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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

Lectures on Baptist History.

LECTURES

ON

Baptist History.

BY
WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS.

PHILADELPHIA:
AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY,
1420 CHESTNUT STREET.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by the
AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY,
In the OflSce of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

Westcott ft Thomson, Grant, Faibes, ft Rougkbs,
Bttrcvtyptra and JSlectrotypero, Philada. Printers, Fhilada.

CONTENTS.

i.
PAGE
JOHN THE BAPTIST, THE LORD'S HARBINGER  9

II.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST  39
III.
BAPTISM AND REGENERATION  65
IV.
THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST AND AS MADE
BY MAN  91
V.
OUR CHURCHES UNDER THE BAN OF ANTICHRIST  119
VI.
THE ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 141
VII.
RATIONALISM IN ITS RELATION TO OUR CHURCHES.... 169
1» 5

VIII. PAGE
THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY  203

IX.
THE BAPTISTS OF THE COMMONWEALTH AND PRO
TECTORATE  231
X.
JOHN BUNYAN  263
XI.
BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS  291
XII.
BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE  321

I.
JOHN THE BAPTIST,
OTJE LOED'S HAEBINGEE.

JOHN THE BAPTIST,
OUE LOED'S EAEBmGEE.

The introduction of Christianity into our world has
been recognized by a modern French writer, who has
discoursed upon society and philosophy, as being the
greatest moral revolution recorded in the annals of our
race. Such estimate is the more remarkable, as coming from
a scholar who is regarded as doubting the existence of a
God, and who cannot therefore be charged as biased by
religious prejudice in favor of the faith which he dis
cerns to have been, and acknowledges frankly to have
been, thus signally potent. M. Vacherot — for it is to him
that we refer — has in glowing utterances presaged and
depicted the future spread of democracy. Writing in
the days of Napoleon III., he presented to France and
to Europe our own people as the truest republic then
on the face of the globe, and very distinctly does he
attribute the prosperity, and even the very possibility
of the existence, of free institutions amongst us to the
influence of the Bible upon our nation. It is interesting,
amid the acclaims of our national centenary, thus to hear
the judgment of a foreign scholar, not a believer — his judg-

10 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ment upon the sources of our strength and of our success,
in achieving and preserving liberties, that, in so many
other lands and through so many experiments made
in former ages, have speedily or ultimately collapsed.
Yet this same eulogist of our freedom looks forward to
a time when our Bible shall be outgrown and superseded.
From a foreigner thus free from patriotic partialities such
as an American might feel, and chargeable with no
traditional or professional leanings toward the gospel, we
may accept gratefully so strong a testimony as to the
high power of the Scriptures on national well-being;
whilst we withhold our assent from his auguries as to
the ultimate displacement of the volume from the school,
the library, and the sanctuary. Admitting his analysis
of the past, we fail to subscribe to his omens respecting
the future.
The book which, scepticism itself being witness, has
thus colored the history of our race, and moulded so
visibly and so happily our own national career, is a vol
ume of peculiar structure. It has an Old Testament and
a New. Between the writing of the last portion of the
older part and the composition of the earliest Gospel in
the New, Matthew's, there intervened a chasm of nearly
four centuries. This is a larger interval than yawns be
tween our times and those of Christopher Columbus.
During that long spasm of silence from Malachi onward
no prophet appeared in Israel. Yet writings so remote in
date of origin and in the circumstances of their writers,
the two Testaments, one of them closing just when the
Jew had emerged from his captivity to the Chaldean and

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 11
the Persian, and the other, the New, taking up the inter
rupted strain four centuries after, when the Jew had
passed under the sceptre of the Roman ; the book in
Hebrew, whose last scribes had not so very long left
Euphrates, in the far East, where their harps hung on its
willows ; and the book in the Greek, the earliest of whose
penmen had been tax-gatherer under magistrates who
came from the banks of the Tiber, in the far West, — these
books, so dissevered in date of their origin, are by a
divine wisdom wondrously made to cohere with each
other in the closest interdependence.
Old English conveyancers, in preparing the record of
the transfer of some important estate, drew up two copies
of the same deed upon the opposite ends of one and the
same parchment. Then the scrivener's knife severed the
skin into two separate documents, by a line which was
jagged like the teeth of a saw, or undulating like the
hollows in the water of a lake rippling before the breeze.
The old name "Indenture" survives to this day at the
head of our deeds, when the old usage of actual " dent
ing " or " indenting " has been generally abandoned. One
party, the original grantor, kept the one copy ; the other,
the purchaser, retained the counterpart. Was there in
after-times doubt as to the genuineness of the document,
antique simplicity soon determined the doubt by laying
the two indented portions of the one original vellum
together. If tooth met tooth, if the indenture tallied
without shrinkage and without overlapping, there was
tangible, visible demonstration of the original unity.
There was the same grain in the skin, and there was

12 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
exact coadaptation in the line of severance. The inden
ture stamped the genuineness. Now, in our Bible, the Old
and the New are not bare verbal transcripts the one of
the other ; but the same Divine Author who furnished
both made the ancient to fit as by a line indented in
divine exactness and symmetry into the New ; the wave
in the low trough of it upon the one parchment meeting
another wave in the answering crest of that wave as
upon the other parchment, so that the two covenants
thus authenticated showed the same Supreme Mind. It
was a Mind, one in its several dispensations, and har
monious through all ages of the world's history. Proph
ecy, or " history in anticipation," responds to history, or
prophecy become fact, across the two sides of a vast
chasm ; just as, in the days of Joshua, Ebal pealed back
to Gerizim and Gerizim pealed back to Ebal the alternate
snatches of the same law, and the strophe and antistrophe
swelled up together, praising the same Jehovah, Leader
of their exodus and Giver of all their victories. Prom
ise, warning, and unfinished history upon the one side,
tallied with and matched fulfilment and retribution
and completed history on the other side. "Comparing
spiritual things with spiritual" is the apostle's enuncia
tion, as to the rule of successful interpretation laid down
by the Holy Ghost, the Inspirer of the entire record.
Collate the origins with the results — lay the pledges of
Eden and Sinai against the achievements of Bethlehem
and Calvary — and see illustrated, as over the stormy
tides of human commotion, and over the wide chasms
of earthly centuries, the unity and inflexibility of him

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 13
who is in one mind and none can turn him, the Far-
sighted and the Infallible Sovereign who, amid the heav-
ings of primeval chaos, saw distinctly the welterings of the
final conflagration and the orderings of the last judgment.
He, in this, his unity of purpose, which he had main
tained through all varieties of utterance, and all relays
of successive scribes, and all mutations in the outer form.
of his providence, had indented the Old Testament, so
that it required and necessitated the New; and then,
resuming, after the interval of a dozen generations of
mankind, his unwavering, unforgetting scheme, he had
indented the New Testament to supplement and to verify
and to perfect the Old Testament.
Now, the very last sentence in the very last prophet of
the Old Testament is such pendant fringe and indenta
tion, awaiting and demanding a new advent and a novel
herald, who shall usher in the steps of that grand and yet
dread Visitant, the Hero of the expected advent. "Be
hold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming
of the great and dreadful day of the Lord : and he shall
turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart
of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the
earth with a curse." For four centuries had that banner
of the long-expected Forerunner been hung, fluttering over
the uttermost edge of the finished Hebrew canon. The Old
Testament had, as regards the same harbinger, still earlier
pendants hanging out. Not merely four, but seven cen
turies before, the day that Zechariah received the promise
of a son, God had, by Isaiah, pledged that there should be
lifted up the "voice of one crying in the wilderness" and

14 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
calling men to " prepare the way of the Lord." Let us en
deavor, by nearer and more modern measurements, to appre
ciate the dignity bestowed, in these far-dated promises, upon
John the Baptist, by those prophecies going so long before
his birthday. No earthly prince, Plantagenet or Bourbon.
ever had his cradle thus foretold for hundreds of years.
More than four centuries separate us in our age from the
times when Columbus turned his prow toward our conti
nent. Supposing that God had by divine illumination
prompted the Genoese to erect, when touching the rim of
this western continent, a tablet describing the character
and mission of our own Washington, how would the
ancient oracle have shed a new and dread majesty over
the career of him who led our fathers to freedom. Such,
and even larger, was the interval between Malachi and
John the .Baptist. But a yet broader chasm severed John
from Isaiah : this was a span of more than seven hundred
years. Let us look back, from our homes and sanctuaries,
to a period of modern history seven hundred years re
moved. We reach the times, in British and Syrian history,
of the Crusades, of Saladin the brave Saracen, and of
Bichard Coeur de Lion of England; and in the history
of the Anglo-Saxon people, whose blood so largely makes
our national life, we find a little nearer yet, what to us
ordinarily looks so far, the days of John and of the Eng
lish barons who extorted from a craven and heartless
monarch the glorious sanctions of Magna Charta — a doc
ument underlying so largely our ancestral liberties and
laws. That was not full seven hundred years from us.
Suppose that when Richard fought in Palestine or John

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 15
surrendered at Runnymede there had been erected a me
morial, that the God of nations intended to bring about,
in the far West and among a new people, the setting up of
what we now see, a home of welcome for the exiles of
many lands — a banner of hope for the rights of the long
oppressed — a sanctuary for his own truth and his own
Zion from the persecutions that hounded both in the old
Europe so fiercely and so long, — how would a prophecy
so long since recorded, and after the weary interval of
ages so strangely and exactly fulfilled, make our country
all the dearer and the holier — august, ancient, and sacred ?
It is by such feeble illustrations from our own modern
times that we can understand in some degree the peculiar
honor put on John the Baptist. He was a prophet and —
as the Master whom he heralded pronounced — "more
than a prophet ;" for no seer merely human, from Enoch
to Samuel, from Samuel to Isaiah or Daniel or Habakkuk,
had thus, four centuries — ay, seven centuries — before his
cradle swung, been the subject of solemn and written pre
dictions — predictions registered in the most venerable and
sacred annals of the nation. But besides these there were,
as to his great Master and Lord, pledges running back to
Eden, when the serpent's transitory triumph was, as God
promised, to be followed by the birth of the Seed of the
woman, crushing the head of the tempter. With the
history of man's blight was intertwined the covenant of
God's predestined balm. Abraham was to have not only
a favored nation spring from him ; but in him all nations,
Gentile as well as Hebrew, were to be blessed. David was
i
not only to have a sure throne, but ultimately a Divine

16 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Progeny, whose should be- an immovable kingdom.
Hosea told of a time when Israel should have neither
priest, ephod, nor temple, nor sacrifice. Moses, the leader
of the Exodus, foretold a distress for Israel when the
mother should in famine sacrifice her own babe, and told
also of a prophet like unto himself, whom Israel was to
hear as reverently, as they had heard him when yet fresh
from the glories of Sinai, and when standing at the foot
of the cloudy pillar out of which God's own voice spake.
Isaiah told of the Lord's Servant rejected, yet suffering for
the sins of others and by his knowledge justifying many.
Bethlehem, the place of his birth ; his kingdom, a stone
cut out of the mountain without hands and towering to
fill the earth and to shatter all other empire, — were pre
dictions by Micah and Daniel. Upon how many tags and
projecting indentations of the ancient record, had God
required that the new history of the world, as his Messiah
should shape and rule that history, was necessarily to fit,
in order to show the identity of the authorship, and the
eternal symmetry and immutability of the grand scheme
of revelation and redemption.
Thus foreseen and indicated, not only before Herod had
commenced his restoration of the existing temple, but
before the heroic strife of the Maccabees and before the
persecutions of an Antiochus, and before even an Alexan
der had led Greece over so wild and so wide a career of
invasion and domination, before a Cyrus and a Nehemiah
had rebuilt temple and city from desolation, and before
even a Nebuchadnezzar had flung down fane and city into
the desolation whence they were thus restored, anticipat-

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 17
ing the national ruin and the national recovery,— God had
put upon the national annals his pledges, as to the work
which John should do and as to the scene where this his
servant should labor. As Isaac, the great stock of the
national tree, had been the child of a long-childless home,
born to a sire and a mother of great age, so was John
born to Zachariah and to his wife Elizabeth. Not only
had Isaiah and Malachi received commission to predict
of the harbinger: but, as the hour neared, an angel.
Gabriel, came down to announce the close approach of
the long-predicted messenger' of the Messiah. Although
John himself wrought no miracle, yet, as Hume has well
said, a prophecy is itself a miracle. A prediction pre
cise and fixed, promptly and literally fulfilled, of what
man could not foresee, of what man unaided could not
achieve, is a miracle. In that light, the prophecies of
Isaiah and Malachi and Gabriel, culminating upon the
head of the babe whom Elizabeth clasped as the child of
her old age, made his birth in itself a transcendent mira
cle. Seven centuries before, four centuries before, and
then, but in the very year, divine oracles, and in the last
date an angelic messenger, stamped the infant's career as
one on which the eyes of Heaven were intently fastened,
and to which were summoned the eyes of God's elect
people, not only in their native Palestine, but through all
the far lands of the Gentiles into which exile and com
merce and adventure had scattered the far-travelled
Hebrew. His childhood and youth were not idle, though they
were comparatively lonely. He was in the deserts until
2* B

18 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
the day of his showing unto Israel. Nurtured in solitary
communings with Scripture and with nature, and with
God, the Author of both, he was of hardy frame and
schooled in self-denial, simplicity, and endurance; his
robe was of camel's hair ; and his diet the rudest fare of
the rude wilderness, "locusts and wild honey." But a
prophet withal is he, of God's own rearing and God's
own prompting.
Of this class of divine ambassadors, some were men
whom God meant to make, by the written word, teachers
of generations long after their own time. They were the
prophets of the pen. Such was Isaiah, and such proba
bly Habakkuk, in their main ministry scribes rather than
heralds. For others, whom their Sender intended for
direct and prompter results, and that they should arouse
the multitudes of their contemporaries, a fitter designation
was prophets of the voice. They might leave little of a
permanent literature of their own composing, but they
spoke face to face with their hearers, and lifting up their
voice, as of a trumpet, denounced the crying sins of one
age and announced the impending woes of the next age.
As a man of kindred spirit, in Britain, long after, said
respecting this very mode of rousing and mending
society— it is John Wycliff'e that we quote—" It was by
preaching that he, Christ, conquered the world out of the
fiend's hand." And as Christ himself, the Great Teacher,
left no writing; his forerunner was preacher, not writer; a
prophet, not of the pen, but a prophet of the voice. But
why did he proclaim his message in the wilderness, and
not, as did Jonah, in the streets and squares of the great

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 19
capitals, amid the hungry rabble and the crowding
traders and the jostling pilgrims come to worship ? The
wilderness where he spoke, was not utterly desolate, but
only sparsely settled. It lay in the line of travel both
for traffickers and caravans and worshippers. And it
allowed, which thronged metropolitan streets did not
allow, opportunities for leisurely meditation. The atten
tion, fixed on solemn themes, might be held there till it
issued in right action. That desert, the scene of Joshua's
incursions upon the Canaanites, and afterward of David's
flights and raids and victories, with two seas, the great
Mediterranean on the west and the Dead Sea on the east,
the last sea sad and dark with its brooding memories of
the eternal scar which God had in his anger there put on
his own chosen land, where sin had been especially rife
and fierce, with Sinai on the south, and Zion and Carmel
and Hermon and Lebanon to the far north, — how did the
environment lift the soul out of its ruts and summon it
to solemn reflection on death and eternity and the inev
itable judgment ?
What was the burden ? In part, of the Great Stranger
whose goings forth were from everlasting, and who was
soon to make in lowliness his long-expected appearance
upon earth. That advent is rushing on. He, John, the
herald of it, was to prepare the way of the Lord and
make his paths straight. A nation that would profit by
their Messiah must put away its idols. In part, the
prophet's burden was to turn the thoughts of his hearers
upon themselves. The times were out of joint; they
needed a dire and deep wrench to bring them back.

20 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
They were called to repentance. The heart of the fathers
was to be turned to their children, and the heart of the
children to their fathers. Some read one of these phrases
as a mere repetition of the other. But, in Hebrew paral
lelism, the second use of the same word is often an en
largement of the kindred but narrower thought contained
in the first use of the term. When Christ said, " Let the
dead bury their dead," the parallel was not a repetition.
The first "dead" meant spiritually dead — men careless
and ignorant of God, but having bodily life ; the second
" dead " meant those who had lost even this, and the new
use of an old word described corporeal death, the stiff
form of an earthly kinsman, out of whom had gone the
last gasp and sob of an earthly life. So, in Malachi's
phrase, the heart of fathers -turned to children meant a
recovered sense in the fathers of that generation as to
their own social duties to households, to their own off
spring, and to the wives and mothers in whose care the
common progeny were especially left. As Josephus, their
own historian, testifies, it was to Israel, as it was to their
Roman masters and their Greek -teachers, a time of great
social profligacy. This might be rectified. When, cen
turies after, Rousseau launched the volume of the Social
Contract, as he called it, in which he appealed to men,
his neighbors, upon the rights and duties of society as
founded upon a sort of mutual bargain and compact, he
made an appeal that, as all thinkers allow, had very
much to do in bringing on the great French Revolution.
But he, as a writer, had his heart so engrossed with his
compatriots and fellow-citizens, that it was hardened as a

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 21
father's heart against his own children; and he, the
mender of the ways of nations, sent the offspring of his
own life to the foundling hospital to be reared or to be
slain by strangers, as the chance might be, in the savage
heedlessness and heartlessness that has too often governed
such institutions. John the Baptist called the Elis of his
age not to overlook their Hophnis and their Phinehases.
He would not have a David even, to rear by slovenly ten
derness and criminal indifference Amnons and Absaloms
for mutual hate and fratricide and parricide. He would
carry home, as did Nathan to the paramour of Bathsheba,
God's terrible ban against household sin.
John dealt with all social sins, wrongs of the rich to
the poor, wrongs of the powerful to the feeble, and again
of the feeble and dependent, in their envy and discontent
toward their more opulent neighbors. Publican and sol
dier, Pharisee and Sadducee, all were summoned to re
pentance, each of his class-sins and his own personal mis
deeds. It was an age in Rome and in Csesarea and in
Jerusalem of relaxed social ties. He preached the sanc
tity of marriage. The Herodian family had been es
pecially reckless in this matter. Without fear and with
out favor, this herald of God came out of the desert in
prophet's garb and with primeval sternness; the ascetic
dares to put down, simply and rigorously, the require
ments of the law of Sinai, unrepealed and irrepealable.
To Herod he said, " It is not lawful to have thy brother's
wife." That speech bred a grudge which rankled in the
heart of the queen. Thus censured, Herod felt reverence
and compunction, but anger and wounded pride as well.

22 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
But as we said, " children " and " fathers " had, by the
law of Scripture parallelism, yet larger meanings in the
second and recurring use of the old phrase. The most
aged of John's contemporaries were, by descent or by
intermarriage and adoption, the children of earlier gen
erations. They were summoned to turn back, in their
estimates of duty and virtue and freedom and blessed
ness, to the ancestral patterns and the memories of the
Exodus, the law-giving, the temple songs of David and
the temple structure of Solomon, and, yet behind these
even, to the memory of Abraham, the father of the faith
ful, and of Enoch, who walked with God. A nation who
aim to reform their households, the very seed-plots of
national order and freedom and unity, must cultivate the
memory of ancestral glories and of primitive innocence.
The child of Adam must trace back his pedigree till it
ends in saying that he is the handiwork, the child, and
the servant of God. He may not forget, much less abjure,
his Maker. If he must renounce all such high parentage,
if he be sprung of the moUusk, how dare he devour, in
cannibal greed, his ancestral oyster ? If the ape were his
sire, will he lift pistol to shoot the kinsman chimpanzee,
or look derisively out of his parlor window, in unnatural
contempt, on the antics of a poor relative, capering
grotesquely to the music of a hand-organ and craving
pennies on the sidewalk? Man, to be free and true and
noble, must be kindly and reverent, and begin far back to
make a genuine progress far forward. He may not forget
Eden, and the Creator who placed Adam and Eve there.
If of God's making, he must stoop to invite and accept

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 23
God's teaching and ruling. The great social problems of
John's day and of our day must, to be rightfully solved.
carry back the hearts of us, their children, to our remotest
forefathers; and back of all ages, geological and astro
nomical, show us our origins. Woe worth the race if.
in their science and their greed, they find no Maker and
Heavenly Father at the head of the ladder along which
they patiently or impatiently clamber, or down which
they swing to find the worm and the protoplasm as their
first parents at the bottom of the deep abysm !
John came, and Elijah, not, as the Jews of his day many
of them ignorantly interpreted it, a transmigration — a
return of the old prophet, who had worried Ahab's court
and wrung Jezebel's heart, in his actual personalty. That
actual personage did come down to the Mount of Trans
figuration with Moses — the one the receiver and the
other the restorer of the law — to glorify Christ. This
identity with Elijah John denied. He revived no wild
Oriental fable of transmigration ; Elijah's self he was not.
But as Christ explained it, he was Elijah in reproduced
temper and in the reduplication of the old seer's fearless
simplicity and rugged energy, just as Jefferson said of
Nathaniel Macon, one of our own early Baptists, a states
man of his own party, that he was "the last of the
Romans," not meaning that he, Macon, had Latin blood
in his veins, or could, perchance, have held a Latin dia
logue with an old Roman Brutus or Cicero had they
returned to the earth, but that, in his antique sternness
and dignity of character, he recalled the Cato and the
Camillus, sturdy and upright men, who stood when

24 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
others wilted and crawled. Yet John was not a courtier
wearing soft robes and sharing dainty meals. These were
to be found in kings' houses. But in the desert was fitter
haunt for a prophet and a seer of the old heroic and saintly
mould of an Elijah, such as was John the Baptist. Thus
was John an Elias in his mood and bearing. His genera
tion had revered him as a prophet. Did he reciprocate
the reverence paid him by courting and guarding popu
larity; and thus fear man ? No. The Herod who sold him
to death feared the chief estates of Galilee, who had heard
his rash promises, and feared the scorn of the damsel who
had danced with such dazzling gracefulness, and feared
the imperious Herodias, whose affection had been the
blight of his own household and palace. And when the
poor homeless prophet quailed not, true as steel and un
appeasable as conscience ; on the other hand this prince,
amid splendor and wealth and courtiers and soldiery,
poor weakling as he was, feared, wavered, and broke
down, and gave God's ambassador to a sudden and igno
minious death. A craven may head armies and wield
richest exchequers; and the martyr, who finds but the
fare and garb and death of a Lazarus, may out-face and
out-brave and out-live the despot that dooms him. As
said the French Jansenist poet, Racine, long after, " Fear
God, and fear none else." Thus did John.
But if God's appointed and long-predicted precursor, to
besom the pathway for God's own only begotten Son, why
is he, the man of Elijah's mould, not blessed in his de
parture from earth with such a heavenward wafting as
Elijah received, and as had in antediluvian days been

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 25
t
accorded to Enoch, walking with God, and then missed
of men, for God had taken him ? Had not this son of
Zacharias earned such fiery chariot and angelic escorts,
bearing him to the Father's welcome on high? No.
The higher dispensation needed to begin in a lower hu
miliation. It was enough that the disciple should be as
his Lord. He had preached repentance and the remission
of sins. How the last was to come — a true and large
remission of sins — how the penitents whom he charged
home with guilt, and summoned to an immediate and
utter change, were to be pardoned and to receive absolu
tion from their sins, he had intimated rather than plainly
expounded when he pointed to the greater Prophet out of
Nazareth. Was it with an allusion to the Passover victim,
whose blood sprinkled on each returning year the door
posts of each Hebrew dwelling and recalled the dread
night in Egypt when the angel of vengeance slew each
first-born of the Egyptian homes, but spared and passed
over the gore-bedabbled doors of their Hebrew bondsmen ?
Or was it also a reference to the daily oblation, yet nearer
and more frequent, of the lambs presented in the temple
in each day's sacrifices? John said, in one or both of
these aspects, turning to his kinsman Saviour, "Behold
the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world !"
By abnegation and suffering, by the ignominious and
agonizing sacrifice on Calvary, that great Prince was to
become the Redeemer of the world. If the faith of the
forerunner had for the time faltered in his own dungeon,
or if, perchance, he sought only to reinforce, by personal
conference with Christ, the faith of the disciples whom he
3

26 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
had sent on this message, — John had asked, "Art thou he
that should come, or look we for another ?" — simply and
sublimely had the Christ responded, " Blessed is he who
soever shall not be offended in me." The disciple who
accepts meekly the Master's cross and who prefigures
right loyally and right fearlessly the Master's tremendous
and incommunicable agonies is "not offended." In an
early day, Elijah's chariot; in the day of Christ's ap
proaching slaughter, the headsman's block and the heads
man's descending sword, are a grander chariot for the
second Elijah, putting him yet closer to his Prince. In
the path of lowliness and loneliness and resolute endur
ance to the end, John' was thus honored to win a higher
distinction even than had been accorded to his great pro
totype and model, Elijah. On Carmel that stalwart and
older servant had said, " If the Lord God be God, follow
him;" and Israel had exclaimed, "The Lord, fie is the
God." In the low dungeon of Machserus, when the har
binger bowed his neck to the flashing falchion that the
daughter of Herodias and the craven fear of Herod had
sent against him, the later prophet had virtually pro
claimed again, " ' If the Lord be God, follow him.' And
follow him will I, though it be to a culprit's death and
with the dunghill of a Lazarus awaiting my headless
corpse." And he who afterward promised to the penitent
thief beside his own cross a remembrance in his, the Mes
siah's kingdom, had not overlooked, we may well believe,
the welcome and the place of honor in that same kingdom
for his fellow-sufferer and for his precursor, John the
Baptist. And turning to the blended histories of both

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 27
servant and Lord, we the Christians of so many lands and
so many centuries justify and congratulate the servant in
his meek trust, and we magnify and confide in the Master in
his unparalleled oblation, and we, too, take up the outcry
at the foot of Carmel, " The Lord, he is the God." Yea,
verily, then ; yea, verily, now ; yea, verily, for evermore.
And the deeper his humiliation, all the loftier is his love,
and all the surer the final victories and the compensatory
glories of all the martyr-train who have preceded him or
followed him to the sacrifice. The love, stronger than
death, is glorified by death, as his saints confront and
defy that terror.
As an expression of the repentance that he preached,
John administered baptism in Jordan. Was it before
known to the Jews? Scholars have been divided as to
this. We think the weight of evidence to be that Jewish
proselytS baptism was unknown before John's time. That
it was before unknown seems implied also in the question
from Jerusalem brought to him: "If not the Messiah,
wherefore baptizest thou then?" He pointed to it, as
commanded him by the Jehovah who had trained him
for his work and now launched him upon his mission —
the Jonah of a spiritual Nineveh and the Daniel to a race
in spiritual captivity. When Christ, manifested as such
by the same Heavenly Power that had sent the forerunner,
applied also for baptism, John declined it, as if to admin
ister it would imply inferiority on the part of the recip
ient of the rite to himself, the administrator. Christ
insisted on it as needed " to fulfil all righteousness." It
did not bespeak repentance as needed by him, but it

28 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
bespoke the perfect righteousness with which his volun
tary humiliation was accepted and proclaimed — how he,
the Prince, honored his servitor and that servitor's loyal
proclamation and that servitor's legitimate ordinance.
But to the rest of its recipients John professed to give
it as a baptism of the penitent acknowledging unworthi-
ness and renouncing his sin ; not as though due to them
as a race, for he said to men of warring creeds but a com
mon Hebrew nationality — to the Pharisee, who so accu
mulated and magnified tradition, and to the Sadducee.
who rejected all tradition, and even exscinded much
also of sacred Scripture ; to the easy-going liberalist and
rationalist on the one side and to the strict and bigoted
ritualist and traditionalist on the other side — Alike you
need a change of nature. The Abrahamic covenant will
not lift you into the kingdom of Abraham's God. " Gen
eration of vipers," bring forth fruits meet for repentance —
a change you need that shall be thorough and radical.
The axe, brandished in rightful severity, has not yet
felled the tree which it threatens, but its keen, bright
edge lies against the root of the tree. All national calam
ities and household sorrows are but the chippings and
blazings of that " two-handed engine " which lies ready to
smite once, and smiting once needs smite no more. And
barrenness, if inveterate, is the seal of the inevitable burn
ing. I, John, demand the repentance. It is the prerog
ative of another, now on his way, to give repentance and
the remission of sins. I baptize you with water ; but he
gives the baptism of the Holy Ghost, creative and re
newing. And if opportunity be wasted and warning be

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 29
spurned, then he sends the deluge of fire. The fruitless
tree goes to the furnace.
Some scholars, and not of our own denominational
affinities, have supposed that in pagan mysteries, eagerly
sought and long and widely practiced, a purification by
water and by blood had become familiarly known, as the
emblem of a great change in character and soul and pur
pose, before John's age. Moses had found the ark in the
pagan Egyptian ritual far more ancient than the day of
his own adoption by the daughter of Pharaoh. He had
continued this emblem in the Jewish economy, not as the
loan of paganism, but as a memorial of patriarchalism,
which paganism had borrowed and perverted, and which
he rightfully reclaimed. Men like Melchizedec and like
Job had preserved much, in Gentile lands and lineages,
of patriarchal truth and history. The ark among such a
people had been the emblem of the escape of the world's
grey fathers, sons of Noah, in the days of the Deluge. It
was a memorial of God-planned and God-wrought deliv
erance, of a provision of the divine grace riding triumph
ant over the wreck of a world weltering under the floods
of a divine wrath. And as Moses honored the fragments
of a patriarchal faith in transmitting and consecrating the
Gentile ark, so might John, divinely taught, accept and
reinaugurate the emblems of supernatural lustration in
the old Gentile mysteries. If Satan, " the ape of God,"
as an old Father so justly called him, had used these frag
ments and splinters of the shattered old faith of the patri
archs for many most crafty and wicked purposes, God
might snatch his own truths out of the gripe of the great
3*

30 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
counterfeiter, and vindicate and re-establish in their
primitive, and celestial majesty the great, the primitive
verities, that a flood of the divine wrath threatened an
apostate and revolted race, that, even as an incensed ven
geance of Heaven against earth had once poured Noah's
flood, so was it now about to send its second and more
dread instalment, the world's final deluge of fire. Mean
while, as mercy framed the ark of Noah to ride the first
deluge, so in the ark of Moses was seen the mercy-seat,
the throne of the divine benignity, set over the tablets of
the law, the embodiment of divine justice. And so in
baptism, the penitent acknowledging that justice had
rightfully let loose its flood of wrath, might yet hope and
plead that mercy could now rejoice against judgment.
For Christ was to die, the Lamb of God, taking away the
sin of the world, by death foiling and spoiling him that
had the power of death ; and now by heralds and ordi
nances proclaiming hope for the lost, and pardon for the
guilty, and the return of the exile, and the welcome of
the prodigal. A repentance that wrenched itself loose
from the old idols; a contrition that acknowledged the
breadth of the law and the depth of man's despair as to
any right of his own ; and a trust that clasped in the God-
given atonement its one and its sufficient hope, and a
filial appeal that implored passionately the divine Spirit,
freely promised and graciously outpoured,— such repent
ance, such contrition, such trust, such filial rush of a soul
in its despair, "one alone to the only One," as an old
philosopher phrased the soul's turning desolately to God,—
all these feelings found striking expression when the

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 31
floods met over the bowed head of the disciple, whether
that head so descended beneath the waters under the
hand of the forerunner John or under the hand of the
apostle. The proselyte thus and there stooped to the
death of the old, and accepted in tears of glad faith the
birth of the new — a new Master, a new life of service
under the cross upon the earth, and a new life of unutter
able joy through that Redeemer's resurrection, ascension,
and mediation at the right hand of his Father — his Father
and ours — in the world of higher gladness and fuller
union, where patriarch and harbinger, and apostle and
prophet, martyr and confessor, sit down together in the
presence of him who, as the Lamb, is alike the Temple and
the Sun of his New Jerusalem beyond these terrestrial
scenes. And both John the harbinger, servant of our Lord, and
the Christ, John's Divine Master — each of them a prophet
of the Voice — yet bid us alike not to neglect, but to pon
der, the sayings of the prophets of the Pen. The fore
runner appealed to the oracles penned by Isaiah and to
the histories preserved by Abraham. His Divine Follower
and Prince said, " Search the Scriptures ; they testify of
me." Some would claim great and paramount value for
the voice of tradition, apart from the inspired and written
Bible. The history of the churches and the nations, in
the very case of John himself, illustrates significantly the
snares and perils of such unwritten memory, enhance
ment, transfiguration, and distortion of the old utterances.
In apostolic times, the beloved apostle, John, namesake
of the harbinger, records — but whilst recording discoun-

32 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
tenances — the tradition then current of himself, that he,
the son of Zebedee, was to survive in the body on the
earth until the return of our Lord in his second advent.
It is an early tradition, and, in an apostolical age even,
many credited the tradition ; but, as an apostolical hand
testifies, old as was its date and wide as was its cur
rency, it was a departure from the Master's actual words,
and so was a figment. So, in the case of our theme, John,
the son of Zacharias, the Lord's harbinger, has had for
many years, and centuries even, a set of professed disciples,
who, on the base of their own traditions, have called them
selves disciples of John, and were known, to a recent time,
as Zabians, but whose faith is really without a gospel and
without a Christ. Tradition really floated them away from
John and Christ. His real genuine disciples were content
with their teacher's testimony, that he must decrease and
his Lord increase ; and like Peter and James and John,
they left the harbinger, in order to swell the train of the
Prince. Others of them, when Herodias had secured the
martyrdom of their beloved instructor, buried the corpse
and went and told Jesus. That Saviour testified that
never had there been a greater prophet than was this, his
own loyal forerunner ; but he added, " He that is least in
the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." Just as the
flagman, bearing his red pennon in front of a railway
train through one of our city streets, carries not one of the
passengers or an ounce of the freight which the engine
and cars have undertaken to transport. He is not in the
line which they keep. His movement is on the feet of the
steed which he backs ; theirs is by wheels and cogs and

JOHN THE BAPTIS'K'x-
steam upon the rail. Yet the distinctne^at^i^tec^k'
does not argue the uselessness of the preliminary service.
The last poor convert from heathenism that, on the faith
of Christ's gospel, moved yesterday, under the Mas
ter's welcome, into the Master's heavenly kingdom, was
"greater" while here in the body, in privileges, in the full
amount of insight, and the clear foundations of hope
given by a finished gospel, than the son of Zachariah,
living in a less enlightened stage of God's revelations.
But he was not " greater " in holiness or " greater " in his
heavenly recompense than the illustrious harbinger.
When Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot and orator, came
to these shores, he was, in national privileges, outranked
here by the ragged, unkempt, and untaught newsboy
who jostled through the skirts of the pageants, and who
was an American, whilst the illustrious visitor was an
alien. In this sense the inferior in endowment and in
trinsic worth and in enduring fame was yet the greater in
immediate privileges and native citizenship. Such we
suppose the force of " greater " in our Lord's use of the
word regarding his herald and loyal martyr. He was
outranked, in immediate privileges and in earthly instruc
tions enjoyed whilst he was yet in the body, by multi
tudes of Christ's simple followers, who yet, in the world
of greater elevation and fuller vision, acknowledged them
selves far outranked, in grace and in reward and in mas-
siveness of services, by the illustrious prophet whom a
dance bought for the shambles, in order to fatten the
grudge of a heartless adulteress, and to seal the craven
weakness and the final perdition of the poor kingling
c

34 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
who played a more modern and meaner Ahab toward
his truculent and glittering Jezebel.
Now, the existence of such misguided believers in tra
dition as the Zabians, that call themselves by the name
of a prophet who would impatiently disavow and
denounce them, is not the whole lesson against that error
furnished by the story of John. A Scottish historian,
Burton, not wanting in research or in acuteness, records it
in the first volume of his work on the annals of his
nation, that there are, in the different portions of Chris
tendom, not less than eighteen heads of John the Baptist
presented as inviting the reverence of the faithful. For
each, tradition would lift up its testimony. Certainly
there is little reason to believe in its asseveration as to
any one of the honored relics. But if, to preserve unim-
peached the honors claimed for an ancient and far-descend
ed tradition, we accord equal honors to the entire num
ber, in what a condition must the morning of the resur
rection place Christ's harbinger. If he accept all, he will
be more than rival to the Cerberus of pagan mythology ;
and will he not rank with Kalee, the popular goddess of
Hindustan, who appears before her frenzied devotees with
a necklace of human skulls swinging down to her girdle?
No. He who with such resolute sternness besomed
away the ecclesiastical tradition of the Pharisee, and the
rationalistic tradition of the Sadducee, uplifts for himself
as out of his grave, with force all the stronger from these
vagaries of human fancy and these wild contradictory
legends of ecclesiastical tradition, the old and blessed
memorial, "It is written." Not "It is currently re-

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 35
ported," " It is very widely believed," but, " It is written ;"
and a louder and more august Speaker takes up the
herald's unfinished testimony, and his outgiving is this :
" Heaven and earth shall pass away, but one jot or one
tittle of my word shall not pass away." It is the utter
ance of him who was Builder of both heaven and. earth,
and knows the exact number of all their constituent atoms,
and the full date, precise to a moment, for their continu
ance and for their removal. It is the utterance of him
who, as he is the Theme, so he is the Prompter, of all
Scripture; whose blood bought us all; whose grace invites
us all; whose word warns us all; whom John, having
worthily served on the earth, serves now more earnestly
and loves jret more reverently in the upper worlds of light
to which his testimony and his example point us, that
through the faith and patience of the saints we too may
endure and overcome and attain. Thanks be unto God,
who gave him the victory; and who will to us give, if
we look to the Lamb whom he heralded, the sight of
that common glory and a share for ever in all that
unspeakable blessedness.
John the Baptist closes the Old Testament and opens
the New. Christ, his Lord and our Lord, both begins the
Old and rounds and shuts the New. The promised Seed
of the woman in Eden just when sin entered it, he is
the Light of the world and the Opener of that New
Jerusalem into which sin shall find no entrance, sealing
to his. church a Paradise regained which shall never be
forfeited ; and as out of its gates he proclaims, " Whoso-

36 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ever will, let him come and take of the water of life
freely." And from the harbingers and from the followers,
the saints of all ages and all dispensations, comes the
thunder of that one acclaim, " Behold the Lamb of God
that taketh away the sin of the world."

II.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD
AS SET HP BY OHEIST.
4

THE KINGDOM OF GOD
AS SET UP BY OHEIST.

