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This controversy caused most unlovely bickerings in the Churches, some few of them Independent, as well as Baptist. Concealed worship had first made silence necessary, to avoid persecution, till about 1680. The contest was prosecuted through numbers of books and pamphlets with great fierceness, the whole question turning on the one point, whether or not there was scriptural precept or example for the whole congregation, converted and unconverted, to join in the singing as a part of divine worship. Yet they all believed that such persons as God had gifted to sing might do so, one by one; and in this form of solo all the Churches had singing, but only as the heart dictated the ‘melody,’ and not by the use of rhyme or written note.

Mr. Keach was a prolific author, having published forty-three different works, some of them large. He had great faith in God, and was the subject of many marked interpositions of his goodness. One striking fact is related of his later years. He was so ill in 1689 that life was despaired of, even by his physicians. Mr. Knollys, who greatly loved him, knelt at his bedside, and after fervently praying that God would add to his life the time granted to Hezekiah; on rising, said, ‘Brother Keach, I shall be in heaven before you.’ Both the prayer and prediction were honored to the letter; Knollys died two years afterward and Keach lived fifteen years.

For three generations the Giffords were noted Baptist preachers. ANDREW was the head of the family, and was highly esteemed in the west of England. He was born at Bristol, and entered the ministry in 1661, when persecution began to be very fierce. Many thrilling stories tell of his adventures and perils, some of which he escaped by boldness and ready wit, as well as by gentleness of spirit. While he was preaching at Bristol the mayor and aldermen came with the sword and other official regalia, and commanded him to come down. He told them that as he was about his Master’s business, they would oblige him to wait until he was through, then he would go with them. They complied, sat down and listened with close attention; when he went with them to the council-house, where they gave him ‘a soft reproof and caution,’ and dismissed him. He was thrice imprisoned in Newgate, then a loathsome dungeon, and in many other ways suffered for the truth. He was drawn into the uprising of the ill-fated Duke of Moilmouth, but escaped the legal consequences of his course; while Elizabeth Gaunt, a noble Baptist, was burned at Tyburn for giving refuge to a rebel of whom she had no knowledge, being prompted by humanity. But Jeffrys, whose meat and drink it was to sentence a Baptist to death, sent her to the stake on the oath of the outlaw whom she had ignorantly succored, and burnt her October 23d, 1685.

A second ANDREW GIFFORD, D.D grandson of the above, was born at Bristol in 1700. He was baptized at the age of fifteen. In 1729 he removed to London and formed the Eagle Street Church, which he served for fifty years. He was very learned and a powerful preacher. For the last thirty years of his life he was Assistant Librarian of the British Museum, a post which he filled with great honor.

The Hollis family was noted also for its preaching ability, although Thomas and John, its most distinguished members, remained in business while they preached. Thomas, the younger, was one of the most liberal supporters of Harvard College, Mass. In 1720 he founded a professorship of theology there, and in 1726 a professorship of mathematics and experimental philosophy, and sent over apparatus that cost £150. The first of these was endowed with a salary of £80 a year, with £10 each to ten scholars, four of whom were to be Baptists; the second professorship was to have the same salary, £80.

Probably the most learned man amongst the General Baptists at this period was Thomas Grantham. He became a pastor when very young, and was early called to suffer for conscience’ sake in Lincoln jail. There he wrote a tract called ‘The Prisoner against the Prelate,’ in which he gave his reasons for separation from the Established Church. It is supposed that he wrote the Address or Confession which he put into the hand of Charles II, and which is chiefly of value for our purpose because it sets forth that it was adopted by many representatives of the London Churches, and ‘owned and approved by more than twenty thousand;’ which shows the number of General Baptists at that time, and gives us an idea of their proportionate strength. If the Particular Baptists numbered ten thousand in 1662, as is supposed, this would give the entire Baptist strength of England at thirty thousand; which, together with their sympathizers, shows a strong element in the population, estimated at that time at three hundred thousand in London and from three to five millions in England. This fair estimate throws light upon the question of fear and hatred toward them in the State Church.

