countrywide associations of ‘Strict and Particular Baptists’ who held to the old, distinctive Baptist doctrines, especially as enshrined in the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith.

Broadmead, Bristol, who had been part of that community, moved in the new direction.  By the mid nineteenth century the church had followed Robert Hall’s lead and opened its membership and communion to all who would confess faith in Christ as Lord and Saviour.  It became a loyal supporter of the Baptist Union and the Baptist Missionary Society, a position to which we still adhere to-day.

ROGER HAYDEN

8. Getting the Gospel to the World

William Carey

Baptist prayer, theology and action

    Baptists at the close of the eighteenth-century, caught a vision for God’s purposes on a world scale through one Baptist minister in particular, William Carey.  His contemporaries thought the apostolic mandate was addressed only to the apostolic age, when it had been duly fulfilled.  However strange such thinking seems to us, the modern missionary movement in Protestant churches began against this background in the 1770s and 1780s.  Three Baptist ministers first, challenged their churches about their objectives in prayer, then their understanding of the Gospel, and finally posed the need for all Christians to be actively with God on His mission.  Let me introduce these three, John Sutcliff, Andrew Fuller and William Carey.

[1]    John Sutcliff calls the Association to Prayer

John Sutcliff first become acquainted when Sutcliff, after training at Bristol Baptist College, formed a deep friendship with Fuller, both sharing a passion for mission.  Sutcliff was born in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, on 9 August 1752, and  went to the Wainsgate Baptist Church, where he was baptized by his minister, John Fawcett, on 18 May 1769.  In February 1772 he made his way to Bristol Academy to be trained for the ministry by Hugh and Caleb Evans.  He was admitted to ‘transient communion’ at Broadmead, Bristol, on 9 February 1772, having walked all the way from Yorkshire so that the money saved could be spent on books for further study!  After training he moved to Olney in 1775 and after due trial as pastor, he was ordained there on 7 August 1776.

    As soon as Sutcliff’s ministry began it was called in question by some members, a situation which persisted from 1777 to 1784.  By consistently visiting all those who disagreed with him, he gradually won over most of them to his own position. In 1784 he introduced the idea of a regular prayer meeting for the revival of religion, at home and abroad, at the Northamptonshire Baptist Association meeting.  In a book, Revd Jonathan Edwards, had pleaded for a regular hour every month to be given to concerted prayers for the revival of religion.  Edwards had published this plan in America in An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ’s Kingdom in 1747. Sutcliff had experimented at Olney with days of prayer for specific purposes in 1779, 1782 and 1783.  After preaching at the Northamptonshire Baptist Association meeting in 1784 he proposed the Association churches should have prayer meetings to pray for revival on a monthly basis: a root which eventually bore fruit in the formation of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792.

Sutcliff’s motion at the 1784 Association meeting, read:
‘...respecting meetings for prayer, to bewail the low estate of religion, and earnestly implore a revival of our churches, and of the general cause of our Redeemer, and for that end to wrestle with God for the effusion of his Holy Spirit, which alone can produce the blessed effect, it was unanimously RESOLVED, to recommend to all our churches and congregations, the spending of one hour in this important exercise, on the first Monday in every calendar month.  We hereby solemnly exhort all the churches in our connection, to engage heartily and perseveringly in the prosecution of this plan …’
What was the object of such prayer? 

‘That the Holy Spirit is to be poured down on our ministers and churches, that sinners may be converted, the saints edified, the interest of religion revived, and the name of God glorified.  At the same time remember, we trust you will not confine your requests to your own congregations, or to our own immediate connection; let the whole interest of the Redeemer be affectionately remembered, and the spread of the Gospel to the most distant parts of the habitable globe be the object of your most fervent requests.... Surely we have enough love to Zion to set apart one hour at a time, twelve times a year, to seek her welfare.’ [NBA, Circular Letter, 1784, p.12]

The Midland and the Yorkshire Baptist Associations by 1786, had come to share this growing concern for mission.