The time of our Lord's appearance in the world was
one of general suspense, of widespread and intense ex
pectation. Caesar, in the person of Julius, the greatest of
the name, had laid the foundations of an empire wider
than Alexander's. Augustus, retaining cautiously the
names and shows of the old republic, had given that im
perial power inherited from his uncle the unity and con
solidation and energy of an absolute despotism, varnished
over with the memories and titles of a patrician aristoc
racy and of a plebeian democracy, which, though wearing
their old titles and flaunting their old badges, did — more
meekly than begrudgingly — their stipulated service in the
pay and under the banners of a virtual autocrat. Old
and independent kingdoms had become dependencies of
this central empire. Peace had in a certain sense been
secured, and the temple of Janus, at the capital, had its
gates closed — a token of the rare event. But what was
to be the result of the general submission when now no
power, however remote, sturdy, or barbarous, seemed able
to make head against the invincible legions of Rome?
Was it the repose of a new and riper order, or the stagna-
39

40 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
tion and decay of a confessed imbecility and despair?
Did it pledge the harvesting of a fresher life, or was it the
torpor of corruption creeping into the vitals of the state
and suffusing the nations with death ?
How magnificent was the sweep of that Roman Empire,
and over its broad domains with what a lordly supremacy
did it set up and did it put down. A living English jurist,
of high reputation and wide experience both in the East
ern colonies and home-schools of Britain, speaks, in his
¦lectures on law, as if not loth to acknowledge the lights
thrown on the history of civilization by the pages of scrip
tural prophecy. Sir Henry Maine mentions the Roman
Empire as accurately described in the prophecy of Daniel :
"It devoured, broke in pieces, and stamped the residue
with its feet." Its influence was marked, says the same
writer, "by the comminution which it effected." "The
Roman Commonwealth from very early times was distin
guished from all other dominions and powers in that it
broke up more thoroughly that which it devoured." Was
it in its tremendous work of trituration prepared to give
the unity and compactness of a new life, a legal symme
try, and a moral soundness to the peoples and tongues
and societies which it thus ground into a compulsory
assimilation ?
The first Napoleon, with that massiveness of thought
which distinguished some of his utterances, spoke of the
Mediterranean as fitted, and as he hoped destined, to be
come a "French lake." Thoroughly, it seemed in the
days of our Lord's advent, had the old Roman imperial
ism made this great inland sea to become merely a Latin

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 41
lake. The histories, the religions, the literatures, the arts,
the commerce, and the navigation of all precedent ages
had to a great extent gathered around its shores, its isles,
and its havens. Just as in the huge amphitheatres which
antiquity knew so well how to construct, tier rising on tier
till the population of a whole city might find room on the
benches, and thence might look down on the centre, which,
by waters let in, was often made into a lake and the scene
of a great mimic sea-fight, — so, as over a grander amphithe
atre, did the empire survey that great inner sea washing so
many lands. Over that old sea had scudded the builders
of the Pyramids and the lords of old Etruscan soil —
merchant-sails of Sidon, Tyrian fleets, and Carthaginian
traders ; the vessels of the old Argonaut in quest of the
Golden Fleece; the pirate-keels of early Greece; the be
siegers of Troy; the prows of republican Greece that won
the battle of Salamis; Egyptian galleys; the ships of Tar-
shish; the keels of Alexander; and the Romans that won
the great sea-fight of Actium. That old sea, upon whose
blue waters looked down so many centuries and so many
nationalities and kindreds and languages, imperial Rome,
we say, seemed to have made her own home-preserve
but a grander amphitheatre for the display of her vast
resources and energies. From the Pillars of Hercules on
the far West to the Bosphorus on the North-east and to
the mouths of the Nile on the far South-east, none dared,
upon all the outlined coast, to contest the power of the
great Roman Empire. To the brooding eye of the poet it
might seem as if the three great continents which made
up the chief subjects of thought to the ancient world had
4*

42 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
each, by its tutelary genius, sat down to bathe its feet in
those azure waters. Africa and Europe and Asia, each
with Roman collar on the neck and Roman fetter on the
ankle, subjugated if not loyal, all looked up to the eagles
of Caesar as the symbols of a mighty and incontestable
sovereignty. With what jealousy do modern nationalities
watch the divided power over the same great waters.
Britain is holding the' western keys in Gibraltar and
Malta, and eyeing France enviously as in her Algerine
dependency she seems seeking to control the desert, or
as she at the mouths of the Nile or by the Suez Canal
threatens English communications with India; and fore
casting anxiously the results should Russia replace Turkey
at the gates of the Bosphorus, in the old city of Constan
tine. The shores thus parcelled out and begrudged by
modern civilization were, in our Lord's day, all gathered
under the rule of the one Caesar.
But if outwardly the vast empire were at peace, it was
not at rest. Augustus himself had felt the necessity of a
moral renewal of the realm that he governed. Marriage
had. become discredited, and it was hoped by enactment
and reward to make it again popular or unavoidable.
The sovereign's own household was in such condition
that the father's heart, as he turned to his own child, was
saddened and stung within him. The legislator knew,
that, if the old homes of Rome were not restored with
something of their antique order and sacredness, Roman
greatness . must perish on its own crumbling and dese
crated hearthstones. His only child, Julia, died in dis
graced exile. Tiberius, who had submitted to a reluctant

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 43
divorce from a wife whom he loved, to become the hus
band of this imperial daughter, succeeded, as the recom
pense of this union, to the throne of his father-in-law,
but upon the wreck, as it were, of his own household
peace and honor. The Augustus who could subjugate an
empire could not reform its households, or even guide
wisely his own. And how ineffectual edicts and penalties
and exiles were, to make the home secure and the conju
gal union blessed, was illustrated in the very days com
memorated in the Acts of the Apostles. The Claudius in
whose times occurred the famine predicted by the prophet
Agabus had, before reaching the purple, been twice mar
ried and divorced. When emperor, he was twice mar
ried again. Under the pressure of that scarcity of bread
which Agabus had foreseen and which the charity of
early Christians sought at Jerusalem to relieve, Claudius,
in his passage through the streets of the metropolis, had
been pelted with crusts of bread by the populace, who had
learned to depend on imperial largesses for their suste
nance, and who were provoked at the delay in the arrival
of the expected supplies. When, at last, the long-desired
keels from Egypt, the granary of the empire, had brought
bread, this same Claudius selected, as one of the rewards
for the mariners who had come up with timely and wel
come supplies, the expressive and singular privilege that
they should be exempted from obedience to the law of
the empire making marriage compulsory. It was a ludi
crous yet most lamentable confession, how the. homes of
the empire had become hopelessly forlorn and loveless,
when bachelordom should be proclaimed as the emperor's

44 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
own singular recompense for the hardy voyagers who had
fed the hordes of a famishing capital.
The great historian Tacitus has told us how general
was the expectation of a great Deliverer from the East,
who should set up an universal dominion. And the pages
of the chief Roman poet, Virgil, a favorite of Augustus,
had, in one of his eclogues addressed to Pollio, heaped on
a child born to his friend images and anticipations of
coming good, that the best critics now agree in supposing
to have been derived from the phrases and pledges of
Hebrew prophecy concerning the Messiah. Palestine, the
land of our Lord's birth, was one of the outlying depend
encies of the great pagan Empire of Rome. The God who,
by Daniel, had foretold the growth of Latin imperialism
and the peculiar force that it should wield in crushing its
subject populations, had pledged the rise of a kingdom
that, like a stone cut out of the mountain without hands,
should become a great power and fill the earth. Not of
man's shaping, it should defy and outgrow man's curbing.
In the child that at Bethlehem was laid in a manger;
in the youth that as an artisan aided at Nazareth in the
workshop of his reputed father, Joseph the carpenter; but
who had been proclaimed by his forerunner with such
directness and solemnity as one taking away sin — the sin,
not of Israel, but of all people ; the guilt, not only that
with which, under Ahab and Manasseh and Herod, Pales
tine had been drenched, but the sins of the outer Gentile
world, not merely far as Tyre had discovered it, or far as
Rome had conquered it, but to shores never reached by
Phoenician keel, never overshadowed by Roman eagle,

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 45
over the entire globe, — in him God had prepared the offer
ing of an oblation that could, in. the energy of its efficacy,
span all the continents and travel down the entire course of
the world's centuries. This Deliverer was to be the moral
Renewer, the mighty Conqueror, the Divine Redeemer,
adequate to meet such a task, however cumbrous and
complicated ; to rise up to the dignity and vastness of an
enterprise so blessed ; but seemingly so hopeless, from the
very extent of its compass and the countless multitudes
of its perishing beneficiaries.
" The kingdom of God," said the Saviour at an early
period of his ministry, " is within you ; other legislators
deal with the outer act, and visit with the corporal pen
alty, and can follow the refractory but to the scaffold and
the tomb. I deal with the soul ; I go to the root of the
evil to be remedied in the stem and centre of the human
character. Come from the unseen and eternal world, I
wield its retributions, as I open its blessedness. Fear not
those who can kill the body and find their puny power
there all exhausted ; but fear him who casts the soul into
hell." Make the tree good, that its fruit may be good, is
the philosophy of Heaven. The laws of the kingdom
that he came to establish were spiritual, and the energies
that he came to wield were not tangible and visible, to be
counted on the ten fingers, and to be entered on tablets
and in exchequer rolls. Sacrifice was the price of his own
free boon to a guilty and ingrate race. Lifted on the cross,
he would draw all men to him, but the love that made
him willing at such a price to rescue his very maligners,
blasphemers, and murderers, was a love that, when it was

46 LECTURES ON BABriST HTSTORY.
kindled by reflection from him in their hearts, would
make them strong to compassionate and brave to endure.
They would become resolute and meek and glad cross-
bearers in the train of a crucified Redeemer, and freely
receiving would freely give. Continuing and deepening
the work of his harbinger John, he by his Spirit turned
the hearts of the fathers to the children, when he, in the
very hour of his advent, taught by his prescient Spirit an
aged Zacharias and an exultant Elizabeth, and a Simeon
and an Anna in their feeble and decrepid isolation, . to
look hopefully toward the days of relief now begun for
Israel and for all mankind; to see in cradles now ten
anted converts and messengers, trophies and apostles, of
him, the coming Hope of Palestine and of all the earth.
When he took up little children into his arms ; when he
bade his disciples remember that those coming into his
kingdom needed to come as with the docility and gentle
ness and submission of the infant, he inaugurated a new
era for the childhood of humanity. And when, in near
prospect of his own bitter and lonely passion, he turned
to commiserate the women weeping, by bidding them look
forward to those days of national woe and retribution,
when the childless mother, now generally in Palestine so
commiserated, should be rather felicitated and envied;
when the infant in its captive mother's arms should be
doubly forlorn in the desolation of exile, bondage, and
penury, — how did he illustrate his own deep regard, and
how did he by example inculcate a keen and special ten
derness in the heart of the elder to the younger. So when,
in the sermon on the mount, he expounded the spirituality

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 47
and breadth of the law, relieving it from the narrow, ex
scinding glosses of the Pharisees and vindicating the utter
ances of the old Scripture from the crippling and belittling
rationalism of the Sadducees, how did he victoriously
turn the hearts of the children of Abraham in that age
to the sounder and fuller views of their earliest fore
fathers. When he expounded the law of marriage,
carrying it back, beyond the indulgences and tolerations
of divorce permitted by Moses, to the institution as it was
in the beginning, when Adam and Eve walked the alleys
of Eden under the eye of the Father and Maker, how did
he vindicate the original integrity of the first and fore
most institution of human society, from all the interpola
tions that had been made upon it by the weaknesses of
man, and the relaxations of it by divine sufferance, allow
ing at certain times and for certain surroundings a remiss
ness which was not to be permanent or universal, as it
had not been the primitive and original type.
His forerunner had called to repentance. He proclaim
ed the remission of sins ; and by parables of the greatest
simplicity, pathos, and power, he bade the prodigal take
heart, and the outcast to look with penitent hope upon
the celestial home and the parental heritage which he
had wilfully forfeited, but which a Divine Father was
willing yet to reopen. The publican and harlot, the dregs
and off-scoured scum, so to speak, of all human society, he
does not seal to despair ; but his readiness to instruct and
recover the very classes upon whom the hypocritical
Pharisee had branded utter reprobation was one of the
very reproaches his enemies flung on his character, when

48 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
it marked him, in reality, as the true Rebuilder of the
moral desolation that strewed with ruins contemporary
Hebrew society. Not upraising this refuse of the com
monwealth to license and impunity, but encouraging
them to contrition and recovery, he showed himself thus,
indeed, the Refiner that early seers had portrayed for their
coming Messiah — one who could out of the refuse-heaps
bring forth the true silver. As he had made a Manasseh
in the old dispensation an exemplar of his bounteous
grace, so in this his new dispensation a Magdalen was
the herald of his resurrection, and she, out of whom had
gone, seven devils, now saw the vision of the angels who
guarded the vacated sepulchre and witnessed of the Lord,
as being on his way to a victorious ascension. The lever
of a new-found hope was put below the sunken courses of
the Hebrew Commonwealth. The opening of the prison-
house to those spiritually bound was part of his preroga
tive ; and the earnest of his joyous triumph, as Destroyer
of the power and kingdom of Satan.
Among the thronging rabble that hooted him on his
way to the cross might have been some, then in their
childhood, who in the days of their manhood writhed
in agony upon the crosses which Titus, when pressing
close his siege of the fated city, planted in ghastly lines
about the Hebrew capital. If impenitent mothers of
these impenitent Jews survived to behold the fulfilment
of Christ's rejected warnings, how, amid their keenest and
most rancorous despair, must there have come back even
to their souls some sense, that the far-seeing Christ who
had, so many years before, felicitated the barren and child-

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 49
less wife, was as kind in sympathy as he was piercing in
his divine forecast. Out of the deepening gloom of his"
own impending passion he had foreseen, and he had pitied
the woes of the nursling in the days of the Roman siege,
and the pangs of the frighted and famishing and cap
tive mothers on whose necks those puny nurslings clung.
Eyes, that had been dimmed with the bloody sweat of
Gethsemane but a few hours before, could bend compas
sionate glances on the maternal hearts that were to be
wrung, when the Latin siege-lines should surround the
Hebrew sanctuary.
But he, thus divine in knowledge, in compassion, in
stainless holiness, and in miraculous powers, is an Obla
tion. But he is Priest as well as Victim, and, gone up on
high, he pleads, in the most high and holy place of his
present celestial exaltation, the cause of his people. He
is Prophet; and in his own fresh prediction, and in his
symmetric and unexampled accomplishment of the older
prophecies, that from earliest days had gone before con
cerning him, how had he set himself, not only before the
nation, but also before all Gentiles, as the Desire of all
nations, the Prophet and the Helper and the Teacher of
all people.
John the Baptist had confined himself to the Jewish
nation in his ministry. The greater Prince also, for whose
way John prepared, limited his immediate ministrations
generally to the seed of Israel. But in his expositions, at
the synagogue, of Elijah's errand of mercy to the Gentile
widow of Zarephath, and of Elisha's miracle of healing
for Naaman the Gentile soldier and ruler; in his refer-
5 D

50 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ences to Jonah and to Daniel, each of these great seers
laboring partly for, and largely amongst, other than a
Hebrew population, — how had our Saviour brought forth
into clear prospect the purpose which he cherished of
making the gospel of his kingdom to be glad tidings unto
all nations. Reappearing after his resurrection, he had
declared that all power in heaven and in earth was given
into his hands, and that his truth was to be preached to
every creature. A heaven-wide benefit demanded a world
wide testimony.
In all this how signally, yet how unexpectedly to his
own countrymen and even to his own apostles, did he
fling down in his new empire the old barriers of exclu
siveness, the middle wall of partition between the uncir-
cumcised heathen, and the children of Abraham with the
rites of the law sealed upon them. And how did he illus
trate the breadth not only, but the bounteousness, of the
new kingdom. It was not for his own kingly lineage or
for the tribe of Judah ; for the learned, the wealthy, and
the mighty : his gospel was pre-eminently for the poor.
In the imagery of the Apocalypse, the roll which the
angels were not adequate to open and read, and which the
Lamb only was competent to free from its seven prisoning
seals, was written, as the apostle says, not only within, but
on the outside as well. The classical antiquarian tells,
how the rolls of ancient ages sold in the booksellers' stalls
were, when intended for the affluent, written on parch
ment and only upon the inner side; but cheaper copies
of the favorite classics, demanded for students of narrower
meansj were on rolls of paper, and the writing there was

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 51
not only upon the front of the roll, but upon the back as
well. A volume of this character, whatever its seals and
its Divine Holder, was, from this aspect of the lines in
scribed on it, — without as well as within, — denoted by
that single feature, as being the contribution of a new and
divine literature, not for the select and affluent and lux
urious few, but for the multitudes whose longings after
knowledge poverty could not repress. The classic of the
skies was to be edited for the masses. Philosophies and
inquisitions might seek to hold it back; but God's book
challenged the hungering eyes of the multitude. As into
the world of light, our Divine Teacher carried this emblem
of his benign thoughtfulness for the vast masses, just as
he had said, when his harbinger John from Herod's
prison inquired for new credentials of the mission of the
Emmanuel ; and he, the Divine Enfranchise^ put as the
crown and culmination of all his evidences this, that the
poor had the gospel preached to them.
The poor rabble of Rome had from their pagan lord
their doles of bread and their games in the amphitheatre.
They saw the wild beasts tear each other and the glad
iators stab one another; and, hungry for human gore, they
howled in gladness over the large provision an emperor,
chary of his own blood, but profuse in shedding the blood
of his victims, provided for the imbruted populace of
Rome in the circus. When an Augustus died, one of his
supple courtiers asseverated, that he had seen the spirit
of the deceased ruler mounting to the skies; and so the
obsequious senate voted the deceased emperor a god.
With armies, and navies, and treasures, and laws, and

52 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
magistrates, and largesses, and games, all at their com
mand, why should not Rome's pagan emperors, thus
voted into a godhead, set up a permanent, a world-quell
ing dominion? Human nature in its baser promptings
and instincts was all on their side. The literature and
poetry and oratory and philosophy of the age were all in
their pay. If old powers bore continuous sway, is there
any doubt that pagan Rome, backed by an impenitent
Judaism, by a temple that cast out the Heir and Lord of
that temple to be slain, strong under Sadducean and
Pharisean guidance, with its cry of " Crucify him I" against
a new claimant for universal royalty, — is there, we ask,
any doubt, that pagan Rome in its imperial might, thus
seconded by an impenitent Judaism, must crush the new
faith, and this Claimant of a heavenly kingdom, into
obscurity and irremediable defeat? Is not all secular
might, thus banded, sure to triumph over the fishermen
and tent-makers that claim, unarmed and poor, to
announce everywhere the reign of this Man of sorrows,
returning as Judge of quick and dead ? Meanwhile, these
strange heralds announce, that, in his grave, the second
remove from a cross, there lies the only hope of the race
for renewal and life everlasting. The poor, the denounced,
the prisoned, the tortured, the martyred, went everywhere
attesting that this King of Israel met all earth's real neces
sities and aspirations — was the Desire of all nations. Call
him rather, the world might scoffingly respond, the Scorn
of all people. The vilest contumely, now gathered on the
images of halter and scaffold, then was grouped as
intensely on the cross, accursed to the Jew, and to the

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 53
Roman so odious that the most abandoned culprit, if of
Roman citizenship, was accorded some less forlorn and
villainous a death. But they who follow him have
counted the cost, and are ready to tread in his footsteps
their own meek, resolute way to the cross. Who will fol
low, at such risks and against such odds, the Claimant that
says, " I am the way, the truth, and the life," speaking as
from a gibbet whence his disciples had so recently lowered
his lifeless corpse, speaking as out of a tomb where ene
mies had but lately sealed him, and as they thought
effectually and finally quashed his mission ?
A great company will be his believing disciples, and
eager witnesses to his recovered life and his experienced
grace. Priests, who had once hounded the rabble to
extort from the reluctant Pilate the consummation of the
sacrifice, will become themselves obedient to this faith, a
great company of them recanting their blasphemies, and
adhering to the faith of the maligned and excommuni
cated Nazarene. A Nicodemus and a Joseph of Arimathea,
out of the very Sanhedrim, will show their adhesion to
his cause. A Saul fresh from the school of Gamaliel,
and from the scene of a Stephen's martyrdom, will
become a convert and an apostle. And the story of
Jerusalem and the Jewish people, as Josephus wrote it,
their siege and their overthrow and their dispersion, will
blaze forth the working of a divine power, to show the
truth of the warnings which this rejected Prophet had
delivered. A pagan Rome will come to accord, however
reluctantly, its testimony to the same inexplicable fore
sight and unerring prevision, in his foretelling the fates of
5*

54 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
the church as he had built it. No power in the cabinets
and camps of earth, no power couched in the gates of
hell, has proved able to withstand this King's edicts, and
to falsify the pledges of this strange Potentate, emergent
from the sepulchre and preaching immortality as from
its dark shadow.
The history of Roman imperialism has been written in
the days of its decline and fall with signal ability and
great research, by an infidel scholar of Britain. Gibbon
has endeavored to show, how causes merely human
account for the overthrow of Paganism, and the triumph
ant diffusion and general reception of the new faith. But
his reasonings have not, to the candid and dispassionate,
seemed adequate or self-consistent. A Scotch jurist, Lord
Hailes, of acuteness and erudition, promptly replied to
the inadequate explanations of the sceptical historian.
Christian scholars like Guizot, the eminent French states
man, not long since departed, and like Milman, the Eng
lish poet and theologian, have to their several editions of
Gibbon appended notes and comments explaining, at less
or greater length, the insufficiency of the evasions which
Gibbon employs to sheathe the force of Scripture proph
ecies, and to lessen the wonders of Christ's new and spir
itual sway. In days yet more recent, the Comte de Cham-
pagny, a French scholar and statesman, son of one of the
ministers of state to the first Napoleon, himself a devout
Romanist, has presented the story of the closing days of
the Jewish State and of the earlier ages of the Roman
Empire, with a thoroughness, a vividness, and an elo
quence, that stir the reader's soul. This work it is, prob-

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 55
ably, that has procured for him the honor of an admission
to that eminent literary body, the great French Academy,
whose membership is among the foremost distinctions of
all modern scholarship. As a very decided Ultramontan-
ist, he cannot carry with him in some of his views and
conclusions the sympathy of his Protestant readers: but in
a presentation of the inner constitution of the Roman im
perial State, of its modes of enveloping and adopting the
cities and peoples that it conquered, of Paganism sick to
the death, and Philosophy unable to palliate the social
evils it must confess, it is a book of great merit, and de
serving close study. We have nowhere else seen a, state
ment of the gradual interpenetration of the Roman liter
ature and the Roman jurisprudence and the popular phil
osophy of the Empire, by the principles of the gospel,
that approaches, in fulness, in clearness and force, this
work of De Champagny, well worthy of an English ver
sion by some competent and faithful scholar.
Into the catacombs — places of burial, but of shelter
also — went the hunted and proscribed followers of the
Nazarene, and out of these catacombs the confessors of
this faith one day emerged, to see the Empire awed and
many of its nationalities won, by the spiritual doctrine
which once these Gentile rulers had endeavored to con
sume by martyr-fires, and to drown out in the blood of its
hapless proselytes.
Now, what had been Daniel's imagery of this great and
widespreading power ? It was not to be some statue, like
the figure seen in . Nebuchadnezzar's dream, bespeaking
the sculptor's toil of hand and the critic's educated eye,

56 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
and exhibiting, it might be, all the symmetry of art.
Like the unhewn stones of the first altars of the Mosaic
economy, without mark of graver upon them, it was to
be a growth, and not a fabric; heaven's boon, and not
man's device.
So the Spirit of God, working when and where he
would, had made, on the one side and on the other, this
truth to take hold on fresh converts and win new accre
tions of proselytism, until, insensibly, the rock became a
cliff, and the cliff a towering mountain-range, that com
manded the regard of every eye, and crossed the path of
the most heedless and unobservant traveller.
But if Christ be a king, what are his prerogatives as a
monarch? Now, earthly governments are generally re
garded in their threefold arrangements as to the legisla
tive, the judicial, and the executive power. Under certain
forms, and by assemblies or counsellors chosen or deputed
to the end, the laws are framed, amended, enlarged, or
revoked. The Parliaments of our British kinsmen, and
the Congresses of our own country and people, are the de
positories of this law-making power to the Anglo-Saxon
race. To judges, of longer or briefer tenure of their office,
is committed the power of interpreting and applying these
laws to the various cases respecting which they may need
explanation and adaptation. But to the judge a free
country is jealous of allowing any direct or large share
in the law-making. The executive, though the minister
of the law, is himself amenable to the legislator and the
judge, yet in certain posts he may be their equal or supe
rior in dignity. The constitutional republic depends for

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 5?
its perpetuity and success on the harmonious and uncob
liding interaction of these great depositories of power, the
law in its making, the law in its uttering, and the law in
its enforcing. No republic but must fail, as old republican
Rome failed centuries ago, if its town slums usurp and
absorb and intermingle these distinct branches of govern-
ment; and the rabble of yesterday arrogate to make the
law of to-day, with no certainty that it shall please them
to regard it as the law of to-morrow. A kingdom of hu
man administration, we dread as liable to corruption and
revolution. But a kingdom, if divine and in the hands of
an Infallible and Undying and Omnipresent King, every
where near to the cry of his petitioners, and every hour
wielding an omnipotence that neither stumbles nor tires,
is the more blessed for its subjects, and the more perfect
in its character, when its legislation and its judgment are
grouped into the hands and heart of one Potentate, the
Lord God Almighty.
We read the New Testament, and read it as collated
with the Old, its precursor. In its imperfect and frag
mentary measure, the elder book is the counterpart and
earnest of the newer, its complement and its crown. And
there, in the indented and corresponding portion of each
record, we find Christ the one Lawgiver. And no gather
ing of men, however august or venerable, as synod or as
council, has right to add as legislators one jot or one tittle
to the law-book as the apostles and the prophets left it.
So ripe a scholar, and so staunch a churchman, as the
great Archbishop Ussher, said to Richard Baxter, " Coun
cils are not for government, but for concord." So, as

58 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
to judicial power, we suppose the canon laws, as men
style them, to be the voluntary adjudications of those to
whom the Master has in his oracles left no such author
ity. We dispute and repudiate their judgment. As to
the executive power, we find God in his book setting up
the congregation, a local assemblage of true disciples and
their pastors, as servants to him, the present Ruler of
Israel, and as, under him, office-bearers, watching spirit
ually over and for each other. They .go safely only as
they implore the Spirit's guidance and as they apply the
Scripture teachings. To the end of the world, the King
has pledged his presence with his people in the assem
blies that number but their two or their three. Trusting
in his veracity and invoking his fulness of counsel, they
cannot fail. What is their safeguard ? Not the unity of
a great human ecclesiasticism, not the unity of some
provincial or national convocation, but the "unity" of
the " Spirit." The Paraclete, who cannot deny himself,
boundless in resources and covenanted to take of the
things of the Father and of the Son in his divine immu
tability and infallibility, overspreads all the jostlings of
the schools and clasps together all the wide chasms of
the centuries. An Augustine's Confessions, a Pascal's
Thoughts, a Bunyan 's story of the pilgrims, or his graphic
tale of his own vivid experience in " Grace Abounding "
meet yet an answering throb and waken the pulses of a
heaven-lit sympathy in the readers whose own earthly
training has been, it may be, under widely dissimilar in
stitutions of human origin. The one Spirit weaves his
bond of peace across the hurtling warp and woof of mor-

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 59
tal dissonances and earth-born controversies. Through
Christ, the one way, the children of many various civiliza
tions, with skins blanched by arctic frosts or blackened
by the tropical heats, subjects of political despotisms or
self-governed in political democracies, have access in com
mon to one Father, and breathe in blessed anticipation
the airs of a common Paradise awaiting them, when the
death-day shall have ended the exile and gathered in the
household. It was the grand and kindly purpose of the Monarch
who is also the ransoming Elder Brother of his people to
commend the statute-book of his laws and judgments to
their reverence, their credence, and their diligent study,
by giving it the name, variously rendered, of covenant
and testament. Take it in the sense of a covenant or
solemn compact, it is the league, sacred and mutual, of
the King of saints with all his vast flocks of the various
centuries. It is a covenant, according to the imagery of
this volume, ratified with blood. Abraham, father of the
faithful, entering into covenant with his God, had for
himself to pass, and the Maker who entered into pledge
with him went, by the symbol of a smoking lamp — Divine
Grantor and human grantee — both went between the
severed portions of a slain victim. The covenant was
ratified by sacrifice. And when the Redeemer on the
cross was giving up the ghost, the great inner veil of the
temple, with its lofty webs of gorgeous tissue and thick
stout folds, w*as rent in twain from the top to the bottom,
as if the indwelling Jehovah, before hidden in remote
seclusion, came out to attest the nearer, clearer manifes-

60 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
tation of his nature and character; and that into the Most
Holy Place was now given free access, not as before to
priest only, but to each worshipper as well. As the apos
tle phrases it, a new and living way was thus opened for
us. We were made kings and priests to God by a new
and loftier consecration, and we may not forego, we may
not forget, this covenant through which the Father, God,
thus came out to be nearer than ever before to us, and
through which we, the worshippers, come near unto him,
the Father. The blood of that oblation bedews the vol
ume from Genesis to Malachi and from Matthew to John's
Apocalypse. The cross tore down for evermore that veil.
But take the term in the sense which others prefer
giving to it. It is a testament, a last will, reciting the
final and unamendable instructions of a Brother who
has bequeathed a pardon here and eternal life hereafter.
It was of necessity that the Testator should die ere the
instrument could obtain its validity. Has he really shot
the gulf and taken hold on the immortality beyond ?
The Fall of Jerusalem responds no less than the scenes of
the crucifixion and resurrection. The Jewish people had,
a few years earlier than the time when the old fane of the
Hebrew went down in blood and ashes before the batter
ing-rams and the torches of the Roman, invoked, as in a
solemn moral suicide, by their high priests Caiaphas and
Annas, by their Sanhedrim, by their populace filling the
lanes of Jerusalem and demanding the crucifixion of
their King — had implored deliberately the adjudication
of Heaven, as between the nation dooming this Sufferer
and the Sufferer whom they had so doomed, so assured

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS SET UP BY CHRIST. 61
were they of his guilt and of their own innocent indigna
tion as being a holy zeal — had invoked and implored that
the blood of their Victim should rest on them and their
children. The invasion of the Gentile ; the devastation
of their land and the erasure of their sanctuary; their
long exile from the place of their ancestral offerings and
sacrifices; their wide dispersion from the one spot where
God had set in that dispensation his name — are a terrible
response of the divine Nemesis to the fearful appeal which
then and there they had made, and a very significant en
dorsement that the Lord of the vineyard had not disowned
the Son and Heir whom these, the keepers of that vineyard,
thus undertook to repudiate and to condemn. Like the
earlier Abel's blood bringing down Cain's mark, the gore
of this blasphemed but redeeming Abel is yet crying across
the ages to the Justice above. As the English jurist, Lord
Erskine, one of the greatest and acutest of their advocates,
has said, the dispersion of the Jewish people is among the
most convincing evidences of the truth of Scripture.
A covenant over the severed Lamb of God, a testament
sealed with the blood of the generous and loving Elder
Brother, the Bequeather as well as Earner of its legacies,
has indeed the highest claims as the law-book of God's
people henceforth ; its statutes not to be enlarged, amended,
or retouched ; its judgments to be accepted as perfect in
equity and wisdom ; and the legatees and the covenanters
recognizing in no human authority the competency to
revoke or to revise the arrangements God has thus indited.
This kingdom faces the mythologies and the philoso
phies and the governments of the race. It claims per-
6

62 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
petuity of dominion and universality of acceptance. The
Christ confronts the world's other masters. Which of
them shall withstand him successfully ? or which present
a plausible claim to replace the Man of Nazareth as the
Light of the world and the Judge of the eternities ?

III.
BAPTISM AND REGENERATION.

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION.

As into the sliding tubes of a telescope, narrow as they
may seem, are yet compressed the prospects of the further
most fields of heavenly space which man's eye can reach,
so it may be said that into three words of no very great
length are shut up the entire hopes of our race for both
worlds. For the relief of the lone, forlorn sufferer, and
for the elevation and betterment of the corrupted and
degraded masses; to make oppression impossible and to
bring wars to an end ; and to banish ignorance and pau
perism and vice, all sorrow and sin, from our globe, how
have statesmen schemed and sages pondered and patriots
toiled and martyrs bled. The wail of Need and the shout
of Hope have seemed to unite in that word, Reform. But
obvious and unquestionable as may have appeared the
necessity for reform in our neighbors, it has been hard to
convince ourselves that Reform needed to make its knock
ing heard at our own door. The man with the beam dark
ening his own eye has officiously been seeking to remove
from his neighbor's eye the mote, as our Lord's gentle sar
casm paints it. Legislators have devised reforms in law,
and socialists have projected vast reforms in the innermost
layers and most sacred bonds of society. A Lycurgus has
bequeathed his iron reforms to Sparta; an Augustus, in
6* E 65

66 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
our Lord's own time, has inaugurated what seemed his
golden reforms in the vast imperial domains of Rome.
But how limited was the scope and how superficial the im
pression made by reforms that have come from the ruling
classes down upon the subject masses of the population.
In Jewish history, how soon after a Joshua had been laid
in the tomb or an Elijah had been caught up into the
clouds of heaven have the old evils recurred, and the vows
of grandsires been forgotten in the revels of their grand
children. To make that word reform potent, the great Father and
Ruler on high has seen it necessary to show behind it the
shadow of a more portentous word, Revolution. When
saintly seers could not divorce the Hebrew people from
their unworthy craving for the idols of the Gentiles, God
called in those heathen whose foul deities these his own
people had coveted, to be the inaugurators of a revolution
that taught the ingrate tribes, in captivity, impoverish
ment, and oppression, the infatuation of their choice and
how ruinous the exchange had proved. And so, in mod
ern times, when a nation would not otherwise learn or
practice reform, God has let loose upon them the interior
forces of class hatred, or, from beyond the national bound
aries, the greed and ravin of some powerful invaders.
And in British history some of the greatest and most
successful of statesmen have been those who heard in
season the tramp of a coming revolution ; and averted it
by such change of measures as calmed discontent, ap
peased the strife of parties, and inaugurated a partial or
a widespread amendment. In the days of the later

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 67
Stuarts the people of Cornwall, a stalwart race, then
known to be hardy and fearless both as miners and as
wreckers, heard that the chief of one of their own noble
families — a Trelawney — was in danger, at London, of
losing not only his freedom, but his head. They organ
ized their masses, and the county resounded with the
rude refrain —
"And shall Trelawney die? and shall Trelawney die?
Then thirty thousand Cornish boys will know the reason why."
And these omens of a revolution that might burst forth
were among the influences, as was thought at the time,
that aided to obtain for Trelawney and his fellow-prison
ers their speedy discharge by jury and judge. In our
own days the Reform Bill, as it was called, establishing a
more general representation in Parliament, and the Cath
olic Emancipation Bill for Ireland, were both regarded as
necessities, quenching by timely concessions widespread
discontents, that might else have flamed out into revolu
tionary excesses. In our own national history it was to
methods of this high and extraordinary class that our
fathers resorted when they severed the ties of colonial
dependence on the mother-country. When France, with
vast masses of wrong to be redressed and wild hopes of
amendment and enfranchisement proclaimed, but under
standing not man and fearing not God, rushed into her
great Revolution, whatever the evils that she corrected and
the wrongs that she avenged, yet how much, too, she suf
fered and how vainly, and what ravages she blindly com
mitted at home and abroad. After empire and monarchy

68 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
and republic, each twice tried and twice renounced with
fickle restlessness, how difficult is it even yet for jurist or
for philanthropist, for ruler or for voter, to determine
where and when and how the reform may be made gen
uine, thorough, and permanent, and thus revolution be
effectually stayed. The communist and the absolutist
each would have his methods adopted; but, like the squir
rel shut in its ever-revolving wheel, after all the din and
the whirl of the varied experiments the bars remain, and
the citizen often feels himself cooped up at the last revolv
ing, neither free nor safe nor content.
For great as is Reform and dread as is Revolution, a
third word was launched on the world centuries ago, yet
greater in significance and surely and only blessed in
its workings. That word is the utterance of the Christ
whose it was to set up the kingdom of God in the world.
It is Regeneration ; it contains in itself the pledge of a
reform that shall be thorough and enduring. It is the
first stir of an avalanche-revolution that shall travel with
augmented might and with ever-growing massiveness
adown all the centuries, and on for the obedient beyond
the judgment-day into the far and blessed eternities, and
for the disobedient into exile boundless and hopeless.
The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. It is
within you, its seat in the renewed heart, its aims lifted
heavenward, and taking its hold on the brother's heart of
the Incarnate Christ and on the throne of the Everlasting
and Omnipotent Father.
Ye must be "born again" was his, the King's, exposi
tion of the first principles of his rule to the startled and

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 69
perplexed Nicodemus. By an agency invisible as the air,
but, though untraceable in its origin and its issues to the
bodily eye, felt and heard in the oracles it uttered and in
the new principles and feelings it infused ; by the Spirit,
omniscient and unerring and omnipotent as on the dawn
when it wrought out the present creation of our globe, —
were men now to be made over again. It was to the re
proach of this earthly doctor in the Sanhedrim, receiving
and arrogating the honors of a master in Israel, that he
did not lay to heart the old lesson which had been recited
afresh in his ears and passed anew over his own lips every
time that in synagogue or in closet he had read, had lis
tened to, or had uttered the prayer of the Psalmist king,
"Create in me, 0 God, a new heart, and renew a right
spirit within me."
Let men philosophize and refine as they will about the
processes, there was the principle recognized wherever a
holy man of either one of the earlier dispensations, patri
archal or Levitical, had walked with God. Such unison
and accord could not be until the human spirit worship
ping and the Divine and Worshipped One were brought
into one mind. He who shed his creative energies to
brood over chaos when Eden was framed, presided yet
over the outbreaking and upbuilding of his own renewed
image in the lapsed and chaotic soul of man. God in his
providential kingdom had ruled over all precedent ages
of darkness in the world's annals. Now he was to set up
more manifestly his own empire, brushing aside earth's
particolored and shattered dominions, and smelting down
into true purity and unity a church that should gather

70 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
the many-tongued Gentiles and rule all the far future of
the world's history. Reform of the grandest, for it went
into the roots of the character ; revolution of the widest,
for it altered the man's relations, not merely to his fel
lows, but to his old tempter and despot, Satan, and to
ward the true and recovered Father on high — a reform
that accomplished changes which the ethics of earthly
moralists and the speculations of Eastern and Western
sages were alike incapable of projecting, much less in
competent to achieve — a revolution that should ulti
mately beat earth's swords into ploughshares and make
the Britons, once the stupid slaves over whose incapacity
as household helpers and whose cheapness in the market
a Roman orator could with serene scorn dilate, the heirs
of a civilization beside which the vaunted Latin valor and
the Greek wisdom and the old lore of the far Orient were
to look poor. Such reform and such revolution was the
Nazarene to make the grand hope of the race in the re
generation which he proclaimed to be his indispensable
requisition for the citizens of his new empire, but the
bestowment of which he made free to all who honestly
asked it. If earthly parent gave good gift to his child,
though the parental hand outstretching the gift were
soiled with grime or were red with slaughter; if men,
being evil, yet retained sufficient tenderness to give good
gifts to their children, — much more would the Father on
high, only and evermore good, give the Holy Spirit with
out mistake and without counterfeit to all men who asked
it of him.
The evangelist John is, we believe, now very generally

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 71
recognized as writing to fill up the voids left in the three
earlier Gospels by a fuller recital of our Lord's teachings.
In the first sentences of this apostle's Gospel we are told
how the Light making its entrance into the world was yet
disowned and refused, in his incarnate manifestation, by the
race who were his own handiwork, and by the Jewish peo
ple, who were the chosen depositories of his prophetic or
acles and his regal pedigree and his world-wide title-deeds.
" He came unto his own, and his own received him not."
But when the chief builders thus disallowed and rejected
the chief Corner-stone of the spiritual fabric which Heaven
was to rear as the final fane for earth's worshippers and
the crowning dome of all human aspirations, this very
refusal by the human builders was the seal of predestined
identification on the part of the Divine Architect. By
every page of prophecy, every offering, every prayer, that
had gone up, were the nation and their ritual and religion.
all "his own." "His own received him not." Aaron's
line would not veil mitre in his honor ; Herod's mongrel
progeny had no purpose to grant this peasant from Naz
areth an inch on the lowermost steps of the throne which
they had usurped from David's true descendants; hoary
scribes muttered, with Isaiah's warning placed as under
their gray eyebrows, " We hide our faces from him ; we
esteem him not," and thought themselves, forsooth, thus
defeating the very Emmanuel whom they were thus
according the very reception which their own Isaiah had
foreseen for him. " Come unto his own. Of his own not
received." The evangelist goes on to add, with a divine
equanimity, " but as many as received him to them gave

72 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
he power to become the sons of God, even to them that
believe on his name." As Christ at quitting the world
said virtually, belief is salvation, unbelief is perdition,
so has John declared, that the hinge of regeneration, the
seal of sonship to a new adoption by God the Father, is
belief or faith in Christ. "To them that believe on his
name, which were born not of blood nor of the will of the
flesh nor of the will of man, but of God."
The Holy Ghost is the author of the new birth. Faith
in the name of the Divine and Atoning Son as the channel
of the regeneration; and a common heirship this side the
grave and beyond the grave in the household of faith
with the other children of divine grace, and hereafter
among the sharers of the celestial glory, as the prospect
set before those renewed in nature and born to a higher
and better and purer life, — such is John's statement of
regeneration. Until the great work of his passion was consummated,
and the final culminant miracle of his resurrection and
his ascension was superadded as the counterpoise and the
enhancement of Christ's humiliation to death, it was not,
in the harmonious order of the divine economy, as yet
fitting that the Holy Ghost should be given in the full
measure of his influence. After its outgushing in Pente
cost, the apostles were prepared for carrying their world
wide testimony to all people. The Saviour had himself
honored in the centurion and in the Syro-phcenician
woman and in the Samaritan a faith that as from Gentile
homes was stretching out its hands to the Hebrew
Messiah, who was also to show himself the Desire of

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 73
all nations and the Light of the entire world. The book
called the Acts of the Apostles seems to some a disordered
and fragmentary treatise; but it appears to us framed
with a divine symmetry. It begins at Jerusalem with a
Hebrew apostate. It wheels around to Antioch, a centre
of Greek cultivation, where the disciples were first called
Christians, and where the question is raised, Should
Jewish proselytism be required to membership from Gen
tile converts in the new kingdom universal and eternal ?
From Jerusalem inspired apostles attest and sanction as
right the course of Paul. The Gentile believer need not
enter Christian privileges through Jewish portals. Then
that great apostle of the Gentiles is dropped at the con
clusion of the history in Rome, the pagan heart of that
great Gentile civilization, there to deliver before Caesar
and his motley household, and his many-tongued
garrison, and the polyglot traders and courtiers and visit
ors of that metropolis, a faith that demands the credence
and the homage, and that propounds the salvation, of all
people under the whole heavens.
Citizenship in Christ's empire begins with regeneration.
Faith in him is the very first outgush of the new-found
spiritual life. The new heirs of Jehovah are born into
the household of faith with brotherhood to the Man of
Nazareth on their birth registers. True religion is not a
matter of heritage. God's new progeny are not such
by virtue "of blood," be it that of Abraham or that of
Caesar or that of Japheth. It is not " of the will of the
flesh, nor of the will of man." Carnal parentage cannot
secure it, nor can pastor or apostle, saintly man though he
7

74 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
be, assure it to his most cherished and kindly pupils.
The divine power stamps the images, the divine grace
widens the invitation. All may ask from the bounty that
is of Heaven's bestowing; none may presume from the
nationalities and the kinships, the objects of man's con-,
fident reckoning.
We said of the three great words, reform, revolution,
and regeneration, Christ's was the greatest. The Jew had
been warned by our Lord's harbinger that the axe was
uplifted in vengeance; and, unless there was reform, there
would come revolution. The mass of the nation were
heedless of the warning and reckless of the impending
retribution. Caiaphas had said that unless . Christ were
taken out of the way, the Roman would soon strip them
of home and nationality. In the quick rush of the divine
arbitrament on this great quarrel, and as against this sin
ning people, the Roman came, soon after they had taken
off their Christ, to take from them fane and priesthood,
city and home, and the independence and unity of the
national life. Refusing reform, they incurred revolution.
In how tremendous a shape the last came, as the alterna
tive of a proffered but a spurned regeneration, the pages
of Hebrew and Roman writers tell. Twelve thousand
Jewish captives labored to build that massive Coliseum
begun by the father, Vespasian, and completed by the son,
Titus, under whose valor Judea incurred her largest and
worst captivity. That Coliseum, in its ruins, stands to
our own times, so vast and strong, though plundered of
its materials and layers of stone, that pilgrims had learned
to say long since,

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 75
" While stands the Coliseum, Borne shall stand ;
"When falls the Coliseum, Eome shall fall ;
And when Borne falls — the world."
But Rome has yet another great monument commem
orative that Christ — however improbable, at the time of
its utterance, his warning seemed — spoke as One having
authority over times and empires, over civilizations and
barbarisms, classic, mediaeval, and contemporaneous.
The Arch of Titus, reared in honor of the waster of the
temple and the subjugator of Judea, has been, at the
hands of one of our own denominational worthies, Robert
Haldane, in his treatise on the Evidences of Christianity,
discussed with singular force as one of the monuments
of the truth of the gospel. We allude to it now only in
another light. The Great Teacher, who announced regen
eration as the condition of life, and ruin as the dread,
inevitable alternative for the rejection of it, hired no
sculptor and enlisted no soldiers, and with not a roof to
shelter his head had seemingly little reason to expect that
art and history and architecture should give bond "in
marble and enduring stone " as to the verity and gravity
of his solemn admonitions. Yet when on the moulder
ing tablets of that arch the traveller sees depicted the
spoils of the temple, how strangely does it seem ap
pointed that the chisel of the heathen who reared the
emblems of Hebrew rite kept no trace of altar where bul
locks bled or other altar where incense smoked; but he
framed the golden seven-branched candlestick and the
table of shew-bread and the two silver trumpets of jubilee
and passover. In the candelabrum seems preserved by

76 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
credible and authentic tradition the image of that which
Moses framed for the tabernacle, and that which Solo
mon and Nehemiah and Herod renewed for the temple.
When Judaism of the past gave place to the novel ordi
nances of this new Messiah and his new kingdom, did
not architect and sculptor " build more wisely than they
knew " when they fixed before the eyes of long-succeeding
generations of pilgrims, that were to gaze upon the blurred
outlines after traversing the wide Atlantic and coming
from homes on the edge of the far Pacific, such emblems,
that befitted not so much the old but rather the grander
dispensation that abolished the temple ? He proclaimed
himself " the Light of the world," and his apostle John
saw in the seven lamps of the Apocalypse the Spirit of
God in his sevenfold energies, as the power, to all after
ages, replacing and representing Christ. The Christ pro
claimed himself the Bread of heaven, and the faith that
fed on his flesh spiritually had life for evermore ; and the
enginery to which he committed the overthrow of an im
penitent Judaism and an imbruted Paganism, the subver
sion of the old fetiches of Europe and of Asia and of
Africa and of America, the contradiction and the refraga-
tion of all the philosophers and all the sciences, falsely
so called, that would dispute and contradict him. His
device was the trumpet of preaching. For the past, it
announced the resurrection, and the jubilee of a finished
redemption ; for the future, it blows steadily the louder
blast of a second resurrection and a universal judgment
and a final and irreversible retribution.
The very trophies of stone that heathen conquerors