In the reign of Charles II the Rev. FRANCIS BAMPFIELD founded the body known as the Seventh-Day Baptists. He was a graduate of Oxford and a prebend of Exeter Cathedral, but in 1653 subscribed to the commonwealth, and took the Scriptures as his sole religious guide. The Act of Conformity in 1662 expelled him from his living, and, continuing to preach, he was cast into prison. But he preached in the jail-yard, then, being released, he was re-arrested and was imprisoned for eight years. Still he not only preached, but formed a Church within the prison walls. On his release he founded the first Sabbatarian Church in London, and became its pastor in 1676. Here he was declared out of the protection of his majesty, was condemned to jail during life or the king’s pleasure, all his goods were forfeited, and he died in Newgate, February, 1684. This body of Baptists never was numerous in England, but a bequest having been left to the Church in Whitechapel, the property has now become very valuable. On the death of Dr. Black, its late learned pastor, the membership was reduced to about half a dozen old people, and the property was likely to revert to the crown by the conditions of the bequest. A Seventh-Day Baptist pastor could not be found in Europe, and the vice-chancellor decided that, if the Seventh-Day brethren could not fill the place, the property would be lost to the Baptists. It was the happiness of the writer to open negotiations whereby an American was sent over to fill the place, and the Church is more prosperous today under the labors of Mr. Jones than it has been probably for a century.

The formation of the Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers, was a movement in which the Baptists had some interest. The Continental and some of the English Baptists held peculiar views in regard to the lawfulness of judicial oaths, the bearing of arms--even in self-defense--the severance of Christians from the civil magistracy, simplicity of manners and plainness of dress. One by one they dropped these peculiarities, and the views adopted by George Fox were little more in the origin of the society than a modification of these austere Baptist positions. The principal point, however, on which Fox separated from the Baptists was the question of the ‘inner light’ by which a believer could discern between truth and error without the letter of Scripture. The Baptists admitted the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, whose function it was to interpret the written word, but to the Friends ‘the leading of the Spirit’ was the infallible authority, because the voice of God in the soul. It is an unquestionable historical fact that but for the Baptists of the two hundred years preceding, the Society of Friends would not have come into existence in 1648.

We have many traditions, but little written history of very early Baptist Churches in England, especially touching the date of their origin, their line of pastors, the Number of their members, or the notable events of their history. We have some data, however, concerning a few Churches in the west of England. In Cornwall there were Baptist Churches as early as 1650. Forty ministers were ejected in Cornwall, in 1662, and a Baptist Church was gathered at East Looe, and another at Trelevah. The last, from which sprang the Church at Falmouth, was founded by Tregoss. He was educated at Oxford and settled at St. Ives, was ejected and suffered frequent imprisonment, until the king released him in 1671. We are more highly favored in the case of the Broadmead and Fenstanton Churches, the records of which are preserved, and other records may one day come to light. John Canne formed the Bristol Church in 1641, a body noted as the field of Robert Hall’s labors in later years. Canne published the first English Bible with references, and it is worthy of his fame for learning and consecration to Christ, as well as for his labor in planting This living Church.

With the death of that faithless monarch, Charles II, in 1685, a brighter day dawned for the Baptists. On his deathbed he received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church, though he had professed loyalty to the Church of England during his life. His disgraceful persecution of the Non-conformists had concealed his secret love for Rome; but when his brother, James II, ascended the throne, he avowed himself a Romanist, and the severity of persecution was relaxed. In the theory of the law, the Catholic was in the same category with the Independent and the Baptist as a Non-conformist. And as the Catholics must be treated with lenity, so must the others be, to make this lenity more easy to them. However much Protestants might oppress each other, they were a unit against Rome. Accordingly, when James issued his Declaration of Indulgence, in 1687, dispensing with penalties against dissenters, he was surprised to meet with remonstrance on all sides, and especially from Non-conformists, because they could not purchase religious liberty at the price of their civil freedom as Englishmen. The king had assumed to do away with all the religious penalties on his own prerogative without law, and the dissenting bodies would not accept his toleration without law and contrary to law. James could not hoodwink them by his crafty policy, for they saw clearly enough, that when once the Catholics should gain sufficient power, the toleration which the king had granted to his own faith for a purpose would be withdrawn from others, and Protestant England would see sorrowful times. The Baptists joined the other Non-conformists in protesting against the illegal means by which their general liberty had been granted, while they used it freely as a right in spreading their faith. And they continued to resist James until the day that he was compelled to fly and William of Orange became the ruler of England.