    Sutcliff also had considerable influence on William Carey in the 1780s, when  Carey became a member at Olney Baptist Church from July 1785 until November 1787, so that Sutcliff and his church might test Carey’s gift for Baptist ministry.  At first Olney were not prepared to commend him, so he received further training from Sutcliff who taught him the basics of Greek, Hebrew and Latin.  Eventually Carey’s preaching found acceptance with the Olney congregation and he was commended by them ‘to preach the Gospel wherever the providence of God might lead him’.  Carey began as pastor at Moulton in 1787, with John Sutcliff and Andrew Fuller preaching at his ordination on 1 August 1787.  [For Sutcliff see, M Haykin, One Heart and One Soul,  Evangelical Press, 1994]

[2]   Andrew Fuller proposes a new theology for Baptists

The founding of the Baptist Missionary Society came after long discussions among the Northamptonshire Association ministers.  Two of them were John Ryland, jnr, trained by his father who had been taught at Bristol Academy, and another Bristol student, John Sutcliff.  Both had a significant influence on the two self-taught ministers who conceived the Missionary Society, William Carey and Andrew Fuller.  This group of Baptist ministers all valued the writings of Revd Jonathan Edwards, particularly his account of the Great Awakening in New England, and his publication of the Journal of  David Brainerd. [For Edwards, see, Jonathan Edwards: A Life, George Marsden, Yale, 2003]

    Andrew Fuller challenged the extreme Calvinism of John Gill which had resulted in dry, arid, non-invitation preaching in the churches with his book, The Gospel Worth of All Acceptation, or the Duty of sinners to believe in Jesus Christ, (1785).  Fuller had read a tract by Abraham Taylor, The Modern Question, which claimed that the ‘eternal God does by his word make it the duty of poor unconverted sinners who hear the Gospel preached or published, to believe in Jesus Christ’.

Fuller, in the first part of his book, stated it was the duty of all who hear the Gospel to trust in Christ with faith, placing their personal trust in Christ’s promises.  The second part comprised arguments to prove that faith in Christ is the duty of all who hear the Gospel.  Unconverted sinners are commanded, exhorted and invited to believe in Christ for salvation.  The Gospel requires obedience, and such obedience includes saving faith.  Scripture ascribes want of faith in Christ to man’s depravity, and God has threatened the most awful punishments on sinners for their not believing in Christ as Saviour and Lord. 

‘I believe it is the duty of every minister of Christ’ wrote Fuller, ‘plainly and faithfully to preach the Gospel to all who will hear it … I therefore believe free and solemn addresses, invitations, calls and warnings to be not only consistent, but directly adapted, as means, in the hand of the Spirit of God to bring them to Christ.  I consider it as part of my duty which I could not omit without being guilty of the blood of souls.’  Fuller’s own independent judgment was that faith was not a person being persuaded he had an ‘interest’ in Christ, but a coming to Christ, believing in Him, and therefore being changed.

    When Fuller came to the Northamptonshire Baptist Association at Olney in the spring of 1776, he met Sutcliff for the first time.  Immediately they established a deep rapport with each other and with the young John Ryland. The success of Fuller in breaking through was his ability to provide a complete and comprehensive theological answer to the ‘modern question’ in his book, The Gospel Worthy of all Acceptation.  [For Fuller, see Peter J Morden, Offering Christ to the World: Andrew Fuller, 1754-1815, Paternoster, 2003]

[3]   Enter William Carey with an Enquiry

Fuller went to the Association Meeting, held at Olney Baptist Church, on 5 June 1782.  The meetings were well attended for the fire of revival was smouldering in many hearts.  A window had to be taken out of the Meeting House, and an improvised pulpit placed within the chapel, so that the crowds who gathered might hear.  Looking at Fuller from the yard as he preached, was a young man from Hackleton, William Carey.  Carey had been three years converted, but was not yet baptized – that would be next year – 1783. 