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 77
reared in their triumphs over Christ's Jewish compatriot
slayers unconsciously, but most impressively, typified that
if a Levitical dispensation had gone to wreck, a Christian
dispensation had followed, an antitype outshining its
ancient typical lights, renewing and surpassing its conse
crated food, and publishing a most welcome jubilee; but
if it were unheeded, then behind it the advent of the
world's doomsday in the general resurrection. On the
Mount of Olives had he wept over a city knowing not the
time of her visitation and senselessly careless to her prof
fered redemption. As from the figures that tell of the
dire victories of the grim legions of Titus there comes
forth to the Christian's brooding eye the light and table
and trumpet, the memory of him who gathers to his ban
quet of the regenerate of all people, the rays of whose
mercy stream over all coasts and all kindreds, the light
of all earth's hidings and mysteries, and out of whose
gospel, heed it or scorn it as we may, blows steadily the
peal to make us a new heart and a right way ; or failing
this, to abide as best we may the unalterable ruin of
those who would brand falsehood on the Incarnate Truth,-
and who scoffed at the world's Judge when they might
have had in him the world's Redeemer and Regenerator.
The figure, veiled and sad, of Judaea the captive, on the
Roman coin minted when Titus conquered Palestine,
seems the image of a remorse that had wasted opportu
nity, and of a despair that had cancelled grace.
Now, what are the relations of this great truth, the new
birth of regeneration, the only true gate for admission
into the church and kingdom of the Christ, and of that
7*

78 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ordinance which, in the general judgment of all Chris
tians, stands as the first symbol, on the convert's part, of
his accession to the ranks of the militant church, and as
the humble avowal of his hope, through the merits of his
great Captain, to share one day the joys -of the triumphal
Church on high, the general assembly and church of the
first-born ?
As to its mode, we suppose that the form of the original
word, its classic use in heathenism, and the connections
in which that term is employed by the inspired evangel
ists and apostles, lead alike to the inference that it was to
betoken a great moral wrench in the penitent's life, break
ing him away from old associations and habits, and land
ing him, as by an irrecoverable consecration, under the
command of a new Master, and set apart to the toils and
sacrifices of a new and blessed conquest. The Lord,
whose voice he had heard, and the Spirit, whose touch
he had experienced, called him to remember that the
Lord God, the Emmanuel, had said, " Behold, I make all
things new." He, the loyal follower, bade deliberate fare
well, not only to the hostile, but to the indifferent; not
merely to the open scoffer, but to the waverer halting be
tween two opinions. As for him, he was the cross-bearing
recruit, who had accepted earnest-money and livery from a
cross-bearing Leader. Bought with the Redeemer's own
blood, he accepted the purchase-price, confessing himself
no longer his own, but ransomed as with the precious
blood of that sacrificed and atoning Victim.
In the language of Paul, he was buried as into the
grave of Christ, and he emerged as if to share in the rising

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 79
again of him who in his own rent tomb had proclaimed
and legitimated his claims to be the Resurrection and the
Life. His soul's hope was not extinction with a crushed
Victim, but the new life of a spirit planted as in the like
ness of that exultant and invincible Conqueror who had
said to death, " I will be thy destruction," and who had
thus defied the ancient destroyer, not for himself only, but
for the vast host of his regenerate and elect followers, and
also for his enemies as well, whom death was not to hide
from the just recompense of their impenitent and ingrate
rejection of his appeals, his sympathies, and his media
tion. Judge of quick and dead, the humblest disciple
might look to share one day in the high prerogative of
those who, as Paul pithily says, are to judge the world,
assessors at the doomsday of this the Great Dispenser of
man's endless condition and recompense. He was a scion
grafted into the stem of Christ's life, and a fellow-heir
made participant in the glories of the Elder Brother's
royalties. Now, many of the forms and rites of earthly orders
have a touching significance, which the later generation
who come after the founders might too easily forget.
When, in the old chivalry, a young knight received his
spurs, he put his clasped hands between the joined hands
of his baron who conferred the distinction, and professed
himself "the man," the vassal, in all honor, of this his
feudal lord. Whils't his palms thus met betwixt, the
clasping palms of his elder those fingers could not grasp
sword or spear; he was defenceless in the control and
keeping of his superior. So the believer, participant of a

80 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
new and recovered life, has consecrated himself to Christ
as the Lord's liege follower. If that better Captain, in
stead of hands meekly joined, ask a surrender as of arm
and head and breast and feet, in the entirety of consecra
tion to the loving Deliverer who, by cross and grave and
sealed tombstone, redeemed him, is it a servile act that the
convert should evade ? On the contrary, it is his joy to
proclaim that he has foresworn his old and degrading en
slavement to self and the world and Satan. The Lord's
full freedman he would be in every member of his bodily
frame and in every faculty of the inhabiting soul — sur
rendered to the providence and Scripture and Spirit of
this enfranchising Brother. The Greek communion, in
heriting the language of the New Testament, has for
eighteen centuries put upon the term one meaning. The
Latin communion for nigh twelve centuries used ordi
narily immersion as its method. Bossuet, one of the
highest authorities in the Romish Church, allows its an
cient and general prevalence. Campion the Jesuit, ex
ecuted in England on account of treason in the days of
Elizabeth (1581), regarded by his own order as a martyr
and proposed for canonization, had been in Ireland, and
wrote an account of the Irish as he had seen them. He
represents them as leaving in baptism the right arm of
the boy-babe unbaptized, to allow its giving a more cruel
stroke, and a more deadly, when the boy should be a grown
man, whilst the rest of his body was covered with the
baptismal waters. Elizabeth herself is said in her infancy
to have received baptism by immersion. In the life of
Cardinal Ximenes, the great statesman of Spain, who did

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 81
so much in the days of that monarchy's greatness to ag
grandize his sovereign and to compel the exile or the con
version of the Moor and the Jew, is said by one of his old
biographers to have been obliged, in consequence of the
number of his reluctant neophytes who to shun exile ac
cepted Christianity, to omit the old and established usage
of immersion, and to have substituted affusion or asper
sion. With three thousand Moors in one day, or four
thousand as some state it, to receive the ordinance, it be
came easier for the cardinal by a new mode of baptism to
gather in his compulsory neophytes.
So, when an apostle, speaking of the deluge, declares
that a like figure thereto, even baptism, doth now save
us — baptism, not the putting away of the filth of the
flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God —
does not he imply that the burial as of a flood was the
natural form of baptism ? And how does it enhance the
honors of Christ's law when it is seen thus, not only to
recall the crowning mercy of his subjugation of himself
to the temporary bondage of the grave, but to receive the
yet more ancient wonders of his mercy, when in the days
of the deluge his care rode the entombing waters, and
mercy rejoiced against judgment, and the ark, built by
the prevision of the Sender of the deluge, saved his own
elect from the general ruin, and over the ruins of an old
effete, sin-scarred, and death-branded civilization made to
ride the seed of a new economy and the ancestry of a
freshly-peopled world, who, thus scourged and thus
schooled, might be expected to learn wisdom and dread
fresh relapses into sin.

82 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
In these, it has its connections with the dispensation that
Christ opened by his gospel, and with the dispensation
that Noah had centuries before reopened in quitting the
ark and pressing his feet on Ararat. Baptism has, we say,
very solemn intimations. The Great Architect who pre
scribed the keel that was to float the few saved from the
deluge ; and the Great Deliverer who foresaw as from the
edge of the crib at Bethlehem the cross where he was
himself to hang, drawing all men unto him, — set up a rite
in its retrospects, alike of the recent Calvary and of the
remoter Ararat, which should speak of the new King's
investiture of his soldiers with their livery, their badge,
and their letters of registration, by something impressive
and august. And we read in the ordinance as the Sover
eign Saviour bequeathed it, in the yielding waters that
bury and then restore the loyal disciple, the cenotaph of our
great Leader, the persistent tomb perpetually erected by
which he would have his death set forth to the end of the
world, and his exulting triumph over death and his
jubilant entrance into Paradise as well. And if it would
be thought temerity for a follower of Michel Angelo or of
Christopher Wren to pull down the tomb of either of
these great architects on the plea of substituting a better,
is it less temerity to innovate on the design in the gate of
his own church, reared by the Great Architect? Bury us
into the tomb he occupied. Plant us into the new-emerg
ing life that he there displayed; nor think it shame to
stand loyally by the ways that he has opened, and that .
none in all the world may better.
But who are the rightful recipients of this ordinance?

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 83
In the case of John, his harbinger, we find that he did
not regard mere descent from Abraham as entitling men
to pass to his ordinance. They were to be penitent, and
to have the tree good, if they would have the fruit good ;
else, a generation of vipers, they were banned from the
privileges of the kingdom which he announced. Was
Christ's a new baptism ? In larger privileges and clearer
views of the truth, it might be. But we have no traces in
Scripture that the apostles who had received John's bap
tism were required to accept a new rite in joining them
selves to the Prince as they quitted the herald of that
Prince. And when John the Evangelist declares the son-
ship given to Christ's true people to be not after the will
of the flesh nor the will of man, but to be for those who
believe in the name of Christ, it seems a simple and inev
itable inference that regeneration belongs, only in the
way of faith upon Christ, to the souls who personally see,
know, and welcome Christ.
Now, to put the ordinary expression of regeneration out
wardly before the actual and internal experience of such
regeneration in the enlightened, discipled, penitent, and re
newed follower of Christ, seems a most dangerous assump
tion of power in the church, and also a most rash ascription
of intrinsic and magical efficacy to the outer emblem.
The churches early, but most unrightfully, learned to
annex not only the remission of sins to the ordinance, but
the regeneration itself— to attach pardon from Christ and
new life from the Holy Ghost as sequents to an external
rite. Priestly hands and church lavers were thus em
ployed, by an assumption that not one page of Scripture

84 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
warrants, to usurp the prerogatives of God the adopting
Father, and Christ the mediating Brother, and the Para
clete, the renewing and illumining Teacher.
Some were induced, like Constantine and like Theodo-
sius, long after becoming in conscience and judgment con
vinced of the truth of the gospel, to delay submission to
the rite from the fancy that by deferring to a late day
their baptism they should thus ensure the cancelment
and the remission of all sins that had been before com
mitted ; whereas they had learned to think sins wrought
after baptism especially likely to miss pardon and to
ensure hell. Thus they had been taught to look away
from the Atoner and the Regenerator to the rite, and the
sacerdotal hands and the consecrated walls connected with
the administration of the rite.
Others, believing again that the infant dying without
baptism was beyond the reach of regeneration and re
pelled hopelessly and evermore from the precincts of Par
adise, urged the speedy bestowal of the rite upon helpless,
untaught, wailing, and protesting infancy. And a council,
which Hefele declares it probable to have issued such a
canon (a.d. 418) in the beginning of the fifth century,
pronounced its anathema on all holding that children
dying unbaptized might possibly be saved, and might, if
missing Paradise, reach at least some intermediate region
of peace and painlessness. This sixteenth synod of Car
thage pronounced the kingdom of heaven and life ever
lasting beyond the reach of the little child dying so
without church rites.
The anger of church and church-rulers, in the Middlr

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 85
Ages, was especially enkindled against all who, reading
their Bibles, held that the rites of the church were due
only to the willing, the believing, and the regenerate, and
that the eternal interests of the little child, be it of hea
then or of Christian parents, dying in its age of helpless
ness, were very safe in the keeping of him who could do
no wrong. The bitter and the murderous rage of perse
cution flamed against those who held thus to the salvation
of infants, entirely apart from the church ordinances of
which they were as yet incapable. Augustine himself
who had wavered as to the spiritual prospects of such
babes early dying, was silent after the voice of the council.
Jansenism itself, so noble and glorious a memory in its
defence of the great doctrines of grace, has yet its sad
record in this very matter. The great volume that Jan-
senius prepared on the doctrines of Augustine, and whose
posthumous appearance awakened so memorable and pro
tracted a conflict, the effects of which are not yet spent,
has attached to it, in some of its editions, the treatise of,
an Irish ecclesiastic, a fellow-student of the great founder
of the Jansenist school, and who afterward became an
archbishop of Tuam, Florence Coury. Its theme is, " The
State of the Little Children who die Unbaptized ;" their
outlook in the world beyond. In monastic establishments
the middle meal of the day was often accompanied with
some religious reading, one of the brotherhood reading
aloud whilst his brothers were at the board. St. Beuve,
the last accomplished historian of Port Royal, speaks of
this treatise with its gloomy forebodings as to the despair
awaiting all children who die unbaptized, whether in

86 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Christian or heathen lands, as being made, in the early
days of the Jansenist movement, the reading of monastic
schools in Belgium, where, while partaking of their noon
day repast, the youthful theologians were invited to muse
as they ate on these sad dwelling-places of exile return-
less and of despair unappeasable, that, according to their
false views of baptismal regeneration, awaited so many
hapless myriads. All pagan infants so dying, it is held,
go beyond the range of hope.
Now, the pontiff awarded to Henry VIII. of England —
though he and his successors in wearing the tiara had bit
ter occasion to regret the bestowal — the title of Defender
of the Faith. Ghastly and ludicrous seemed often its as
sociations when contrasted with the character, morally, of
some of the royal wearers. Especially baleful and deplor
able must it have seemed to a devout Romanist when this
same Henry, defending the faith, hounded to the death
zealous Romanist champions, like Bishop Fisher and his
own accomplished chancellor, Sir Thomas More; more
sad even to a devout thinker of Protestant sympathies
must it have seemed when flaunted by a Charles II. in his
harem, or a James II. in the butcheries that he required of
a Jeffreys against his innocent Protestant subjects.
Earlier than its permanent bestowal on Henry VIII.,
that title, " Defender of the Faith," had been occasionally
bestowed on individuals of the Lancastrian royal house
who had brought into use against Wycliffe and the Lol
lards the terrible writ for the burning of heretics. He
who had rebuked his own apostles, when they would have
called down fire on the village not receiving him, with the

BAPTISM AND REGENERATION. 87
calm reproof that these over-zealous disciples knew not
the spirit which they breathed when thus avenging in
juries to him who came not to destroy men's lives, but to
save them, — he gave no such patterns as to the mode of
guarding his own truth and saving faith.
And whatever claim, regal or pontifical, rulers have arro
gated, to confer or wear the distinction of being truly and
heartily the defenders of the faith, we doubt not that the
verdict of honest history and the sentence of the eternal
judgment will be, that the epithet belongs rightfully and
loyally to those who, standing on the ancient ways, have
refused the innovations, and resisted meekly and fearlessly
the usurpations, that would entrench on the laws Christ
left for his own churches.
To preserve the honor of his cause it is needed that the
confessors who call none other than him their Master
should jealously guard the integrity and the spirituality
of the churches of the twice-born, the regenerate. While
asserting, that the infant should be shielded with all ten
derness, and taught early and faithfully the gospel as
Christ gave it, how many of our fellow-confessors have
resoluteLy held that only those taught of the Spirit and
regenerate had right to the ordinance of Christ's house.
They have also taught with resolute simplicity that the
souls of those dying in early childhood — so large a por
tion as they formed of the trophies of Death from our
race — died as safely without church ordinances as if they
had been admitted to them, unconscious of their meaning.
They have held that to expect, for the unconverted and
unholy, remission of sins and a true regeneration from

88 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
outer ordinances and priestly manipulations, was to cheat
the soul thus misguided, and to degrade the ordinances
thus misapplied. They have dared to ask that those
bearing the vessels of the Lord, the Holy One, should be
holy ; to assert that none, unless born again, had right to
stand in Christian membership.
But for just these professions of hope and confessions
of doctrine they have been put under ban, harried,
exiled, proscribed, and incarcerated. Some have been '
drowned ; others flung to vermin in foul and untended
dungeons ; others burned alive ; others buried, like the
Belgian sister of our own faith, Anna van den Hove, who,
as the sixteenth century was going out, was attended by
Jesuits as the grave was gradually filled over her, and
urged to recant that she might have life spared her.
When she persisted in her meek confession and then and
there refused the apostasy, was not hers a defence of the
faith which many a learned apologist can never hope to
rival? And in the great day of rising and of awarding,
they who thus avouched the truth, and scorned to accept
deliverance at the cost of renouncing and surrendering
that apostolic verity, will shine when he, the Christ, shall
lead the full and final regeneration of his people.
A new Pentecost, bringing the churches to a higher con
secration and putting the Christ in his rightful supremacy
over conscience and creed and character, is the hope of the
world for abiding reform; for peaceful and general revolu
tions, that shall enfranchise, exalt, and unite the nations ;
for a regeneration such as God waits to bestow, and which
man should habitually and reverently implore.

IV.
THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST
AND MADE BY MAN".

s*

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST
AND MADE BY MAN.

It may to some have seemed that church histor}' begins
where the Bible ends ; that it is more properly the annals
of the people of God after the Master in his bodily pres
ence had quitted them, and after the Holy Spirit had pro
nounced the last sentences of the New Testament with a
solemn ban upon the rash adventurousness that should
either on the one hand mutilate the record, or on the other
hand assume to amplify and supplement that Revelation.
But if the church be, in truth, a kingdom whose Divine
Founder and Ruler is still in his omnipresence at what
ever spot, in whatever land, and in whatever century,
but two or three of his meanest disciples gather in his
name ; if his Scripture be her unamendable, unimpeach
able law, and his Spirit her perpetual and indispensable
life, — then no safe history of her can be outlined with
out hearing first his own claims and tracking his earthly
career, or without pondering the traits and laws of the
first churches in the first Christian century as the New
Testament paints them. Go to the Christian Fathers as
dissevered from the inspired evangelists and apostles;
turn over the voluminous and dreary records of the so-
91

92 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
called councils, and the inquirer is floundering as in a
pathless forest, where trees obstruct on every side the
vision and show no pathway — a very Dismal Swamp,
where the foot sinks and the miasma ascends and the
snake lurks. In the fight between the adherents of Absa
lom and the loyal soldiers of his father it is said, that
" the wood devoured that day more people than the sword
devoured." Church history, severed from the New Testa
ment and from the Christ whom that Testament presents,
is such mere morass and pestilent jungle, alike perplex
ing and destructive, where a man learns to plunge for
ward into passive credulity or to start back into sheer
skepticism and despair.
But learn from the book, as Heaven has completed and
sealed it, the character and promises of the great Captain
of our salvation ; find there the hint given of the plans
on which he has inaugurated his campaigns for the con
quest of the race by the few, the poor, the persecuted, and
proscribed ; see there his precise and emphatic announce
ment that the gates of hell will storm, but fail to shake,
the church built on the Emmanuel, its foundation-stone ;
heed loyally and trustingly his pledge that to the little
flock, hurled amid the ravening wolves of the nations as
a flock of gentle and harmless sheep, and in comparative
numbers, as against the hosts of their opponents, " a little
flock," it is yet the Father's good pleasure to give the
kingdom ; hearken to the portrait he draws of the growth
of that kingdom, slow and inconsiderable, like the evolu
tion of the mustard-seed, which has grown into branches
that shelter the birds of heaven, inaudible but persuasive

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST. 93
as the leaven tingeing and altering the whole measure
of meal under which it seems at first irrecoverably con
cealed and suppressed ; listen to the pledges given, as out
of his agonies and humiliation and entombment, that thus
should he draw all men unto him, and that to the end of
the world he will be the Light and the Life of his people :
ponder all his warnings as to the tares interwoven with
the wheat, and the false Christs that shall arise, assuming
to personate and supplant himself, but against whom his
servants, vigilant and forewarned, must patiently watch and
loyally protest, — then, thus furnished, the simplest Chris
tian may launch out upon the quaking fen and tread his
way across what else would seem a God-forsaken wilderness.
With the Bible in hand and the eye fixed on Christ, the
Lawgiver and Sovereign of the kingdom and the Leader
of the sacramental host, order springs out of the tangled
mass of seeming confusion. And it is one of the grand
arguments of hope, in the spiritual collisions of our age,
that the eye of foe and of friend has alike been turned so
signally on Christ. His character is the very core of Rev
elation ; his history is the clue of all God's providence, in
the long past and through the dim, far future. Now.
from every school of faith, and almost, it might be said,
of unbelief as well as faith, has proceeded some new biog
raphy of this Son of man and Son of God. Paulus and
Strauss and Neander and Sepp and Farrar and Angus
and Andrews and Pressense and Ellicott and Renan are
but a small part of the throng that have essayed to write
the wondrous story. And to the errorist and the man of
true evangelical faith come the Hebrew and the Moham-

94 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
medan even, adding their attempts to solve the mystery
or to explain the revelation. It is to the believer cause
of gladness and holy gratulation that the onset of battle
dashes thus in our own age, on the part of Christ's adver
saries, upon that portion of the Christian lines wrhere, as
we well know, moves the Invincible, where plans the In
fallible, where, overruling all events, comes he the Inev
itable, our Captain of salvation, the Lord of lords, to
whose feet, as subject or as penitent, must ultimately con
verge all the schools of worldly lore and all the colliding
interests of all the nations that fret their little day over
the crust of our tiny planet. Let the gainsayers explain
our Christ if they can, without shattering their philoso
phies upon the problem. They who stumble there are
broken. And if the unbeliever must, as he best may,
give some plausible and harmonious solution of the
appearance and character of this Hebrew Sage and Re
former, much more should the Christian commence his
survey of the course of the churches as under the eyes
of this his Redeemer, and fasten the first unrolling fold
as between the lids of the New Testament. The king
dom of God is a growth. The church of Christ's planting
is a vine, of which himself is the stem, and all the saints
of all the ages are but the dependent branches. Were I
called to study the pine, should I begin with it as it lies
under my hand, in the wood of this desk, after wood
man's axe, and carpenter's plane and hammer, and paint
er's brush have all in their turn passed over it, giving it
new outlines and place and hues? Or should I not
rather seek the tree in its own original site, the rock at its

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST. 95
foot, its top soaring heavenward in the free air, and the
storms of winter howling harmlessly through its dark
green shrouds? So the church begins her story in the
book of Inspiration, and in the course and character of
her Divine Head and Architect. His cross, instead of
being her doom, is her banner, woven into her creeds,
inscribed on her ordinances, the burden of her every
song, and the plea of every prayer that swells from her
closets or her sanctuaries, or rises from her quiet death
beds or the smoke of her martyr-pyres. He, the
Saviour, the Alpha of creation and providence, is, es
pecially and pre-eminently, the Alpha of all true church
history. What is the church? In her future state, when faultless
and complete, all the elect gathered to their final home :
in that church triumphant, which is the attendant of the
Bridegroom Redeemer in the last stages of God's prov
idence, — she is one and perfect. In her intermediate and
earthly stage she is, according to the "ordinary language
of Scripture, many and imperfect, made up of local con
gregations. In these may be intermingled the truly con
verted and the self-deceived, or the conscious heartless
pretender; a Simon Magus jostling a Simon Peter. But
where faithful men, holding the Head, meet in Christ's
name, obeying his word, and imploring and receiving the
aids of his Spirit, and observing his ordinances, his Bible
recognizes them by the name of churches. It has no
hesitation to employ this term, not only in its singular,
but also in its plural form; and to recognize the churches
having rest in Judea; the churches of the Gentiles; the

96 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
churches of Galatia; the churches of Macedonia; the
churches of Asia.
Some seem to forget this, and think of all the commu
nities of primitive believers as making up but one visible
church. To this new imaginary body it is easy to
ascribe a legislation, a power of development, and a
power of repression and excision, which the Holy Scrip
tures do not attach to the churches as apostles move
among them. If the views of our Lord's kingdom, as
we have reviewed them, be just, we may not admit that
he has transmitted his legislative and kingly power to any
earthly synod or representation. It was consummate and
it was exhausted in his own Divine Selfhood.
Compare with this view the language of one of the pro-
foundest and clearest intellects our race probably ever
had, the devout Jansenist, Blaise Pascal. Speaking of the
church as his Catholic training presented it to his mind,
and regretting its modern deficiencies as compared with
its pristine traits, Pascal has said, in regard to baptism,
the ordinance treated when we last met :
"It is not to the church that should be imputed the
misfortunes which have followed a change in such (her) sal
utary discipline, for she has not changed in spirit, however
she may have changed in conduct. Having . . . seen that
the deferring of baptism left a great number of children in
the curse of Adam, she wished to deliver them from this
mass of perdition by hastening the aid which she could
give them ; and this good mother sees, only with extreme
regret, that what she devised for the salvation of these children
has become the occasion for the destruction of adults. . . . She

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST. 97
does not accord baptism to children until after they have
declared by the mouth of sponsors that they desire it, that
they believe, that they renounce the world and Satan."
Infant baptism, in the mind of this great thinker, came
in, because the church in baptism saw the remission of
sins and regeneration ; and lest, by her deferring it to the
age of actual belief and until the fact of personal renewal,
the infant should miss heaven, she accepted the vicarious
engagements of sponsors on behalf of these their voiceless
charges ; but the consequence was, that the church had no
longer, as in early times, a membership who had actually
and personally and consciously renounced the world and
the flesh and the devil. Yet, it might be asked of the
holy Jansenist, if the adults were, in this later age of the
church, thus in unbroken league with the world, the flesh,
and the devil, of what avail could such ungodly sponsor
ship, proffered by the liege adherents of this evil trinity,
be for the infant in whose name they repeated promises
which these vow-takers for babes had never kept for them
selves ? And who gave the church this power of " chang
ing her discipline" to protect infants, early dying, from the
danger of missing heaven? Was that danger stated in
any page of the New Testament? Has the church that
power of " development " for which John Henry Newman
has in our own day pleaded? Developing baptismal
regeneration as contingent on the ordinance, and as a
protection, antedating baptism, to secure such right to
Paradise, she could not, in the first stage of her error,
sever the one ordinance of the Christian church from the
other, the baptism from the communion. And so, for
9 G

98 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
centuries, the eucharist was administered to infants.
And they who lean on early Fathers for their attestations
on behalf of infant baptism cannot, in consistency, shut
their eyes to the attestations of the same Fathers on
behalf of the little children partaking of the bread and
the cup.
As presented in the New Testament, the churches of
true disciples, apostles yet surviving to oversee and guide
them, were not free from errors and from scandals. In
Corinth and in Galatia, Paul reprehends them. In Crete,
the frank apostle quotes an old harsh proverb, to note the
besetting sins yet clinging to converts. In the churches
of Asia, John denounced the Jezebel found in a Christian
assembly, wielding her influence and swaying her parti
sans; and disowned the synagogue of Satan, as he termed
them, sheltering themselves under Christian forms and
names and surroundings.
Both the Divine Master and his apostles warned against
the growth of evil influences, in closest proximity to or
dinances and revelations even. There were Antichrists
already in the world. One who "letted," or hindered,
prevented the coming development of a great Man of sin,
the dread and paramount Antichrist, who, sitting in the
temple of God, should give himself out as God. Against
these dangers the primitive disciples were to keep them
selves in the study of the Scripture, in the love of Christ,
and in the faithful practice of the institutions as the
apostles had delivered them.
In the one of the New Testament ordinances, the dis
ciple pledged himself to a continuous remembrance of his

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST. 99
Saviour's death; — that ordinance was to him emblem,
monument, pledge, and earnest — a rite of fourfold aspect,
presenting emblematically hope for the flock out of the
Shepherd's sacrifice — a monument of the mode in which,
borne to the dead, that Rescuer had emerged out of the
gloom, Lord of the living and the dead — a pledge, by the
disciple, as solemnly, deliberately proclaiming to the world
of impenitent men, and to the gazing world of angels good
and angels evil, that the convert believed himself partaker
of a new spiritual life, enfranchised from his old tyrant
Satan and sealed to the will and kingdom of his Enfran-
chiser Christ — an earnest, for the disciple, that, like as his
eyes, from a momentary and liquid entombment, looked
out afresh on the world intact, so out of the later sep
ulchre, to which disease and perhaps martyrdom should
consign him, he looked to arise, in the right and in the
likeness of his ascended Lord, to a better life which that
Master had prepared in heaven for all his true followers ;
and an earnest too that, as in obedience to Christ's com
mands he now receives from the Consoling and Illumining
Spirit fresh cheer and hope, so hereafter in loyal waiting
he may expect evermore fresh helping, and the Hill Diffi
culty open out upon the House Beautiful and the Delec
table Mountains.
In addition to this preliminary ordinance not to be re
peated, a single and final act of consecration to Christ's
laws and people, he was to repeat frequently another ordi
nance, that set before him and his fellow-confessors their
spiritual dependence on this same Saviour for continued
grace. Bread of heaven and cup of salvation, they all

100 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
were to find in the Incarnate Son of God. Withdrawn
from the eye and ear of sense, he, the God, was not veiled
from the opened ear and unsealed eye of faith. On this
Lord, as the day's task came, they leaned for the day's
strength. Teachers might be removed; age or persecution
might smite down the men at whose lips they had first
heard the word of life ; but, in the grace of the Ever-
Living Head, they were assured of a presence that no
bereavement, no prisoning walls, no remote exile, could
isolate, estrange, or bar out from them. Bound to each
other as bearers of a common burden, they were pledged
to sympathy and brotherhood and mutual vigilance.
But, besides their obligations to the mass of their fellow-
worshippers, they had regard to the teachers — artisans it
might be or scholars, men mighty in the Scriptures and
rich in spiritual experience — whom God had set over
them as under-shepherds. Far as their admonitions and
instructions were warranted by Scripture, to these, their
teachers, they were pledged to give heed, as to those set
over them in the Lord, and watching for their souls as
those who must give account. When the providence and
Spirit of God called any of them to a distant field of toil
and witness, the contributions and the prayers of their
fellow-confessors should help the journey, and sustain the
messenger in the remote scenes where his testimony
might be delivered.
They were laborers and light-bearers, for the world as
well as for the church, gathering, by counsel and example
and winning tenderness and serene patience, the regard,
and, if it might be, the souls, of the unconverted around

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST. 101
them. The church was a candlestick giving light — a
pharos shedding its beams along a perilous coast and
over a stormy sea. The embodied churches cared for the
nations and looked to see the ingathering of multitudes,
won to the same Paradise, and aroused by the appeals of
the same Redeeming Brother, the same Avenging and
Inevitable Judge.
The church had, as a local body, its right not only,
but its covenanted duty, of governing, under the rules of
Christ's statute-book, in the presence of the Omnipresent
Head, and by the aid of that Paraclete promised as his
gift and officiating as his representative, the body of fel
low-disciples. The reproof, the rebuke, the exhortation,
the encouragement, and, if it were necessary, the excision
from the number of the faithful, were among the services
for which they had been enlisted and solemnly sworn.
The name "sacrament" among these Pagan-Roman mas
ters meant the soldier's solemn oath of loyalty to his stand
ard in the repose of the camp and the rush of battle. Chris*
tians early learned to apply the term as denoting that the
ordinances of discipleship pledged each church-member
to a loyal, lifelong, and fearless aggression upon the world
as massed in spiritual revolt against its rightful Lord.
What safeguard, it may be asked, was there for true
unity? Needed there any better, could there be any
higher, than the covenanted supervision of him who
walked, with unwearied tread and unblenching eye, amid
the golden candlesticks, and who, to the end of the world,
assured his loyal followers that this his care should not
falter? The Godhead was pledged to the oneness and

102 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
invariableness and all-sufficiency of the great Source of
their life and growth. There was, however, yet other
wreath of perpetual union between the devout church on
the earth and the great Theme of their worship in the
heavens. It was — in the withdrawal of his own bodily and
visible presence — found from the nearer presence of the
Holy Ghost, one Spirit with the Father and the Son, and
to be implored and obtained by all the godly. To them,
the Paraclete's omnipresence was the seal of true per
manence and of real interior oneness. Author, as well as
Expounder, of all Scripture, he would keep in the bond of
peace and brotherly accord his own Israel, of many earthly
ancestries and many terrestrial dialects ; yet, in his power^
they would be assured of a force that should melt and re
cast them into one incandescent and flowing unison. In
virtue of it, the child of an imbruted Heathenism, in our
days, is made one in heart with the Psalmist of Hebrew
lineage, and with the confessors of primitive Christianity,
and with the German, the French, the British Christian,
whose ancestry and training were so divergent from his
own. One Spirit stretches its unbroken accord over the
wastes of the centuries ; and the church of the one God is
one — radically, cordially, intrinsically, and inseparably one
in him, the Jehovah, holding Christ the one Head, having
all one Father, and keeping the unity of the Spirit in the
bond of peace.
Is there power, it may be asked, in these narrow, parish-
bound, local communities of the regenerate, to effect har
monious feeling over large tracts of territory? We an
swer, the writers on civil government and national growth

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST. 103
in our own age are discerning in just such local, self-
knowing, self-ruling neighborhoods the secret of republi
can prosperity in the New World, and the chief haunt
and refuge of social order under the despotism of the Old
World. De Tocqueville found the talisman of the free
dom of our Revolutionary forefathers in the preparation
which the town-meeting, with its care of the local needs
and the local wrongs, had given those fathers for the due
administration of a republic when it was cast upon them.
So Sir Henry Maine finds, in the village communities of
old India, a form of self-rule that has preserved most of
the peace and real order of the Eastern nations under the
successive waves of invasion that have gone over their
land. "Their rulers shall be of themselves" was God's
promised blessing to his people when obedient. A local,
independent, self-governed community was the original
form of polity for the primitive Christian church.
But man, in his temerity, has undertaken to develop
and to improve and to expand upon the handiwork of
God. What has been the result? As the faith took hold
on individual diseiples in the great cities of the Roman
Empire, it became the practice of too many to lower the
spiritual requirements, that they might more easily and
rapidly augment the external discipleship. Wealth and
worldly honor flowed in upon the religious bodies thus
enlarged; but the spirit of worldly aggrandizement took,
with too many, the place of the fear of God, and of the
love for the truth. Christian leaders affected the pomp
and the prerogatives and the severities of pagan magis
trates. Synods, grown up at first in the purpose, it may

104 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
be, of cultivating a brotherly accord and co-operation,
affected legislative powers ; and pronounced, in their own
fancied eminence, their edicts and their anathemas. The
humble preacher was replaced by the arrogant prelate.
Festivals of a foul and reckless heathenism were imported
into the Christian ritual and service, to attract and recon
cile a rabble of unregenerate worshippers. A thin var
nish of Christian- names and usages was used to convert
huge blocks of paganism into buttresses of the Christian
church. The Satan, who, as a Christian Father has so justly said,
is " the ape of God," wise and shrewd enough to see the
unmatched sagacity of divine methods, and blind and
callous enough to affect a rivalry, alike unwarranted and
baneful, with the one and holy Jehovah, saw it his
interest, when persecution could no longer intimidate the
advancing churches of Christ, to shift his engines and
affect to be the ready patron of what he could now best
clog, by climbing to its chief places of council and domina
tion. As Hawthorne, in one of his grim but most ex
pressive stories phrases it, Beelzebub undertook to run
special trains on a railroad line which deftly passed and
evaded the Wicket Gate, and ran through the Valley of
the Shadow of Death to the Celestial City, himself chief
engineer and stoker; but somehow failing to land his
passengers at the promised gates of the heavenly Jerusa
lem ; and, by a dark tunnel, at the spot where Bunyan's
Ignorance disappeared—a tunnel somewhat badly lighted
— contriving quietly to shunt off the cars to a place which
the old-fashioned disciples had called Tophet.

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST. 105
The Jewish polity was a scheme of surpassing force and
skill for its purposes of preserving, in a special people.
the Ught of the divine oracles and covenant, till the
times were ripe for the manifestation of the long-expect
ed Christ. Meanwhile, by solemn rites and a gorgeous
temple and a separate priesthood and one central local
sanctuary, the nation were trained to be the custodians
of the incipient and germinant gospel, until the era came
when bud was to burst into full flower, and the Trust of
one people to be proclaimed as the Desire of all nations.
When he came, he put away this local, central sanctu
ary and this separate priesthood. The sacrifices received
their fulfilment and their absolution in the one oblation
upon Calvary proclaimed as final when the Victim cried,
"It is finished!" and endorsed by the Father as effectual
in the descending blaze of the Spirit on Pentecost. If
the Epistle to the Hebrews have any force, its meaning is
that Christ is henceforward the one true Priest. His peo
ple all, the regenerate hearers as well as the regenerate
preachers, are priests unto God, and are also kings as well
as priests ; but it is not, in the case of human pastor or
disciple, a secular royalty or an Aaronic sacerdocy. That
dropped away with the fall of Jerusalem and with the
dispersion of the Jews and with the establishment of
God's kingdom in Christ, just as the last year's husks
scaled off and disappeared from the bread-corn that
furnished the loaves of to-day's repast on your tables.
The new economy eliminated it. But because that polity
of sacrifice and priesthood and central temple, which God
used, for their fit time, and then superseded them, was so

106 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY. *
grand and wise a provision for the establishment of a
temporal domination, Satan, the mimic, grafted the out
grown and obsolete economy of Judaism on his travesty
of the Christian economy. A pompous ritual ; and sacri
fices many, so called ; and a great central religious fane, the
seat of special power over all people,— were, in defiance of
apostolical prediction and apostolical warning, made the
enginery of one sitting in the temple of God and giving
himself out as God.
When a nation was willing to allow this corrupt form
of the Christian church to bewitch and control it, the
state drank, in the terrible language of the Apocalypse, of
the wine of the Sorceress. It was made the duty of the
secular power to aid, by fines, exiles, and prisons and
martyr-fires, the edicts of the nominal but apostate
church. Was it a scene of real peace for the nations ? On the
contrary, some of the darkest pages of modern history are
reeking and bloodsodden from the rivalries and wars, the
scandals and enormities and massacres, thus occasioned.
Was it real unity, when, in the rivalry between the metro
politans of York and Canterbury, in mediaeval England,
the one called the primate of England, the other enlarg
ing his titles to be called the primate of all England, and
when all the mitred hierarchy had assembled in solemn
convocation, — was it in the spirit of Jesus, the lowly and
the cross-bearing, when the one of these great churchmen,
to prevent his rival from acquiring, by any seeming sub
mission on his part, the superiority over him, as that rival
filled the chief central seat, deposited himself on the knees

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST. 107
and in the lap of his fellow-archbishop, thus indicating
his stern resolve to make no implied renunciation of his
own equality, if not superiority ?
The state gives power, but she imposes checks, as well
as pays revenues. And when, in our own colonial days,
the English Established Church sought, far back as the
times of Archbishop Laud, and next by Bishop Atterbury,
the elegant friend of Pope and Swift, and now by Bishop
Butler, the author of the immortal "Analogy," and now
by Archbishop Seeker, the extension of the episcopacy to
these American colonies, how loth was the home govern
ment to make the required expenditure, and how averse
the Puritan colonists to accept the restraints and the cost
liness of new and colonial sees.
Local churches, self-controlled and self-sustained, had
preceded by far the wealthy imperial government in the
task of evangelizing our shores. So when India with its
millions passed, by the enterprise of the East India Com
pany and the valor of Clive, under the sceptre of Britain,
how reluctant were merchant-traders in the far East, and
British legislators in the far Western isle, to permit, much
less to equip, an evangelizing force for the myriads of their
new subjects, Pagan and Mohammedan.
And when the feeble churches of our own English
brethren adventured in the work, how scant were their
stores, how grim and savage the dislike they encountered
from the colonial governors; how fierce and rancorous the
scorn that rained down upon them from the high places
of literature. But strong in the faith of Christ, and free
in their local church government, Carey and his brethren

108 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
went forth, with a few paltry pounds in the treasury, to
confront the Brahmin and the old Sanscrit lore, and the
widow's suttee, and customs and philosophies that were
already old and solidly anchored in the national habits
in the days when a Daniel was yet living in Shushan.
Denied a home on British soil, they accepted and effected
a lodgment — like some tiny sparrows building their nests
in the pediment of some tall temple whose gates they
might not be allowed to pass — on the little Danish ledge
of Serampore, skirting closely but timidly the proud and
broad colonial realm of Britain.
It was a victory for the local, congregational, undow
ered Christian church when they went forth thus. Yet
the glory was never arrogated by these good but humble
men as being their own. The Sanscrit lore of the world
is in their debt. British domination, assured by their
Havelock, in the day of its terrible peril, against odds the
most fearful ; modern missions, thus encouraged and fol
lowed up by other churches, undowered and established
as well; the souls they have won, the Scriptures they have
translated and scattered, and the social reforms they have
aided to inaugurate, — all these emphatically attest the
wisdom of leaving our churches, as Christ himself left
them, bound to be scriptural, bound to be spiritual, that
they may thus be one, thoroughly, permanently, and in
separably one.
And such unity it is that makes certain the true free
dom of the churches. When Wycliffe sent his "poor par
sons," as they were called, men with long russet robes, to
preach the gospel through England, the great Reformer

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST. 109
shrewdly boasted that tliese true "watch-dogs," as in
homely phrase he described them, were " not chained to
the kennel." In market-places and by roadsides, wher
ever they could win hearefs, they raised their voices and
delivered their testimony. The Reformer's translation
of the Scriptures into the English tongue and the toils
of these humble teachers brought on the great Lollard
movement It spread into Bohemia, then, by royal mar
riage-ties, connected with England; and Huss and Jerome
of Prague were among the fruits. Seemingly quenched
for the time in blood, yet, as dominant and established
churches did not commence it, as parish boundaries could
not limit it, so prisons and pillories and stakes could not
utterly extinguish it.
Long after, when Methodism under Whitefield and the
two Wesleys invaded the religious apathy and stagnation
of Christian Britain and reached the British colonies on
these Western shores, it was again as free local churches
that the converts were gathered by the resolute and lov
ing itineracy. The heart, set on fire by the love of Christ,
waited not to ascertain stipend or to bargain for cosy har
boring and quiet hearing. The well of living water, as the
Master promised, upbursting by the Spirit's energy and
the Saviour's prompting in the regenerate heart, shot up
its crystal column of gladness and refreshing, when, alas !
it provoked but too often priestly scorn and the hootings
and brutal maltreatment of the mob. Whitefield bore to
his death-day scars received in Ireland for thus preaching
the gospel ; and the Wesleys were more than once in dan
ger of sacrificing life in those labors, then so denounced,
10

110 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
now so generally and justly acknowledged as a blessing to
the nation.
The Methodists in their leaders were church clergymen,
but the church generally disfavored or openly and fiercely
condemned them. They acted on the great principle that
the isolated church and the isolated believer have a right
to proclaim the common salvation to a world sinking,
if unwarned, into a common and speedy perdition. As
Baptists, we do riot claim their honors ; but we rejoice in
the manful and heroic exemplification they gave of the
great principle that no church, national and state en
dowed, has a right to hinder by its edicts, or its parish
bounds, or its fines, or its prisons, the course of free
churches in proclaiming a free gospel.
Our own Baptist brethren in Virginia and in New Eng
land brought themselves into the danger not only, but
into the endurance, of loss and imprisonment, when they
thus, in the homely image used by Wycliffe, burst the
chain, foreswore the kennel, and carried their watch-dog
mission wherever the poor flock of Christ were wandering,
like lost sheep in the wilderness, and with none to care
for them — wherever the great enemy was driving his wolf-
hunt of error and sin across the land.
To some, it may have seemed that all these are truths
too generally accepted to need that they be again repeated.
But if, as others hold, all who have been baptized, no
matter by what sect or by what errorist, are in that fact
made irrevocably subject to the control of one Christian
church, and if the body claiming that oneness, and the ex
clusive right to the name Christ's own church, by recent