Both by training and conviction William was opposed to all persecution for religion, and the alliance of all but Catholics against James made his new policy easy. The continuous and determined efforts of Baptists, Quakers and some of the Independents for complete religious liberty had, by this time, been aided by the pen of Chillingworth, and even some of the English clergy were friendly thereto. But, perhaps, the fact that the policy of legal repression had been thoroughly tried and failed was the most potent consideration in the public mind. The land was sick and disgusted with the fiendish attempt to manacle conviction to men’s souls by chains, and to fry heresy out of their consciences by flames.

Toleration was forced in England by the two branches into which the Independent Churches divided. They both agreed in the statement of the principle, but they differed in regard to its vigorous enforcement. Philip Nye and Thomas Goodwin suffered severely for toleration of a certain order, but Hanserd Knollys and Roger Williams suffered for absolute religious freedom, without any toleration or qualification whatever. Their ideal was that God has directly granted to man in his birth and nature the individual right of a free conscience, and no toleration of his conscience can be rightfully claimed or defended by his fellowman. Yet, the best defenders of toleration as against absolute religious freedom, such as Jeremy Taylor, Chillingworth and Locke, were obliged to base their pleas for toleration on the ground of a free conscience, but they stopped short of its full demand. And the result of the radical ground taken by the seventeenth and eighteenth century Baptists was not only the creation of new impulses in the struggles of religious liberty and a new type of human legislation, but the creation of a new conscience itself, which asserts to each man his right from God to this freedom.

The Toleration Act of 1689 is one of the great landmarks of English history, incomplete and mutilated as it appears to us now. It failed to place all Englishmen on an equality, and left many suffering civil disabilities for religious belief, but it was a long step forward, and substantially ended active persecution. The Baptists now gave the fullest and freest information of their faith and practices in three notable Confessions, two respecting the General and one respecting the Particular Baptists. The General brethren issued the so called ‘Orthodox Creed’ in 1678, approved by their Churches in Bucks, Hereford, Bedford and Oxford, signed by fifty-four ‘messengers, elders and brethren.’ Its Arminianism is mild, and approaches moderate Calvinism. The Calvinistic Confession issued in 1677 and again in 1689, is decided, though not extreme in its doctrinal positions. Aside from distinctive Baptist principles, it is practically the Westminster Confession. Yet; in many things the Baptists stood entirely alone. Curteis calls them ‘Puritans, pure and simple, the only really consistent and logically unassailable Puritans. If Puritanism is true, the Baptist system is right. . . . For the maintenance of more strictly Calvinistic doctrines, for the exercise of a more rigorous and exclusive discipline, for the practice of a more literally scriptural ritual;’ they were justified in standing alone.

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A HISTORY OF THE BAPTISTS

By Thomas Armitage

1890

[Note from the publisher. This valuable out-of-print book was scanned from an original printing and carefully formatted for electronic publication by Way of Life Literature. We extend a special thanks to our friend Brian Snider for his labor of love in diligently scanning the material so that it might be available to God's people in these days. For a catalog of other books, both current and old, in print and electronic format, contact us at P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, [e-mail] (e-mail), http://wayoflife.org/~dcloud (web site).]