Pearce Carey tells the story of his grandfather on this occasion thus:
‘Carey’s first experience of an Association day was a thing of remembrance.  No leader knew him, nor gave him a thought.  He was one of the least of the concourse thronging the Olney meeting-house and yard … Carey had never seen Fuller before and would fain have thanked him.  He had never witnessed such a day’s religious zeal.  With not a penny in his pocket he could buy no food, and except for a glass of wine at a friend of Mr Chater’s, he fasted.  But his mind and spirit had a feast.  He would have been amazed had he foreseen how fiery a chariot this Association was to become, with himself its charioteer.’

In 1784 the Association met in Nottingham, and Fuller preached on Walking by Faith, which when printed became Seven Persuasives to an Extraordinary Union in Prayer for the Revival of Real Religion added.  Fuller urged prayerfulness by considering
[1] Christ’s readiness to hear and answer prayer;
[2] what the Lord has done in times past in answer to prayer;
[3] the present religious state of the world;
[4] what God has promised to do for his church in times to come;
[5] if we have any regard to the welfare of our countrymen, connection and friends, to let this stimulate us in this work;
[6] that what is suggested is so very small; and
[7[ lastly, it will not be in vain, whatever the immediate and apparent issue of it.
   
    Carey was a poverty stricken shoe-maker, employed by one of Fuller’s deacons, Thomas Gotch.  One day Gotch met Carey as he came to collect some shoe-leather and uppers to work on the next week.  Gotch asked Carey how much he earned from his shoe-making, each week.  Carey replied it was about 10 shillings a week.  ‘Well now,’ said Gotch, with a twinkle in his eyes, ‘I don’t mean you to spoil any more of my leather, but get on as fast as you can with your Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and I’ll allow you ten shillings a week from my private purse!’
   
    Fuller had told Gotch of Carey’s proposal for a discussion at the Ministers’ meeting: ‘Whether the command given to the apostles to teach all the nations was not binding on all succeeding ministers to the end of the world.’  Fuller notes that Carey constantly raised this issue, but his fellow ministers, ‘mostly regarded it as a wild impracticable scheme and gave him no encouragement.  Yet he would not give it up, but talked with us one by one, till he had made some impression.’  Just as Fuller had proved the Gospel COULD be preached to all, so Carey demanded its corollary, the Gospel MUST be preached to all. 
   
    When the Northamptonshire ministers met in Clipstone, at Easter 1791, Fuller preached on a striking text from Haggai 1.2, ‘This people say, the time is not come, the time that the Lord’s house should be built’.  The sermon was concerned with the dangerous tendency of delay in the concerns of religion: a powerful address in the context of all the praying that had been going on for revival over seven years.  Fuller said:

‘We pray for the conversion and salvation of the world, and yet neglect the ordinary means by which these ends have been accomplished.  It pleased God, by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believed … Ought we not then at least to try by some means to convey more of the good news of salvation to the world around us than has hitherto been conveyed?’

At this ministers meeting Carey demanded action from his colleagues, but they remained cautious.  He moved that something should be done that day, ‘relative to the formation of a Society for the propagation of the Gospel among the heathen’.  The other ministers had been compelled to consider such action, because Carey had constantly advocated it.  However, it still seemed to them too great an undertaking, and utterly beyond their reach.  To gain time and to satisfy Carey, they urged him to revise a manuscript he had prepared on the subject and put it into print.  Thomas Potts, a deacon at Cannon Street, Birmingham, gave £10 to pay for the printing of Carey’s Enquiry.

Carey wrote in the introduction,
‘as our blessed Lord has required us to pray that his kingdom may come, and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven, it becomes us not only to express our desire of that by words, but to use every lawful method to spread the knowledge of his name.’