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST. Ill
and solemn enactment proclaims that the state is bound.
when the church shall think it expedient, to enforce sub
mission to her authority by similar penalties, it will evi
dently follow that the question of true church unity and
real church independence becomes a burning question,
one of high moment to us as American citizens.
The Spirit of God has not, in the day of Pentecost,
waited for the assent of Hebrew Sanhedrim and Roman
Senate before he precipitated his influences on the
churches of God. Where the Spirit of God is, there is
liberty. This has been the old apostolic testimony. It
has, through all the course of the intervening centuries,
been the experience of Christ's loyal and regenerate
people. With his book as the guide, and with a ministry
and private membership of his anointing, the church has,
as her birthright, imprescriptible and indefeasible freedom
to make her testimony wide as is the range of her prayers,
and to broaden her prayers to the full compass of the
Master's generous promises.
Sir Isaac Newton held that the churches of our denom
ination had been memorably useful. Unhappily tinged
with grave error as was his own mind, that lofty intellect
pondered the prophetic portions of God's word ; and he
wrote on the Book of Daniel a treatise yet reprinted. He
was accustomed to hold, that the Baptists and the Arians
— or at least the Eusebians, a special division of the
Arians — were the Two Witnesses named in John's Apoc
alypse. We have this statement on the authority of
William Whiston, who succeeded Newton in his profes
sorship at Cambridge, a man wrongheaded but singularly

112 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
honest, and as little capable of intentional misrepresent
ation as Goldsmith's imaginary Vicar of Wakefield.
Whiston, who in his own Life more than once repeats
the statement, adds to it the remark that he, Whiston,
was both Baptist and Arian, but he did not, as did his
illustrious friend, hold the Baptists to be identical with
one of the two witnesses. Whiston rather inclined, with
the learned Bishop Lloyd before him, and with many
later scholars, to regard the two witnesses testifying for
God and slain by Antichrist, as being the Waldenses and
Albigenses. Heylin, the learned but bigoted biographer
of Archbishop Laud, was loth, as he said, to follow the
Waldenses and Albigenses into "their conventicles" for
the succession of witnesses to God's true gospel.
But, apart from all these interpretations, it is deserving
of consideration, that, mysterious as is the last book of
the New Testament, yet amid its gorgeous and dazzling
images, hard to interpret, are interspersed some of the
most emphatic and direct utterances as to the future and
celestial blessedness of God's people. The poorest and
simplest of God's people have been enlightened and de
lighted by these intermingling promises, embedded but
not beclouded in these mysterious prophecies. There is
a special blessing, pronounced by the Divine Author of
the book, on those who study it. Of course, examples,
dire and many, recent and flagrant, warn against study
ing in self-confidence, and uttering our views and counting
the years in precipitate heedlessness.
Much of the imagery of the Apocalypse is reproduced
from prophetic books of the Old Testament. In the ear-

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST. 113
Her volume, the golden candlestick is one, as Zachariah
saw it; but fed by two golden olive trees, emptying their
golden oil by golden pipes into the candlestick, which
needed this feeding to keep up its blazing. God presents,
to the view of the apostle John, two candlesticks as well
as two olive trees, where Zachariah had discerned but one
candlestick, with a twofold supply from olive trees, not
waiting for olive-gatherer or olive-press to cull and crush
their fruit, but shedding the richness of their juices di
rectly into the lamp-fires. It has seemed to us not im
possible that God may have intended to symbolize and
emphasize thus the peculiar distinction of preaching in
the church of the New Dispensation. The written Scrip
tures were the source of guidance, and the reservoir of
divine inspiration, to the earlier of the dispensations.
But the King, now at last setting up his actual sover
eignty on the earth in his own church, made the ministry
its great means of edification and increase, and of spirit
ual aggression as against the world. It was a new and
additional olive tree. The light of divine truth, in the
character and story and dominion of Christ, is to shine
steadily and with enhanced brightness over our own and
all other lands. It is to be, under the plenary influences
of the Spirit, fed, on the one side, by the written oracles,
the record of the utterances of the old prophets of the
Pen; on the other, it is to be fed by the evangelist and
pastor, if truly commissioned of God, as his prophets of
the Voice. They have no right to affect, or the merest
approach to the authority of, the inspired prophet and
apostle, whose testimony the Bible preserves. But, if
in* H

114 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
truly called of God and commissioned by the Spirit, they
are to be mighty in the Scripture, and, as was said of an
old worthy, " men of one book :" — thus spiritual, and dis
tilling in a devout and lifelongstudy the lessons of Holy
Writ, as by the living voice, into the ears and hearts of the
church and the world, they cherish the flame that God lit;
and that, once having lit it, the faithfulness and veracity
and unchangeableness and unity of the Godhead will,
evermore, guard, replenish, and heighten.
But he will not so guard it but that, for a season,
under terrible forces of error and persecution, the two
witnesses will seem slain, though scorn will require that
their corpses lie unburied and dishonored. An age will
come when the Scripture may be withdrawn, when, under
the abounding influence of infidelity or scepticism, a liv
ing ministry will have also ceased. Preaching and Bible-
reading will together have gone down. But the corpses
will lie, like the corpse of the Saviour shut in the sepul
chre loaned by Joseph of Arimathea. Faithful women
and mourning apostles came to embalm the Redeemer.
No mourning, but wild revelling, will shake the nations
over the two witnesses laid unburied in the streets of the
great city. But the earth shall hold its merry-making,
and send its mocking gifts over the remains of the two
prophets that had tormented the earth for a brief space
only. Then shifts the scene.
Amid the riot and the din of the universal triumph,
the Spirit, who needs not man and waits not for man, will
but have waited the predestined and narrow bound for
the great and outbreaking gush of terrene and infernal

THE CHURCHES AS LEFT BY CHRIST. 115
enmity to display its strength. Three days and three
nights were the limit of the Saviour's own subjection to
the tomb. Three days and a half— literal or figurative
time — will be the space and breadth for the seeming aboli
tion of Bible and ministry. The light blazes again ; it is
the light of doom. Where the voice of worldly hate had
been, " Lie there and rot," comes now a voice, falling
from the skies. It is, " Come up hither."
The churches of Christ have their toils and their inev
itable sufferings; but their ultimate lot is translation to
the celestial city. The Scriptures, gathering new evidence
from every storm of Antichristian proscription, and of
skeptical derision and blasphemy, which they have
encountered or shall yet encounter, are not to be deserted
and disclaimed by their Author, throned on high. The
record, true here, shall be remembered and explained
more vividly and resplendently there. The true heralds
of the cross, working not for gain or power or worldly
praise, if truly anointed of God, shall have their record
and reward on high.
And in that fair city, of which Christ is both the Temple
and Light, it shall be seen, that thrice blessed were the
Bible telling on earth of the salvation, the pulpits vocal in
earth's many dialects of this our faith, and the churches
who, pondering those oracles and heeding those teachers,
pass ultimately from the lesser and dimmer beamings
of earth, to the cloudless and perpetual splendor of the
Beatific Vision.

OUR CHURCHES
OTDEK THE BAN OF ANTIOHEIST.

OUR CHURCHES
TJKDEK THE BAN OF ANTIOHBIST.

It was, but a few years since, said by a distinguished
English convert to Romanism, Archbishop Manning,
who has more recently been made a cardinal, when
speaking of the communion to which he had attached
himself, that "men now acknowledge it to be either
Christ or Antichrist."* A few lines after he adds: "The
Catholic Church is either the masterpiece of Satan or
the kingdom of the Son of God ;" yet a few pages farther
on he represents men as concluding in its favor, " though
at first they think the church of Jesus Christ to be
Antichrist." Familiar as is the term to the readers of the New Testa
ment, so ghastly is the shadow it is there made to cast
upon the purity and growth of Christ's true churches, that
some in our own times dread allusion to the phrase even,
as bringing back controversies which have rent nations and
guttered more than one region of the earth as with rivers of
blood. But if the beloved disciple testified that there were
even then many Antichrists come into the world, warn
ing, however, that another, more vast and heinous, was to
* Leet. on the Fourfold Sovereignly of God, Lond. 1871, p. 171.
119

120 LECTURES ^ ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
come, whose full manifestation was hindered, or, in the old
English phrase, " letted" by a power yet dominant — if, as
the old Fathers held, the power so obstructing was the great
pagan empire of Rome, it is matter of moment to the stu
dent of history and the reverent tracker of the course of the
Divine Providence in the rule of nations to ascertain what
great influence for evil grew up into its ill-omened domin
ion on the waning and overthrow of the old Paganism of the
great heathen empire. If Hobbes, the old infidel of the
days of the Commonwealth and the Restoration, said, with
that command of pithy English of which his writings afford
many a specimen, that Papal Rome was but the ghost of
the old Roman Paganism sitting crowned on the sepulchre
of the early heathen dominion, the wording might be his,
but the thought was one familiar to all the schools of Eu
ropean Protestantism. The martyrs of Southern France
and Northern Italy, of Holland and Germany and England,
of Bohemia and Scotland, in the study of their Bibles,
had learned to pronounce the great power claimed and
wielded by the Roman Church, the New Testament Baby
lon, the mother of abominations, to be the counterfeit and
antagonist of Christ. Bishop Cox, one of the compilers of
the Liturgy of the Anglican Established Church, writing
from England in 1559, whilst Elizabeth filled the throne,
to friends on the Continent, says, " We . . . are thunder
ing forth in our pulpits, and especially before our queen
Elizabeth, that the Roman pontiff is truly Antichrist." A
nobleman of that house of Russell which, so early and
so long, has distinguished itself for zeal in the behalf of
Protestantism, the Earl of Bedford, in the next year, 1560,

UNDER THE BAN OF ANTICHRIST. 121
writing to Gualter, a Swiss Reformer, prays that Christ
may prosper the Swiss Christians in their endeavors to
" destroy the kingdom of Satan, the pomp of the world,
and the power of Antichrist."
On the other hand, a Roman Catholic gentleman, Am
brose Lisle Philippe, of Grace Dieu Manor, about twenty
years ago published a volume intended to prove Moham
med the great enemy of truth who was veiled under this
portentous title. One of the most learned of all volumes
on these topics is that in folio of the Spanish Dominican
Malvenda. Born only about six years after Cox had so
designated the wearer of the tiara, his results are, of
course, far different from those of the various confessors
and martyrs that his own Roman Church had disowned
as heretics, and his own Dominican order had racked, im
mured, and burned as heretical blasphemers. The ques
tion is one long litigated, but it cannot be banished if the
great Head of the church is to be regarded as not a mere
alarmist when warning against the false Christs that
should come in his own name and deceive many. And
if to his servant in Patmos he gave images so startling of
the spiritual powers that should beset his people, we may
well believe that those of his followers best serve him on
earth and those most surely win his welcome in heaven
who take early and reverent heed to these oracles of his
framing, nor walk into snares against which he has fore
armed them.
It is part of the Master's blessed provision for the spir
itual needs of his discipleship, down to the day of his
own return in the glistening cloud and on the white
11

122 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
throne, that he has, in the brief tome of his New Testa
ment, a book that the schoolboy's wallet, and the soldier's
knapsack, and the sailor's chest may so easily stow — that
in these pages, to which the dying turn for glimpses of
the world beyond the grave as it yawns so near, and in
which the bereaved catch, amid their falling tears, hope
for the vanished kindred who have left home desolate — he,
the Lord of the centuries, should have placed so conspic
uously and thundered so emphatically along the whole
onrolling course of those centuries his warning — sad
boding and stern — that we receive not every claim to
spiritual dominion, even though the world, the whole
world, for the time, go wandering after it, and though the
Man of Sin throne himself for a time in the very temple
of God, giving himself out as God. As Manning, the com
panion of John Henry Newman in departure from the
British Establishment, and, though not the peer of New
man in learning, logic, or intellectual power, far, probably,
his superior in popularity, elegance of style, and sway of
hearts as a preacher, — as, we say, Manning has put it
tersely and plainly before the English-speaking Christians
of the round world, the question becomes a very signifi
cant and urgent one : the King of heaven or the master
piece of Tophet ; the Christ the Truth, or the Antichrist
the huge Untruth.
In an old German pamphlet, issued by Roman Catholic
writers of the Continent, and intended to warn against
prevalent heresies, whilst Luther was comparatively ob
scure—for he is not named in it; and the strength of the
denunciation, in which is against the Waldensians and

UNDER THE BAN OF ANTICHRIST. 123
the Poor Men of Lyons, and the followers of the English
Wycliffe, and the Bohemian Huss — it is said of these Poor
Men of Lyons, that they "regard the Ban as their own ever
lasting benediction." * By the word Ban — fallen practically,
with the shrunken powers of the hierarchy, into disuse —
was meant in ancient times the power publicly and sol
emnly to curse. It delivered over the individual heretic
to excommunication, banishment, prison, or death; and
the land it laid under an interdict, abolishing in it, for the
time, all holy offices, and smiting service and worshippers
as with a moral paralysis, and — if the Saxon phrase be
permitted us — as with a spiritual lockjaw, that hindered
further movement, and, if left unrelieved, would bring
on utter death.
The Waldensians this Roman Catholic pamphlet repre
sents as claiming that they had been in the world since
the days of the first Pope Sylvester and the Emperor
Constantine, when the fatal bounty and patronage of this
emperor had corrupted and secularized the church, as
Waldensians held. That is, far back as the closing of the
third and opening of the fourth Christian century, the
Waldensians dated the fatal wrench and blight. Denying
their full antiquity, but allowing that they, the Walden
sians, had been in the world more than three hundred and
fifty years, they, the Roman Catholics, charge on these
Waldensians the heretical statement, that true priestly
orders had gone from the Roman Catholic Church, far
back as the days when Constantine endowed her, and
when Sylvester received, the imperial recognition as pri-
* Artikel um Ursprung (1524).

124 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
mate over the church. Prayers for the dead, purgatory,
prayers to the saints, pilgrimages, jubilees, burial in con
secrated ground, and the use of oaths, they charge the
Waldensians with denying. To the Poor Men of Lyons,
they impute the assertion, that the Roman Church is the
Harlot of Babylon ; that all the new laws made for the
church, since Christ's ascension to heaven, are unauthor
ized and valueless; that true baptism comes only after
belief, personally; and that Infant Baptism is to be re
jected. To Wycliffe, the pamphlet imputes the sentiment,
that to ban a man, a bishop must know that God has first
banned him; and that, banning another without such
personal knowledge, the prelate makes himself a heretic ;
that the men who, in dread of man's ban, turn from hear
ing God's word preached, are themselves banned, and at
the day of judgment will be doomed as traitors against
God ; that bans of the pope and his bishops are not to be
heeded, for they are but judgments of Antichrist. The
pamphlet closes with the decrees of the Council of Con
stance (a. d. 1414) condemning such heresies, and sending
Huss and Jerome to the fire.
The yellow quarto tract of some eight leaves, in its rude
black type, is thus like some dark thunder-cloud swollen
with portents of doom. But, itself three hundred and
fifty years old, and allowing to the Waldensians in that
age a history actually three hundred and fifty years back,
or seven centuries from our times, it cites, though it dis
putes, the Waldensian statement, that they came from the
days of Sylvester, or a time when Constantine, by enrich
ing, had, as Dante also complained, secularized the church.

UNDER THE BAN OF ANTICHRIST. 125
The Catholic accusers allowed them an antiquity of three
hundred and fifty years ; the Waldensians claimed a real
antiquity of twelve centuries, or nearly nine centuries
more than their persecutors granted them.
Now, Neander, Hebrew in blood, but Christian eminently
in spirit, of vast erudition and greatest candor, says * that
it is not without some foundation of truth that this claim
of the Waldensians goes back far as the times of Sylves
ter and Constantine's gift. Of one of the old Waldensian
manuscripts, claiming to be of the year a. d. 1120, and
having as its theme Antichrist, Neander says that it
belongs certainly to the twelfth century."}" Rainerius,
once himself a member of the Catharist or heretical com
munity, afterward a persecutor, traces them back to Syl
vester's times, and to the apostles even.f These Walden
sians held Antichrist, in his early stages and ages, to have
been "mute." It was their striking phrase for his slow
development, and the growing boldness of his utterances,
and the wide sweep of his later assumptions. In the
imagery of the Apocalypse, the evil influence had been
"letted" — cribbed and hemmed in — by adverse' powers
that it was to survive, and finally to eliminate and to
supersede. As Hobbes phrased it, the ghost of the pon
tificate sate crowned on the tomb of the empire.
A man of earlier times than those of Neander, the
saintly Leighton, holds of the Waldensian church this
language :§ "The devil, crafty as he is, makes use, again
and again, of his old inventions, and makes them serve
* Bonn's ed., London, viii., 351, 3o2. f Ibid., 352. J lb. 352 n.
\ Works, Pearson's ed., London, 1828, vol. i., p. 285.
11*

126 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
in several ages; for so were the Waldenses accused of
inhuman banqueting . . . and divers things not once to be
named among Christians, much less to be practiced by
them." Just, in other words, as old Paganism libelled
the first Christians as grossly wicked, so the persecutors
of later believers maligned, before they martyred, many
of their victims. Bossuet, however, allows the moral exal
tation of the Waldenses, though he will not admit the like
to be true of the Albigenses.
It is .not claimed that our denominational views were
universal among the Waldenses. There were — as read
ers of ecclesiastical history, entirely independent, and far
removed in position from each other as are our own
Robert Hall and Schleiermacher of Germany, have agreed
in judging — some of the Waldensian Christians who
upheld, and others who rejected Infant Baptism. So there
were also, among the Lollards, or early English followers
of Wycliffe, some who followed out the results of Wy-
cliffe's principles, in the study of the vernacular Scrip
tures, to the conclusion that baptism went with faith, and
that infants, not capable of exercising the one, should
not receive the other. Rastell, one of the judges of Eng
land in the days of Queen Mary, has preserved in his
Entrees legal documents coming down, some of them,
from his grandfather, Sir John More, a justice of the
King's Bench, and father of the illustrious chancellor, Sir
Thomas More. In this volume, Rastell has preserved a
Latin writ, sending over to the bishop for judgment, ac
cording to the canon law, three several groups of Lol
lards, who all rejected Infant Baptism. The date he has

UNDER THE BAN OF ANTICHRIST. 127
not given ; it might have been the time when his grand
father served on the bench, or when he, the grandson,
accepted a similar post in the days of Queen Mary, on
whose death the doughty Romanist sought refuge on the
Continent, dying at Louvain. From the designation of
Lollard given to the errorists, the earlier date of the time
of Rastell's grandfather, the elder More, would seem the
more probable. Gross immoralities are also imputed to
two groups of the three. But we know how carelessly,
cruelly, and falsely both pagan and papal Rome showered
such accusations against their innocent victims. And a
reader of ecclesiastical history soon finds that crude but
justly-founded criticisms of the heretic against the mar
riage services and practices of the dominant church
were, by the priesthood whose services and fees were so
impeached, wrested most perversely to bear a meaning
which the righteous dissident never held. But one, who
had personally known Wycliffe and sympathized with
early Lollardism in England, but afterward left that com
munion, gave as the reason, that among other errors the
Lollard followers of the great Reformer at Lutterworth re
jected the baptism of infants.
In the vast hecatombs that sealed their faith with their
blood, it is now impossible to trace out the exact ecclesi
astical tenets, and church relations, of the sufferers who
gave home, freedom, property, and life,' to the cause of the
Master. But, amid the sufferers under Alva, when the
Netherlands were so drenched with human gore, multi
tudes were of our faith ; and they had their share, in that
land, in early versions of the Scriptures for the general

128 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
use of the faithful. The followers of Henry de Bruis, at
an earlier day in the history of France, were with us, on
this topic of Christian faith and duty. Indeed, many of
the Holland Mennonites hold the Waldensians to have.
been the first propagandists, on Holland soil, of these
views, in their flight northward from persecution in
France and Italy. It has been said by one of the early
Mennonite writers, that the oldest families of the Menno
nites, in certain towns of Holland, had names of Walden
sian origin, and claimed to be the progeny of such exiled
forefathers. Venema, himself a Pedobaptist, living in
Holland, a theologian and scholar of such eminence that
Adam Clarke, the British Methodist, said of his, Venema's,
Commentary on the Psalms, that it was a Goliah's sword
as described by David, "There was none like it:" — this
eminent scholar, beyond the reach of denominational
bias, and speaking of the ancient history of his own
country, ascribes to the Baptists of Holland an origin
earlier than the time of the Munster orgies, where too
many would fain place their cradle. Mosheim, a Pedo
baptist and a German, places our origin far back. Ypeij
and Dermout, members of the Established Presbyterian
Church of Holland, in their history of that, their own
national church, put our origin as a people beyond the
age of the Protestant Reformation.
What was there, in the position and traits of our
churches, to bring upon them the ban, in its heavy and
burning severity ?
They insisted much upon the power of the Spirit, as the
great Conservator and Guardian of the life of the Christian

UNDER THE BAN OF ANTICHRIST. 129
church. Now, far back as the days of Montanism, this
was offensive to the Christian churches, who became.
under power and wealth and fashion, secularized and
corrupted. The Comte de Champagny — who has written.
though an Ultramontane Catholic, so eloquently and
eruditely, on the early history of Christianity, and the
collision of it with Judaism on the one side and Pagan
ism on the other side — has said of the Montanists, that it
was hard to find doctrinal error in their views; that they
were rather like Jansenists or Methodists, in their high
views of religious emotion and experience. They were
accused of claiming inspiration, when they intended,
probably, only, bike the early followers of Cameron among
the Covenanters, or of Wesley among the English Meth
odists, the true experience of God's work in the individual
soul. Out of Montanism came Tertullian, early protesting
against the precipitating of Infant Baptism. So the Don
atists made, in after times, a like -testimony against world-
liness; and Bishop Latimer, himself in later years a
martyr, speaking of some Anabaptist martyrs from Hol
land, who went to the stake in England with heroic cheer
and joy, was struck with a parallel of which he does not
seem to have discovered all the force; and makes the
remark, that these glad sufferers at the stake were but
like those old heretics, the Donatists of early ages. The
Paulicians, a later body, were eminent especially for their
love of Paul's Epistles, which they so admired, that their
teachers, many of them, changed their original names for
those of some of Paul's helpers and converts. For centu
ries defamed and pursued, they held their course, testify-
I

130 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ing and witnessing. Hase, the modern church historian,
himself a Rationalist, speaks of them, aB continuing under
various names down quite near to our own age, in the
neighborhood of Mount Haemus, or the Balkan Moun
tains in European Turkey, and in the vicinity of Philip^
popolis, the very town to which the recent atrocities of
Turks, in Bulgaria, have drawn such general and such
indignant sympathy.
Now, in the imagery of the Apocalypse, God described
his own people as hidden in the wilderness. What the
Omniscient conceals, it will be found generally rather dif
ficult for short-sighted science, or mankind at large, to
explain and to make clear. To hide from our haughtiness
occasions of boasting and self-reliance, to take the wise in
their own craftiness, he has more than once allowed the
powers of earth to sweep the stage, as for their own sole
and uncontested occupancy, that, doing as it might be
their best, or doing as it might be their worst, he should,
in the hour when wrong seemed dominant and error
vaunted itself incontrovertible, flash in upon the maskers
and the revellers, from some unexpected nook, with the
torch of Scripture, the enkindled glare of an awakened
conscience, and the trumpet blare of a long-forgotten
prophecy. The world, "by wisdom, knew not God."
The last results of a godless science were to evaporate
Revelation, and to precipitate the dead, flavorless residue
of an infinite and an irremediable despair. The world,
in the guise of the Church, has, by power, extruded Scrip
ture and banned Reform, and, with martyr-fires streaming
their smoke heavenward, asked, Who now shall confront

UNDER THE BAN OF ANTICHRIST. 131
the Sovereign, and impeach the Infallible; — unlock the
buried oracles, and dare the leaping interdict that comes
down from Christ's Vicegerent? God had but to breathe
forth his Spirit, to touch the multiform and noiseless keys.
of his own omnipresent providence, and what was the
result? The Bible leaped from the dusty shelf and the
dead tongues, into homes and marts, into dialects that
never before had even been written. As from the ashes of
the stake, the enfranchised faith blew itself, an invisible,
irresistible influence, across continents and oceans; the
Bible of 1877 has a hold on the ears and a seal on the lips
of the nations, East and West, North and South, such as
no book ever before attained. If the Spirit go with it,
who shall say, that we have begun yet to see the outskirts
of the glorious effects which it is predestined ultimately
to achieve ?
Our churches have held that the Spirit, blowing where
it listeth, goes not in the line of a hereditary order, or
upon the branches of a family pedigree; that the Para
clete may call its peasant and artisan messengers apart
from the ranks of the lettered and refined. By so doing,
they incurred in Britain, in Holland and Bohemia, in
Southern France, the ban, fierce and summary. But the
providence of God and the history of the churches have
vindicated the righteousness of the claim. He who, on
Pentecost, anointed the fishermen apostles, and sent a
tent-maker to teach the men of the Areopagus wisdom,
and the Caesars of Rome duty and responsibility, has not
been at a loss for Bunyans and Careys in days nearer our
own. And they, who undertake to ban, athwart the

132 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
descending sheets of the flaming influences of this Divine
Paraclete, may find that, like the benediction pronounced
on the invincible Armada of Spain, and the acclaim given
the French massacre of St. Bartholomew's day, and the
shelter cast over the atrocities of Savoy in the valleys of
Piedmont, and the applause lavished on the faithless
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the sympathy as
sured the late Napoleon raid on Germany, and the pat
ronage vouchsafed to the assumption of the hapless Maxi
milian as against Mexico, — there was something to have
been learned, that has been rather strangely overlooked.
in what many centuries ago had been said by a very wise
prophet of old : " He hath blessed, and I cannot reverse
it." Balaam, from the hills of Moab, was in the right.
God's providence, and the conscience of the race, and the
verdict of history, and the streaming might of the Holy
Ghost, are not, when they bless, easily reversed, even by
the wearer of infallibility, assuming to speak in the name
and guise of the vicegerent of Christ.
Nay, in the wise providence of God, the very tighten-
ings of old bonds, that were once worn more loosely, by
strain put on the authority of the pontifical church, in
the new denunciations of the Syllabus; the honor and
the influence lavished on orders that have heretofore
wielded power on so many broad theatres, and proved so
disastrously in the past the mingled temerity and brittle-
ness of their policy, are all of them, to the thoughtful
Protestant, among the grand auguries of hope. The
Jesuit order never, with all its literary culture and men
tal acuteness, accomplished a plausible and enduring re-

UNDER THE BAN OF ANTICHRIST. 133
sponse, to the terrible impeachment of its morals and its
casuistry by a Pascal and an Arnauld and their immortal
allies in the great Port Royal movement. They aided, as
an order, in the mission fields of Canada and Western
America, of Brazil and China, and of Japan, with im
mense expenditures of talents and treasure; and yet with
what abiding result from the efforts of a Xavier and an
Anchieta, a Jogues and a Reschi ? The poetic labors of
the last remain, and his catechism ; but what a haze rests
on the great success attributed to the greatest of their
missionary champions, Francis Xavier himself. As to
their mission to the courts of princes, and to the cabinets
of statesmen, how powerfully did their hands move the
secret springs of strategy and statecraft on the European
field. And what was the result of the labors that rev
olutionized Poland, that dragooned Huguenotism out of
France, and that educated in its colleges there a D'Alem-
bert, and a Diderot, and a Yoltaire ?
Restored, they claim to dictate the theology and the
policy of the present occupant of the pontifical chair.
Is there aught in the annals of the ages past; is there
aught in the present aspect of the passing age, now around
us, to make their hold on the helm of the ship other
than one full of dread for the sober and the thoughtful
of their co-religionists, and of cause of hope and sanguine
trust on the part of those who cherish the memory of the
Protestant Reformation and its martyrs? That policy,
which, according to the principles of Loyola, gathers all
wills and all consciences as into the single brain and the
single conscience of the general of the Order, is indeed
12

134 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
fearful in its energetic concentration and in its prompti
tude and in its persistency. But has not God made men,
individually, each with a conscience of his own, and each
to render an account for himself?
And when this selfhood and this individualism is sur
rendered to the control, unquestioned and uncontrolled,
of another, a mortal — not beyond the reach of self-will
and shortsightedness and audacity and delusion — has the
reader of the Bible, and the believer in the sovereignty of
God alone and God for evermore, any other interpretation
than that a policy, thus shaped on the principle of giving
up to a fellow-mortal the prerogatives due only to a God,
must have its result in wide but transient power, yet fol
lowed by ultimate and inevitable and irreparable wrecks ?
They did not make the Gunpowder Plot a success ; they
did not make the Restoration of Romanism in England
under James II. a success ; they did not make the over
throw of Protestantism, and the cancelment of the
pledges of Henry of Navarre, as given to his old fellow-
Protestants, to a Sully and a Mornay du--Plessis and a
Noue of the Iron Hand, a success. And whilst we wish
no man evil for his soul, we do rejoice, unfeignedly, that
to an influence, so plausible, so grasping, and so bound to
failure, is now entrusted the sway of the pontifical cabi
net, and the keeping of the conscience of the spiritual
monarch, who has arrogated infallibility, and hopes to
make the claim, in the hands of his successors, if not of
himself, a grand reality.
Our True Lord, the Only and Irreplacable Ruler, has
not been wout to trust the reins of ultimate sovereignty to

UNDER THE BAN OF ANTICHRIST. 135
Phaethons, bound to hurl the chariots which they drive
over the precipice. The enterprises which we see, under
the names of Infallibility and Divinity, given over to such
conduct, we may very calmly and confidently believe are
not, in car-builder or driver or banner, schemes that the
Christ has warranted. We will not, far as in us lies, sur
render soul, church, or people to such guidance. The In
vincible Armada shall not be aided to repeat in the nine
teenth century the experiment of the sixteenth, and to
make a second disastrous demonstration of its invincibil
ity by our co-operation on our Western shores, although
the Old Unerring Voice launches out its solemn benedic
tion on all helpers, and thunders forth its awful ban on
all doubters and opposers.
The Crusades and the Inquisition ; the auto-da-fe ; " the
Index of Prohibited Books ;'' the graves of so many myr
iads of martyrs ; the libraries of so many literatures ; the
presses of so many languages, — all proclaim, as with one
sad utterance, the old lament of Balaam : We could not
reverse what God has blessed.
Has God no blessing for the devout Catholic ? Far be
it from us to cherish such a thought. An A Kempis and
a Fenelon, a Borromeo, a De Sacy, a Blaise Pascal, and an
Angelique Arnauld and her brothers, are memories dear
to Christians of other confessions. Tregelles, because of
such piety in individual Catholics, was unwilling to ad
mit the interpretation of the prophecies of the Scriptures
respecting Antichrist and the Man of Sin as being in
tended for the papal church. But when God says respect
ing the mystical New Testament Babylon, Come out of

136 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
her, my people, it is implied that her awful errors and
her fearful end are not inconsistent with the presence of
true piety in some individuals of her fellowship. The Bab
ylon of the Old Testament was denounced by God's seers
and foredoomed to an awful overthrow. Yet some have
supposed that Nebuchadnezzar, her Chaldean king, was a
true penitent, and that Cyrus, her Persian conqueror, was
not ignorant of the true God. Of this we know nothing,
and would judge dubiously. But supposing the eternal
escape of either of these Babylonish sovereigns, and re
membering God's care of the thousands in heathen Nin
eveh that knew not the right hand from the left, did these
except, lessen, or parry the swoop of the tremendous ban
that Heaven launched as against both pagan capitals ?
When God told Jeremiah to show his faith in the future
and pledged return of Israel from the Babylonian captiv
ity, he bade the prophet to bury the evidences of the field
which he had purchased, the title-deeds of his new prop
erty in Anathoth, in the ground. After many days the
earth, his registry-office, was to be disturbed, and to give
up its custody of these records of divine veracity and of
the prophet's persistent patriotic confidence. So God has
placed on the martyrs that papal Rome has made, and on
the blessed memories which, far as she could, she defamed
and blackened, the assurance of his coming vengeance. As
Milton and as Vane saw in their day, there is to be a resur
rection of the reputation of God's people, as there is, in the
last day, to be a resurrection of their mouldered dust. It
has been true in our own times of a Cromwell. Hume,
scoffingly and derisively, told how strange a compilation

UNDER THE BAN OF ANTICHRIST. 137
would be that of the letters and speeches of the Protector;
Carlyle, not a bigoted religionist, whatever else may be
his claims, has made such a gathering of the Protector's
correspondence and oratory ; and its effect, even in the
judgment of enemies, is to clear and exalt the wisdom
and the energy and the religious earnestness of the great
Protector, England's greatest ruler.
God suffered the evidence against Roman Paganism, in
the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, to slumber for
many centuries. He exhumed them, and they justify the
Epistle of Paul to the Romans in its dread impeachment
of the manners of classic antiquity. He buried Egypt
and Chaldea and Assyria, and the very keys of the strange
inscriptions were lost. These have been disinterred. The
hieroglyphic and arrow-headed characters have been read,
after the lapse of so many centuries ; and, as out of Jere
miah's earthen urn emerged the evidence of the prophet's
ownership, so has it been that out of these graves of the
ancient and the mysterious and the forgotten he has illus
trated more luminously the truth of his nature and the
certainty of his prophecies. Thus in the past, so shall it
ever be in the long dim future. Our God is in one mind,
and who can turn him?
12*

VI.
ANABAPTISTS

OF THE

CONTINENT AND ENGLAND.

ANABAPTISTS

CONTINENT AND ENGLAND.

In every great movement that awakens keen feeling
over a wide "region, and calls into collision opposing in
terests and rival classes in a nation, it is not cause of sur
prise, that good men should find themselves jostled by
men of exceeding wickedness. Napoleon was wont to
speak of himself as opening a career to all the talents.
Intellect and merit found spread clear before them a free
pathway. But all the talents might be elbowed in the
race, and find themselves distanced at the goal, by "all the
vices ;" and the reptile has wriggled to heights where the
lion could scarcely find foothold, or the eagle even a place
to perch.
A Bible having beeri opened before the people, that each
in his own tongue might read ; the summons having gone
forth, that each man for himself seek God's Spirit, and go,
for pardon and renewal, beyond ordinances and fanes,
indulgences and jubilees, direct to the One Mediator
Christ; the truth having been taught that, in Christ's
church, discipline and rule, or, as it was called, "the
power of the keys," belonged to all the membership, —
141

142 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
this was a change that must work a great moral revolu
tion. Our Lord himself described his own advent, Prince
of peace though he was, as bringing a sword into the
world. Portions of the community, before mutually re
pellent, became soon and early leagued for his destruction.
So a Paul found himself confronted by false apostles ; and
a John, the last surviving apostle, before adding the final
pages to the New Testament, must warn the flock, amid
the baying of Persecution all around them, that there
were, also, within the nominal fold, many Antichrists
already come into the world. So it has been the fact, in
political as well as in religious changes": The name of
Republic, dear to us, has had in other lands its sinister.
aspects and its odious memories. Even as shaped in the
imagination of a thinker like Plato, it had repulsive fea
tures, from which men who loved the purity and order of
home might well shrink appalled. And in times nearer
to our own than are the times of the old Greek sage, how
much was there in the Reign of Terror of the first great
revolutionary republic of France; and in the Commu
nistic havoc and rapine of the very recent outbreak in
that great nation, — we repeat, how much was there that
would give, — to one who recalled Marat and Robespierre,
and who had heard Proudhon's cry, that " Property was
robbery," and who mused on democracy thus formulated,
— only feelings of distrust and strongest aversion.
The Christian church saw itself, in very early years,
simulated and haunted by rival and corrupt bodies ; first
the Gnostic and then the Manichean, that had, in the eyes
of the persecuting pagan government, the same names and

ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 143
ordinances, and used partially the same Scriptures with
the genuine churches, yet from whom the true believer
turned in indignant terror and holy detestation. See the
volumes, learned and elaborate, that Matter, the French
scholar, launched, and that appeared posthumously from
the British thinker, Dean Mansel, on these Gnostics ; and
the bulky tomes compiled by the old Huguenot refugee
Beausobre on the Manichees. Were these books on the
Gnostics and the Manichees to be courteously laid before
an ingenuous student, wishing to know the first annals of
Christ's people on the earth ; and were he told, that in these
he might find the unhappy and soiled cradle-wrappings
of an infant Christianity, before it had strength to become
just and true and orderly and reverent, — he might well be
disturbed at the covert impeachment. Yet some modern
scholars, in stating the earlier aspect of our own Baptist
churches, gravely adduce the annals of the madmen of
Munster and of the Peasant War of Germany, as if we
here began; whilst they kindly allow, that we have, as a
people, become ameliorated in the lapse of years, having
outgrown and renounced these excesses of a riotous and
atrocious childhood. When Dryden, after his own con
version to the Roman Church in the days of the Romanist
king, James II., depicted the Episcopal Church which he
had left, it was under the image of the panther, sleek,
spotted, and treacherous; and the Roman communion
which he had joined, it was as the harmless, spotted
hind ; but for the Anabaptist he reserved the symbol of
the wild boar of the forest, rough, savage, and headlong.
The heraldry of printer, painter, and poet is of little au-

144 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
thority in settling a question of history. But the old
Waldensians adopted as their emblem a branched candle
stick, with the motto, " Light in the Darkness." As a
guide for the erring, and a rebuke for the lover of dark
ness, their history had not belied their symbol. And the
old Mennonite Bible, printed and circulated in the ver
nacular language of Holland, years before Alva com
menced his career of multitudinous massacre in that
country, had in its front page, in either of the two Tes
taments, the expressive emblem of a lily fenced with a
framework of thorns, and its motto from Solomon. "A
lily among thorns." And, in either case, we must hold,
that flower and candle well fitted the truly written history
of our elder brothers in the valleys of Piedmont, in Bo
hemia and Moravia, and in Holland. Their mission was
benign and rich in benediction.
We alluded to Venema, a Pedobaptist scholar resident
in Holland, and writing without the bias of attachment to
our own body. He has said,* "The immediate origin
of the Mennonites is, in my judgment, more justly to be
traced to the Waldensians and to those of the Anabaptists
who wished a renewal of the innocence and purity of the
primitive church, and that the reformation of the church
should be carried farther than Luther and Calvin had
arranged it. The Waldensians, apart from the question
as to the origin of Christ's human nature, in the chief
articles had, in almost all things, like views with the Men
nonites, as is evident from their history as (I) stated (it)
in the twelfth century. ... To find other beginnings as
*T. vii. Hist. Eccles. Soocul. xvi. p. 443, Lugd. Bat. 1783.

ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 145
the source of Mennonitism is needless, much less those
invidious ones, placing them in fellowship with the men
of Munster and other like fanatics. From these they
cleared themselves, both in old time, and now through a
long space of years have so vindicated and justified them
selves, in Ufe and institutions, that longer to confound
them with that class can be done only by notable injus
tice and gravest insult."
The word "Anabaptist" is of an antiquity far preceding
the times of the great Reformation. But it acquired its
portentous and repulsive sound, especially as applied to
men whose career was begun after Luther's, and mainly
in that Germany where the great Reformer wielded his
largest and most enduring influence. God had his true
witnesses before he raised up the monk of Erfurt and the
translator and teacher of Wittenberg. When Zwingle of
Switzerland and Luther of Germany were yet children in
the nursery or boys in the school-room ; in 1487 — whilst
Martin the miner's son was but a child — the Pontiff had
found it necessary to preach a crusade against the Wal
densians, encouraging the warriors by the promise of a
plenary indulgence given them for taking part in the
butcheries. In 1500, at the opening of the century, when
Martin was ignorant as yet of the Bible and soon to enter
an Augustinian monastery, the Moravian brethren pos
sessed two hundred places of worship.* They were the
inheritors of the labors of Huss and Jerome, of British
Lollards, of Wycliffe and Waldo, and laborers yet earlier
than these, whose memories and whose reward are safe
* Riddle's Eccles. Chronology, p. 320.
13 K

146 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
with the God whom they meekly and faithfully served,
and then went down unrecorded by their fellows to a for
gotten or a dishonored grave.
Without a press ; holding their assemblies, over a large
portion of their field and through a long tract of their
history, in private residences, and in such manner as to
evade the eye of the official and the informer — they relied,
for the diffusion of the truth as they had received it, on
personal appeal; on the intercourse of travel, whereby
much of the commerce of the age was transacted, as by
visits to fairs and by long journeys on foot; on the ex
change of kindly offices with the stranger and the needy.
As an old pagan satirist had, by an expressive graphic
phrase, described the early Christians as "Christ ped
dlers," so were these men, who, like the itinerant trader
with shop in the pack on his shoulders, carried about their
faith and the testimony of their one Hope and Redeemer.
Even thus the Waldensians are picturesquely described
as making their petty industries, the humble knapsack
strapped behind them, the channels through which they
commended, to those who showed any temper of serious
ness, the Bible, of which many of these humble Christians
had committed whole books to memory; and whilst show
ing other ornaments, they praised the jewel of a good
hope in him; and thus with the pathos of experience
they urged on the sad, the bereaved, and the thoughtful,
great truths in fraternal simplicity and earnestness. Scant
as in that age literature was in comparison with its pres
ent redundance, the treatises and notices of the age, writ
ten often by their enemies, yet attest the wide currency

ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 147
of the message and the far-drawn circuit and scope of the
evangelical itinerant.
When Luther was, in God's providence, raised up to do
his great work, he found, in more than one quarter of Eu
rope, those who had preceded him, and into whose labors
and testimony he in some sense entered. His seed sank
into soil made ready by their tears and prayers and
martyr-blood. In 1524, Casper Tauber, in Vienna, end
ed at the stake a Christian life. He was one whom
Luther ranks with others, who, as he says, became
"brilliant lights by their glorious deaths, wherein they
have offered to God a sacrifice of sweet savor." There
was another worthy of like views and the same age, Bal
thasar Hubmeier. He had been a pupil of Eck, the an
tagonist of Luther, and was, as a scholar and a preacher,
a man of more than vulgar endowments. Under the
influence of Luther's writings he became an adherent of
the Reformation, and in his pastoral charges won, under
God's blessing, hearers and proselytes. He went beyond
Luther, however, to the rejection of Infant Baptism ; and
so wide was his power, that Chemnitz, whom Bossuet
ranks as among the greatest of Protestant theologians, in
his, Chemnitz's, Examination of the Council of Trent,
. quotes Hubmeier as the greatest of the Anabaptist body.
Martin Duncan, a Roman Catholic priest of Holland,
who in Menno's lifetime impeached his views, is doubtful
whether he should regard Hubmeier or Menno as founder
of the heretical body. He seems to have been somewhat
like Luther in his aptitude for sharp, pithy sayings, that,
like barbed arrows, stayed where they struck. Speaking,

148 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
for instance, of the impossibility of finding the papal doc
trine of Purgatory in any part of the Bible, he says it is
like the grave of Moses, which can never and nowhere be
found. Driven from post to post, he was such an object
of priestly and princely dread, that the Catholic sovereign
of Austria made his surrender a condition of peace, with
subjects who had been compelled to yield to the emperor's
superior power. Brought like Tauber to Vienna, the cap
ital of Austria, to make his final sacrifice, he was, with all
his holy resolution, and cheerfulness even, a sufferer, being
burned to death. His pious wife, who heartened her hus
band to constancy, was drowned. Led on the 10th of
March, 1528, four years after Tauber, to the place of burn
ing, he kneeled, and lifting his eyes heavenward prayed:
" 0 my gracious God, grant me patience in my suffering.
My Father, I thank thee, that to-day thou wilt lift me
from this valley of sorrows. With joy I die, that I may
come to thee, Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of
the world. My God, into thy hands I commend my
spirit." Turning to the bystanders, he begged, that if, in
word or deed, he had offended any, he might for God's
sake be forgiven. He spoke his own forgiveness of all
who might have ill-treated him. The executioner rubbed,
when preparing him for the death, into the martyr's long
beard, saltpetre and gunpowder. Smilingly cried this con
fessor, " Salt me well, now ; salt me well." Then, again
facing the multitude, he said, " Dear' brethren, pray for
me, that God give me patience in my suffering: in my
Christian faith I will die." Amid the explosion and the
flames was heard the cry, "Jesus!" and the smoke and

ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 149
the fire suffocated Balthasar Hubmeier. Sprugel, the
Roman Catholic dean of the University of Vienna, at
tested, that, to the end, men saw only joy and bright
cheer in his face. Many of the bystanders melted into
tears. His faithful wife, who had before her conversion
been a Roman Catholic nun, in bidding farewell to her
husband, adjured him to abide faithful to death. Three
days after her husband's oblation, on the 13th of March,
1528, she was brought to the bridge over the Danube, and,
with a heavy stone bound to her neck, she was hurled into
its stream. The old river has many a memory. The time
is coming when this shall be among its illustrations.
It was not until thirty-five years after, or the lifetime of
a full generation, in 1563, that there left a Holland press
the Mennonite Bible now before us, bearing on its front
the emblem of the lily amid thorns.
Was not Hubmeier's brave widow, encircled by her mur
derers, such saintly flower ? Eleven days after her death,
or a full fortnight after the sacrifice of their pastor, on the
24th of the month, were burned two of his followers, one
a shoemaker, the other a peasant, who at the funeral pyre
sung aloud a hymn invoking God, the Holy Ghost, to
come down. The pious of our own day, reading the
record, feels yet the downward rush of the Hallowing
Influence thus invoked. Hubmeier's writings, as well as
his oral preachments, were so numerous and effective, that
on the Index of the prohibited books of the Papal Church
his name appears, in some editions, in no less than four
different forms, as author of works only fit for the flames.
Now, among these writings, thus denounced, yet in some
13*

150 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
copies surviving this stern process of destruction, is one
on the burning "Of Heretics," in which he had taken
ground against the right of worldly governments to com
pel religious obedience by such punishments. More than
a century before the days of Roger Williams this German
author had delivered his testimony; and husband and
wife, by fire and by flood, had sealed their cheerful and
fearless protest for Christ's truth and for the secular free
dom of Christ's church.
In the days when Hubmeier wrote and preached, there
wrote and preached another Baptist, whose name is more
generally known, though intellectually not Hubmeier's
peer ; it was Thomas Miinzer. His name is by some con
founded with the city Munster, with which are identi
fied far darker memories. But that city in Westphalia
was far from the German towns where Miinzer labored,
and it did not emerge into notice in the Anabaptist
tumults until some years after ; as Miinzer died in 1525,
and the Munster Revolt was in 1534, nine years after
his beheading.
Miinzer had gone beyond the rejection of Infant Bap
tism. The doctrine of equality in the rule of the church,
as belonging to all members, led him to sympathize with
the Peasants' War, the twelve articles of which were in the
beginning so moderate and just that Voltaire said, a Ly-
curgus would have signed them. Niebuhr, the critical
historian of Rome, said, the peasants adopting those arti
cles were in the beginning in the right. Bunsen, the late
ambassador of Prussia to England, a civilian himself of
high standing, has said of the same document, "As to

ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 151
what they demanded in their twelve articles, all impartial '
historians declare, that, on the whole, their demands were
just; and all of them are now the law of Germany." This
is the language of a German jurist and scholar naturally
leaning on the side of the aristocratic and ruling classes.
The words appear in his article on Luther, contributed to
the last (eighth) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Vericour, a scholar of Guizot, and dedicating to his teacher
his work on Christian Civilization, has said, that all later
historians have taken a more favorable view, than did the
earlier writers, of Miinzer's character. But he erred, as a
religious teacher, in taking what he called the " sword of
Gideon ;" and in so far making his sympathies with the
oppressed peasantry practical, political, and indiscrimi
nate, that he became involved in measures of revolt and
anarchy which he never probably contemplated in the
beginning of the movement. He was executed, and the
rabble of the undisciplined peasantry easily routed, but
in his death-scene he warned the princes against cruel
and unjust dealing with the populace.
Along with the views of the right of the people to a
larger relief from tyrannical exactions,, there had been
spread in Germany and in Friesland, a northern portion
of Holland, and in Switzerland, a general expectation of
the near approach of the millennial reign of Christ. The
prophecy is a part inseparable from the text of the New
Testament, and of the Old as well. If in the Apocalypse
is recorded God's purpose to have for a thousand years
his Christ reign, Daniel had, in ages long preceding, wit
nessed of a time when the kingdom and the dominion and

152 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven
should be given to the people of the saints of the Most
High God. As in the very times and under the very eyes
of inspired apostles there were, however, men wresting
God's Scriptures unto their own destruction, we need not
evidently wonder that like perversions, and with equally
fatal results, should occur in later and less favored times.
Men who sought change merely for its own sake — the idle,
the insubordinate, and the fanatical — became known as
Anabaptists, when, in truth, the Waldensians and the
Hollanders, their allies in faith and religious sympathy,
were generally against war, and against the use of the oath,
and against the church's sharing in civil government even.
They so shunned the world in its contaminations as to
desire escape from participation in the offices and emol
uments of political governments.
In the city of Munster, a rich town of Westphalia, the
principles of the Reformation had found acceptance.
Rothman, a pastor there, had become a Lutheran first; his
people had risen under his preachings against the use of
images, and violently removed and destroyed them. The
feelings of the Peasant War had not passed away. He
and his associates rejected Infant Baptism, but they cast
off government as well from without, excepting that of
the emperor. They had prophetical gifts of their own.
The word of God was laid aside for these self-prompted
oracles assuming to speak in God's name. The polygamy
of the Old Testament and a modified community of goods
also were introduced. Scenes of outrage and carnage en
sued, that may well be veiled in abhorrence. Within, were

ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 153
blood and riot and spiritual frenzy. Without, the secular
and ecclesiastical authorities had combined to besiege the
city and to crush the revolt. They did so, sternly and
effectually. The misguided tailor of Leyden, who acted
as king, and his two chief associates, were subjected to
torture in having their flesh torn by red-hot pincers ; and
their skeletons, enclosed in iron cages, were raised on high
and fastened to a church-steeple, there to remain down
to our own times a ghastly memorial of the power of
religious madness and of the fearful hold that Satan, if
permitted, may attain under the guise of holy names and
gracious reforms. Terrible as baleful is the power that
godliness, when, in the language of Scripture, it is made
gain, and gain, when it is supposed to be godliness, can
exercise over the order, peace, and honor of general soci
ety, of the household, and of the individual. The history
has been often repeated : the last narrator of it, the Roman
Catholic scholar, Cornelius. Over the after-faith of the
city it could not but be a fatal blight. A rigid Catholicism
has been since the unbroken rule and the undisputed
creed in Munster; or, as Luther phrased it when he heard
of the suppression of the revolt and the death of the in
surgents, in one of his sharp, broad sayings, cumbrous and
somewhat coarse, " The devil is turned out, but the devil's
grandmother has come back in his place." A higher than
Pontiff or than Reformer had long since left the pregnant
warning, that change, which is not thorough and hearty
and heavenly, is often one that invites and ultimately
secures a more rooted possession of error and a longer
and more blighting dynasty of evil. The house, swept

154 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
and garnished, is inhabited the second time, but now by
seven evil spirits worse than the first who had been tem
porarily barred out.
Do we wish to blink the fact that the name of the Ana
baptist became, in connection with the errors and horrors
of the Munster rebellion, a name of terror to rulers and,
of detestation to the churches? By no means. Let it
stand, but let it be duly interpreted. Menno was not in
it, nor was Tauber, nor was Hubmeier, nor was Miinzer.
So far was it from their views, as was the school of Marat
from the school of La Fayette, as was the school of Robes
pierre from that of Brissot ; though coetaneous, there was
no internal, vital cohesion between.
So, in the days of the Stuart Restoration in England,
there was an outbreak under Venner, a Millenarian fanatic,
but a Paedobaptist, and rather bigoted in his paedobaptism.
Bunyan's jailers threatened to hold him, the Baptist in
Bedford jail, liable for the bloody and seditious scenes at
London, in which Bunyan the Baptist had neither part
nor sympathy, against alike all his principles, against every
scratch made by his pen, and every prayer made in the
ministrations of his pulpit.
When Domitian, the imperial ruler, was killing flies,
one of his favorite amusements, at the imperial capital,
suppose that there had been brought to the tyrant some
lines of the Apocalyptic vision received by his prisoner,
the aged John, in the isle of banishment, Patmos.
Would the despot have been by any principle of reason
or equity entitled to charge upon the old apostle the
scenes of lawlessness that the apostle had been deploring

ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 155
and condemning as occurring in a community nomin
ally and professedly a Christian church at Thyatira ? In
his Master's name John denounced the wrath of Heaven
as against the children of Jezebel, there retaining their
practices and principles. Was his gospel justly a sharer in
the dishonors that it thus repudiated ? So in later times,
when the great Jansenist body of France — so illustrious
for talent and piety and for sufferings in the cause of
truth — had, in their later days, some who became known
as the Convulsionaires, dazzled by the study of unfulfilled
prophecy, seeing visions and working miracles, and often
passing into scenes of unhappy disorder, were the illus
trious men and women of the earlier days, or those of the
later days, like Sylvester de Sacy the Orientalist, and
Royer Collard the publicist and statesman, the orator and
philosopher — Jansenists of our own day — were these
men, we ask, responsible for the errors of co-religionists
which they neither countenanced nor shared ?
So, of the French Protestant body, how noble is the
great record of the French Huguenots. How much did
they suffer at home ; and how blessed was the influence
which they bore abroad to Prussia and Holland, to
England and to Scotland, to Ireland and to our own
North America. Not long since a French man of science
recorded his sense of the Divine Nemesis, that among the
soldiers who pressed the siege of Paris around the writer's
place of study, so many were under the banners of
Germany serving against France as the children of
Huguenot exiles, that Louis XIV. had hounded and
peeled, returning, in God's mysterious arrangements, to

156 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
plague the land where their forefathers had been so
cruelly treated. Yet all the history of French Protestant
ism is not thus illustrious. Among some who carried on
the war in Southern France was no little fanaticism. The
Camisard was, though heroic, at times most frenzied.
And their brethren in England became, some of them,
what were called " the French prophets," who, with Lacy
and other Englishmen as their dupes or helpers, yielded
to wild excesses and provoked a just indignation and
repressal. But this was not the fault of the great body.
Yet the handful, thus offending, were not soon extinct, or
the flame of their madness without its remote kindlings
and ravages. Out of these French prophets, on English
soil, came Ann Lee, the Mother, as they call her, the femi
nine incarnation of the Godhead, as they hold, and the
first founder of the Shakers amongst ourselves. With all
their thrift and their worldly prosperity, is the record of
religious delusion thus begun one to be fastened on the
great Huguenot body whom Sully and Mornay and
Coligny led, whom Henry IV. deserted, and whom Louis
XIV. so cruelly deceived, extruded, and dragooned?
And is American Christianity, liable justly, before the
nations of the earth, for the great Mormon movement,
with its forged Scriptures, its polygamy, its murderous
tribe of Dan, and its terrible atrocities and profanations ?
The nation deplores what it cannot utterly eliminate.
Far as it may, it is bound to discourage, to circumscribe,
and in all evangelical earnestness to resist and expose and
uproot the evil.
Yet, in the sweeping generalizations to which some so

ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 157
readily and implicitly resort, some might make Mormon-
ism a feature of American society, when the mass of its
converts are of European growth and migration, the
fruit -of the neglect of established churches as shown
toward the population of their own territory. So some
might hold the memory of John Calvin blotted with the
false faith and wild excesses of Ann Lee; might brand
the beloved disciple and last survivor of the apostles as
guilty of collusion with the iniquity of the Thyatiran
church. Individualism is the glory of our nation, and it is one
of the chief distinctions of our religious denomination;
and Hase, the church historian, in his monograph on the
men of Munster, calls our country the land of religious
individualism, and trusts that our denomination may
here forego their study of prophecy. Far as the disposi
tion reigns to constitute the student's own fancy the great
standard of truth, the employment may be perilous. But
to neglect, against Christ's own warnings, the signs of the
future, is to become blind to the true duties of the present.
It is the confession of great theologians, in Denmark and
in Britain and in Germany, that their own churches have
been too indifferent to the significance of the protests
which God's Spirit had drawn, as in advance, against
errors yet to rise, and its portraitures of changes and de
liverances which Providence had in reserve. The elder
Confession of the English Established Church denounced
Millenarianism, a contemplation of, and turning toward,
the future prospects of Christ's church. But Mede in the
Stuarts' times and Elliott in our own, and even Hurd,
14

158 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
the friend of Warburton, in his more sluggish days of
the English Establishment, regarded this as an error, and
lavished thought and toil on these pages of God's Old and
New Testament. So in Denmark, Martensen, a theologian
of no common eminence, considers it an error of Luther
and his church that they took ground against Millenari-
anism. Bengel, one of the highest names of the German
Christians in the study of God's word, was, if not a suc
cessful, yet a profound, collator of and searcher into those
prophetical Scriptures which our early Baptist Fathers are
charged with overvaluing.
Nor can there be any doubt, we judge, among thought
ful believers, that the times of the generations that are to
follow our own will require, not less than our own, that
Christians should give some share of their studies to the
memorials which the Ruler of the ages has set up along
the pathway of history, as notes that the God of prophecy
has been there far in advance of his people. The world
cannot rend the continuity of the centuries. We inherit
the examples of our predecessors, and we are to share in
the responsibility of our remotest successors. He who is
in the Apocalypse presented as the God of the final judg
ment, is, in a certain subordinate sense, judging even now
the families and the neighborhoods and the nationalities
of this nineteenth century. The final and full judgment
is future, but what lawyers call the "interlocutory judg
ments" are around us and over us. The title of the Mes
siah, Judge of the quick and the dead, is sometimes mis
read by our forgetting the force of the older English word.
"Quick," in the mouths of our forefathers and of the

ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 159
makers of our English version, meant "the living," those
selling, planning, fretting, and trifling, studying, suffering,
pining, and dying around us. And the Christ, the Omni
present Emmanuel, would have every pursuit and en
gagement of this daily living throng, these quick ones,
now drawing quick breath, but whose names are soon to
fit into the obituary roll and the cemetery register — he
would have the " quick " of earth's present tenantry under
stand, that by every sentence of Scripture and by every
incident of providence they are bound to remember him,
the Wakeful Judge, and him, the Swift Witness, Infalli
ble, Inevitable, and Irrefutable.
Faithful to the Scripture, and faithful to the Spirit, and
mindful of the Sacrifice, and vigilant for the grace ever
near, and the work ever widening, the people of the living
God have a power that needs yet to be developed, for it
draws on the illimitable resources .of Omnipotence. If
he be ever with his church when that church is efficient
and watchful, devout, lowly, and diligent, they need never
despond. The Elder Brother binds us to his blessed tasks,
not only by his own cross, but by each instance of the
fidelity of our innumerable martyrs.
At the risk of wearying you, we take from the pages of
Hase, not of our communion, and regarded as of the
Rationalist school of thinkers. It is but a leaf from the
story of simple loyalty. In 1527, some Anabaptists (as
they were called) were burned in the house where they
had met, and with the edifice. A young maiden, about
sixteen years old and of great beauty, the persecutors
would have spared, would she but recant her faith. Find-

160 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ing her inflexible, the executioner took her by the arm,
led her to the horse-trough, and bowed her beneath the
water until she drowned, and then the corpse was burned.
In a town of Switzerland, a foreigner, an Anabaptist, was
led to the rack and laid on it, with the promise, that if he
would but tell his dwelling-place and his fellow-believers'
names, he should have life and freedom. His reply was
calm : " I am earth-born ; the earth is my country, and it
will be my grave. My body is in your power. Tear it
and burn it as you like ; it troubles me not. The Lord
has closed my lips to prevent my saying a word that
should harm my brethren, for their time is not yet come.
My soul has no distress ; it overflows with joy from the
inward consolations with which God is filling it." As the
executioner urged him to name his fellow-disciples, and
so relieve himself of the torture, the stout confessor with
antique simplicity spat into his face, with the words,
" Get thee behind me, Satan ; thou savorest not the things
that be of God." Finally released with stern menaces, his
parting utterance to the enemies was, "Ye have seen a
confessor of the new church to your own condemnation."
The Lord who won such resolute witnesses is indeed
Judge of the living. A faith in him, intense, vivid, earn
est, and persistent, becomes a new power in the earth,
with which the literatures of the earth may puzzle them
selves, but it mocks their most heartless and malign
mockeries, and it defies their highest power and wrath.
"The Anabaptists " is the name still given to the commu
nities in Switzerland and Germany which are universally
acknowledged to be of great simplicity, industry, and

ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 161
blameless morality. A French writer has depicted, in
warmest admiration, one such community, which he, a
child of Paris, visited, to be filled, in surveying it, with
astonishment, delight, and reverence. The Anabaptists of
the Vosges are like the Dunkers of our own country, and
like the Mennonites of Southern Russia, long sheltered
there, but quitting their homes because the government
of Russia required of them military service, to which, like
the Friends, they are on principle opposed. You have
heard, but a few months since, of their transit from our
own port, New York, to settlements in one of our Western
States. In the valley of the Shenandoah, Sheridan's raid
encountered religionists of this class, but long settled there.
Miss Cheeseborough, one of our writers of fiction, has
devoted a volume to the traits and virtues of a similar
body, long ago planted in the interior of Pennsylvania.
Before the birth even of the frenzied rioters and revolt-
ers of Munster, views prevailed in a portion of the Wal
densians, those of them rejecting infant baptism, and
among some of the Moravian brethren, utterly op
posed to war and to the use of oaths and to civil office-
holding. It was a mistaken view, as we think, of the
Christian's due estrangement from the world. But
because it did exist, and sway large bodies of hunted
and imperilled disciples of Christ, it seems alike cruel
and ludicrous to commit the anachronism, of making the
fanatics of Westphalia, who were ferociously belligerent,
the spiritual ancestry of a body far older, and peaceful
and blameless and pure, who would not lift up sword or
even take an oath.
14* L

162 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
To show the full absurdity of accepting such lawless
fanatics — " the scum of the Reformation," as they have
been called, one of the side eddies in that great movement
of modern history — as if they constituted the fountain-
head of our own body, let us suppose that the earlier
years of our own Revolution had been as scantily
furnished with writers and presses, as was the Europe of
the earlier half of the sixteenth century. But few wrote,
let us suppose, except enemies of the patriot cause; and
let us imagine that the records of the Revolutionists were
generally confiscated and burned, leaving a comparative
dearth of annalists and registers. Inquiry is made, under
these disadvantageous conditions, from what body of
agitators sprang the movement that finally ushered in a
Washington and a Hancock, the Adamses, and Jay and
Hamilton and Jefferson and Lee, and other worthies.
Then let us suppose there should a writer present him
self whose testimony is that from his best researches the
Cowboys of West Chester, in your own State, were the' pro
genitors of American freedom. They were, it is true, he
would courteously state, a quite disreputable body ; meet
ing and working by night; sparing no man's cattle, and
murdering where plunder could not otherwise be secured ;
and dashing down, now on loyalists and now on patriots,
as might be most convenient; lawless as the raiders of the
old Scottish border, with very lax notions of the rights of
property, and a terror to the orderly in either camp of the
combatants. But they had, this searcher into antique
and broken records would remark, gradually refined and
reformed ; become more amenable to reason ; and, in fact,

ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 163
were really and indubitably the great representatives of
the cause which, beginning at Bunker Hill, closed its
battles at Yorktown, and made you a nation free and one.
Against this theory would at once be alleged a chronolog
ical difficulty — that they did not begin their plunder and
their marauding until after the Revolutionary conflict
had well commenced, and that, in demeanor and princi
ple and character and influence, they were not quite
akin to the Continental Congress, or to the spirits that
drafted the Declaration of Independence. The cham
pions of such origin would reply, that very distinguished
representatives of the statesmanship and patriotism of the
Revolution lived in that same West Chester County ; that
neighborhood implied identity of pursuit, character, and
party ; and that it was a matter of preposterous national
pride to shrink from recognizing such as the real origin
for the institutions of these United States of America.
Yet the dissonance and the chronological entanglement
in such installation of the cattle-stealers and red-handed
prowlers of the borders as the true fathers and founders
of American freedom would only be a parallel to the en
deavor to impose upon the Baptist Christians of the world
such a group as John of Leyden and Knipperdoling of
Munster as the real originators of our principles and
practice. Some of you saw with your own eyes, in the days of
the draft-riots, the mob that plundered and burned orphan
asylums, hung negroes to the lamp-post, and carried for a
time misrule and dismay throughout your peopled city in
the very crisis of the nation's agonizing strife for existence.

164 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Had a foreigner, as you gazed on the grim, fierce visages
of that ominous crowd, assured you that they were, these
same men, guardians of the nation's liberty, honor, and
life; that in them you were to see the flower of her
chivalry, and the highest exhibition of her energy, you
might be somewhat astonished, but not so easily con
vinced. If it were to be told you in confidence, what
history in some later day will probably tell aloud, who
were the guiding instigators of that riot ; and were you to
be assured, that it was by their skill, by the far-sighted
but unnamed and retiring prompters of the mob, that Wall
street, the avenue of your banks and custom-house and
sub-treasury and mint, was guarded; that it was owing
to their patriotic caution and vigilance, that the long street
was not left with every building dismantled and her trea
sury-vaults plundered of the last dollar, like some eel,
flayed, disembowelled, and headless, dragging its sinuous
length from Broadway to the river, one line of irreme
diable ruin, the corpse of the embodied national credit ;
if you heard whilst gazing on such patriots, that their
unseen and bashful leaders by their unwashen hands
defended and protected the riches of the metropolis and
the unity of the Republic, — you would find the comment
rather hard of belief, however quiet you might prudently
make your dissent.
Would it be more so than when reading the histories
of what good men have done and what they have been
in the past, and of what bad men beside them have
attempted, and it may be' have accomplished, of evil
and misrule, to believe, that in the church of God evil

ANABAPTISTS OF THE CONTINENT AND ENGLAND. 165
has begotten good, and iniquity has ripened and elevated
itself into true piety ? A wiser Judge, reading alike the
living and the dead, has decided that thistles do not bear
'figs, and that men can scarce plant thorns and expect
grapes as the fruitage.
The great lesson of all, in the evil and in the good, is,
that it behooves us to know of what spirit we ourselves
are, what Spirit we invoke, and upon what prompting and
helping we lean, in the time of our utter exhaustion. The
Spirit of God, invoked and obeyed by a loyal church, is
the fountain of holy living and the pledge of fraternal
unity. Accept in his stead your own feeble reason, the
public opinion of the masses, the voice of the many, or
the cry of the sharp-sighted few, and your feet must
stumble. But a God giving his Spirit liberally and with
out upbraiding, evermore the banner of his own people,
their Jehovah-nissi, carries unity, liberty, and triumph.
" Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit," saith
the Lord of Hosts. And all the galleries of earth's varied
history, and all the deep mines of man's profoundest and
most patient research, will ultimately give back the loyal
echo of that great proclamation, " Where the Spirit of the
Lord is, there is liberty." It is the brightness of Pentecost;
it is the dawn of millennial splendors ; it is the very
atmosphere of that city and land where God's people walk,
to go out no more for ever, their earthly errors all thor
oughly unlearned, and their mortal discords all finally
hushed, in the One Presence.

VII.
RATIONALISM
IN ITS
EELATIONS TO O UE CHUECHES.

RATIONALISM
IN ITS
EELATIONS TO O TJR CHUECHES.

Those who may have looked into the reprint, issued at
London some two years since, that would reproduce in
brown paper and rude type the first edition of Bunyan's
immortal Pilgrim, will have observed the change that the
great dreamer made in passing to his second edition from
the first form of the work, as to certain talks held by
Christian at the beginning of his way with a Mr. Worldly
Wiseman. This gentleman undertakes to relieve the bur
dened pilgrim. He and Mr. Legality and "the pretty
young man, his son, Mr. Civility," are presented as mis
guiding the forlorn traveller at his very outset, when,
under the instructions of Evangelist, he is, beneath the
shadows of grim Sinai, aiming for the Wicket Gate and
for the Cross beyond it.
The allusions are, on the part of the great allegorist, to
a school of Christian teachers, then represented by many
illustrious names, as thinkers, scholars, and preachers, in
the Established Church, and who were called the Lati-
tudinarian divines. Among them was the Mr. Fowler,
afterward a bishop, with whom Bunyan had a contro
ls 169

170 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
versy, a man of worth and culture, but who assumed
toward the tinker the tone of scornful superiority which
posterity has judged by no means warranted, and that in
justice might well have been reversed. As a man of
genius not only, but in acquaintance with his Bible, and
as a preacher of the gospel grappling with men's hearts
and swaying men to a better life, the bespattered and im
prisoned dissenter was immeasurably above the Latitudi-
narian, Edward Fowler, on whose brow came the mitre
of Gloucester. Burnet, Barrow, Cumberland, Cudworth,
Whichcote, John Smith, and Tillotson, Archbishop of Can
terbury — held, in some respects, to be among the church
men of that day the greatest of their preachers — all be
longed to a new group of teachers, who, alienated alike
from the Puritanism of the earlier Established Church
and from the Ritualism of Archbishop Laud, turned
men's minds from doctrine and discipline to conduct,
insisted on the morals of the gospel, relied much on the
philosophy of the old Greek and Roman world, and gave,
beyond doubt, to the illustrious dreamer the originals of
his Worldly Wiseman, Legality, and Civility, the " pretty
young man," domiciled "in the village of Morality."
Their theology, borrowed, in part at least, from the Re
monstrant, or Arminian, party in the Church of Holland,
led in a later generation to an approach to Socinianism,
and helped to prepare that descent of so many of the
aristocracy of Britain into the Deism -or Naturalism
which Butler in his Analogy deplores as having in his
day become so lamentably prevalent. Their name, the
Latitudinarians, grew from the breadth, the latitude, of

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 171
interpretation which they gave to the old formularies of
doctrine, and the wider comprehension they would grant
to certain forms of religious error within church bounds.
Its tendency, though not its creed, was essentially what
in later daj's has received the appellation of Rationalism.
This term, in our own times, is by some used in a good
sense ; by others unfavorably, in the intent of reproach
ing the first principles and ultimate tendencies of the
system. The Latitudinarians of the days of the Stuarts
would, in most important elements, be found one in tem
per and aim with the Rationalists of later Germany,
France, and America.
Now, our own denomination in Britain and on the Con
tinent has been not infrequently, but most unwarrantably,
as we judge, charged with sliding naturally into the more
advanced forms of Rationalism. One of the old scholars
of the Netherlands, strong in his acquaintance with Latin
and Greek, but wavering rather discreditably in his re
ligious affiliations as interest or ease might dictate, and
ultimately joining himself, with idolatrous honors to the
Virgin Mary, to the Romish communion — Justus Lipsius
— has said, "An Anabaptist is but an ignorant Socinian;
a Socinian is but a learned Anabaptist." Looking back
ward to mediaeval times and to apostolical, and then turn
ing the glance forward from the Reformation down to our
own age, the adage lacks confirmation. It may be curt
and keen, but it is not true. Turn to the statement of
the two eminent Hollander scholars, Ypeij and Dermout,
both attached to the National or Reformed Church of
that country, and writing its history. They have occa-

172 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
sion, in the course of their extended work, to allude to
the remote antiquity of our own so-called Anabaptist con
fessors ; and thus they describe our body, using for it four
several names, as attached to it at various periods of
history :*
" We have already seen that the Baptists — those who in
former times were named Anabaptists, and in later days
Mennonites — were originally Waldensians, the men who,
in the history of the church, in times so far back, have
obtained a well-deserved renown. In consequence, the
Baptists may be regarded as being from of old the only
religious denomination that have continued from the
times of the apostles, as a Christian society who have
kept the evangelical faith pure through all the' ages
hitherto. The constitution, never perverted internally or
externally, of the society of the Baptists, serves them as
a proof of that truth, contested by the Romish Church,
that the reformation of religion, such as was brought
about in the sixteenth century, was necessary, was indis
pensable, and serves, too, as the refutation, at the same
time, of the Roman Catholic delusive fancy, that their
own is the oldest church society."
Ypeij held an ecclesiastical professorship and was a
voluminous author on historical themes, and his various
works are yet largely cited. Dermout, his associate in the
history, was a Reformed Church preacher at The Hague.
Our missionary, William Ward, who, in his visit to Europe
and America in the later years of his life, made a brief
stay in Holland, describes Dermout as chaplain to the
* Oerchied. d. Nederl. Hervormde Kerk, t. i., 1819, p. 148.

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 173
court, The Hague being the city of the royal residence.*
Sepp, one of our Hollander Baptist brethren, a scholar of
reputation, in his essay — which in 1860 obtained the prize
of the Teyler Society — on the theologians of Holland from
the close of the eighteenth to the middle of the nine
teenth century, rates Dermout as among the most power
ful of the nation's preachers in his own age. f Men, then,
such as Ypeij and Dermout, from their social and ecclesi
astical position little liable to undue and over-favorable
views of our annals and of our religious influence, would
seem, by no means, to sustain the judgment of Lipsius as
* C. M. Van Deb Kemp, in his work animadverting upon Ypeij
and Dermout for what he supposes undue honors accorded to Erasmus,
a bias against Calvinists, and a leaning too marked in favor of the
early leaders of the Arminians, De Eere der Nederlandsche Hervormde
Kerk Gehandhasfd tegen Ypeij en Dermout (Eotterdam, 1830, 3 vols.),
at vol. i., p. 2, describes one of our authors, Ypeij, as "professor of
theology in connection with the Eeformed Church in a distinguished
university of our land," and the other, Dermout, as "by his position
the regular teacher in one of our most distinguished churches, court
chaplain to His Majesty, and secretary and permanent member of the
Supreme Eeformed Church Synod."
f Pragmalische Geschiedenis der Theologie Hier te Lande, Sedert
Bel Laatst der Vorige Eeuw tot op Onzen Tijd, Door Christian
Sepp, Predikant bij de Doopsgezende Gemeente te Leider. Uitgegwen
door Teylee's Godgeleerd Genootschap, Haarlem, 1860. The sub
ject was presented for competition by the society in 1858. Sepp's esti
mate of Dermout as a preacher appears at pp. 430, 431, where he
states that Borger, one of Holland's most brilliant scholars, early lost,
was accustomed to rate Dermout, as being above even Van der Palm,
who, as scholar, writer, and preacher, has won a reputation, not only
pervading Holland, but reaching Britain and our own country also.
15 *

174 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
to the imputed spiritual kinsmanship between Baptist
and Unitarian. Yet when our denominational views bid
men go, individually, to the word of God, and to implore
personally the Spirit of God, and to accept distinctly,
and apart from household ancestry or sacerdocy, the
grace and rule of Christ, the development thus given to
the individual soul might seem to lead, rapidly and
easily, to the undue and distorted aggrandizement of
authority, in the individual's own recourse to his solitary,
unaided judgment ; and there have been, in single persons
and in communities, divergencies toward this form of
error. Paul held that the old classic world " by wisdom
knew not God." The Scriptures, ages ago, assured us,
that to lean to our own understanding was not pfudent,
nor wise, nor safe ; and warned us, that the man trusting
in his own heart is a fool. Self-sufficiency, in the concerns
that bind man's spirit to his Maker in religion, creed, and
worship, bars out, in a. certain deplorable sense, the effi
ciency of divine grace, and the all-sufficiency of the God
who would, willingly, be "All-in-all " to his people, and
cannot be this, when they affect to be all-in-all to them
selves. Now, as against the men who employ Rationalism in a
favorable and eulogistic sense only, and who suppose
themselves to find all the reforms of society and each
ascending stage of social progress and national betterment,
in the triumph of Rationalism, it needs to be remembered
that these modern citers of the appellation give to the
term Rationalist a sense entirely different from that in
which the theologians who first coined and who had long

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 175
used the word understood the phrase themselves and
wished it to be understood by their readers. Its first users
would denote by it the tendency of man to set his own ra
tiocinations, as prior and overbearing in their authority, in
rivalry with the utterances of God ; the disposition which
leads us, so often and so easily, to trust what yet care
ful observers so mistrust in their own case — first impres
sions ; to rate the precipitate prejudgment of the disciple's
mind above the deliberate and final judgments of the Mas
ter's mind. The opinion, in a question of morals or creed,
of the great Englishman, called yet by the adhesive title of
the " judicious " Hooker, would perhaps, from the bashful
humility of the good pastor, come later than the prompt
utterances, on the same question, of his parish sexton.
The perter and earlier speaker would be likely to err in
forgetting the Scripture rule enunciated by a speaker
who is to be the world's Final Judge : " Judge not accord
ing to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment."
Yet it might be worth while to wait, after the ready deliv
erance of the bell-ringer, for the more tardy deliverance
of the man wont to occupy the pulpit, though the last
were of hesitating enunciation. Now, many a question
of opinion has been decided wrongly by precipitate ut
terances of those who never undertook to search below
the plausible in quest of the real. On such superficial
arbitraments, ready but not as real as they were rapid,
have been, in more than one age of religious history,
based some of what Rationalism regarded for the time as
its great rules for settling what the Bible is, what man is,
and what God is ; where sin adheres, and whence salva-

176 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
tion comes. Writers, like Saisset in France, and Hase
in Germany, have united in the complaint, that what in
theology its friends claim as Rationalism has never laid
down its definitions, precise and clear, of what in their
judgment is the full prerogative and the wise scope of
human reason in the matters of religious faith. Consid
ering how gravely and widely the assailants of orthodoxy
have dissented among themselves, as to the last results of
their own rational scrutiny and judgment, it seems just
occasion of regret, that the processes upon which those
results were to be ascertained have not been calmly and
distinctly indicated from the very commencement of the
inquiry. Could man make his own Bible, and in the
energy of his mental endowments cast his own god, pro
jecting, at one fling of the intellect, his symmetric deity,
just as the deft hand of Aaron, by the aid of molten
metal, brought out of the mould the golden calf that the
tribes were summoned to worship as the planner of
their exodus? He who makes out of his own reason
his Scripture and his God must go on to make, as best he
may, his own heaven. A revelation being in the world ;
the claim being here before our own eyes, that our Maker
has told us of his own nature and will, and of our duties
and destinies, it is but reasonable and equitable that we
give him patient, reverent hearing before we proceed to
judge. Let us, then, ask hastily :
I. What are the rights of reason in matters of religious
faith ?
II. What are the wrongs which those opposed to Ra-

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 177
tionalism complain of this system as having inflicted by
a perverse use of the name of the reasonable ?
III. Then let us inquire how far the Baptists have, per
sonally or in large bodies, aided the growth of Rational
ism; and
IV. How far they have, as a denomination, been its
eager and not inefficient antagonists.
I. It is unquestionably the province of reason to ex
amine intelligently and reverently the document profess
ing to come from a Divine Author, and to reveal an in
visible world with its* eternal retributions. The volume
of Scripture is made up of several distinct treatises, th^
works of men far remote in age, and very varied in the
character of the surroundings that would naturally in
fluence them. The histories it contains are to be tested
with the aid and the collation of other contemporaneous
narrations, where such may be found.
The miracles on the outer material world and on the
inner world of man's soul and character are not to be
dismissed as at once incredible. Such was in Germany a
very recent and general assumption, but it is certainly
not reasonable; and John Stuart Mill, not himself a
believer, yet allows that if there be admitted the exist
ence of a personal God, there is nothing to be regarded
as extravagant in the claim, that he has wrought wonders
to authenticate his message. Some fulfilments of proph
ecy are, again, of the nature of miracles of a high order,
and of a more diffusive evidence than wonders wrought
in sea or sky or earth. Ascertain the early date of the
prediction— often when uttered of unlikely fulfilment —
M

178 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
and then see, centuries after that date, by parties and
influences not interested in the sustaining of the record,
the fulfilment of the ancient oracle, and here is a miracle
of a very high order, as impartial reason must allow.
The dispersion of the Jews for so many centuries, with
out their national absorption, is among such portentous
authentications that the book making the pledge of their
being scattered among the nations, yet not intermingled
with the nations, came from a divine foresight. Then,
again, reason has a right to ponder, and is bound in
equity to weigh dispassionately, the moral contents of the
Scriptures, the holiness of the God there portrayed, the
character of the Saviour — Son of the Father, and Incar
nation and Presentation of True Godhead — in his dis
courses, acts, and sufferings, in his influence as long
expected in type and prophecy, his subsequent influence
on church and world, in ordinances and conversions, and
effusions of the Spirit. These are moral traits of the
book, putting it apart from all the sacred books of other
religions. The mode in which it shows the reader's own heart,
and as a mirror flashes back the moral judgment of his
own unbribed conscience, is another personal appeal to
the intellect no less than the heart. The book, as Cole
ridge says, " meets me ;" it finds the wanderer, as the
straying sheep was clutched by the Good Shepherd ; it
startles the offender, as Ahab was shocked when he turned
to Elijah with the cry, "Hast thou found me, 0 my
enemy ?" When Rochester, after a life of profligacy in
the court of one of the worst of English kings — a profli-

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 179
gate before, and hardened by skepticism — was on his
deathbed, he was brought to read the volume, and ex
claimed to his Christian friend, "The only argument
against the book is a man's own bad life ;" and the frank
confession was followed by a deep penitence. In this
case we have the attestation of Reason ; when the glare
of the torches of Vanity and Fashion has died out, and
the masks of interest and passion have dropped off from
Error and Vice, the pages, with the light of conscience
and eternity beaming upon them, flash back the rays of
their own divine origin.
The book, again, appeals to the reader to obey what he
sees to be true if he would be led onward to fresh truth.
"If any man will do his [my Father's] will, he shall
know of the doctrine," said Christ. A loyal towardness
is the requisite temper for a happy issue of the examina
tion. A man must, in ordinary fairness and reason, be
willing to yield this in the course of his scrutiny. He
must be willing to relinquish the idols there detected, and
to follow the clues there manifested.
Now, in all these modes, as well as in exercising a
judicious criticism on the allusions and imagery of the
volume, reason has its legitimate sway and prerogatives.
The Bible is a letter from an absent Parent. The genuine
ness of an epistle received by a son in the city from a
beloved mother, it may be in the far rural home, is evi
denced in part by the postage-stamp that it bears, and by
the livery and known occupation of the postman who
delivers it into the eager hands of the recipient; and for
such evidence from the postman, even if the letter itself

180 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
comes in the handwriting of some neighbor who corre
sponds in behalf of the mother, now perchance on her
sick-bed, and that hand be to the son an unknown one,
the youth who takes the letter and breaks the seal may
be grateful. Reason is the postman delivering us God's
message from the far skies. But supposing that, after the
letter-carrier has delivered the epistle to its owner's keep
ing, he should stop and suggest his criticisms on the good
mother's mode of uttering her thoughts, and should go
on to say, that if the letter was in the venerable woman's
own hand, the spelling of "honour" with a "w" was anti
quated, and not sustainable according to the authority of
Webster, and that the good lady took more of her paper
for maternal admonitions than in his judgment was de
sirable, would not the recipient of such critical emenda
tions be rather annoyed ? Would it not be quite natural
if he should hint gently, that, gratified as the reader of
the letter might be with the postman's services in au
thenticating the country postmark and the hour of the
city receipt, it was scarce desirable that his valuable time
should be wasted in further remarks on what lay more
between the mother and her Benjamin? So, if God has
promised his Spirit to the asker, the perennial intercourse
of the Heavenly and Divine Parent with the dependent
and filial soul is a matter which Reason should leave to
the handling of the God who has undertaken it. The
letter-carrier should attend merely to his proper duty,
and should not affect to encroach, and to improve upon
the teachings of the Parent.
There will be, as the old Christians were fond of re-

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 181
marking, much that may be above reason, that yet is not
against reason; great facts and truths, that the unaided
intellect could not have discovered for itself. Yet some
of these truths, thus requiring superior wisdom for their
manifestation, are, when disclosed, sustained by their
own intrinsic beauty and majesty. What, again, we do
not fully comprehend, we may really and reasonably ap
prehend. The man who has never trode the shore of
China, and never expects to, may yet have full confi
dence that there is such a landj from various reports and
testimony. If his brother sail thither and be a mission
ary there, both brothers hold the truth; but the one
never visiting apprehends the nature of the country,
whilst the other residing there comprehends it. There
are, again, as even reason may perceive, truths that, par
tially discerned, cannot in this existence be fully mas
tered. Here we "know in part." Mysteries belong not
to religion only, but to science as well; not merely to
the things of the soul, but to the very life of the body.
No man of us has seen his own heart or his own brain.
There are portions of the human frame, carried by indi
vidual men for centuries, of which medical science can
yet scarce tell the properties and purposes. We are a
wonder, a mystery, to ourselves. Life is a mystery. The
light by which we see is a mystery. Thought itself is a
mystery. To object to the existence of mysteries in God's
book and in his nature and in his providence ; to make
them as a cause of questioning his volume or his own
character and rights, is not to act a reasonable part. It
is to make our littleness an argument against the great-
16

182 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ness of the God that formed and feeds and would fain
bless us.
II. Now, as against the system that its admirers have
installed, under the name of Rationalism, to judge and
supersede the Bible, the churches of Christ have cause
to object that its criticisms have no present harmony, and
result in no practical unison. If, indeed, the new and
adverse power be the outbreak of Reason as against Faith,
it should by this date have settled upon some tribunal in
which the overruling power that so abridges and re
trenches, and even rejects, Revelation is made to centre.
and fix its permanent seat. Is this the judgment of the
thinker, each man for himself, apart from his fellows ? or
is it the common sense of the great masses, apart from the
prejudices of schools and the dogmas of churches ? or is
it the more cultured and more richly-stored mind of some
philosopher, living apart and thinking profoundly and
seeing clearly, when others are but purblind, or discern
with disturbed vision? The faith of the Nazarene has
had some of the loftiest intellects of the race in the ranks
of its loyal, its lowly adherents. There is yet no response
as to the great Delphi, whence the oracles of this over
ruling Reason are to be proclaimed. The masses are not
agreed ; the schools jangle ; the philosophers themselves
change, collide, and mutually blaspheme.
But many seem to have forgotten the obvious facts, and
feel that the popular flings against right and truth are to
be accepted as decisive against the existence of such right
and revelation, and as to the presence of such truth in
the old prophet and apostle. Let us, then, ask if the ob-

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 183
jectors are greater, intellectually and morally, than the
receivers. Take up the Thoughts of Pascal, as commented
upon by Voltaire and Condorcet. Brilliant and clear as
are these critics, who are sometimes scoffers rather than
critics, we judge that his must be a warped and blinded
mind who, in reading the text and the margin, does not
feel and does not own that the Christian philosopher, in
force of thought, in tone of feeling, and in high purpose,
is immeasurably the superior of the two skeptics who sit
upon the skirts of that Christian's robe. The tone of Vol
taire at least, reminds one of what might be the grimaces
of a showman's ape who had lighted upon the diary and
medicine-chest of some Howard, dead in the forest, and
who sputtered indignantly over the bitterness of the
drugs which, in the hands of their beneficent owner, were
meant to quell pain and to avert death, but Avhich, to the
exasperated finder, were an utter nullity and a cruel dis
appointment. There is much of a disposition in every age to idolize
the present, as outranking the past, and as containing all
the hopes of the future. As travel becomes more rapid
and free ; and as translations, rendering the literary and
religious treatises of one tongue into another tongue,
spoken, it may be, on the other side of the planet, are
bringing the long-severed into close and easy collation, it
is very natural to form the thought that all the several
religions are to be levelled to the same rank of the ques
tionable and mutually irreconcilable, and that they must
be, all and altogether, abandoned. Burke, in his day,
spoke of Englishmen who had dropped the articles of creed

184 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
and decalogue in the sea which they traversed as, round
ing the Cape of Good Hope, they sought a new home in
heathen India. We do not know that the process was a
reasonable one, or the results happy and enviable.
So the criticism and literature of the age are prone to
affect the popular, and secure this end often by flattering
the very weaknesses of the age. Sir Arthur Helps, in one
of his books, speaks of a British nobleman whose wonder
was that the weakest of his sons was the most generally
liked. The sentiment was far earlier than the days when
Helps notes it. Charles II., the shrewd but the reckless
and merry king, blamed the men of the Established
Church for not gathering back the Dissenters. One of
his chaplains, a very weak man, but a busy one, had
been appointed by his king to a rectory where he had,
by going among his dissenting parishioners, brought
them all to the church. The sovereign said it seemed
to him unaccountable, but that "the man had put his
nonsense to their nonsense," and it had succeeded. In
reward for his English success, the king made him bishop
of. an Irish see, as Burnet tells it. But the popularity of
some of the objectors to the Bible is accounted for on this
very principle. It is weakness sympathizing with and
flattering weakness. Yet to some the currency of such
objections seems explicable only on the principle of their
justice and unimpeachable rightfulness. The Rational
ism of Germany, at an age of her religious history not
very long gone, was just of this class. Men took up and
gave back — took up from the mouth and gave back to
the ears of the people their flimsiest and their boldest

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 185
objections. For a time the hurricane seemed irresistible.
But it went by, and the immortalit}' of its literary organs
went down as rapidly as it rose. Look at the influence
wielded by the great Encyclopaedia of Diderot. Where
is it now ? Look at the power of Nicolai in German lit
erature. Who now, of ordinary German readers, knows
his time and position ?
And yet, under the influence of such objections and
leaders, popular, shallow, plausible, and headstrong, doc
trine after doctrine was dropped from the creed, book
after book was shoved out of the Canon. A Christ,
without prophecies to herald him, or miracles to attend
him, was discrowned and undeified. First he was sage,
then fanatic, then schemer, then myth. Revealed relig
ion became natural religion ; and natural religion became
a particolored deism, or a blank, a dark, atheism. As said
one of their homely sages, Matthias Claudius, men in
their wisdom undertook to require that the sun in the
heavens should be set back, or urged forward, to bring the
orb of day into due and loyal subordination to their own
revered wooden clock, that ticked over the kitchen chim
ney. God was to mend himself to suit man ; or, failing,
he was insolently warned to take the consequences. #
A favorite plea for it all was that only by such rational
accommodations of the old and strict orthodoxy could
the masses be propitiated and saved from utter irreligion.
The sceptic would thus be saved to the church ; and the
church would thus be preserved by the tolerance, if not
in the full confidence, of the nation. The result was in
little accordance with the prediction. Instead of winning
16* *

186 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
the scoffers, they were incensed and scandalized at such
temporizing with what claimed to be divine oracles.
Lessing, a man of unquestioned genius, but himself
unhappily not a Christian, very distinctly and almost
fiercely wrote of the new Rationalists as bringing in a
system infinitely less wise and harmonious and worthy of
respect than the old orthodoxy. See, in our own days,
¦ the language of Morley * in his life of Voltaire, himself
in seeming sympathy with his subject, when he refers to a
peculiarity of our own times : " The strange and sinister
methods of assault upon religion, which we of a later day
watch with wondering eyes, and which consist in wearing
the shield and device of a faith, and industriously shout
ing the cry of a church, the more effectually to reduce the
faith to a vague futility, and its outward ordering to a
piece of ingeniously-reticulated pretence."
Such is the estimate that infidelity, not in this matter
biased in favor of our gospel, puts upon the methods of
popularizing the gospel in order to save it.
If it does not satisfy the doubters who are to be placated,
it fails — which is still more strange — to satisfy the very
authors of these vaunted amendments when they get
old«r and nearer the edge of this brief mortal life. Sem-
ler, the father of modern German Rationalism, is not satis
fied in his old age with the results of his own work.
Paulus comes after him, a Rationalist of another school,
and a great Orientalist. But his old age is one of discon
tent. Strauss, still another who had aided to discredit
and ridicule the acknowledged evasions of miracles in
*Life of Voltaire, K Y., 1872, p. 8.