[Table of Contents for "A History of the Baptists" by Thomas Armitage]

BAPTISTS OF GREAT BRITAIN

LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE--ASSOCIATIONS--THE STENNETTS--IRISH BAPTISTS

It has been stated that several ‘Anabaptists’ of London made a declaration against universal toleration in 1659, but the value of this statement is light as testimony because, even if the declaration is authentic, the names and number of its supporters are not known. Possibly, a few Baptists might have sided with Milton. in proscribing the Catholics, but the weight of large treatises and several Confessions of large bodies of Churches put them, as a people, on unquestionable record to the contrary. With gratitude it may be written, that down to this day, no known Baptist has penned a sentence favoring the infliction of bodily pain or material penalty by civil government for the belief or practice of a purely religious tenet. On the contrary, with amazing unity Baptists have demanded the right for all men of absolute liberty of conscience in matters of duty to God, without any interference whatever. They stand so radically on the cardinal principle of personal responsibility to God, that to deny this absolute liberty would be to destroy themselves. Locke only chronicled their inner life in saying, that ‘the Baptists were from the beginning friends and advocates of absolute liberty--just and true liberty--equal and impartial liberty.’

In 1609 certain Puritans petitioned for toleration, but disclaimed all ‘way for toleration unto Papists, our suit being of a different nature from theirs,’ and the English Independents asked for little more. Stoughton, in his late Ecclesiastical History of England, entirely agrees with Masson, in Baptist lead here. He writes: ‘The Baptists were foremost in the advocacy of religious freedom, and perhaps, to one of them, LEONARD BASHER, citizen of London, belongs the honor of presenting, in this country, the first distinct and broad plea for liberty of conscience.’ This comprehensive book, indeed, covers the subject so forcefully, that scarcely a new thought has been added to its treatment since 1614. It maintains that it is ‘lawful for every person or persons, yea, Jews and Papists, to write, dispute, confer, and reason, print and publish any matter touching religion, either for or against whomsoever;’ that ‘it is irrational to persecute any man for religion, because faith is the gift of God to each man, which neither bishop nor king can command, to make Christians by force.’ He pronounces it ‘unnatural and abominable, yea, monstrous for one Christian to destroy another for difference and questions of religion.’ So ringingly does this book present the doctrine of the nineteenth century, that Masson says, ‘It cannot be read now without a throb;’ and speaking of Helwys’s Church, with which he as well as Barclay connects Basher, he uses this strong language: ‘His Baptist congregation maintained itself in London side by side with Jacob’s congregation of Independents, established in 1616.’ As if to signalize still further the discrepancy of the two sets of sectaries on the toleration point, there was put forth in that very year, by Jacob and the Congregationalists, a ‘Confession of Faith,’ containing this article: ‘We believe that we, and all true visible Churches, ought to be overseen, and kept in good order and peace, and ought to be governed under Christ, both supremely and also subordinately, by the civil magistrate; yea, in causes of religion, when need is.’ ‘A most humble supplication ‘ from the Baptists to Charles I, 1620, opposes all kinds of religious persecution. Still, when Chillingworth sided with the Baptists on soul-liberty, in 1637, he stood alone in the Church of England. The eight Churches, 1643, laid down this doctrine with the clearness and fullness of an American Bill of Rights today, in Article XLVII of their Confession. Featley’s wrath boiled over at its radical utterances, and devout Baxter protested: ‘I abhor unlimited liberty and toleration of all, and think myself easily able to prove the wickedness of it.’ ‘But the Baptist idea spread against all resistance. Treatise after treatise came from the Baptist press in its defense, until one hundred ‘baptized congregations’ formulated it in Article XXI, of what is now known as the Confession of 1689, although Crosby claims that it was only republished in that year, and that the first edition was issued in 1677. It says: ‘God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are in any thing contrary to his word or not contained in it. So that, to believe such doctrines, or to obey such commands, out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience; and the requiring of an implicit faith and absolute and blind obedience is to destroy liberty of conscience and reason also.’