Christ’s commission to the apostles was still binding on the Church, despite others that we should concentrate upon our countrymen; and others that God would himself have responsibility to bring the heathen the Gospel.  Next Carey surveyed missionary endeavour from the New Testament to the present, urging this was still the primary responsibility of ministers, who must exert themselves in this task.
   
    Carey suggested a way forward: the first, and most important was prayer, fervent and united, recognising that Sutcliff’s Association prayer-call had been significant.  However, ‘we must not be contented with prayer, without exerting ourselves in the use of every means for obtaining those things we pray for’.  He put forward a SOCIETY idea, with a competent committee to administer it.   But there was still reluctance.  In despair Carey grabbed hold of Fuller’s arm and cried out: ‘Is nothing again to be done?’
   
    Fuller was deeply moved.  It was agreed that the Plan for such a Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Heathen be prepared for the October meeting at Kettering.  Carey preached his challenging sermon at Nottingham, Expect great things FROM God, attempt great things FOR God, and world mission among Baptists was on its way.  Carey willingly translated vision into action by himself sailing with Dr John Thomas in 1793, for India, never to return to these shores. [ For Carey, see S P Carey, William Carey, London, 1923]

Many things can be learned from this part of our Baptist story, but for me it is important because it reveals what in the present could be called ‘a Baptist Spirituality’, which is useful for to-day.  It illustrates our interdependence as Baptist Christians.  These ministers needed each other.  One was a man of prayer, one a man with theological insight, the third a man with a determination to put a vision into practice.   When prayer, theology and action come together to seek the mind of Christ, as each one brings a vital gift and shares it with their friends, so God’s will could be known and done

ROGER HAYDEN   

[8] Getting the Gospel right! Or, ‘How much of a man was Jesus Christ?’

In the 1700s the Baptist story was concerned with the good news of who Jesus is.  After the civic and religious unrest of the previous century, the country finally settled down under Hanoverian kings, and the church by law established, the Church of England sought to re-assert its former dominance. 

Anglicans believed there must be a ‘national church’, which would provide a common order of worship every Sunday in the Book of Common Prayer; and state the belief of Christians in the Thirty-nine Articles.  The significant number of English Christian people who did not agree with this pattern were classified as Dissenters, or Non-conformists.  These Christians had a range of ideas about how to be the church of Christ, but believed the touchstone for all this was the Old and New Testaments.  They advocated the complete separation of State and Church, with Baptists calling for religious liberty and toleration.  Baptists also advocated the view that the church was a community of adults who had personally come to trust the ‘Jesus story’. This was declared initially through baptism:  the complete immersion of believing adults in water, in the name of the Triune God.  This faith once confessed and accepted within the local church covenant, was renewed regularly at the Lord’s Table.

The 18th century has been called the ‘age of rationalism’.  There were those who said Scripture alone is not enough for determining the answer to the central question for Christians, who is Jesus?  This came to a head in a debate held at Salters’ Hall, London in 1719.  The fundamental question concerned the nature of God.  Is the One God to be described as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?  This matter had been at the centre of Christian discussion as early as 325 AD.  An Alexandrian priest, Arius, claimed that Christ existed as a divine person, before his incarnation, so Jesus was in some sense divine.  His followers were called Arians.

200 years before the Salters’Hall debate took place, two  Italian religious teachers, Lelio  and Fausto Sozzini, , an uncle and nephew from Sienna, totally rejected the idea that Christ existed before his appearance on earth, and with it the Trinitarian idea of God.  They believed that Jesus was a man who, because of his life work, God made worthy of adoration.  The propagation of these views by an Anglican priest, Stephen Nye, in 1687 led to the Blasphemy Act [1698], which made those advancing such views liable to 3 years imprisonment.  Nonetheless the heresy gained ground, particularly through William Whiston’s book, Primitive Christianity Revived. [1710].