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 187
Paulus, has his Lives of Christ; writes and alters; and
alters and rewrites ; and goes off the stage believing in no
revelation, and losing all hope of a personal immortality,
yet expecting to be heeded in every whirl of his whiffling
unbelief. But God took, in his providence, other methods of
answering. As Tholuck said, " the thunders of the battle
fields of Leipsic and Waterloo rekindled the sparks of
religious life in the German nation."
III. Now, of this fearful course, that in a form so un
reasonable and with results so disastrous has labored to
amend the handiworks of God, have our, churches had
any large share ? The younger Socinus settled in Poland.
There was, in a certain portion of the churches there
and in Hungary, a sort of intercourse for a time between
Baptists and Unitarians. Dudith, a Roman Catholic
bishop, who attended, as such, the celebrated Council of
Trent, and delivered two discourses there, which are pre
served in the published records of that council, became
rather Unitarian, and some say a Baptist, in that portion
of Europe. The fraternization was, however, limited in
extent and temporary in duration. So, in Holland, when
the Remonstrants or Arminians went down before the
predominant power of the Calvinists, some of the Remon
strants projected a coalition with the Mennonites of that
country, as a numerous and a popular body. Some of
those Remonstrants passed over to Arianism, and there
were some of our Mennonite churches which also imbibed
the same influence. So, in England, the General Baptists,
who had been, though Arminian in doctrine, yet evangel-

188 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ical in the earlier times of influence, became also Arian.
Wm. Whiston was identified with them. With them, too,
sympathized, Gale, a learned writer of our own body, of
that branch of it. And the James Foster whom Pope, no
very facile or partial critic, has consigned to immortality
in the lines, " Let modest Foster, if he will, excel
Ten Metropolitans in preaching well,"
was a General Baptist and an Arian. But under the in
fluence of Rationalism, in this form of it, the General
Baptists wilted into weakness, and wellnigh into extinc
tion, as the Mennonites of Holland, under the like curse,
have diminished rapidly in numbers, zeal, and influence.
The Particular — by which name was meant the Calvin
istic — Baptists have grown. They had, in the days of the
Commonwealth and Protectorate, men of piety and some-
men of scholarship among their pastors. Bunyan stands
apart. He was of them. In later days, Gill — of whom
Toplady the churchman, but a personal friend, said that
in controversy he was never met by any his match — was,
in Rabbinical learning we should judge, the equal of
Lightfoot, generally held the greatest of Rabbinical schol
ars among English theologians.
When, in times near our own, God stirred up an illit
erate but devout man, Dan Taylor, among the General
Baptists, to protest and strive against this dangerous her
esy, his New Connection began to thrive. John G. Pike,
not long dead, and the author of works reprinted and
valued here, was one of the preachers in this new body,

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 189
recalled from heresy, and thus and thenceforth pervaded
with a new life.
When one of the missionaries of our evangelical breth
ren in India, originally a Baptist, became there Unitarian,
he attempted a mission to be sustained by fellow-Unita
rians in England and America, but it soon withered and
perished. IV. What have we done, let us lastly inquire, to resist,
under God, this influence? Our churches have as a
whole, neither in Switzerland, Britain, nor in this coun
try, yielded to it, but stemmed, and often most vigor
ously, the onflowing tide of error. Andrew Fuller, one
of our writers, destitute of classical training, but a man
of singular acuteness and clearness of intellect, and with
great force and directness of utterance, was not only ef
fective against infidelity by his Gospel its Own Witness,
but by his Calvinistic and Socinian Systems Compared, he,
a mere Shamgar, as it might seem, entering the battle
field with but an ox-goad against the mailed errorists of
his island, produced an impression that some learned
Unitarians sought, but very unsuccessfully, to counteract.
In Boston, at the time when all the churches founded
by the Puritan Congregational Fathers had, with one ex
ception, gone over to this error, our people stood firm,
and their services to the cause of evangelical truth in that
respect have been, by Psedobaptist brethren, more than
once acknowledged.
One of the causes of the growth of Rationalism has
been found by German Christians in the ashes of a dead
orthodoxy. Now, our own churches seem in one respect

190 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
1 less liable to this evil than those having an infant mem-
jbership. The last inherit a creed sometimes without an
experience. Our polity, if faithfully administered by
spiritual churches and pastors, demands inexorably, far
as human judgment can scan it or secure it, that there
shall be a personal experience along with the inherited
creed. Our Mennonite brethren in Holland seem to some
of us, observers from abroad, to have succumbed more
readily to this influence of a traditional hereditary ortho
doxy, not vitalized by personal conversion in their new
membership, because, in some of them at least, the prac
tice had prevailed of letting in the young at a certain age
to membership, by a sort of confirmation, as in the Epis
copal Church it would be called, without rigid exaction
of the evidence of personal piety on the arrival of the
young at such development of thought and mind as
might make their adherence intelligent, whether or not
it were cordial, a matter of the brain, if not of the
heart. The missions to which God has stirred up our churches
have reacted visibly and vividly on their own home-life.
That their form of polity is not the main cause of the
failure in Holland and in the General Baptists of Britain,
to maintain the old evangelical faith, may be inferred
from the fact that the Presbyterians of England largely,
and to some extent those of Scotland also, became in
volved in the same drift toward a denial of the old doc
trines of the trinity, atonement, inspiration of the Bible,
and justification by faith. The church of Matthew Henry
—himself so devout, and the son of the holy Philip Hen-

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 191
ry — went over to Arianism. And in the great church of
Scotland, the bulwark, as it might have been expected to
prove, of sound doctrine, the reign of Moderatism carried
over numbers of its most learned and its most intellectual
pastors and writers to principles not very distinguishable
from those of German Rationalism. In the Presbyterian
Church of the North of Ireland, it also prevailed. God
raised up Witherspoon, by his Ecclesiastical Characteristics.
to witness against the Scottish defection. Bishop Warbur
ton, who was far from full reception of the evangelical sys
tem, yet felicitated Witherspoon on the appearance of that
work, and declared that there was a class in the English Es
tablished Church to whom the charges were equally appli
cable. In Ireland, God raised up Dr. Cooke to denounce
the error and all coalition with it, and he led the healing
severance. Our own Carson partook in the good work.
Upon the fall of the first Napoleon, the Continent of
Europe, long closed against British Christians, was once
more opened to their evangelizing zeal. Among the first
to enter it was Robert Haldane, a member of one of our
own churches. His earlier religious history had been
remarkable. He was born to wealth, and a near relative
to the British admiral, Lord Duncan, who had won the
battle of Camperdown. When the grace of God met and
changed him, Haldane had sold a magnificent home and
estate, intending with the proceeds to sustain himself and
Greville Ewing, and other Pedobaptist friends, as mission
aries in the possessions of the British East India Company.
Notwithstanding his aristocratic alliances, the jealousy
of that Company forbade his being allowed to plant that

192 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Eastern mission. He then devoted the zeal and means,
thus barred out from the far East, to home evangelization
in Scotland. He and his brother, once in command of a
ship sailing to India, now devoted to the same gospel,
made it, under God, a most effective enterprise. But
study of God's word made both these brothers Baptists.
When Robert, the elder and wealthier, visited Geneva,
he found the old home of Calvin given over to a predom
inant and proscriptive Rationalism. The good Scotsman,
not master of the French, could hold but cramped and
imperfect conference with the young theological students
of that Unitarian school, whom he had by effort gathered
around him. But God gave to his testimony, as attended
with the Spirit's energies, the awakening and conversion
of Gaussen and of Merle d'Aubigne", the historian of the
Reformation. How large the field of influence since
traversed by the new laborers — not, indeed, denomination
ally with us, but won to the common gospel by a cham
pion of our own denomination — we cannot pause to
remark. If, in an earlier generation, Robert Robinson of Cam
bridge, of our own ministers, under the influence of
Priestly and of Lindsay, swerved from the old foundations,
and deserted the faith his hymns, sermons, and controver
sial labors had once maintained, the mocking tone of the
convert gave umbrage to Priestly himself; and neither
the church over which he had long presided, nor the
more brilliant successor who filled his vacated pulpit,
Robert Hall, partook in the secession. Dyer, the learned
but eccentric Greek scholar, who wrote Robinson's life,

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 193
has scarcety made the memory of the preacher and
student one to awaken an infectious admiration, or one to
win new recruits for the standard of the new gospel.
Chalmers in Scotland was, in thje hands of the Divine
Providence, an instrument to discourage Moderatism, as
it was called, and to hearten and enlarge the evangelical
party until it became a majority. But the action of the
British government in patronage provoked and drove out
that majority to create a separate church — the Free, as they
called it — and one eminently vigorous it has proved itself,
in missions, literature, and pastoral work. But the estab
lished Presbyterian Church left behind,-on the withdrawal
of the Free, seems threatened with a growth of the old
Moderatism. One of their own members, the late Norman Macleod,
regretted the effect of Rationalism, as he found it in the
Reformed Presbyterian Church of Holland, in leaving
many pastorates unfilled. And in the spirit of deference
to the papal portion of the nation, the schoolbooks of
Holland, as Macleod records, may no longer mention the
sufferings of the nation in the strifes with Alva, Spain,
and Rome, when their martyrs and our own Mennonite
martyrs were burned, drowned, flayed, and buried by
thousands. It is one of the strange, yet we think natural,
results of a large infusion of Rationalistic feeling into a
nominally Protestant country, that its churches and insti
tutions tend rapidly to feed Rome with new converts.
Bring the conscience and faith of the churches from the
One, the Spirit of God — Perfect and True, and the Guard-1
ian of truth — down to the many, be they Fathers, synods,
17 N

194 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
writers, or preachers, and the result is to unsettle the
foundations and to divide the membership. What rests
on the faith of the many, the many may alter, desert, and
'denounce. Principle » then becomes but opinion, and
opinion becomes a matter of traffic and mutual barter.
One surrenders this, and another renounces that; and
both have, for the God-given and the God-witnessed, re
ceived in exchanged the veneerings of man and the refine
ments of fashion. The opinions clash, and man's reason
aspires to supplant what God seems, in this negligence of
his word and Spirit — seems, we say — to have left unpro
vided for. The result is that the fancies of earth soon re
place the oracles of heaven. As in the second of Bun
yan 's great allegories, the Holy War, the Lord Secretary
of Mansoul, the Divine Spirit — to whom Christ bequeathed
the care of his church and the continuous vitality of his
ministry, his ordinances, and his membership — slighted,
neglected, grieved, withdraws the evidences of his presence.
It is, to the spirituality of the Christian church, what
blood-poison is to the bodily frame of the individual man.
The whole activity of religion is palsied ; the currents of
religious zeal and hope and love flow languidly, or stag
nate utterly. The Paraclete will not be dispensed with
by any arrangements of human wisdom, art, or eloquence.
He is the Author of the written oracles and the Feeder of
the living ministry ; and when duly sought, there is no
potency in all the resistance of earth, or all the machina
tions of hell, to foil his wisdom, or neutralize his might,
and turn back his pledged and irresistible help. He waits
to be inquired of, and the prayers of which Rationalism

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 195
disputes the worth, and to which skepticism denies any
relevancy or any cogency, he comes down to answer. The
concerts of prayer, which Scotland suggested, and New
England, by Jonathan Edwards adopted, and England
by Andrew Fuller and others planted there, were
appeals to this Great Agent; and the whole story of
the -translations and conversions and martyrdoms and
harvestings of the foreign mission field, in continents and
islands, is but one simple suggestion to the churches that
the Divine Helper, one and unchanging, is true to his
word, and is sufficient for his work.
Far as our churches invoke and honor him, he will
meet their every draft. The faith at which the world
scoffs, is yet the one secret principle over which Heaven
bends approvingly, and before which Hell quails to her
innermost depths, transfixed by its irresistible energy.
The Spirit in the Bible, and the Spirit in the collected
church, and the Spirit in the regenerate heart, has been
clothed, by the purpose of the Father and the promise
of the Son, with all needed light and energy. He made
the material world; he can remake the moral world.'
When we forget dependence and fail to ask and win the
proffered resources, we are not merely liable to a passive
impoverishment, but we become active in a positive and
terrible depravation.
As Bunyan picturesquely puts it, Doubting Castle may
be rebuilt, and Giant Despair recalled to a new-fed life.
See him under new names, the lord of a goodly caravan
serai, the home of all opinions and all nationalities. He
will be aided by the Giant Slaygood and the Giant Grim,

196 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
whom Bunyan saw slain, but who can be restored to a
new activity under a new nomenclature. The fields of
speculation, which the old pilgrims found so treacherous,
will be planted with the groves of a new Academe, and be
decked with the piazzas to the porch of a new Stoicism.
The Lady Diffidence, which in Bunyan's time meant
Habitual Distrust, and in Paul's time would have been
called Chronic Unbelief, will be queenly occupant of the
castle as the Lady Liberalism. The pilgrims, who will
not accept the livery of the new host, will serve, having
tenanted the dungeons for the requisite time, to garnish
with their skeletons, scraped, wired, and varnished, the
surgical museums of the great pageant of the new faith
that has replaced God's oracles and covenant and Mes
siah. Will they last? Only till the measure of the
provocation below is filled, and the long-drawn patience
on high is exhausted. Then the end.
If, as some would present the case, the Sovereign of
the universe is really the "Unknowable," then, it seems
to follow, that as respects our race he is also the " Untalk-
able," and whilst we are condemned to grope in irremedi
able blindness, it is a predestined necessity of his nature
that, far as man is concerned, he, the God, is voiceless
and dumb. Occupying a throne to which our specula
tions even cannot soar, much less our prayers climb, it is
idle to believe that he should ever descend from it to
attempt for our guidance a revelation, much less to ac
cept, in our behalf, an incarnation that should redeem,
regenerate, and enfranchise us. Over duty rests a thick
haze never to be pierced, and over destiny as well. The

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 197
old gospel of our fathers bids us take, at the foot of the
tree of Golgotha, a God-sealed pardon, and to look off
beyond the grave as to a welcoming home on high, of
cloudless splendor and endless felicity. But now we are
to unclutch our hold on this cross; to strip off the wed
ding-garment of his own everlasting righteousness, the
free gift of the Ransomer ; and to dismiss the hope of re
union with our lost friends, so many and so excellent,
who leaned on this faith, and died expecting to greet us
there before his throne.
Certainties so blessed, around which have gathered the
memories of patriarchs and confessors and martyrs, earth's
noblest tenantry for many a generation, are all to be re
nounced. Instead, we are to solace ourselves with the
Great Uncertainty, and to look steadily as we can, with
sinking hearts and dying eyes, to the "Grand Perhaps."
Paul exulted in a "Yea and Amen" gospel of a Christ
who was the Truth, the very Amen, solemn and unques
tionable, immovable, and final. But Modern Progress
and the Rationalism of the age cry, "Yea and Nay."
There may be another life, and a Judge, and a Helper,
and there may be not. Pillow, poor weakling of a day,
thy head, in the hour of its last woes and uttermost needs,
on this rocking line, May Be and May be Not, Perad-
ventuee and Who Knows. Renounce the dream of a
Father's home on high. Strip off the wedding-garment,
for the marriage-supper does not come off; the Bride
groom is dead. He who was proclaimed as "the First
and the Last" has been effectively snuffed out by the
"Latest News" from the last philosophy. The Church,
17*

198 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
the Bride of the Lamb, may now go away deploring
into a. perpetual widowhood. Fret out thy little day of
earthly life as thou best canst, and in the hour of disso
lution shoot out thy being in the wild forlorn plaint,
"Whitherward? — what?" The grave has no outgate.
Bible and Christ and God are evanished.
Is this a reasonable conclusion, a sufficient refuge, a
final and unquestionable settlement ? No : by the reason
that we have ; by the conscience that stirs at times even
within the most obdurate; by all the memories of the
past ; by all the omens of the future, — it is not rational,
or just, or wise, or true.
Christ is, ever blessed be his name. The necessities of
all people required his advent. The consciences even of
his enemies have begrudgingly admitted his majesty and
goodness. The Man of sorrows is neither myth, nor blun
derer, nor deceiver of the people. He sways the centuries
that he has inherited. He sheds forth, even at this hour,
over a gainsaying world, the Spirit that he promised.
From myriads on myriads of saints, calmed, renewed,
established, gladdened, and sanctified by the Spirit's
present workings, comes back the thundering acclaim,
" He is our God ; we have waited for him ; our fathers
have waited for him." And when the hour strikes, out
of the rending heaven, and across the emptied graves and
the shuddering earth, shall come down, shall shine out,
this — the Desire of all nations — the Judge of all the gen
erations of the race, Lord of the quick and the dead.
Science has no other solution, history no other clue.
The heart and the reason and the craving imagination

RATIONALISM AND OUR CHURCHES. 199
sink adoring before him, the very Truth, the only Life,
the Everlasting God, naught beyond him, naught beside
him ; and his people shall be for ever with him, content
with his fulness, and radiant in the reflection of his holi
ness, unsullied and eternal.

VIII.
THE BAPTISTS
AND EELIGIOUS LIBEETT.

THE BAPTISTS
AND EELIGIOUS LIBEETT.

The late Robert Southey, in his closing years a staunch
churchman, and with no small knowledge of ecclesiastical
history, and whose biography of Wesley our Methodist
brethren, notwithstanding some of the writer's prejudices,
have been compelled to adopt and reprint as the best lit
erary portraiture of their reverend founder, has spoken
strongly of another worthy, who, though once a clergy
man of the Establishment, left its precincts and expended
his energies on the outside of its fellowship. Roger Wil
liams was, in Southey 's estimate, "the best and greatest
of the Welshmen," and he pronounced him deserving of
the honors that have been intercepted by William Penn.*
His allusion is to the influence in favor of a diffused re
ligious freedom. Voltaire, whose power in the literary
world was once almost despotic, has given to the founder
of Pennsylvania a high place as establishing toleration
among the first principles of government. In pages which
Southey was more deliberate in preparing, in an article con
tributed to the Quarterly Review,^ he spoke of Williams as
* Selections from Lett, of Southey, by Warter (Lond., 1856), I. 390 I.
f October, 1813. 203

204 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
the one who "began the first civil government upon earth
that gave equal liberty of conscience," and describes him
as " one of the best men who ever set foot upon the New
World, a man of genius and of virtue." Archbishop
Whately, a churchman also, speaks of the Pilgrim Fathers
as having compelled the ever-venerable Roger Williams,
the great champion of toleration, to fly from them to
Rhode Island, where he founded a colony on his own
truly Christian system.*
The cause of religious freedom is now far in advance of
its position in the days of American colonization. Vari
ous influences have contributed in co-operation, or in
mutual counteraction, to bring about this enhancement
of honor for the advocates of enfranchised religion alike
from the control and from the endowment of the state.
In our own times, an illustrious statesman of Italy, not
long gone, had it as the great watchword of his policy —
-Count Cavour it was— "A free church in a free state."
The church dominant and the state its liege vassal had
been for centuries the law of pontifical rule and the first
term in Roman Catholic loyalty. Cavour's study of Brit
ish literature and institutions had made his views what
they were. The kingdom from which he derived these
principles has not yet ventured fully to conform its own
institutions to this great scheme. Yet few now venture
to impugn in English literature the wisdom of a larger
religious toleration.
Who inaugurated the change ? has been a question va
riously answered. Some point to the French chancellor,
* Annotations lo Bacon's Essays. Essay V. ; Of Adversity.

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 205
L'H6pital ; others, to Sir Thomas More in his Utopia.
But whatever the theory of his romance, the great Eng
lishman, in practice, held to the bringing of heretics to
death, and is said to have sanctioned personally the use
of torture. Bodin, a great French jurist, was said to
teach similar principles ; but they were attributed to his
having Jewish blood, which caused him to lean to the
side of the proscribed, and naught appears of his having
been able to give any practical application to the princi
ples. His own views on religion were supposed skeptical ;
and lessons from such a source would have less efficacy.
In later days, Jeremy Taylor, when the Episcopal Church
lay under the cloud of the Commonwealth and the Pro
tectorate, was in favor of the liberty of prophesying ; but
when power was regained by the bishops of the British
Church, no trace is found of the good prelate's aiming to
give efficacy to these the lessons of the day of the church's
adversity. Locke was on the side of religious freedom,
but he had not the honor of embodying the principle in
state constitutions.
Yet English Protestantism, in her martyr age under
Mary the bloody; and English Puritanism, in her long
days of suffering; and Scotch Presbyterianism, in the
days of the Covenanters' worship on the moors and suffer
ings on the gibbet, — all tended toward the gradual develop
ment of a principle, which no one of these great schools
was able fully to enunciate, or willing, when in power, sys
tematically to pursue. The wise man declares, that God,
in his providence, alternating for our race prosperity and
adversity, has set "the one over against the other, to the
18

206 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
end that man might find nothing after him,"* or, in other
words, when in prosperity be compelled to acknowledge
indebtedness to God as its bounteous Sender, and Himself
its indispensable complement, and in the season of gloom
and trial to bow submissively and penitently to God as
its righteous Dispenser and Himself its only adequate
solace, thus never wafted above dependence on the
Highest, and never sunk beyond relief at the hand of the
Mightiest; and so shut up to a perpetual trust and an
indefeasible sonship and pupilage. So, too, has it been
in the history of God's churches : we find the schools of
the wisest and best continually displaying their incom
petency, and driven back from themselves on the conduct
of a wiser and the grace of a kinder rule than was found
in their own nature.
The progress of Protestantism in Britain has been
largely aided by the volumes of John Foxe, picturesque,
simple, earnest, and solemn. The earliest edition of that
great record was not in English, but in Latin, the learned
tongue of the age; a small volume compared with the
subsequent folios, and prepared on the Continent, where
Foxe was a fugitive from the sway of Gardiner and Bon
ner and Cardinal Pole. In that earlier tome, now a book
of great rarity and high cost, are some narratives, that a
kind regard for the heroic sufferers induced the good Foxe
to withdraw from the later issues. One of these states
the appeal made to Rogers, afterward a martyr, and a
manful one, in the days of Queen Mary, to induce him to
interpose his offices with the government of Edward VI.,
* Eccles. vii. 14.

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 207
the Protestant predecessor of Queen Mary, to prevent the
cruel death by burning of some Anabaptists. Rogers —
for good men are not always and altogether good — replied
to his fellow-Protestant, that burning was not so painful a
death. His friend, supposed to have been Foxe himself,
smiting the hand of Rogers, replied, that he might yet
have occasion to know that it was not so easy ; and among
the early victims of Edward's sister, truculent Mary, was
this same Rogers. Spite of the claims of wife and children,
he faltered not; but made, blessed be God, a heroic end.
But probably, in the eyes of those who were readers of
that first Latin edition, and in Foxe's own eyes, the stake
where, as these on the Continent heard of it, Rogers was
bound and burned, seemed somewhat of a retribution as
well as a stage of heroic perseverance. So good old Hugh
Latimer had thought little of the piety, and rated but
meanly the patient and cheerful endurance, of Anabaptist
martyrs, whom he too had heard of as suffering in the
same manner. Meeting, as we doubt not Latimer and
Rogers did, in the presence of the same Christ, the Ana
baptist sufferers, for whom they had in the early years little
commiseration, both had occasion to adore and rejoice in
that Saviour's grace, which overlooked in both of them
their adherent imperfections and errors, and taught them,
in the Beatific Vision, to find, not in self or brethren, but
in him, the one Christ and the one God, that absolute per
fection which left "nothing after him" to be desired, to
be missed, and to be corrected.
So their descendants, on either shore of the Atlantic,
have cause to bless God for the wondrous brightness and

208 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
value of their services to the cause of truth, of national
freedom, and of religious fruitfulness. The eulogies have
been ardent, and they might well be so ; but here, too, as
in the case of the earlier worthies of the Marian era, God
has not suffered his people to find, in their human an
cestry, however noble and saintly and blessed, a perfec
tion of influence and a symmetry entire and unimpeach
able. There, too, men, if candid and teachable, find them
selves shut up to the conclusion, that man in some aspect
and at some time fails,' and that God alone is the Un
failing. The vacated pulpits, the prisons, and the pillories of
the mother-country, and the wildernesses of this Western
world, have borne record to the stern endurance and the
resolute energy and the prayerful trust of these men of
God. And our own people in them, and in the scatterings
and siftings of Waldensians and Huguenots and Palatines
and Hollanders against our own wild coast, in the early
days of the feeble colonies, have had men whose story
bears inspection, and whose example deserves devout
honor. But still, back of their imperfections and insuffi
ciencies, lies the same horizon, stretching out and call
ing "after" God — a long, wide field that his faithful
ness and his truthfulness only can adequately fill.
Of the man whom Southey and Whately eulogized,
and whom Bancroft — a scholar not of our communion — has
placed so vividly and brilliantly on the pages of the
national annals, an old Puritan worthy, Cotton Mather,
had said, that he, Roger Williams, "had a windmill in
his head." Gather up such comments, and the founders

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 209
of Rhode Island may be disparaged ; but a sheaf, full and
ill-odored, of such censure, would not certainly serve to
honor the cause of the common Master. Our own de
nomination has been sometimes suspected of canonizing
this worthy. As a people, it is a fault of which we are
as little guilty as our brethren, it may be. Certainly, the
acclaim of genuine admiration, about the character and
exploits of English and American Puritans, we as Bap
tists have not habitually or generally sought to lessen or
drown ; we have rather shared it and swelled it. In the
canonization of Romish saints, it is customary to employ
one who argues the case against the proposed candidate
for saintly honors, and whom the populace call "the
devil's counsel," impeaching, disparaging, and travesty
ing the new saint. Imagine such a work among Protest
ant Christians, and how easy were it to gather from the
missiles of controversy, criticism, and enmity, masses of
scorn and invective. The Wesleys, to whom Westminster
Abbey has lately opened its doors, suffered largely in this
way. Smollett, a man of some genius as a poet and
romance-writer, yet, in his History of England, has most
unworthily portrayed men immeasurably in mental
power and moral worth his own superiors. So the David
Brainard whom Yale expelled and refused to restore ; and
the Henry Martyn over whose weakness, as unnatural, so
kindly a man as Sir James Mackintosh commented, so
unhappily and unjustly, we think ; and that great name
in American history, the elder Jonathan Edwards, so
towering in intellect, but who speaks with so plaintive
a frankness of his own feeble spirits, — might all, to an
]8 * 0

210 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
industrious Advocatus Diaboli — the scholar who should
thus hold a brief for the devil, the " Accuser of the Breth
ren "' — furnish a theme of sarcastic depreciation. George
Buchanan, the Scotch scholar and patriot, whom Jesuit
poets have represented as in his last days unable to recol
lect the Lord's Prayer; and the Beza; and the Calvin;
and the stern John Knox, whom Scotland so justly and
reverently honors, — how have they each borne the most
terrible denunciations. From Luther's days down to
those of Scotch Covenanters and British Quakers, how
much have raillery and reviling and misrepresentation
done to belittle and vilify men of whom yet the world
was not worthy ?
Roger Williams was a native of Wales, born, according
to what seem the most credible accounts, in 1599, in Gla
morganshire. An antiquary of our own city thinks that
he has ascertained his birthplace to have been at Cum
Towey, near Neath, and that he was related to a family, the
Williamses, of Aberpergwm, long settled and still residing
there, and who claim a relationship to Oliver Cromwell.
For the great Protector is sprung from a family of the
name of Williams, who, intermarrying with one of the
kin of the Thomas Cromwell, so powerful as a statesman
under Henry VIII., applied for, and, as was then easily
done, obtained, a change of name to that of their great
patron and kinsman. When the protectorate of Crom
well was closed by the restoration of Charles II., a nephew
of Oliver, who sat in the British Parliament, applied for
an act changing his name back to Williams again — a fact
in after-times as little to his credit as it seemed in that

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 211
day useful for his ease and influence. He bartered
abiding distinction for cheap obscurity. If the founder
of Rhode Island were of the Aberpergwm family, it would
account for the representation, sometimes made, that
Williams pleasantly claimed, at times, to be of the blood
of the great Protector ; for that Aberpergwm family now
lay such claim. The crest of the Aberpergwm family, and
the Welsh motto, were at least singularly appropriate to
the after-story of the builder of Providence. The house
hold crest was the lamb and flag, and its old British
legend, " Suffered that he might conquer." When a
mere lad, Williams attracted the notice of Sir Edward
Coke, the great lawyer, by his diligence in taking sermon
notes, and was placed in the Bluecoat school of London,
that has turned out so many great men from Wesley's
days to Coleridge's and Havelock's. He seems to have
studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and graduated
there. His name, Roger, had been given him, probably, in
honor of a great British commander in the Netherlands,
whom Camden praises for his valor, and whom the Earl
of Leicester, the English commander-in-chief, praised as
worth his weight in gold for wisdom equal to his valor.
A public and elaborate funeral was given him ; and
for a time, probably, it seemed as if the little name
sake in Glamorganshire would hardly rival the baronet
and soldier thus honored by a national service of entomb
ment. But peace has her victories ; and the fame of the
Netherland battle-field is, in our days, almost evanished
before the memories of Rhode Island and Providence
Plantations. In the church, the Puritan proclivities of

212 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Williams awakened persecution. He had been, for a
time, shielded by an eminent namesake, then Bishop of
Lincoln, the same afterward Archbishop of York, who at
one time had been chancellor under James I., and whom
Laud supplanted and persecuted. Williams found his
departure from England so hurried that he could not, to
his regret, pay a visit to his friend, the aged Sir Edward
Coke. Coke's last stage had, for his patriotic services
and his share in drawing up the Bill of Rights, made
his close more happy and illustrious than were the later
days of his great rival, Lord Bacon. In his New England
settlement, the gifts and zeal of Williams awakened regard
and admiration. But he was early and urgent and out
spoken in his denunciation of conforming to what he
deemed the grave errors of the Established Church, and
would require from consistent church members separa
tion from its services. Most of the Puritans would not go
that length; and to some later critics such rigid separa
tion has seemed inconsistent with his large views of soul-
liberty and the relations of the church to the state. We
think the difficulties disappear when it is remembered
that his separation was to be inside the church, in its con
stituency and membership. As to the state, he held it
early not entitled to punish breakers of what are called
duties of the first table, the earlier of the ten com
mandments, those enjoining our duties to God. These
offences he held the state not entitled to punish, except
where they involved a breach of civil peace. He after
ward formulated his doctrine under the name of " Soul-
Liberty," a quaint but expressive phrase, and carrying a

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 213
world of revolution in its brief, terse syllables. His
mind, like that of many of his race among the Welsh of
Great Britain and among the Bretons of France — a Pela-
gius, an Abelard, and a Lamennais, — had the courage
of its own convictions; but also sacrificed, it may be,
at times, to logical cohesion, the interests of practical
usefulness. Though he had the esteem of many most excellent men
in the colony, he had awakened alarm. The ultimate re
sult was, that Hugh Peters, a much less clear thinker and
a much ruder manager, gave him notice of his exclusion
from the church to which he had belonged. Measures
were adopted, to use the phrase of Masson, the biogra
pher of Milton, " to kidnap " Williams, place him on ship
board, and return him, a banished and discredited man,
to England. The banishment he bravely encountered;
but the deportation he evaded by seeking a new home in
the wilderness among the savages, to whom he had shown
sympathy, and by whom he was kindly received, though,
as he says, " bed and bread," the repose and the food of
civilized life, were long things unknown.
When wishing to visit England — not as a deported, dis
credited man, but to publish a work on his views of re
ligious persecution — he had to seek the Dutch settlement
of our own New Amsterdam, then under magistrates from
Holland, and thence to find his way to the old country.
He found an Indian war raging around and against the
city, and his kindly offices with the Indians were prof
fered and used toward securing a return of peace. In
England, he launched his work, now peculiarly identified

214 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
with his name as an author and with the great question
of religious toleration and persecution.
He had in England the friendship of the younger Vane,
of Milton, whom he aided with instruction in the Dutch
language, and of Cromwell. Men like the Scotchman
Baillie, deeply averse to his views on religious toleration,
seem yet to have been conciliated by his spirit, and Bail-
lie speaks of him as "his friend." Baillie was then in
attendance on the great Westminster Assembly of Divines,
in which the Presbyterians of England and Scotland were
the chief controlling power, though a few Episcopalians
and some Independents belonged to it. In that body, by
its preachers and in the sermons of its preachers before
the two houses of Parliament, the sentiment of toleration
was denounced as big with all evils of complicity with
falsehood and sin. And had the views of the majority
in that assembly found adoption by the Parliament, and
by Cromwell above all, Presbyterianism would have been
established with but a mere toleration of Independency,
whilst a denial of Infant Baptism would have been made
an offence punishable with imprisonment.
The army and navy had become largely pervaded with
our own denominational views. Cromwell, himself an
Independent, was in close relations with valiant officers
and soldiers and sailors who were thoroughly Baptist in
their views of doctrine and polity. Williams returned to
his American home ; and it was well he had done so, for
his book, innocent as we now regard it, was ordered to be
burned by the hangman; and had the writer remained,
harsh measures might have visited himself personally.

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 215
Now, of that great assembly of divines and scholars
where Selden actually sat, and to which Ussher had been
invited but never came, we would speak with unaffected
reverence and affection. Baxter, not of them, pronounces
a warm eulogy on their worth and power. But when they
set themselves to prove, as Milton said in effect, that
"Presbyter was but old priest writ large,''
their own Presbyterianism of the confession and cat
echism, both which they had launched, and of the cov
enant prepared in Scotland, which, with slight modifica
tions, they had adopted and signed in England, — when
this they would make, to the exclusion of the Episcopa
lian and" the Independent and the Baptist, the sole faith
of the land and of its colonies, it was but copying in a
rounder hand, " writ large," as John Milton phrases it,
the sacerdocy that they and their fathers had denounced
in Bancroft and punished so sternly in Laud. Men, as
Cromwell more than once firmly and pathetically pleaded,
who had ventured their lives under the national banner
by land and by sea to secure the liberty of the people,
were not to be required thus to do violence to their own
consciences. The liberty of the nation, so won, had well
earned "soul-liberty" for the nation's champions. Yet
men like the godly Samuel Rutherford, the Scotsman,
whose letters Baxter is said once to have pronounced a
book next in place to the Bible, and Baxter himself, the
writer of the Saint's Everlasting Rest, — preached and wrote
against the new toleration. Herbert Palmer, a man of
genius and piety and noble connexions, and of high place

216 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
in the Westminster Assembly, preached also earnestly,
if not violently, against the doctrine. Petitions came up
from London, numerously signed, and sustaining the
same views. Do we recall these facts/in order to dispar
age the holy and able men who thus misjudged? Not so;
but to remind the Christians of our day that the religious
immunities, now so free and so unquestioned, were in those
days bought by a great fight of afflictions, and as by cruel
mockings and scourgings, and at the risk also of bonds
and imprisonment. .
Our own Baptist denomination was so manifestly and
universally identified with this question of religious tol
eration, that when some riotous soldiers of the Baptist
faith were brought before Sir Matthew Hale for interrupt
ing the worship of others, that upright magistrate empha
sized the inconsistency of it by men who as Baptists stood
so largely and strongly for liberty of conscience.
It has been said, that Roger Williams was not the dis
coverer of this great truth. He did not claim it. He
frankly spoke of earlier worthies of his own denomina
tion who had written — being in confinement and denied
the use of paper — their views on the paper stopper of the
flask containing the milk with which they were fed. That
stopper was unrolled into a sheet, and the milk was used
to write upon it; then, the sheet being held by the friends
who received it to the fire, it became discolored and
legible, and thus he said it had been before taught. And
Featley, a learned man, one of the few Episcopalians in
the Westminster Assembly, a good man, but a bitter one,
wrote of the book of Williams, mistaking and misrepre-

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 217
senting this statement. He said, in allusion to the re
ligious and fraternal tone of Williams' book, that it was
milk containing some rat's bane.
Not the originator of the truth, but proclaiming and
defending it at the peril of his own freedom and reputa
tion and influence, he was so far worthy of gratitude as
its earnest and self-sacrificing champion. So Jenner did
not claim to have discovered the power of vaccination.
Milkmaids, long before, had perceived the power of the
eruption to neutralize the dreaded and often fatal small
pox. Jenner staked his medical fame against the denun
ciations and dislike ,of his professional brethren in the
promulgation of the truth, and he earned righteously the
reward that the Parliament and a grateful nation awarded
him. Harvey is praised for giving currency to the great
fact of the circulation of the blood ; but it was virtually
hinted at by one of the old Christian Fathers centuries
before, and Solomon is thought by many to have taught
it when talking of the pitcher emptied and filled, and the
wheel revolving at fountain and cistern of the human
body. But because Harvey did not first suspect or dis
cover it, does Science erase his name from the scarcely-
crowded list of great discoverers ? So moral science and
religious freedom needed a stalwart and sinewy cham
pion, and Roger Williams was such. He had the sym
pathy of his friend, the younger Sir Harry Vane, one
of the greatest statesmen of Britain, to whom Milton
accords the distinction, which most statesmen have scarce
deserved, of knowing the bounds that part the civil from
the religious power. He had the sympathy of Cromwell,

218 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
of Milton, of Hutchinson, of Baptist soldiers like Harri
son and Dean and Lawrence, and of Baptist sailors like
Admiral Lawson, the associate and compeer of Blake;
but he arrayed against him the masses — the religious
masses ; and the herd of statesmen who walk in the well-
worn path of old precedents; and the distrust, loud, sacred,
and inveterate, of some very good and very devout Chris
tians. He persisted. It was said that England would be
made what Amsterdam had become by its wide tolera
tion — a very sink of all errors and of prodigious evils.
But he feared God and fainted not, and God's providence
blessed his courage ; and God's people in these later ages,
and over wide continents — farther west than his Indian
friends ever travelled, farther east than his incipient mis
sion zeal had ever ventured to spread its wings of holy
enterprise — God's people have learned to acknowledge
tardily, and some of them very begrudgingly, the justice
of these bold principles, and the safety of these greatly-
decried liberties for the individual conscience and for the
separately-worshipping assembly.
Yet he did not continue long a Baptist, but went over to
the Seekers. Some understood, in that day, by this term,
a body deserting all religion and sinking, in the phrase
ology of the day, into Nullifidians, or men of no faith.
It was a grievous misconception. Like the Plymouth
Brethren of our own time, they leaned too much on the
distinct line of spiritual descent. They wanted a regular
traceable line of spiritual genealogy, like the apostolic
orders of the High Church Episcopacy, or like the newly-
desiderated apostolate of the followers of Edward Irving.