Nor were the General Baptists a whit behind their Calvinistic brethren on this subject. They issued their belief in ‘An Orthodox Creed or a Protestant Confession of Faith,’ 1678, in which Article XLV says: ‘Subjection in the Lord ought to be yielded to the magistrates in all lawful things commanded by them, for conscience’ sake, with prayers for them for a blessing upon them, paying all lawful and reasonable customs and tribute to them, for the assisting of them against foreign, domestical and potent enemies.’ Then, the next Article, after fully setting forth that Christ is the only King of conscience, and that no man can hold it in ‘usurpation,’ declares: ‘Therefore, the obedience to any demand or decree, that is not revealed in, or (is) consonant to his word, in the holy oracles of Scripture, is a betraying of the true liberty of conscience. And the requiring of an implicit faith and a blind obedience destroys liberty of conscience and reason also, it being repugnant to both.’ The ‘Westminster Confession,’ 1648, Chapter XX, says in substance the same thing; but in the same chapter it maintains that as matters ‘concerning faith, worship . . . or such erroneous opinions or practices, as either in their own nature, or in the manner of publishing and maintaining them, are destructive to the external peace and order which Christ hath established in the Church; they may be lawfully called to account, and proceeded against by the censures of the Church, and by the power of the civil magistrate.’ Then, of the duty of the civil magistrate himself, Chapter XXIII says: ‘It is his duty to take order, that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed, all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline be prevented or reformed, and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administered and observed.’ Such hybrid liberty of conscience as this may account for the fact, that when the Presbyterians had the ascendency in the Assembly and Parliament, 1648, a statute was passed inflicting imprisonment upon those who held ‘that the baptism of infants is unlawful and void, and that such persons ought to be baptized again.’ The same ordinance inflicted ‘the pains of death,’ ‘without benefit of clergy,’ upon other heretics therein mentioned. Keal pronounces this law ‘one of the most shocking laws I have met with in restraint of religious liberty,’ and shows, ‘that the governing Presbyterians would have made a terrible use of their power, had they been supported by the sword of the civil magistrate.’ Whatever else this contradictory teaching of the Westminster Confession may prove; it fully supports Professor Masson in saying, that neither the Presbyterians nor the Independents of that period had any proper notion of absolute or universal toleration, much less of perfect liberty, that they were mere learners in that school, and were far behind ‘the old Baptists in their views.’ He is not choice of his words here, but says squarely:

‘As a body, the Presbyterians of 1644 were absolute Anti-tolerationists. The proofs are so abundant, collectively they make such an ocean, that it passes comprehension how the contrary could ever have been asserted. From the first appearance of the Presbyterians in force, after the opening of the Long Parliament, it was their anxiety to beat down the rising idea of Toleration; and after the meeting of the Westminster Assembly, and the publication of the "Apologetical Narration" of the Independents, the one aim of the Presbyterians was to tie Toleration around the neck of Independency, stuff the two struggling monsters into one sack, and sink them to the bottom of the sea.’

In 1648 Cradock, the Independent, used language quite as strong, saying: ‘I know also by the way that there are a company of people that would arrogate the name of Presbyterie though improperly. The name doth not beseem them, that is, those that have been the Bishop’s creatures and are all for fire and fagot; there are some such among us and they would arrogate the name of Presbytery; I would not have them do it, it doth not befit them.’

When we come to trace the effects of Toleration on the English Baptists, after it was procured, we see at once the paralyzing result of false doctrine, and their decline in spiritual power. This is nowhere more distinctly visible than in their Associations and General Assemblies. The insidious leaven of centralization had even worked itself into the later notions of Smyth, and the fifth charge on which Minton and Helwys expelled him in Holland was his teaching, ‘that an elder in one Church is an elder of all Churches in the world.’ A tinge of interchurch authority crept into the Confession of the eight Churches, 1643, in these words: ‘Although the particular congregations be distinct and several bodies . . . they are to have counsel and keep one of another, if necessity require it, as members of one body in the common faith, under Christ their head.’ The paternal principle of Associations was laid down here, with a slight margin for its abuse also. An Association was formed in 1653, when the Somerset Churches, with those of Wilts, Devon, Gloucester and Dorset, met at Wells, ‘on the sixth and seventeenth days of the month.’ This body of Particular Baptists published the ‘Somerset Confession’ in 1656, which is not to be confounded with the ‘Somerset Confession’ issued by the General Baptists in 1691. The Midland Association of Particular Baptists was formed in 1655, at Warwick, but was reconstructed in 1690, and still exists; its original record books, however, are lost.