Dissenters dealt with this question about who Jesus was, when London ministers were asked to give advice about the views of two Presbyterian ministers in Exeter.  The question was this: Can ‘who is Jesus?’ be resolved by an appeal to Scripture evidence only; or can an appeal also be made to the historic creeds of Christendom, for example, the Apostles or Nicene Creed?  The majority of Presbyterian and General Baptist ministers declared Scripture alone sufficient.  Most Congregational and Particular Baptist churches advocated appealing to historic Christian creeds as well.  For General Baptists this was the beginning of many moving towards Unitarianism by 1800.

Particular Baptists had taken an interest in creedal statements in the previous century when they made common cause, once the monarchy was restored [1660]. with Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Independents against the Anglicans.  For Particular Baptists the gathering of over a hundred delegates from Baptist churches in London, in 1689, was a key event.  The Baptist gathering produced the 1689 Confession of Faith, which became a foundation document across Britain.  The 1689 Confession was drawn up by delegates who attended the National Assembly, where Baptists set about securing an ‘able and evangelical ministry’ for their churches.  In the 18th century, Bristol Baptist Academy and Broadmead Baptist church made possible the training of over 200 ministers for these churches.  In our Western Baptist Association, Broadmead led the way in making it a Particular Baptist community, when General Baptists were excluded by an Association resolution from Broadmead, whereby fellowship was confined to those who accepted the 1689 Confession.

Why was a statement of ‘the faith of the Church’ so vital? First, it made clear how this community understood the scripture story.  Second, it was decisive in doctrinal terms for the minister and his ministry each Sunday.  Third, it was the foundation upon which future ministers were to be trained at the Bristol Academy.  Fourth, it provided a tool for catechising children and new members.  Finally, it made clear what the boundaries were between different denominational groupings.

As Baptist churches have engaged in ministry and mission down the centuries, ‘Who is Jesus?’ has been a recurring theme requiring an answer.  The 1689 Confession remained foundational for Particular Baptists in the West of England until the 1850s.  The Baptist Union, in an attempt to make itself of service to all Baptists in the UK, consciously removed it as its basis, and in 1832 invited all Baptists, General and Particular, who accepted ‘those sentiments usually denominated evangelical’ to become members.  However, the issue still surfaces and as recently as 1971, one of our College principals, Michael Taylor, was asked to address the Assembly on a theme, chosen by the President, Rev Dr. G Henton Davies.  Davies’s theme was this: ‘The Divine presence: How much of a man was Jesus Christ?’  Taylor’s courageous and honest attempt to answer the question plunged Baptist churches in to disarray as they wrestled with one Baptist’s answer, but which the majority did not accept. 

But once the issue was resolved in the eighteenth century, Baptists were ready to face the task of telling the whole world who Jesus was, what he had done, and why: a story we will look at in the next article.

ROGER HAYDEN

TOLERATION AND LIBERTY: Baptists between 1640 and 1689

To describe Baptist Christians to-day as Dissenters or Nonconformists, would only be understood by a few.  However, such words were used because they conveyed who Baptists were.  When Charles II came to power as the monarchy was restored in 1660, the Act of Uniformity [1662] re-established the Church of England as an Episcopal state church that all Christians must accept.   All ministers had to declare their ‘unfeigned assent and consent’ to the Book of Common Prayer, and the Thirty-nine Articles’ If they had not been ordained by a Bishop, they had to be re-ordained.  Conformity to the established church was also required of every university Fellow, school teacher and private tutor.  There was no place for any kind of dissenting from this. 

All ministers had to sign up to the Uniformity Act by 24 August 1662, St Bartholomew’s Day.  1,000 clergy resigned their livings rather than do this. 2029 clergy, lecturers and Fellows were deprived of their posts between 1660 and 1662. Of the 2029 clergy affected, 194 were known to be Independent[Congregational] ministers, and 19 were Baptists.  Most stood down with great reluctance.  For a while the Presbyterians tried to get a foothold in the restored Anglican church without success, and by 1689 were firmly in the dissenting community.  They dissented from, and were unable to accept, the form and practices of the Church of England. 