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 219
They waited or sought — hence their name of Seekers —
such living apostles, such heaven-sealed orders. They
died without the sight. But they lost not their care for
man or their faith in God's great doctrines of the gospel.
Vane was with Williams ; some suppose Vane to have
been the teacher of Roger in this expectant attitude of
irresolution; others, like George Horn — a divine from
Holland, then visiting England, and writing of its relig
ious bodies — seem to regard Williams as the instructor,
in this dubiety and irresolution, of his friend Vane. He
was an honored and cherished guest at Vane's residence.
He returned to England in later times, and obtained a
charter from the restored Stuarts for his colony. A man
of fully lovable character, he seems to have been, by the
testimony of friends, and even the reluctant concessions
of enemies.
His magnanimity was singularly illustrated in his
using his knowledge of the Indians, and influence with
them, to avert from the colonies that had banished and
maligned him the butcheries of an Indian invasion. He
learned the Indian language and wrote in it, annexing
poetry of his own, English verse of the most rugged cha
racter. With the Dutch governor of our own good Man
hattan, he discussed the question of the origin of the
Indian tribes, his Hollander host inclining to suppose
the red man of our own forests and shores of the same
stock with Icelanders of Europe. A love of usefulness,
and a skill of winning hearts by simplicity and affection
ate earnestness, seem in his case to have been marked
traits. It is hard, therefore, to see some critics lightly

220 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
quoting impeachments of bitter foes upon his motives and
his truthfulness. Puritanism itself, the great dominant
body, that in some of its chief representatives he with
stood and foiled in discussion as to this great principle
of religious toleration — Puritanism, we say, has itself suf
fered sufficiently from satire and malign distortion of
character and motive, to make those who would defend it
as against the rival fame of Williams to remember that
" cruel mockings " have, from the days of Paul, the great
apostle of the Gentiles, been no uncommon attendant on
the steps of truly upright and eminently holy men.
Ben Jonson in the early days of the Stuarts, and But
ler, of Hudibras fame, in the later days of that family,
have poured out vials of scorn on the Puritan traits and
visage and dress and dialect; but the verdict of dispas
sionate history has not sustained the satire. And men who
know what the power of that great school has been, here
and in Britain, on national order and freedom and thrift
and valor, may well wonder that champions of Puritan
ism should seek to bring the like artillery of derision to
bear on services and risks and sacrifices like those of the
founder of Rhode Island. The ribald songsters of the
Restoration have done their worst to besmear the names
of the Cromwellian heroes and saints ; but each day is
making the libel more odious and incredible, and bright
ening the fame of the libelled into a higher lustre.
Not many years ago the remains of Williams were dis
interred. It was found that the roots of an apple tree
had penetrated the coffin-walls as they mouldered, and
followed the line of the skeleton with a curious fidelity.

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 221
It was as if to say, that the righteous are fruitful of good
even in the dust of their mouldering. And over a broad
republic — every day widening its territory and the sweep
of its influence, political, literary, and religious — it seems
to-day impossible to say how much of the national order
and happiness is traceable to the memory and example
of the man there entombed ; is the fruitage, under God's
benediction, of the sufferings and sacrifices of the weary
pilgrim and exile who there found repose.
A free church he taught — as against the logic of good,
eminently good, but narrow, fearfully narrow, minds, like
that of John Cotton — was safe to hold its own against
error and worldly power. The experiment has verified
the principle. The churches of primitive Christianity had '
done it, not only without such aid of the state, but as
against the power and bribes and fierce proscriptions of
the state, indignant and inveterately prejudiced.
But a free church demands something more than un
curbed license and general indifference. It is not, in our
own community, free rum at every corner, breeding a
brutal intemperance ; it is not free fraud, playing its own
dire will at ballot-box and registry-roll ; it is not free pec
ulation, draining your treasuries and consuming your
taxes and bribing your legislatures, — that will enable the
state to stand.
So guided and so drugged, it staggers, if its course be
unchecked, toward the rule of the strong-willed despotism,
as that power shall be intercalated with this, the sway of
the infuriated rabble.
A church, really and radically free, needs the Spirit,

222 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
the truth, and the presence of God. It will find these in
the faith that trusts a present Jehovah. It will lose them
if it make liberty, apart from truth and equity, its idol.
Truth itself, said Pascal in one of his profound utter
ances, severed from the love of the truth, may be an idol;
and liberty, if it be unprincipled and untaught, of the
earth earthy, is the sure bane of a people, and carries dis
solution into the party employing it and the nation per
mitting it.
No theme can be regarded, in our own land and in the
age upon which God has cast our lot, as more popular
than that of liberty. We stamp the head on our coins ;
and a foreign artist, from the country which gave to our
Revolutionary forefathers a La Fayette, proposes to rear
its towering image as a statue and lighthouse at the gates
of our own harbor; there, the winds of ocean sighing
around its head, the waves of ocean breaking at its feet,
to hail the emigrant landing on our shores, with its prom
ise as to the spirit welcoming him throughout our institu
tions, and thus also to remind the American, quitting his
country for the Old World, that in such a name he is to
brace himself against the allurements of mediaeval art,
and by such a memory to estimate aright the real worth
of ancient despotisms, gorgeous ' but oppressive, costly
and outworn.
But we are, perchance, in danger of forgetting that lib
erty, if a priceless treasure, is also a trust not to be dis
charged without effort and eager vigilance and anxious
sacrifice. It will not be its own guardian. Back of na
tions and governments, its security lies in the individual

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 223
conscience. Education and religion are among its indis
pensable conditions, and he who knew, better than sage
or jurist has ever gauged them, the capacities and the ne
cessities of the human soul, the glories and the sorrows
awaiting the nation, for he is the Wielder of the prov
idence which shapes the annals of the entire race, — he it
is who has said in one brief but inexhaustible sentence,
" The truth shall make j*ou free." It is only as man gets
access to the real, the true, the innermost core of things,
and the great controlling principle of duty, right, and
happiness; it is only in science, as we reach the truly
existent; and, in art, conceive and reproduce the intrin
sically beautiful ; and, in faith, get near to him, the Great
Verity of revelation and salvation, the Way, the Truth,
and the Life, — that man becomes personally and uncon
querably free. Fact — the combined grouping of the great
facts of God's making and God's telling and God's giving
— the fact is the very basis of true freedom.
Another great lesson of the Book, in which the world's
Maker tells the story of the world's making; and the
world's Ruler lays down his laws for the world's ruling ;
and the world's Redeemer discloses the great mystery of
the world's rescuing and restoring ; and the world's Judge
lays bare the grand materials he is storing up for the
world's inevitable and materiable dooming, — is, that only
as the Book of God becomes the manual of earth's lore
does the race become permanently, innocently, and fra
ternally free. He adds, by his apostle, a lesson reserved
for the age of higher illumination, that was to follow his
own ascension and his return to the Father, that " where

224 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty," where the Para
clete, proffering his influences, is welcomed, heeded, and
cherished, there only does man rise to the dignity of the
Lord's freedman. He warns us against the false teachers
who, promising liberty, should be themselves the servants
of corruption ; or who, in the hapless bondage of sin them
selves, could never become the channels of a true illumin
ation and the messengers of a permanent and indefeasible
enfranchisement. The closet, the sanctuary, the Sunday-
school, conversions, revivals, missions, all the enginery of
a resuscitated faith, and an energetic charity,, and a world
wide hope, are among the necessities of a true freedom.
For the Spirit's presence is the life-blood of liberty in any
high, just sense of the term ; and this Spirit, thus indis
pensable to the experience of soul-liberty, is a jealous and
holy Spirit, who must be revered ; a comprehensive, boun
teous, and self-surrendering principle in the regenerate
heart, that seeks light for all people and blessedness for
the whole tenantry of the round globe.
Out of these Bible relations, as between freedom and
truth, and as between liberty and the Divine Paraclete,
grow, then, our great social needs. We need, as persons, as
households, as neighborhoods and denominations and
nations, and as a race, a free press. Milton pleaded elo
quently for it in his Areopagitica. How did the State
Licenser and the Church Index of books to be expurgated
and books to be utterly prohibited stand up against the
claim ; but the cause of liberty has already gained, in
the lands of greatest illumination and progress, its claim.
It is a claim to be reopened and reargued, if the Syllabus

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 225
and the Personal Infallibility become the law of Chris
tendom. When the Prussian government consulted the
devout Neander as to the suppression of the work of
Strauss by state repression, he counselled its having its
free course, whilst Christianity was left free to answer.
The result showed the wisdom of the advice. Bunyan
spoke plaintively of being scarce able to see out of the
e3*es into which so much mud of obliquy had been flung.
Baxter bore, from Jeffreys, the most flagrant and violent
insults, uttered under the sanction of the judge's robes,
and as from the bench whence came, in the days of the
Stuarts, fines, incarceration, branding, and death. White-
field, as Cowper painted him, stood " pilloried " on Infa
my's high stage and bore the pelting scorn of half an age.
But the press of our day prints the biography of the
evangelist, and multiplies copies of the Pilgrim and
the Saint's Everlasting Rest, and never, except as anti
quarians disturb the dust-bin, now recalls the unsavory
missiles, with which the world once thought to extinguish
the reality of faith and the might of true godliness.
And so society needs, if it is to be made free and kept
free, a free school. It is only an instructed and a well-
principled people that can value and retain the freedom
inherited from patriotic and religious forefathers; and
society has its right over the household, to require that,
if its citizens vote, they know something of the principles
of morality, and the story of the nation's past, and the
outlines and scope of the nation's future duty and destiny.
Back of ballot-box, lies the town-school, and an education
that shall prevent the peasantry from becoming the pas-

226 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
sive, blind dupes of either the demagogue, the fanatic, or
the priest.
And so, too, the free church is needed ; not the commu
nity, that, thrusting aside Scripture and superseding God's
oracles by man's traditions, affects to overrule all secular
legislation by its ecclesiastical canons and political inter
dicts ; but the church, as Christ left it, building a king
dom not of this world, and in its separate, self-governed
assemblies preparing men to confront, personally and
directly, an open Bible, a present Saviour, and a regen
erating Spirit.
Such free church is of the essence, in this nineteenth
Christian century, of a free state. Aside from it, we
may see spiritual domination crushing out the last mut-
terings of dissent, and restoring the rule of Dominic, as it
was once in Mexico of the New World, and as it was in
Madrid and Rome of Europe, and at Goa of Asia in the
Old World.
Our churches, in their missions, did their share in
breaking down for the Bible, God's free code, its way to
the heathen myriads of India, against the barriers set up
by the great East India Company; and backed, too, though
those barriers long were, by the vast power of the British
government at home. Whilst God's Spirit is invoked and
trusted and obeyed, they can do the work over again, if it
needs to be done ; and by the help of the Omnipresent
and Omnipotent Christ, it is not arrogance to say, that
they can renew the conflict and repeat the victory, in the
right and might of him who to the end of the world is
with his loyal followers.

THE BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 227
As the dying Wesley said, "the best of all is, God is
with us." Shrivelled and wrinkled, and already smitten
with death, the poor old man's arm that was feebly waved
as he said the words ; but the truth that came from the
pale lips is imperishable and imprescriptible. Jehovah
floods with his omnipotence the whole field of human
activities and perils. Trust him, ye people, and your
cause is surer than the action of gravitation, and its
movement to final triumph swifter than the path of
the light. A God behind it ; a God before it ; a God
all around it. He inherits the past, dominates the fu
ture, and bids his people only know, grasp, and use the
present.

IX.
THE BAPTISTS
OP THE
COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE.
20

THE BAPTISTS

COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE.

When we speak of the Commonwealth as it arose on
the death of Charles I., we intend to include also the Pro
tectorate of Cromwell; and as many of the men formed
in that age did not end their earthly career until years
after Cromwell had been gathered to the tomb, we cannot
avoid grouping to some extent the period of the Stuart
Restoration, and a monarchy readjusted on the British
throne, with the era of the institutions which had pre
ceded, and to some extent had conditioned and limited,
such restoration.
Three great influences were contending for the control
of the people. The first was a supreme love for the
Bible; its motto, "It is written." It was an age of great
events and of remarkable men. The British constitution,
so long the boast of the nation and the object of admir
ing or envious regard on the part of other peoples, cannot
be understood without a thorough review of that era in
English history. For a time it seemed doubtful whether
the old kingly rule of the Tudors and the Stuarts would
not permanently give place to republican institutions, 231

232 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
such as the scholars of the land had pondered in the
history of Greece and Rome, and which had been in later
times reproduced in the free cities of Italy, as in the
Swiss confederacy on the Continent, and in the republic
of the United Netherlands, as the last arose after the mag
nificent birth-struggle of Holland and her fellow-prov
inces against the truculent power of Spain and Rome.
The original purpose of the British patriots who with
stood James the father and his son, Charles the First, in
their encroachments on the powers of Parliament and the
national freedom, had certainly contemplated no such
sweeping overthrow; but the necessities of the conflict,
and the proved duplicity of their king, and the reckless,
aggressive despotism of some of his counsellors, like Straf
ford, shut up the men who had originally taken arms to
vindicate rights most ancient and sacred, as did Eliot,
Pym, and Hampden, to make their protest effectual and
their reforms abiding by safeguards, that sheared royalty
of its trappings, and finally brought the king, as a truce-
breaker and a subverter of the constitution under which
his crown was held, to the ghastly, bloody scaffold.
In resisting the forces that sustained the king, the Par
liamentary leaders soon discerned, as Cromwell early saw
and forcibly stated it to his kinsman, the great patriot,
John Hampden, the need of enlisting a class of men as
soldiers who had intelligence and religious principle, a
Bible in their knapsacks, and a conscience behind their
sharp bayonets. The soldiers thus raised, who prayed as
well as fought, soon proved themselves invincible. Crom
well, whose valor and practical wisdom soon raised him

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 233
to higher posts, and clothed him with widening influence,
and made him necessary to the party of reform and of free
dom, had, we believe, no other than honorable and self-
sacrificing designs in his original engagement. As he
afterward said, " No man rises so high as he who knows
not whither he is going." It was true of him, that, not
aiming at present advancement, the very needs of his
country and the strong rush of God's providential lead
ings made the more firm and resolute and persistent
mind soon the master-spirit of the struggle of the land,
and, we may say, of the age.
It was an age which had recent and sad experience of
the need of resisting oppression, and that form of tyranny
especially which leaned on spiritual despotism. There
were men living and acting who had the Spanish Ar
mada among the recollections of their childhood. Its
memory was about Hobbes, the child of a parish minis
ter, in his nursery. The projects that had been foiled
in the detection and failure of the Gunpowder Plot were
among the youthful memories that shaped these men's
judgments of contemporary political movements. They
did not mean that in their time the funeral pyres of
Smithfield should be rekindled ; or that the St. Barthol
omew massacre in France, which the Roman Pontiff had
hailed with so wild an exultation ; or the terrible butch
eries of Alva in Holland, the smoke and gore of which
had chilled each Protestant heart through all Europe, —
should be re-enacted upon their own quiet island. Whilst
they in England and Scotland were in collision with their
ill-advised king, there occurred, in the sister and depend-

234 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ent island of Ireland, the terrible Irish massacre, like an
outburst of hidden volcanic fire. To relieve its sufferers;
the affrighted and plundered survivors, contributions
were raised not only in England, but in Protestant
Holland. Before the memory of that dread scene of
slaughter and conflagration passed from the minds of
Englishmen came the news, when the Protector had now
established his power, of the terrible slaughter of the
Waldensians in the valleys of Piedmont, and the news
also of its awakening, at the Sacred City, papal exulta
tion. There was also the well-known fact, that some of
the soldiery whom the ruler of Savoy used in butchering
these mountaineers were refugees from Ireland, whom
the stern measures of Cromwell had expatriated when he
subdued and quelled Ireland, and who but repeated on
the mountain-sides and in the vales of Piedmont atrocities
which they had first practised on their own Protestant
countrymen at home. Cromwell's interposition, through
Milton, his foreign secretary, was prompt, decisive, and
effectual. Savoy, though a distant power, had learned
that the Protector was not a ruler with whom they could
presume to be dallying or evasive, and the terrible mas
sacre was stayed from policy, when conscience had been
ineffectual to prevent its first inauguration.
A people thus schooled by burning memories to a dis
trust, intense and deep, of papal domination, leaned earn
estly to the study of that Bible whose general use by the
laity the papal see had so restricted, discouraged, and for
bidden. They had seen Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury,
and long a trusted counsellor of their King Charles in the

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 235
affairs of both England and Scotland, recognize, though
declining, the offer of a cardinal's hat from the Roman
Pontiff. They had felt, on their pastors or their own
households or persons, the heavy hand of priestly power
as it came down on the Puritan, and in the commonalty
alike of field and of camp the cause of Puritanism and
national freedom became speedily and almost inseparably
identified. Holland, again, that had, by such prodigies of heroism,
valor, and martyr endurance, achieved independence of
Spain, the greatest of European monarchies, had been, in
the days of the prelatical oppression upon British soil, to
many a fugitive both of English and Scottish origin, a
place of shelter and of residence more or less prolonged.
Its free institutions, its commerce, its industries, were
admired and emulated. The first colonies of some of
our New England settlements had found such shelter in
Holland before turning the prows of their vessels to this
Western wilderness. So many a Scottish Presbyterian,
who purposed returning to his own Scottish home, had
his acquaintance and his education in those free prov
inces. Our early English Baptists had, in like manner,
some of them, found the country, of such large commerce
and such open-handed hospitality, their temporary home.
Soldiery and peasantry in Britain, then loving and read
ing their Bibles, had a natural proclivity to remember
and to esteem their fellow-Protestants speaking a kindred
tongue, but dwelling in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leyden,
or Delft. Dreading the Spaniard, hating Rome, and cher
ishing freedom, it was an inevitable tendency that the

236 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
sympathies of Protestant Britain should flow very nat
urally toward the other land, with which they were as
neighbors so contiguous, and where Protestantism had
its free Bible and its free churches.
Baxter and Evelyn, authorities entirely distinct in
their alliances and surroundings, join in attesting the
early and rapid diffusion of Baptist sentiments among
the armies of Cromwell and his fellow-warriors, and the
influence which the views of this denomination soon at
tained with the ruling powers of the time. Baxter regret
ted, that he had not earlier accepted the appointment of
army-chaplain, that he might thus have withstood the
spread of denominational views which he held erroneous.
When, after delay, he joined the troops, he found his way
hedged, and his efficiency less than the good man hoped
it would be.
There were men among the clergy of that day, and ed
ucated in the English universities, who, when the repres
sive energies of the old prelacy were withdrawn and their
studies in the Scriptures were no longer thus circum
scribed by the fear of episcopal severities, joined them
selves to the Baptists. Cox, son of a bishop, was such a
one. Tombes of Bewdley, the learned antagonist of Bax
ter on the question of Infant Baptism, was another. Sam
uel Fisher, such a clergyman, originally of the Established
Church, published a folio volume against Infant Baptism.
He afterward went over from the Baptists to the Quakers,
with whom he became a zealous laborer by the tongue
and from the press. Hansard Knollys was another. One
of the Dykes, a man whose printed books, as well as his

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 237
preachings, were highly valued by the pious — one of his
volumes being translated into the German — was another
such accession to our body.
But in that day of religious fervor and activity, the
pulpit was often occupied by those not exclusively and
constantly devoted to the preacher's work. The laity
thought it not unfitting, often, to occupy the sacred desk,
if thus the lack of a faithful ministry might be supplied.
And there were among the laymen uniting themselves to
our body some of loftiest worth and high and varied ac
complishments. Colonel Hutchinson, himself a man of
education and intelligence and varied culture, became,
with his wife, Lucy, author of one of the best biographies
of the times, a convert to our denominational tenets. So
Robert Lilburn, another colonel, brother of the fearless
and irrepressible John Lilburn, the free-born Englishman,
as the latter called himself, was a Baptist. General Lam
bert, nearly related to Cromwell himself, is represented by
many writers of the times as being also a Baptist.
But the man in the ranks of the army who was most
prominent as a Baptist was General Thomas Harrison,
called by Andrew Bisset, a living writer in the history of
those times, " though one of the bravest and most honest,
not one of the wisest, of men." Such was his ardor and
enthusiasm in all that he undertook, that Baxter speaks
of him as being " of excellent natural parts for affection
and oratory, but not well seen [i. e. judicious, as the phrase
then meant] in the principles of his religion ; of a san
guine complexion ; naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity,
and alacrity as another man hath when he hath drunk a

238 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
cup too- much." Baxter himself had heard Harrison
once in a battle, when the enemy began to flee, with a
loud voice break forth into the praises of God "with
fluent expression," says Baxter, " as if he had been in a
rapture." When King Charles was at Hurst Castle in
December, 1648, and learned that troops had been sent
by Parliament to bring him to London, and with Harri
son in command of them, the king was in apprehension,
from what he had heard of the major's enthusiasm, that
Harrison might be his assassin. But on the road the
king was struck with the appearance of the commander
of the military squadron, "gallantly mounted, with a
velvet montero on his head, a new buff coat, and a crim
son silk scarf around his waist." The king in passing
gave a military salute, graciously acknowledged, and was
surprised soon to learn that this was the dreaded Major
Harrison. The king said, " he looked a real soldier, and
if there might be trust in faces, was not the man to be an
assassin." Standing before the fire, at the mansion where
they rested, in a crowded room, the king singled out Har
rison, and drew him into conversation for half an hour.
Harrison indignantly disavowed all treacherous intents,
but frankly added, that, before the law, great and small
must be alike subject. A good man— Newcome — after
ward blessed God for having missed Harrison's acquaint
ance, for he, Newcome, had heard of him as " a most in
sinuating man," but a very decided Separatist, who might
have won Newcome to the same views. He, with Hutch
inson, was among the Baptists as judges of the king, sign
ing the warrant for the execution of Charles I. after his

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 239
trial. When Oliver Cromwell broke up the Rump Parlia
ment, Harrison accompanied and aided him. After sit
ting silent and listening to the debates of the body, the
great general whispered to his friend Harrison, " This is the
time; I must do it." Harrison took Lenthall, the speaker
of the Parliament, by the hand, and led him from the
speaker's chair. Looking on the mace, which lay on a
table, the emblem of the speaker's dignity, Cromwell
exclaimed, "What shall we do with this fool's bauble?
Here ; take it away," said he, turning to give it to a mus
keteer; and then the sturdy Protector, locking the door,
put the key in his pocket. Benjamin West, the Amer
ican painter, has made this the subject of one of his pic
tures, which has also been engraved. When Cromwell,
with his twelve thousand men, set sail to avenge in Ire
land the atrocious massacre, the army observed a day of
fasting and prayer before embarkation. Goffe, the regi
cide, afterward a refugee in Connecticut, and Harrison _
and Cromwell, each, after prayer by ministers, expounded
certain portions of Scripture that seemed pertinent to the
occasion. It was by this expedition of Cromwell, which
was so effective, that the Rebellion was permanently put
down; and to this day, in remembrance of its stern effect
iveness, the Irish Catholics have the phrase, to express
terrible indignation, " The curse of Cromwell be on you !"
As Carlyle says of that expedition, " Cromwell descended
on Ireland like the Hammer of Thor. He smote the land
once, never to be reunited against him any more."
Besides Hutchinson's and Harrison's signatures to the
death-sentence of Charles L, it has also that of Deane,

240 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
one of Cromwell's favorite officers, whom a descendant of
Deane in his recent biography of the admiral represents
as also a Baptist. His master, Cromwell, gave him a
command in Scotland, where his influence in preserving
peace and order was marked and abiding. He was pas
sionately attached to the person and interests of Crom
well — more so than some other Baptists.
Harrison, with others of these, leaned either to a reg
ular republic, or hoped a return of Christ to the earth in
his millennial kingdom, and he became disaffected to
ward the Protector on his assumption of supreme power.
Cromwell seems to have dreaded as well as respected him ;
and among the last measures of Cromwell's life was an
order for the imprisonment of his old fellow-soldier, now
an opponent of his sovereign domination. At the return
of the king, Charles II., Harrison was brought to trial
with circumstances of great indignity and brutal violence,
. but he preserved a heroic serenity, and suffered with an
attachment to the cause of freedom, religious and polit
ical, for which we may well cherish and honor the mem
ory of this illustrious Baptist.
It is to be remembered, to the honor of his tolerant
spirit, though himself an outspoken Baptist, he had as
one of his military chaplains a Mr. Joseph Whiston, " a
very pious man," as his nephew, the celebrated William
Whiston, declares, " but who wrote several books for In
fant Baptism." The soul-liberty for which Roger Wil
liams contended, this Baptist commander recognized in
his subordinate chaplain, a Pa3dobaptist, and yet not, by
his rejection of Baptist views, forfeiting the confidence

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 241
and regard of his superior officer, so staunch a Baptist
himself. In the fleet of England, which became on the sea as
celebrated for its valor and prowess as was the army on
land, was a large sprinkling of Baptist officers. When
Montague, afterward made Lord Sandwich, was put in
charge of this navy by the party who were projecting
measures for the restoration of Charles II., he took pains,
as his secretary, Pepys, assures us, to remove " the Ana
baptist captains" quietly, as far as he could, dreading their
especial and instinctive opposition to the measure. But
the chief in sway of the body of the fleet was Vice- Admiral
Sir John Lawson, a Regular Baptist, who had arisen by
merit and valor from a low position. Wild, a clerical
poet and satirist of the times, alludes to his as a formid
able influence, to be feared in withstanding Monck's and
resisting the return of the Stuarts. But Lawson's judg
ment was in favor of the Restoration, and he brought over
the fleet, as did Monck the army. Clarendon, the his
torian, and long the chief statesman, of Charles II., speaks
of Lawson as a very able and brave man, though, as he
says, "a mere sea-dog" in the roughness of his habits,
but of eminent judgment in the conduct of the navy.
He was the real chief in a great engagement at sea in
June, 1665, in which the Dutch admiral Opdam was
blown up, and Van Tromp, another of the greatest offi
cers of Holland, compelled to retire, a great number of
the Dutch vessels being destroyed. Lawson received a
wound, which compelled his withdrawal from the deck
and command ; and the Duke of York, the nominal, be-
n Q

242 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
coming the real, commander, the fight was broken off, as
some think cravenly, and the victory, though a very great
one, was prevented from reaching a crushing complete
ness. Carried home to England, his wound proved fatal.
Aspiring to a high marriage for one of his daughters
where her affections had been engaged, he raised a por
tion, as he said to his friend Clarendon on his deathbed,
which would leave his widow and remaining daughters
destitute ; and the dying warrior besought for them a
pension. Clarendon secured it as long as he was in
power; but being himself displaced not long after, the
family were probably deprived of it. Clarendon, no friend
of Baptists, is large in his praises, declares him to have
shared in the great victories of Blake, which still remain
among the highest naval illustrations of British valor,
and pronounces him, withal, "one of the most modest
of men."
The Bible enumerates " the honorable women " who
clung to the apostles and the gospel. It is not unfitting
to allude to some of the same sex who, in these days
of conflict, adhered to our denominational confession.
Chambers, in his Domestic Annals of Scotland, speaks of a
Lady Wallace, baptized when the army of Cromwell came
into Scotland; and on our shores you will remember a
Lady Moody of our faith, settled on Long Island Sound
in the early days of the government of Stuyvesant over
New Amsterdam. Mrs. Hutchinson, the daughter of Sir
Allen Apsley, the lieutenant of the Tower, stood not
alone among the cultured women of rank- who joined
themselves to our churches.

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 243
Among the great preachers of the age was Vavasor
Powell, called, for his zeal and energy, the Apostle of
Wales, a staunch Baptist. Kiffin, one of their preachers
in London, was a wealthy merchant as well. But from
some cause, Kiffin, though a good man, seems to have
been somewhat disaffected toward his greater contem
porary, the illustrious author of the Pilgrim's Progress,
John Bunyan. Two of Kiffin's grandsons, young men
of piety, took part in the ill-advised rising in favor of the
Duke of Monmouth, and were among the victims of Jef
freys. When James II. found his Protestant subjects
alienated from him, he endeavored to enlist Kiffin, then
aged, in his favor by summoning the old afflicted mer
chant and pastor to court ; but Kiffin alluded frankly to
the terrible blow suffered in the death of his grandsons,
the Hewletts. The stolid monarch proposed to find, as he
said, " a plaister for that sore ;" but the speech was as
hard as the nature of the unhappy king and the heart
of his ruthless judge. Soon deserted by his own daugh
ters, Mary and Anne, the wretched king may have
learned at length to sympathize with Kiffin in some
incompetent, insufficient fashion. "My own children
have forsaken me," said plaintively the saddened but
unrelenting tyrant.
The relation of the Quakers to the Baptists was in the
age of the later Stuarts close, though not always friendly,
and at times fiercely hostile. George Fox, their founder, is
said to have had an uncle who was a Baptist. Many of
his (Fox's) early associates had left the Baptists to join
the new body. Tallack, in our own day, an English

244 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Quaker, has written a volume of interest on this subject,
but his book does by no means exhaust the topic. Bar
clay, in a posthumous volume just leaving the press, has
traced the connection of the founder of his body with the
Mennonites of Holland, our spiritual kindred in the
Provinces. Bunyan eagerly, on the other side of the
Atlantic, impugned these principles, as did Roger Wil
liams on this shore; and the volumes of both need to be
consulted in presenting the divergencies that widely sep
arate us from them in our views of the authority of the
written word, of the permanence of the ordinances, and
of the witness and work of the Holy Ghost.
Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Baptist and Quaker
bravely incurred severest persecution from the Crown and
the dominant church in fidelity to their convictions.
Charles II. had, before reaching England, in his Decla
ration of Breda, as it was called, pledged himself to
measures of tolerance and gentleness. These engage
ments he chose to neglect, and a Parliament, rampant
in its opposition to the Puritanism that had ruled, sup
ported and enhanced the cruel breach of compact.
The full measure of guilty intolerance has not yet been,
perhaps never can be at this late day, presented ; but in
pillories where sufferers like a Keach stood; in prisons
where inmates like a Bunyan toiled, prayed, wrote, and
preached, and where a Vavasor Powell and a De Laune
pined, the work of God had still its currency, "a fire
shut up" that was not yet extinct, though Court and Par
liament, and Cabinet hoped, if violence and fines and scorn
and threats could do it, that there should be an end of

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 215
dissent, and Puritanism should go down into dishonored
silence. It was not to be. The press spoke what the pulpit
might not. And to the honor of the Quakers it should
be ever recorded that their meek, multitudinous, passive
resistance to oppressive edicts finally discouraged and
exhausted an intolerant Court. Quakerism helped to
choke the prisons of England to repletion, and to drive
jailers and judges into despair.
When James shifted his policy in the hope of building
up by the sovereign power, dispensing with the persecut
ing laws, his claim to absolutism — such as his grand
father, James I., had affected and illegally claimed, but
which Coke and Selden had resisted — and expected also,
in the shadow of indulgence granted to numerous Non
conformists, to bring indulgence, and ultimately power
and sovereignty, to the fewer Catholic sufferers, the Non
conformists generally discountenanced measures of relief
thus brought about by treading down law and the power
of the Parliament enacting law. They shrunk, most of
them, also from the proffer of civil and municipal em
ployment made them by the Court to entice their leading
ministry to support the papal policy of the Crown. Bun
yan was among such repudiators of court patronage and
favor, when some of .his Baptist brethren, less farsighted
and less self-denying, accepted the bribe and sustained
the insidious schemes of the monarch.
From Holland, the land so often of refuge to the perse
cuted Presbyterian of Scotland and the hunted Puritan
and Baptist of England, was to come, in God's good prov-

246 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
idence, relief for English religion and English liberty. The
Prince of Orange, William III., the son-in-law of James
II., as decided a Protestant as was his wife's parent a
bigoted Romanist, commanded and accompanied a fleet
which brought the Revolution of 1688 and put a final
period to the Stuart dynasty.
Now, in that very Holland whence Christian England
thus received timely and effectually relief,- God had,
during this Stuart dynasty, and in earlier years than
theirs, a home and shelter for large bodies of men, in
their views of infant baptism sympathizing with us, but
in their views of war and oaths approximating the
Quakers. Among them were men of eminence for genius
and for literary activity. The greatest poet of Holland,
Joost van Vondel, whom the critics of that country put
on the plane of rivalry with Milton and Shakespeare, was
a Mennonite. But he joined that portion of the body
sympathizing with the Remonstrants, or Arminians ; and
after a time, in his later years, he went over, like Dryden,
his British contemporary, to the Romanist communion.
The Mennonites, like Menno himself, seem to have regard
ed affusion as sufficient baptism. Martin Duncan, a Ro
man Catholic priest in Holland, writing against Menno,
in his lifetime and whilst an imperial edict set a price on
Menno's head, holds language intimating that such affu
sion was, in Menno's view, sufficient. But there were Ana
baptists and Anabaptist martyrs in Holland before Menno
himself had yet left the Roman communion. That some
of these preferred and practised immersion, we infer from
the fact that their persecutors, who delighted in fitting the

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 247
penalty, as they cruelly judged it, to the fault, put many
of them to death by full immersion, swathing the
sufferers in large sacks which confined arms and
feet, and then huddling the sacks with their living con
tents into huge puncheons, where the victims were
drowned. So the Swiss Anabaptists, some of them at
least, immersed in rivers. This appears from the work
Sabbata of Knertz, a contemporary Lutheran. The
Dunkers, too, on our shores, who were driven from
a Swiss or German source, are immersionists in their
own fashion.
A small, but in its day a very distinguished, branch of
the Mennonites, too, were on principle immersionists.
These were the CoUegiants, or Rhynsburgers. Now,
amongst them, was Conrad van Beuningen, in his youth a
teacher among them. He retained his principles, though
devoting himself at the call of his country to political
life as an ambassador. With the Oxenstierns of Sweden,
and the Turennes of France, and the Stuarts of England,
he was brought into personal relations. Louis XIV. had
a dislike to him, from his influence and his strong Protes
tantism ; but he was propitiated on the personal approach
of the eminent diplomatist. It was said of him by his
admiring countrymen, that he carried the keys of the
Cabinets of all Europe with him. A Psedobaptist theolo
gian and historian of his own country, wonders at and
compassionates this great statesman, that he so devoted
himself to the study of prophecy. For with all his polit
ical greatness, he was. like Napier of Scotland and Sir
Isaac Newton of England, a reverent student of the pro-

218 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
phetic Scriptures. He reached an advanced age, but from
unhappy investments he is said to have spent his last"
days in poverty.
In times later than these, in the following century, this
same community of Holland immersionists received the
accession of Wagenaar, one of the historians of Holland,
whose work, in numerous volumes, is still consulted. The
body has nearly ceased to exist. Some funds for orphans
that it possessed are still applied by the other branch of
the Mennonites to youths, who have the choice of baptism
by the method of the CoUegiants or that of the Men
nonites. Thus, in people so distinct in some periods of their
history, and so closely allied at other eras, as the nations
of Holland and Britain, it has been seen that God's free
Bible, in the hands of a free church, has not been without
its approximating effects in the judgments to which it has
led its students.
Among the two bodies, however, Rationalism, to which
we have before alluded, has alike written itself the waster
and the overthrower. The older Mennonites of Holland
have become greatly shrivelled in numbers, as compared
with their ancestors ; and some of their scholars, amongst
others Halbertsma, a Holland scholar, personally known
to Southey, and a Mennonite minister, have written, as
not long since the Quakers of England in regard to a
like diminution in their own body also did, to inquire
into the causes of this loss of their old hold on the na
tional heart.
The General Baptists of England— a body which in the

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 249
days of the Restoration had a scholar and pastor like
-Grantham, author of a folio volume on religious doctrine
and ritual, and in the main evangelical — passed over after
the days of Grantham to Arianism and Socinianism ; and
though having scholars among them like James Foster
and Toulmin, their diminution was sure and irremedi
able. It was only as they had raised up among them men
comparatively ignorant, but full of faith and of the Holy
Ghost, like Dan Taylor and the late John G. Pike and
Amos Sutton, that the work of disintegration was arrested.
An open Bible and a free church contain the elements of
success whilst men consult and invoke the Holy Spirit —
not when they neglect and provoke and repel him.
It is in the character of a people like the English and
like the Americans that the play of such influences is
most distinctly visible. Give to a solitary reader — give
to a community of religious worshippers — the Bible, but
with the continual inculcation that his own reason is to
such student and such assembly paramount as author
ity over every and any other spirit ; let a people, however
cultured, erudite, and keen-sighted, learn to proclaim the
strength of their own wisdom, to dictate to the Most High •
the chapters and contents of his own oracles ; every man
becomes, as Coleridge expresses it — once himself infected
with the error, but happily learning earnestly to deplore
it — " every man becomes his own revelation." " If the
light that is in thee be darkness," said the most gracious
and the most wise of teachers, " how great is that dark
ness." Into such an error it was that the princely intellect of

250 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Milton seems to have been beguiled and precipitated.
He who in his early days as a schoolmaster had led his
students to the small compend of Ames on Theology,
thoroughly Puritan and evangelical, became apparently
in his later days a student and proselyte of the Socinian
works printed in Holland, and afterward gathered there
into the large and bulky folios of the Fratres Poloni. Re
jecting the full deity of our Lord, he yet held our views
of baptism, though he seems to have regarded the use of
flowing, living water as essential to the just administra
tion of the ordinance. His third wife, who long survived
him, returned after his death to her native place in
Cheshire and joined the Baptist church there, the pastor
of which preached her funeral sermon, which he also
printed. Macaulay made the remark, that England, in the days
of the Stuarts, produced but two great works of creative
genius ; the one was the Paradise Lost, the other was the
Pilgrim's Progress. It is matter of honest exultation and
of devout gratitude to God that Bunyan was, with his
brilliant genius, thoroughly evangelical. As to Milton,
we accept his attestation as a scholar to the Bible evidence
for immersion as baptism and for the regenerate as its
proper recipients; but with his aberrations of doctrine
we have no sympathy more than with similar errors of
Arian character in that great philosopher, Sir Isaac New
ton, who yet so honored our denominational fidelity to
the ordinances and church polity of the New Testament
as to believe us, with his own favored and favorite Ari
ans, one of the two witnesses described in the book of

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 251
the Apocalypse, loyal whilst Christendom wavered and
swerved. No force of language can be too strong to deplore any
disposition that may be displayed to ignore or to super
sede the indispensable energy of the Holy Ghost as neces
sary to the true life and the continuous growth of the
Christian Church. The Christ who went up to heaven, by
charge august as aught belonging to so vast and wide and
far-descended kingdom must be — by charge emphatic
and deliberate — commended the church — about to be
seemingly widowed, when his bodily presence should
be withdrawn from her — to the care and custody of
the Paraclete. "He shall receive of mine and shall
show it unto you. All things that the Father hath
are mine; therefore, said I, that he shall take of mine
and show it unto you." Pentecost was, as he said, in
his solemn and final leavetaking, to precede the set
ting out of his apostles on their errand of evangeliza
tion to all the earth. And all the earth combined, apart
from and in forgetfulness of that Paraclete, can only suc
ceed in depraving the evangel and in cancelling the apos
tolic commission. Its colleges cannot supply his place.
Its sciences, be they in their topic material or immaterial,
cannot, under the conduct of any finite mind, however
brilliant, acute, or persistent, affect to ignore him, the
Original, the Infinite, the Divine Mind.
Pascal, one of the loftiest intellects of the race, ever
gratefully acknowledged the justice and value of a lesson ,'
set him by his father, that the things of religion have an
evidence of their own. The Divine Spirit speaking to

252 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
man's own spirit and conscience is such sufficient and is
such ever-near evidence.
In the training of royal pupils, it was one of the weak
indulgences of ancient times that a lad brought up with
the young prince was made to bear vicarious punishment
whenever the kingly nursling was disobedient or heedless
or wilful. A favorite of the unhappy Charles I. was Sir
George Murray, who had thus in the days of the nursery
and the boyhood been, as it was called, " the whipping-
boy" to Prince Charles, taking for his own palm or
shoulders the punishment due to the recreant prince. In
our own times we hear of men of science who summon
up the august form of John Milton to serve as whipping-
boy for the prophet Moses. But is the scandal saved or
the popularity honestly cherished by resorting to such
methods? If Moses be in fault, let Science with a firm
fidelity, like that of the old Christian martyrs, bring
Moses to the scourge. But let it be also remembered that,
in the judgment of the Christian community, there is
truth in the saying of the Judge, " Inasmuch as ye have
done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it
unto me."
Cite Moses or cite Paul, and make the scourge fall on
the beloved disciple John as well. But we are persuaded
that, as it has been found true of ancient times, so it will
be found in later ages also, the Author of the volume will
put in, by his providence, an appearance, when the cita
tion is served, on behalf of the scribe of his own edicts-
and the penman of the Oracles which the Unerring dic
tated and the Unslumbering guards.