The immediate effect of the Restoration was to bring persecution and suffering between 1660 and 1689, as the Broadmead Records testify, with Ewins, Hardcastle, and Fownes being imprisoned, as well as many other church members.  It was also the final step towards the division of English Christendom into Church of England, Dissenters, and Roman Catholic..  It was in this period that Baptists, as a denomination found their shape, beliefs, and practices.

Baptists had already argued for religious toleration when they returned to England, with Thomas Helwys giving religious liberty and toleration ‘the finest and fullest defence it had ever received in England’.  The King is a mortal man and not God, therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects.  Helwys argued that the state has no right to persecute people for their religious opinions or invade their worship gatherings.  Wars of religion, the savage tortures of the Middle Ages, the cruelties of the Inquisition, the brutal penalties enacted by Protestants on one another, all depended upon linking of the state’s secular arm with its religious arm. 

With John Milton, our Baptist forefathers protested against those who would
‘Adjure the civil sword/To force our consciences that Christ set free.’

A distinguishing mark of Baptist people was their fight to establish the complete separation of Church and State, so that the secular force could not be used in matters of religious belief.  Equally, Baptists argued that the affairs of the Church should be controlled by the church, not by the Crown through Parliament.  Think of the persecution of Christians in Islamic countries, as is happening in Pakistan now, or when Baptists, like Georgi Vins, were being persecuted in the Communist Soviet Union for their religious faith, and the vital relevance of this distinctive belief is seen as a contemporary issue for Baptist people.

Toleration, religious liberty, and the separation of Church and State, were vital issues in this period and the price paid to secure them was significant.  Baptists let them fall into disuse to-day at their peril. Richard Hooker argued in his famous defence of the Church of England as established by the first Queen Elizabeth, that:
“There is not any member of the Church of England but the same person is also a member of the commonwealth; nor any member of the commonwealth, which is not also of the Church of England.”

He was profoundly wrong in thinking that Church and commonwealth were ‘personally one society’.  The Church of England was then regarded as the nation in its religious aspect.  It was not true then, and it is not true to-day.  Our dissenting forefathers rejected the idea, believing such a view obscured and distorts the true nature of the Church.  The church is, as R C Walton, one of my predecessors at Waterbarn, Bacup called it, The Gathered Community; or as Ernest A Payne preferred to call it The Fellowship of Believers.  From within that believer community within our nation, the Free Churches, as we Baptists and other dissenting friends call ourselves to-day, are not called to be ‘a beneficent voluntary association within the life of the State, which the State is content to patronize’ as an adjunct of its ‘Big Society’, serving its goals.  We are to be a necessary ‘prophetic voice to the state’ concerning God’s values and plans for his world.  The gathered Church community and its ministers are here to help the State to be properly an agent of the coming Kingdom of God.

ROGER HAYDEN

Baptists between 1640 and 1689 (Part 1)

Oliver Cromwell

In the 1640s England went through a period of civil war as Oliver Cromwell first came to dominate Parliament and then defeated King Charles I.  Cromwell’s new society was established through his innovative ‘New Model Army’, which kept order in a period of colossal political unrest.  Cromwell believed profoundly he was the instrument of Divine providence:  ‘I have not sought these things; truly I have been called unto them by the Lord.’ 

By 1648 Cromwell was finally convinced that the Puritan cause would never be successful until the King was removed.  He signed the order of Parliament which authorized Charles II’s execution in 1649.  Politically, Cromwell persisted with the inefficient ‘Long Parliament’, which was dominated by small cliques, until in 1653 he lost patience with it. He then introduced an Instrument of Government that made him Lord Protector, consistently refusing to be King, and ruled by a series of constitutional experiments. 

Cromwell effectively abolished the Church of England; removed Bishops, the Book of Common Prayer and The 39 Articles; and severed the close ties between church and state.  Cromwell, as a Puritan, embraced the intense spirituality of the Congregationalists; but his alternative ecclesiastical organization can only be called chaotic. 

How did Baptist Christians fare between 1640 and 1690, as England first flirted with republicanism, then endured the inevitable persecuting Royalist, Anglican backlash?  ‘Cromwell and after’ is the political and religious background of the Broadmead Records, Bristol. This provides a West Country description of Baptists, which is largely mirrored nationwide.  In the midst of the Civil War, a significant minority of Bristol Christians were in favour of ‘reformation without tarrying for any’. 

Dorothy, the wife of the vicar Matthew Hazzard, gathered a group of lay people around her.  They ‘separated’ themselves from the parish and began house meetings for worship.  They left parish worship, and identified with the Parliamentary forces in the English civil war.  In 1642 the city fell to Prince Rupert, and a large group of future Broadmeadians moved to London, where some joined William Kiffin, a Particular Baptist pastor, and others joined Henry Jessey, whose church had a communion table open to all.  When they returned to Bristol after Cromwell’s victory, the Broadmeadians received pastoral oversight from Thomas Ewins, a City Lecturer in Bristol.


Debates about the traditional relationship between Church and State raged, and presented Baptists with a series of awkward questions.  Should Baptist ministers be paid with the state funds Cromwell promised to give to all ‘godly ministers’ who preached faithfully? Baptists generally answered negatively, and after Cromwell, became convinced that congregations should support their ministers.  Should Baptists pay the ‘tithe’ [state tax] that enabled the state to pay godly magistrates? Most Baptists said ‘yes’. 

In this revolutionary period many, Baptists among them, believed the end of the world was very near.  The execution of Charles I, linked to prophecies in Daniel, led some Baptists to believe Christ’s millennium, a reign by Christ on earth for a 1000 years was about to begin, now, in England.  When Cromwell took ‘Lord Protector’ as his title, some saw this as a sure sign that Cromwell was the ‘anti-Christ’ of scripture.  Vavasor Powell, a Welsh minister in London, was reported to have sent his congregation home with this task: ‘Let us go home and pray, and say: “Lord, wilt Thou have Oliver Cromwell or Jesus Christ to reign over us?” and he was in no doubt as to what answer God would give.  It was not until 1658 that another contentious question in Broadmead, about the form of baptism, was resolved.  Broadmead adopted the practice of adult believers’ baptism, but in the words of John Bunyan’s 1673 pamphlet, it agreed that Differences in Judgment about Water-Baptism [provided] No  Bar to Communion. 

Once Cromwell had died, King Charles II returned to restore the monarchy in England.  The re-action of many Anglican clergy and re-instated Bishops, as well as the Anglican laity, was to persecute all Christians who declined to become a part of the restored Church of England.  Various Acts of Parliament were put through to re-establish the Church’s position in society.  Many Baptist pastors and people who failed to observe these Acts, were fined, had property and goods impounded, went to prison, and some were even transported to the West Indian plantations.  This happened in the West Country, under the regime of the notorious Judge Jeffery.  It was only the Test and Corporation Act[1689] that Baptists and other dissenters were finally allowed to have pastors, buildings for worship, and opportunities to engage in mission.

ROGER HAYDEN

What did Jesus Accomplish on the Cross? A Particular Baptist Reply

John Calvin

We have already noted a significant question for early English Baptists: what did Jesus accomplish by his life, death and resurrection?   John Calvin answered this in a very clear cut, but fundamentally different manner, to that of his successor, Jacob Arminius. 

To understand Calvin’s significance it is important to outline his life and his broad theological principles, before looking at the narrower issue of predestination.  John Calvin [1509-64] a French Roman Catholic, trained as a lawyer at the Sorbonne in Paris, studied the writings of Luther and other theologians, and in 1532, like them underwent a deep evangelical religious experience. ‘God subdued my heart’ he wrote, ‘to docility by a sudden conversion’.

 He was forced to leave France and it was while he was passing through Geneva that he was persuaded to become the city’s ‘reader in Holy Scripture’. Here Calvin published The Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536, a classic statement of the whole of his reformed theology, which was revised continually throughout his life.  He was persuaded to become the organizer of ‘the reformation’ in Geneva, and in 1541 began his work, remaining there as the ‘unopposed dictator’ of a theocratic regime in the city till 1564. 

The government of this new reformed church was by a consistory church court, which could excommunicate unrepentant church members, and had far reaching authority over the private lives of every citizen. In Geneva people saw a theocratic state in action, and many in England thought it the best model of a reformed church.  English separatists who took refuge there responded warmly to Calvin’s revolutionary proposals for a new church structure, and sought a reformation in England advocating the Geneva model.  However, Queen Elizabeth 1 would not tolerate it.  In Scotland John Knox led the introduction of Calvin’s model for church and state.


English Separatist Christians, meeting outside Church of England structures, began to form ‘gathered churches’, established on Calvin’s principles. Henry Jacob led one such Independent Calvinist congregation as early as 1616.  By 1630, this church was led by John Lathrop, the congregation insisting upon a complete separation of church and state, rejecting the ‘parish’ system of Anglicanism.  Ten years later, in May 1640, Henry Jessey was the pastor.  This Calvinist orientated congregation discussed believers’ baptism in the 1640s, and by 1644 believers’ baptism had become the norm for admission to this congregation.  By 1644 seven other London Baptist congregations signed a common statement of their faith and practice.  Calvinist Baptist congregations grew steadily.

In the time of Oliver Cromwell, Baptist Christians in the Parliamentary army spread Calvinist Baptist churches around the country.  It was the English Civil War that led the Broadmead, Bristol congregation to leave ‘Royalist’ Bristol, and migrate to London where they joined with a Calvinist Baptist congregation under the leadership of William Kiffin.  Once Cromwell was ruling the country, Broadmead Christians returned to Bristol, to be led by Matthew Hazzard, his wife Dorothy, and later Thomas Ewins.

Calvinism maintains that the Bible alone contains all that is necessary to know God and our duties towards God and our neighbour.  Calvinist theology asserted that before the Fall, man was in a state of innocence and could attain to holy living.  But the Fall, which was willed by God, substantially changed human nature, so that man no longer had free will.  All human works outside the Christian faith were sins, and even the good works of Christians were intrinsically evil.  However, the imputed merits of Christ won at Calvary covered humanities intrinsic evil, and they were not counted as such.  Calvin argued that before the Fall, even before the creation of the world, God in his wisdom predestined some of humanity, his elect, to salvation and the rest to damnation.

In a recent Baptist Quarterly [January 2011] an article claims that The True Calvinist is a Baptist.   This may be true but to-day’s English Baptists are certainly not Calvinist, but are more accurately termed Arminian.  When Baptist churches in the mid-eighteenth century awoke to the missionary challenge of Andrew Fuller and William Carey, they modified their Calvinism without becoming fully Arminian, because ‘high Calvinism’ had to all intents and purposes, reduced the missionary task of the Church to helping the elect of God to recognise their calling.  Calvin’s assertion of predestination was meant to maintain the sovereignty God, but it effectively reduced God’s elect to a very small number, when set within the context of the vast populations on earth that Carey discovered, when reading of the voyages of Captain Cook.  Arminius, on the other hand, maintained that God’s sovereignty was compatible with man’s real free-will.  He was clear that Jesus died for all people, not just the elect and rejected predestination as unbiblical.


When the Baptist Union united English General and Particular Baptists into a single group in 1891, it signalled a retreat by the majority of English Baptists from full-bloodied Calvinism, though a small group maintained the original Calvinist position, and are to-day as known as Strict and Particular Baptists.