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 253
In the days on which we have dwelt, Spain had little
of the Bible, and France cared to have little. Instead
of the ancient volume, came the canon and the missal,
the index of prohibited books, and the lives and legends
of the saints. Was it for the gain of the race and the
enfranchisement of the land?
France, in later days, had comparatively abolished the
Bible. Did the creed of the Savoyard vicar, as Rousseau
eloquently indited it, and the great Encyclopsedia of Dide
rot, amply supply the lack ?
England and Holland in their best days grew great and
kept their greatness by the Bible. Man needs God more
than God needs man.
Each epoch of culture proclaims the truth. England
had had in the days of the Lancaster kings the proffer
of God's book by Wyckliffe and his Lollards. Her spurn
ing, as a government, of the boon, redounded not to her
freedom or order. In the days of Edward VI., she had
the proffer renewed. The martyrs hailed it and the com
mon people, but the nobles and the sovereign in the next
disastrous reign spurned it. What was the wail of the
broken-hearted Mary over the loss of Calais compared
with her secret sorrow over a barren marriage and a love
less and truant husband and a disaffected people ? When,
in Elizabeth's time, the renewed proffer met with a more
cordial appreciation, Spain felt it, and all Britain felt it,
and all Europe knew of it. When, in the days of James I.,
Puritanism appreciated what the king and his flatterers
did not, with these Puritans was the glory and the future
of England's prosperity. When, in the days of Charles I.,

254 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
the conflict began, with whom was the manhood of the
nation? And, in all after-times, how much of English
liberty is traceable to the resuscitation, in the Revolution
of 1688, of very much which had been undervalued in
the Restoration? In that Restoration, the Reign of the
Saints, as it had been scoffingly called, had been replaced
by the Reign of the Harlots. For British freedom and
honor, what would have been the auguries had the policy
of Charles II. and James II. prevailed, and, pensioned by
Louis XIV., they had forced on England the absolutism
which he, the lord paramount, paying their pensions, had
forced on France ?
It was said, when referring to the signal forces signifi
cant of the epoch that we have been together considering,
that in it three great principles were at strife, each con
tending for dominion over man's conscience. The one of
these was the paramount authority of God's Book, a free
Bible, open for all to consult, apart from priest, synod, or
pontiff, and which every man, from the ruler on the
throne to the beggar in his hovel, was alike bound to
know, to heed, and to obey. The motto of this school,
as the rule inaugurating all inquiry and the judgment
closing all debate, was, " It is written." The saying of
Chillingworth, " The Bible, the Bible only, is the religion
of Protestants," was the shape into which this principle
of the paramount authority of Scripture would be cast
by the Latitudinarian school, of which Chillingworth
was an ornament. Our own churches, in that age as in
a later, would regard the rule as more justly stated and as
leading to safer results when it ran, " The Bible, as read

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 255
by the light of that Holy Spirit who gave it, whose aid
it bids us implore, and whose influence it requires us to
experience and to reproduce." Baptists would, therefore,
condense the principle of religious hope and the law of
religious life into somewhat other utterance. The proto-
martyr Stephen witnessed of "the lively oracles." The
disciples of Christ must be men divinely taught, person
ally regenerate, and then grafted by ordinances into
churches. "A living spirit, consulted in the lively
oracles, and radiated through living churches," would
present the Paraclete, the Bible, and the Church, as the
Baptists held them, all grouped together in the just rela
tions of the Interpreter, the oracle, and the disciple.
In following out these views of Christian doctrine, our
fathers confronted the pillory and the dungeon and the
scaffold ; but persecution neither extinguished their testi
mony nor exploded their influence. Against the great
principle of the individual right to study the Bible, and
to carry out, into independent church organization, its
requirements as to Christian duty and brotherhood, there
were men, many, zealous, and influential, whose appeal
was to the examples of the Fathers and to sacred usages
inherited from hoar antiquity. They relied on tradition
and pleaded the authority of the collective church in her
councils. They cited the Fathers, and dwelt on the
stories of the saints, and argued for the recognition of a
visible head and the decisive deliverances of a personal
arbiter. But, sifted and analyzed, the record was often
found of imperfect character and uncertain date. Gravest
conclusions were built on " overdated rules," to use a

256 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
phrase of Milton's. The opinions and divergent traditions
of men were made to hide and choke Scripture, just as
the Saviour charged the Pharisees with bringing into dis
credit and oblivion the Scriptures of the prophets by
intervening and baseless traditions of their own author
ship. Father against Father, council against council, the
inquirer was left in a maze of vague hagiology and hurt
ling canons. The essence of the doctrine of this school,
closely analyzed, was found to be, when Sinai and
Patmos had thundered, " It is written," that there arose a
new queen, stately and imposing, but her credentials,
when fully investigated, were found to be, " It is rumored."
The Fathers say it there ; the councils decree it thus ; the
pontiffs, by the ban and interdect, Index and Inquisition,
have claimed to settle creed and rite finally and infallibly
and inevitably ; but history says, the pontiffs were not all
good men, and contradicted each other, and perverted
Scripture, and sacrificed true martyrs. And if many
" winds of doctrine " come out of these many and collid
ing authorities, the wise inquirer must look elsewhere for
the refuge of his soul than to any code whose vital prin
ciple proves to be at last the practices, the judgments and
traditions and opinions, of men — " It is rumored." Man's
sayings, however numerous, may not supersede, much
less contradict, the handiwork of Jehovah as he sent
and his people and miracles endorsed, prophet, apostle
and evangelist.
The Stuarts of England under James I., the son of a
Romanist mother, Mary Queen of Scots, intrigued for the
alliance of Catholic Spain, then in colonies, armies and

THE COMMONWEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 257
treasuries and territories, the leading power of Europe.
In Charles I. they were united, by matrimonial alliance,
with Catholic France, when the apostasy of Henry IV.
from Protestantism had won him a throne; but his
daughter Henrietta Maria was the evil counsellor of her
husband, a kindly, irresolute, untruthful man, with whom
his subjects could make no peace, because he had no
sincerity. Charles II., reckless, despotic, though court
eous, keen-sighted, and witty, was secretly a convert to
Catholicism, a pensioner of Catholic France, and intrig
uing to subvert the religion and freedom of his British sub
jects. His brother James, of a more rugged and open
nature, but bigoted and avowed in his attachment to
Catholicism, took precipitate and arbitrary means for the
introduction of despotism and the restoration of Cathol
icism, that forfeited for himself and for his dynasty the
throne of Britain.
In withstanding the attempts of this family, conscious
or unconscious, indirect or avowed, to resuscitate the sway
of tradition and to extrude the authority of Scripture
only, the patriots of Britain were called to strive through
an entire century as against immense odds ; but surely no
man can say that the fall of the Stuart dynasty was other
than a blessing for the cause of freedom and enlighten
ment, throughout their own dominions not only, but
throughout Europe and the world.
And yet the two principles, Scripture and Tradition,
were not the only winds of doctrine that blew over the
nation and the age. There was in the minds of many
potent leaders of opinion, not only those filling univer-
22* K

258 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
sity chairs or church pulpits, presiding on the bench of
justice, or occupying seats at the cabinet, or swaying the
debates of Parliament, but those found in studies and in
libraries haunted by quiet, meditative scholars, a third
great power. It was a philosophy that, with many a
theologian even, shaped and colored his whole system of
doctrine and determined his mode of expounding Scrip
ture. It was his controlling philosophy. Bacon had given
a new and wiser direction to the research and speculation
of men ; but since his time had arisen a Hobbes in Eng
land and a Spinoza in Holland, whose works are yet
reproduced, and whose influence is far from being ex
hausted even on the minds of our own age. And the
scholars of some of these men claimed for the reason of
man a power to set aside and nullify the verities of Holy
Writ. Analyzed to the last results, the philosophy would
be found to rest on the opinions of some single strong
mind, plausibly stated, perchance, and by a throng of
eager disciples passionately sustained. Its ultimate es
sence would be " It is Thought." Arbitrary power in the
court of the Stuarts cited the principles and paraded the
maxims of Hobbes, and the wild Epicurean riot of prof
ligate and shameless courtiers grew proud and defiant on
the same mental sustenance. If an obsequious chaplain
prescribed passive obedience as due from each subject
evermore to the Crown, a bacchanal horde was eager to
shout its implicit faith in the fashionable skepticism when
a crowd of ambitious and venal converts were hurrying
to proclaim implicit faith in conclaves and pontiffs. So
the Christian thinkers of the times of the later Stuarts

THE COMMONAVEALTH AND PROTECTORATE. 259
when maintaining ancestral liberties and primitive, scrip
tural doctrine, found themselves in conflict, direct and
unavoidable, with absolutism, not merely in the state,
but with absolutism in the Romanist Church and its
priests, and with skepticism, now Deistic, now Atheistic,
now Pantheistic, on the part of those who exaggerated
the powers and prerogatives of human reason.
The men who stood by the strong rock, " It is written,"
and belieA'ed that heaven and earth might pass away
sooner than one sentence thus inscribed by the Omniscient
and the Unchangeable Mind of the One Maker, Redeemer,
and Judge, had to watch against the outnumbering masses
of the advocates of precedent, authority, and tradition,
who cried, " It is rumored ;" and, on the other hand, had
to hold their position as against a less numerous, but not
less hostile and less effective, host of foes, who exagger
ated the powers of man's mind in the intent to disparage
the claims of the Divine Mind, and who called, in the
names of Hobbes and Spinoza, men to drop the Bible
and hold the Saviour's claims in suspense until they had
first obtained the assent and endorsement of man's fickle,
fallible intellect. These worshippers of Reason had hurled,
with what to themselves seemed a serene scorn, against
the psalm of the Covenanter and the prayer of the Pur
itan and the text of Bible-loving, Bible-quoting churches,
the dread intimation, " Such, ye bigots and devotees, is
not the judgment of Spinoza, the utterance of Hobbes,
'It is thought.'"
What the Fathers did wisely, bravely, and well— what
the Fathers held victoriously against vast odds, when the

260 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Traditionists pealed, "It is rumored," when the Philos
ophers exclaimed, " It is thought," our spiritual ancestry
replying with a calm burst, " It is written, and let God,
thus writing, be true though every man be a liar" — is
wise for us also, is a just saying and a brave for you and
for me this day; and through the morrow, whatever
changeful fashions that morrow may bring; and into
the far eternity.

JOHN BUNYAN.

JOHN BUNYAN.

It is a principle with which teachers of rhetoric have
been wont to arm their pupils, and a caution also em
ployed by instructors in biblical interpretation to warn
the young exegete against carrying into minutest detail his
explanation of parable or emblem, that " no metaphor can
be expected to run on all fours." What might, from its
likeness in some respects, be a just illustration, would yet,
in other regards, fail to be a parallel, apt and adequate, for
the truth which it was quoted to explain, and jar pain
fully or ludicrously on the disciple's mind. And this
difficulty would be greatly enhanced if, besides touching at
four, it should be held necessary that the symbol and the
original tally at forty not only, but at four hundred, or
even, it may be, at four thousand, points of contact and
mutual resemblance. Yet such is the very essence of suc
cessful allegory. It demands that the approximations be
tween the emblem and its original should be continu
ous and multitudinous; that, through a long-drawn nar
rative, and in the course, it may be, of a journey lasting
for months and covering wide regions, there should be no
grievous dissonance between the lesson to be taught and
the story intended to embody and suggest that lesson.
263

264 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Masters of imagination and of utterance have here failed
signally. Dryden's White Hind is but grotesque when
talking Tridentine theology. It is the vastness of the
risk thus run, and the rare distinction of eminent suc
cess where failure is so easy and has been so general, that
makes the felicity of Bunyan as an allegorist. Goldsmith's
mind was, both in judgment and in compass, far inferior
to that of his great friend Samuel Johnson. But he said,
wisely and wittily, that had the great lexicographer under
taken to write fables like iEsop's, and the subject of the
fable should be minnows, he would make his little fishes
talk like huge whales. His ponderous character would
break the spell of the natural. The late Prof. De Morgan,
a man devoted to the exact sciences, and speaking in con
sequence with more precision of utterance than others,
has said of the author of the Pilgrim's Progress, " He is
all but universally held to be the greatest master of alle
gory that ever wrote."* So the Westminster Review, an
authority with no leanings toward the author's school
or theme, calls it "an allegory the most remarkable in
the world." f Contrast either of his great books of this
class, the Pilgrim or the Holy War of the Elstow tinker,
with the Faerie Queen, the great poetical allegory of Spen
ser. You recognize in Spenser an imperial richness of
fancy, and a melodious sweetness of rhythm, with which
the Nonconformist artisan and preacher could not begin
to cope. But what a sense of weariness soon steals over
the admiring reader of the mellifluous and radiant page.
* Budget of Paradoxes, London, 1872, p. 447.
f October, 1837, p. 118.

JOHN BUNYAN. 265
The writer has left his magnificent poem unfinished; had
it been completed by the author, the perusal would be
left, we fear, incomplete by most who had begun to be its
readers. The unnatural and the unreal breaks through
all the" gorgeousness of imagery and the delicious afflu
ence of style. The queen, Elizabeth, and her antagonist,
Mary Queen of Scots, who shine among Spenser's veiled
personages, are far more glorious and impressive on the
prose pages of Froude than under the poetic touches even
of an Edmund Spenser. The true, the real, on the con
trary, in Bunyan, crops out of the most bewitching nar
rative of the figurative and the emblematical. In the
illiterate tinker's works there is recognized, by men
competent to judge of the great questions of psychology
and of theology there stated, a profound fitness under all
the easy, rapid narrative of pilgrimage, siege, and battle
field. A scholar of our own country, Dr. Cheever, who has
written what both in Britain and in our own land has
been held the best commentary on the Pilgrim, has found,
if we remember aright, only cause for admiration in the
doctrine as well as in the style. Coleridge said of the
Progress, that he believed it the most exact system of
evangelical theology on Calvinistic principles that had
ever been written. And this is the judgment, we must
recollect, of a keen critic and ripe scholar widely read in
various literatures, and a brilliant poet master himself of
an imperial fancy. A venerable scholar of our own coun
try, Prof. Tayler Lewis of Schenectady, deeply familiar
with Scripture and intellectual philosophy, has said in
an Old Testament commentary, "On these deeper aspects

266 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
of humanity, consult that most profound psychologist',
John Bunyan, in his Holy War. . . . Bunyan was Bible-
taught in these matters, and that is the reason why his
knowledge of man goes so far beyond that of Locke or
Kant or Cousin."* Prof. Lewis calls itf "his greatest
book," ranking it, in depth of religious truth and insight,
above the more popular Pilgrim's Progress. And that great
theologian, Andrew Fuller, adjudged also to it the superi
ority over the other beautiful allegory of its author.
Yet the one of these books, so wondrous as philosophy
and theology, children read for its fascination. Southey
declared that his own children read it for the story. The
young Charlotte Bronte, in later years so celebrated for
her portraitures of character, when she was a mere child
strayed from home to find the wondrous land that Bun
yan's pages describe. Gerald Massey, the poet, when a
lad, in much forlorn poverty, records in what circum
stances he learned to prize the immortal dreamer. Hol-
croft, an infidel through most of his days, and known
chiefly as a dramatic author, furnishing many plays for
the stage, declared "it to be the most exquisite book in
the English language that he had ever read." So have
men entirely opposed to its religious teachings owned
the witchery of the narrative. Sender, the father, as
some stjde him, of German Rationalism, speaks of his
having read it; and Priestly, of the impression which
its images of the cave of Despair made on his vouth-
ful mind. Wyttenbach, the great classical scholar, Swiss
by birth, but Hollander by adoption, describes the great
* Lange's Genesis, N. Y., 18G8, p. 286. + Jj;^ p q^j

JOHN BUNYAN. 267
power it swayed over his youthful soul, to the dislike of
his father. So Theodore Parker speaks of its "grand
fabling." Rufus Choate, the rival of Webster, and one
of the most eloquent of the advocates of the New Eng
land bar, held the speech of Mr. Standfast at the river
"the most mellifluous and eloquent talk that was ever
put together in the English language." Choate himself
was a most eloquent talker, with a right, therefore, to be
heard as to force and grace of speech. Buckle, in his
youth, feasted on it, with Shakespeare and the Arabian
Nights, to become in after-life a Positivist. Kingsley says
of this book, " It will live as long as man is man."
Now, the book that thus extorts from childhood and
barbarianism their sympathies, and yet satisfies the pro
found needs of thinkers and scholars like some that we
have quoted, must have had a wondrous history. It pre
sents what to some might seem of necessity the repulsive
theme of Christian experience ; but it has the vivid action
of the drama and the grand march of the epic, along with
the picturesque simplicity of the nursery-tale. There is
the power of rare personal genius, but there is also the
informing force of scriptural truth and of light from
eternity, and all these are ablaze with the Spirit's divine
energies. There was a time when it was undervalued as
a rude book. A good man of the name of Gilpin, a
scholar and a Christian, a clergyman of the English
Establishment when its pulpit had much less than now
of the gospel, many years ago rewrote the Pilgrim, hoping
to render it more elegant. The Rev. Charles Neale, a Low
Churchman, gave a copy of it as his dying present to his

268 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
son, then a lad of but five years, who became the Rev.
John Mason Neale, a High Churchman, a Ritualist, the
author of some beautiful hymns, but who undertook to
recast the Progress with more of the Ritualistic element
interfused into its structure, and in consequence incurred
the indignant censure and remonstrance of Macaulay, not
soon to be forgotten. Others have translated it into blank
verse. There have been three or four attempts to render
it into English rhyme. And yet of its own original Eng
lish prose, as the brazier's hand first wrote it down,
Southey — no feeble writer himself — has spoken most
highly. Macaulay, a yet higher master of English, has
eulogized it most earnestly as a treasury of true English.
It was an evidence of the ripe wisdom and the rare,
fine taste of Bunyan that, familiar as his youthful cam
paigning had made him with the musket and larger
artillery of modern warfare, he clung in his allegory to
the sword, shield, dart, and helmet of ancient battle-fields.
It kept his story more in unison with the imagery of
Scripture, as also with the romances of ancient chivalry
so dear to the youthful fancy and recurrent in the pop
ular ballad. And by preserving in his more popular alle
gory of the Pilgrim the form and details of Biography
rather than the wider field and larger groupings of His
tory, he brought it. more closely home to the individual
heart, as a manual for the closet and a burnished mirror
for the conscience. Scholars in metaphysical and the
ological lore may prize the nicer psychology of the Holy
War, but the Pilgrim wins more easily and holds more
firmly the affections of the lone, simple reader, of the sad

JOHN BUNYAN 269
heart " knowing its own bitterness," as of that same heart
again when gladdened by " the joy wherewith the stranger
intermeddleth not."
The lot of Bunyan was cast in an age of great changes,
dire perils, and heroic men. His father, a tinker, brought
the boy up in his own trade, yet gave him some school
ing, which the lad seems greatly to have neglected and
to have almost totally lost.
Profane and rude, he was perhaps a roysterer, as the
age called it, rather than a vicious lad. James and
Charles I. had both, by the Booh of Sports, fostered cer
tain games as fit recreations on the Lord's Day. In bell-
ringing, Bunyan delighted extravagantly, as once did
Hale, who afterward crossed Bunyan's path in later years
so strangely. At seventeen he drifted into the army,
whether that of the king or of the Parliament is to this
day a matter of debate among his biographers. We rather
think the probabilities that he was on the king's side are
the greater from various considerations. His profane hab
its would have been in keeping with the known practices
of the Cavaliers, but would have been strongly and effectu
ally put down in the Parliamentary forces. Such ignorance
of gospel doctrine as he showed in the days of his first
seriousness he could scarce have had under the teachings
of Parliamentary chaplains and in the society of Parlia
mentary soldiers, many of them exhorters themselves,
earnest and devout men. Had his place been in the army
on the people's side, the successes won by that army at
Naseby would have fixed him still in the ranks ; whereas
the defeat of the royal forces there and elsewhere in that
23 *

270 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
same year would soon disperse the recruits but recently
enlisted and loosely attached to the king's banners ; and
in some such way only does Bunyan's speedy return to
civil life seem explicable. Another collateral circumstance,
pointing in the same direction, is his joining the church of
Gifford. The church which he first attended when deeply
impressed, and which he ultimately joined, had as its pastor
Gifford, who had been an officer in the royal forces, then
a profane and wicked man, but afterward converted and
become eminently pious. Now, the mere fact of having
both been in the king's army would seem a very natural
explanation of their drifting together into the same eccle
siastical community. At the siege of Leicester — a period
when Charles was writing that his affairs looked more
hopeful than they had long done — Bunyan was to have
occupied a sentinel's place. From some delay another
was sent in his stead, who was shot dead at his post.
Bunyan always afterward regarded this as a special de
liverance of God's good providence that he had been pre
vented occupying that post. Drifted back, if our conjec
ture be just, by the defeat of his cause and commander,
to civil life, Bunyan was in his old haunts a violent and
profane swearer; but it scarcely seems he was, either as
libertine or tippler, what would now be regarded as thor
oughly vicious. But his fluent and fierce cursing pro
voked the censure of a neighboring woman, herself lightly
regarded; and the sharp check of those rude lips smote
his heart. Early married to a young woman, the daugh
ter, and probably the orphan daughter, of a pious father,
she brought to her young husband but the dowry of two

JOHN BUNYAN. 271
pious books, Dent's Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven and
Bayley's Practice of Piety. The author of the last was a
Welsh bishop, whose little book, translated into several
languages, had great currency. He had read also in early
or later years the Life of Francis Spira, Luther's Exposition
of the Epistle to the Galatians, the Sermons of Bishop An-
drewes, and Foxe's Martyrs.
His conscience seems to have been disturbed; and his
overhearing the conversation of some poor pious women,
Avho described their own religious experience, aroused in
him a sense of his wanting entirely that inner religious
life of which they testified. As he searched and read
and prayed, his feelings became those of intensest anx
iety, and often of overwhelming despair. The scenes of
the Slough of Despond, the beetling sides of Sinai, the
gloom of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and the ter
rible speculations leading on to the cavern-dungeons of
Giant Despair, — all are but reverberations of his own per
sonal story. The viscid slime of the morass had ham
pered his steps ; the chill gloom of the prison-house and
its rusty iron had entered into his soul.
God brought him through to the light and peace of the
gospel in a sense of the sacrifice and righteousness of
Christ. The doctrine of Luther and Calvin, of Augustine
before them, and Jansenius and Arnauld and Pascal after
them, became the substantial outline of his own view of
the way in which God's grace meets the sinner. Encour
aged by his fellow-Christians, he became a laborer for
Christ, and soon an exhorter, and finally a preacher.
But there were periods even under Cromwell's rule when

272 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
the Presbyterian influence would hamper the preaching
of the Baptists, and Bunyan was thus molested before
the Restoration. But when the Restoration brought a
reckless and proscriptive prelacy into many dioceses,
Bunyan fell soon under the notice of the authorities.
Wingate and Kelyng, names that yet survive in the
legal literature of Britain, were — one as clerk of the
court, and the other as judge — among those who har
ried and threatened our worthy tinker.
But he had counted the cost, and was ready to face the
result. That he did not attend the State-Church ; that he
would not use the prayer-book, when he believed in the
grace and duty of imploring the Spirit's aid in voluntary
prayer, — were offences not to be remitted to one so zeal
ous, so popular, and so constantly itinerant. The loss of
friends and home, and the means of providing sustenance
for his wife and four children, one of them blind, who lay
especially near a fond parent's heart, — all were consider
ations to have made many men pause. But Bunyan was
Steadfast and Valiant-for-the-Truth and Great-Heart all
in one. He went to the prison, in which, for the greater
part of twelve and a half years, he was detained. The jail
sometimes thronged with prisoners ; Bunyan preached to
his fellows there; learned to make thread-lace for the bread
of his household when his brazier-work had been cut off
by prison- walls ; studied his Bible and his Foxe's Martyrs;
and the men of whom this old martyrologist told had in
this simple Baptist one ready to share like sacrifices. For
sometimes he was threatened with banishment- and at
others, even with hanging. But he found favor in the

JOHN BUNYAN. 273
eyes of his jailer, and sometimes in disguise visited his
family and resumed his preaching". At times he was dis
guised, it is said, as a ploughman, in the frock of the em
ployment and with wagoner's whip in his hand, but
everywhere and in all events and perils, he was Christ's
true witness, retaining his people's hearts and sustained
by their prayers.
An appeal was brought by his wife, a second, whom he
had married on losing the first, the mother of his chil
dren ; and the excellent Sir Matthew Hale, when ap
proached with the request, showed himself the serious.
kindly, and upright magistrate he always proved himself.
The friend of Baxter, who was also a Nonconformist,
Hale could not be at least the enemy of one whom yet,
indeed, he had not by his works known. He counselled
a personal application to the king. But that in these
days to the poor in the provinces would seem a sheer
impossibility. The policy of the Court changed. Seek
ing in secret a restoration of Romanism, both Charles and
James II. would have favored the Romish Church, and to
that intent would have relaxed the laws against the Non
conformist portion of the Protestants. But the High
Church were in that day ruthless and proscriptive be
yond even the days of Laud. The Quaker element had
obtained the ear of the Court through the influence of
one of their members on Charles II., whom, when a
fugitive prince fleeing from the rising star of the Com
monwealth and Cromwell, this Quaker, then a sailor,
had aided in his escape to France. Their Quaker breth
ren clogged the prisons along with the Nonconformists.

274 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Bishop Barlow was said in earlier narratives to have inter
fered, but the later accounts represent this Quaker influ
ence as having been almost the sole power in opening
the prison-doors to a large number; and Bunyan was
among them.
His zeal and activity had acquired for him already
the name of Bishop Bunyan. His preaching at his own
church and its various out-stations; his books, small
and great, which he sent out with the utmost rapidity;
his popuiar eloquence; his visits to London, where he
always attracted a crowd, even if the service were in the
early morning, — had made him a name and a power.
Owen, the greatest of the Congregationalists, is said, with
all his erudition and his mastery of the Scriptures, to have
recognized the genius and pulpit power of Bunyan, and
to have given ready and generous acknowledgment of it.
His books show Bunyan to have read human charac
ter rapidly and keenly. Some of his portraitures in the
Progress and in the Holy War are — both as kindly sketches
of Christian excellence, or as a vivid outline of the per
secutor, the whiffler, the pickthank, and the prater — of
a force and neatness which Swift would have made
coarser, but could not have made stronger, and which
Rochefoucau.lt or La Bruyere could scarcely have made
more graceful or have rendered more delicate. Strong in
the Bible, and in the knowledge of his own heart, and
in the story of his various flock, all his books display
one in whom wit and wisdom and devotion greatly shone.
One cannot but imagine what his feelings would have
been had he crossed the path of some of his eminent con-

JOHN BUNYAN. 275
temporaries, also Christian — of good Bishop Ken, or of
Izaak Walton, or of Jeremy Taylor, or of Archbishop
Ussher, or of the saintly Archbishop Leighton. '
An Episcopal poet and bishop of our own country has
expressed the regret that some good bishop did not find
him, take Bunyan home, and make a deacon of him.
The proposal, we judge, was not as practicable, had it been
tried, as it may to some now seem. Bunyan was rooted
in the conviction that acceptable worship should be free
and spiritual, and without the forms of a printed book.
His Calvinism wras decided at a day when the leading
prelates of the church were going over from the Calvinism
of the Reformation and the Elizabethan times to the Ar-
minian and Latitudinarian platform. Fowler, the author
of The Way of Salvation — a book which Bishop Watson,
many years after, reprinted in his Theological Tracts with
much praise — in that very book had taken ground which
Bunyan held fatal to the gospel and denounced in that
light. The controversy was bitter ; and Fowler, diocesan
as he afterward became, acquired little honor in his con
flict with the author of the Pilgrim's Progress. But God
had in his servant alreadj^ accomplished much ; and if
appearances do not greatly misguide, the results hereafter
to be accomplished are even yet greater than the rich in
gatherings of the past. In a mission of mercy, riding to
reconcile a father to his disobedient but penitent son,
Bunyan contracted a fever, lay sick at the house of a
friend, a Congregationalist deacon, in London, and there
died. Interred in Bunhill Fields, his grave has been
since a place of growing interest, attracting its numerous

276 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
visitants. The monument, more than once repaired, has
become lately graced with a recumbent statue. The late
Lord Chancellor Campbell, himself the son of a Scottish
Presbyterian minister, in his Lives of the Lord Chief-Jus
tices* has spoken — perhaps too warmly — of Bunyan as
one who accomplished more by his works for the cause
of religion than all the prelates of the Established Church.
Each man has his own gift. Chalmers once said that
all the revenue of the see of Durham — and it was once
among the richest of the English bishoprics — ever paid,
century after century, to its successive incumbents, did
not overpay the worth to religion of Joseph Butler's great
book, The Analogy of Religion. And it is a volume of
great and imperishable power for thinkers of a certain
class. But the Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan was written
for a wider circle, and with a brighter, if not & keener,
genius. The writings, too, of Beveridge and Andrewes
and Ken and Reynolds, and of men in the church
who never wore mitres, like -Perkins, Sibbes, Preston,
and others, are of high and enduring value.
But God called his more honored servant to show that
* Ld. Ch. Campbell, Lives of Lord Chief-Justices, 3d ed., Lond., 1874,
vol. ii., p. 213: "Inspired by him who touched Elijah's [Isaiah's]
hallowed lips with fire, he [B.] composed the noblest of allegories, the
merit of which was first discovered by the lowly, but which is now
lauded by the most refined critics, and which has done more to awaken
piety and to enforce the precepts of Christian morality than all the
sermons that have been published by all the prelates of the Anglican
Church." It is language of singular emphasis, as coming from one
who, as occupant of the woolsack, had himself sat with the wearers
of mitres in the British House of Lords.

JOHN BUNYAN. 277
"chill penury," which, as Gray tells, has in so many a
lofty soul " repressed the noble rage " of genius, need not
be found an insuperable barrier; that instead of clog, it
may be to Christian faith and Christian love a spur. The
tinker, with no university laurels on his sturdy brow, has
moved calmly to take his place among the celebrities of
English literature, and the literature of the British Islands
has proved too narrow for the range of the widened influ
ence which God meant to bestow upon him.
Sir Walter Scott took unhappy and misjudging measure
of the Covenanters of his own region and of the Puritans
of England ; but to Bunyan he has not been unjust, as to
the preacher's brother-Baptist, Harrison.
The other and later critics have seemingly united to
allow to this man of the peasantry and the workshop
the honors of a prose Dante come back from the Eternal
World as with its clinging, dazzling splendors.
Even in his lifetime our author complained of the
counterfeiters that attached his name to their own wares.
The Third Part, as it is called, of the Progress is of this
unworthy class. Some Scottish professors of eminence in
science, Thomson and Tait, attached as a motto in its first
edition to a recent pamphlet of their own a citation from
this forged Third Part, as if believing its genuineness. In
its theology, as in its cumbrous style, it is wholly unlike
Bunyan ; and it introduces in one of its characters Suicide
— a melancholy theme, and, to modern society, one of
growing interest; and the regret is excited that Bunyan
did not himself treat this dark topic in his own sinewy
Saxon and with his grand force and breadth of fancy, and
24

278 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
with his hold alike on the people's heart and on the peo
ple's Bible.
Art has, in later days, never wearied in its endeavor to
reproduce the characters to which Bunyan's pen first gave
life. An intense Realism is the peculiar distinction of his
genius. As Defoe gave to the creations of his fancy the
aspect of London tradesmen and of Wapping sailors, so
Bunyan, with the fidelity of a Dutch painter, reproduced
character, feature, and bearing — not as an Italian master
would assay to do, idealizing and etherealizing, and so
evaporating them, but in the garb of his own day, and
with the distinct, minute, 'patient limnings, and the clear,
varied, and exact hues, of the particolored humanity he
saw moving around him. His Vanity Fair had lived in
the generation before, as it was living in the generation
around him ; and it will live again long as Vanity whirls
men out of the ruts of Duty into the clouds of an idle
Fancy and into the sloughs of miry Passion.
Yet, with all this accuracy, there was the freedom of
Nature, the many-sided; and the picturesque play of Life,
the many-mooded and the many-hued. But not too low
for pity and tears, not too high for prayers and duties.
Humanity with Bunyan was not the being that Milton in
his later days fancied, that Rousseau in his elaborate and
eloquent sketches exalted ; but it was Humanity with the
image of Eden not all erased, with the fetters of Sin con
tinually dragged at the ankles till the feet were planted in
the ways of Christ's obedience, and the neck grew strong,
erect, and stubborn in the clasp of Christ's enamelling,
enfranchising holiness — a penitent, religious manhood

JOHN BUNYAN. 279
mindful of the Fall, but wistful of the New Jerusalem,
and with eyes bent to the welcoming Father and the
waiting Heavens. Such a man could not be perma
nently wretched, nor could he be effectually proscribed
and crushed.
Such a Puritanism planted our own New England. But
it was not perfect, because it arrogated a perfection which
it did not possess, and denied room to men like Bunyan
and like Roger Williams, except as they were meek and
submissive and conformed to its behests. Robinson had
bidden his brethren, when quitting Europe for America, to
look out for further light yet to break out of God's word
and providence. Against some of that light they bolted
wicket and closed window. That light so breaks out —
not in a Rationalism, self-confident, arrogant, and super
ficial, which blots Revelation and outruns the Christ.
The true light came evermore from him who was an
ciently, who remains at this moment, and will abide to
the utmost bounds of the everlasting hills, the one Light
of the world.
To this Light, Luther looked, as did Augustine before
him. To him Pascal looked, and Bunyan. And at his
feet is the lesson of the day and the hope of the race.
From him comes the destiny of our own and all worlds ;
and it was part of his goodness to have opened the pil
grimage from Destruction to Glory, and to have given
Bunyan the heart to portray for us and for himself the
way thither.
It is matter of astonishment that out of scenes, to the
hurried and scornful glance of man, most unpromising,

280 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
God often summons influences of unexpected potency,
and which, instead of soon spending themselves, seem
destined to win new allies, and take on fresh territories
for their domain, as man and society move on. When
Bunyan was remanded to his prison — the " den," as even
the patient Christian confessor might well term it — his
enemies might seem justified when scouting the presump-
tuousness of the poor " sectaries " in hoping for any
remedy where wealth and power and courtly influence
and spiritual despotism all hurled back the plea of the
poor wife, interceding for Bunyan's hearing and release.
But out of the repulse was bred no despair ; and when
Bunyan's great allegories appeared, schemed and in part
begun in that den, men might begin to see the faithfulness
and beneficence of Providence in the incarceration that
trained the writer ; and might learn how much the soul
that clasped God's promise and covenant could rise supe
rior to the party and cabinet and Parliament which at
the time condemned it; and comprehend how such a soul,
so schooled, could build up an influence to outlive the
Stuart dynasty, and to spread beyond the bounds of the
British empire. And the chief distinction of the town
of Bedford and neighborhood is now, not the ducal home
and library and park of Woburn Abbey, so long tenanted
by the noble family of the Russells ; but yet more, that
Bedford prison was so long the home of a genius now
world-wide in renown. And as if God would not let the
blessed memory of his faithful servitor pass on, limited
but to one single channel, his wisdom brought to that
same prison the sympathies and conscientious regard of

JOHN BUNYAN. 281
John Howard. Residing near and made sheriff of that
county, he accepted the trust, and began to measure and
gauge its extent by ascertaining the discomforts and
snares, the physical and the moral contaminations, and
wretchedness and sufferings, of such abodes. And thus
began that career which Burke in the imperial Parlia
ment so eloquently portrayed and eulogized, and which,
having traversed the British Isles, passed on so heroically,
patiently, and persistently, to the scenes of similar endu
rance on the European Continent. In doing this, Howard
was urged by the same gospel which had been the great
motive-power of Bunyan. Though Bunyan was himself
a Baptist, the church he had long guided and fed passed
to the charge. of Pffidobaptist pastors. One of these, a
Psedobaptist, becoming on examination a convert to our
views of the ordinance, was baptized by immersion ; and
retained his pulpit and charge whilst Howard was resi
dent there. Baptist as Simonds was, Howard was one of
his regular hearers ; and one of the last letters written by
the philanthropist abroad to those having charge of his
Bedford affairs contained instructions for the payment of
his annual contribution to the Baptist pastor's salary. At
London, Howard was the habitual hearer of another and
more distinguished Baptist pastor, Dr. Stennett ; and before
going abroad on his tour of mercy, he wrote to Dr.
Stennett, saying, that the written memorials of sermons
which he had heard from his lips were among his choice
spiritual consolations in his journeyings and his isola
tions on the Lord's Day. It is not certain that Howard
was himself a full convert to the views of Simonds and
24*

282 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Stennett; but it is thus- seen how through a Baptist's old
prison and Baptist pulpits went down, as from dungeon
and from desk, their shares of force to the impulse that
made Howard the admiration and the blessing of so
many in lands so remote.
The honors of a statue and memorial, which in his
lifetime Howard so passionately rejected, were conferred
on him after his death ; and, in spite of his protest, the
figure shaped by another Christian, the sculptor Bacon,
was reared at St. Paul's Cathedral, London. Admiration
of that statue and of the career of philanthropy which
it honored, moved the soul of Andrew Reed, when a mere
lad led thither by his mother ; and out of it, when a min
ister, dame Reed's establishment of four large institutions
of benevolence in and near the British capital. More re
cently a bronze statue has been reared in Bedford to Bun
yan, the gift of the Duke of Bedford ; and at a yet nearer
day the same nobleman has given bronze gates, adorned
with memorial scenes from the Progress, to the enclosure
of the chapel occupied by the church of which in former
times Bunyan was the pastor. When the Bunyan statue
was erected, it was announced that the first book given, in
his childhood, to the duke thus bestowing the memorial
of their eminent townsman on the town of Bedford, had
been a copy of Bunyan's Pilgrim, presented to the young
child by his mother, and that mother an intimate friend
of Mrs. Carlyle, the wife of the historian of the French
Revolution. Dean Stanley, chaplain to Queen Victoria,
officiated at the services of the presentation of the Bun
yan memorial. It was there mentioned, that the present

JOHN BUNYAN. 283
sovereign, now a grandmother, when the eldest son of the
Prince of Wales received infant baptism, gave, as sponsor
to her grandchild, a silver statuette of the late Prince Al
bert, her husband— that husband so cherished and so
lamented — in the pilgrim garb of Christian, the way
faring man of the Pilgrim's Progress. Were John in the
body again revisiting the earth, he might have his own
thoughts as to the infant aspersion ; but it would in his
loyal eyes be a pleasant token of the Christian sorrow of
the widowed queen, that she remembered, and would have
her grandchild remember, in his religious principles and
character, the husband so loved and deplored. And that
ingenious dreamer — who, in delicate allusion to the reign
ing profligates of his own time, the age of the Stuarts,
had said, it would be pleasant "if the tops of the moun
tains could be seen cleared of the deluge " of abounding
and overruling iniquity — might well join the widowed
sovereign in the hope, for her son and for her son's son,
that their eminence might become an exaltation above
folly, a refuge for truth and for holiness, even if holiness
and truth should unhappily be deserted and submerged
all about them.
To crave posthumous fame is pronounced by some an
utter vanity. But, vain or not, Bunyan has received it,
and is continually amassing it in yet increasing measure.
But posthumous usefulness is certainly a boon to be
eagerly sought and to be passionately cherished, if we
believe the text, that the righteous dead, resting from
their labors, have yet their works following them. In
how many languages whieh Bunyan could not under-

284 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
stand is his Pilgrim now pronouncing the old gospel.*
When that martyrdom which raged in the island of
Madagascar — during the reign of a former queen, a fanat
ical persecutor — was at its height, the Christian converts
had already, in their dispersion or in their dungeons,
manuscript copies of a version of the Pilgrim's Progress ;
and the martyrs cheered each other in approaching the
final tortures and sacrifice by citing passages of this book,
Western in its origin, but biblical in its structure and
spirit ; and thus, like the Bible from which it is drawn,
meeting their case and going to the heart's depths in the
hour of earth's last agonies.
The work goes on; and from another side of the same
great African continent comes a like attestation. Dr.
Robb, a missionary of the United Presbyterians of Scot
land, labored long at Old Calabar, in Western Africa. An
accomplished scholar, for seventeen years he toiled on
this dismal and pestilential coast. From the original
Hebrew he translated the Old Testament into the Efik
tongue. Weakened by successive attacks of fever of
growing violence, he has returned to Scotland, but he
has first translated into the Efik tongue Bunyan's Pil
grim's Progress* Sarkis, an Armenian, translating Bun
yan's Pilgrim into his Asiatic dialect, rejoiced, when
dying, at the thought that he should go to see Bunyan
himself, the writer of that book, in heaven. Would the
exultation be only on the side of the convert, and not
of the long-glorified believer as well? Joseph Wolff dis
tributed copies of it in Arabic in the territories of Arabia
* Am. Bible Soc. Record, N. Y., Aug. 17, 1876, vol. xxi. p. 124.

JOHN BUNYAN. 285
itself, perhaps in regions over which Job had wearily
tramped, or which had been traversed by his pious but
aged friends, the sheiks Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad, as
they came to proffer their friend the bootless consolation
that soon became goading to its patient. It has been
given in Hebrew at the gates of modern Jerusalem ; and
if pondered by its takers, we think it likely to be more
cause of gratulation than most of the material relics that
travellers bring from those memorable scenes. In French.
in German, in Danish, in Hungarian, in modern Greek,
in Malagasy, Bengalee, Hindu, Urdu, Tamil, Canarese,
Teloogoo, Malayalin, Mahratta, Samoan, Tahitian, Bur
mese, Karen, and dialects it would be wearisome to add ;
in fact, in more tongues than are enumerated as spoken.
in the day of Pentecost to the Jews at Jerusalem, God's
providence has caused this wondrous volume to be ren
dered. The attempt has been frequently, but never success
fully, made to show Bunyan indebted for suggestions in
his work to earlier or contemporary authors. The hon
est protest he makes in the matter is evidence sufficient,
intrinsically, of its perfect originality. The late George
Offer has devoted what to some will seem weariness of
exhausting comment and analysis, upon the various
books that have been presented as models or exemplars.
The evidence of collation is, we think, overwhelming that
Bunyan was no plagiarist. Bishop Patrick's Pilgrim, to
the few who read it, gives sufficient manifestation that,
whatever the personal worth and scholarly training of
the good prelate, the contemporary of the Elstow tinker,

286 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
yet he was, as a master of English and of allegory, en
tirely incompetent to stand beside the Nonconformist
genius. So various writers have essayed to rival, in the same
and in new paths of allegorical fancy, the career and
power of John Bunyan. A volume of interest might be
compiled on these British and American disciples; but
we believe the voice of criticism is unanimous in its
prompt deliverance, that the mantle of the Bedford wor
thy has not, in his Elijah flight to fame and blessed and
world-wide usefulness, fallen on these admiring Elishas.
Some of the later books are ingenious and able, and not
without their own interest and attractiveness; but they
are not of his spiritual kith and lineage. Hawthorne's
Celestial Railroad is one of the happiest ; yet it is a grim,
satirical episode, so to speak, of a part of the great epic
of the Progress; and shows Abaddon at his old and too
successful stratagems, without that burst of celestial glory
which so irradiates the First Part of Bunyan's allegory.
For the beauty of these sketches we find a voucher in
the lectures on the advantages of ecclesiastical history,
delivered by Dean Stanley to the graduates of an Eng
lish university in which he was professor, — that old Uni
versity of Oxford, which once scouted Methodism and
dissent so haughtily. Stanley, the friend and disciple
and admirer of Dr. Arnold of Rugby, imbued in classi
cal memories, yet thought sentences of Bunyan, tinker as
was the inditer, no unfit opening and no unmeet close
of his classical pages. He begins the first of these in
troductory lectures with a screed from the House Beau-

JOHN BUNYAN. 287
tiful and its galleries shown to pilgrims; and rounds up
the end of his third lecture with a vista as seen from the
leads of the House Beautiful looking toward the Delect
able Mountains of Immanuel's Land and of the Celestial
City, a city and land from those Delectable Mountains to
be yet more nearly and clearly discerned.
Bunyan has been a great teacher, a polyglot teacher in
many dialects ; and nations are gathering to his feet. In
his lessons, the substance is of the old unworn, untorn
gospel : and the blessing of the King has never ceased to
fall, fresh and fast, on the readers of the graphic, witch
ing record. Those readers include all ages of life, all
grades of culture, the grave philosopher, the wary theolo
gian, the nursery-child, and the aged disciple, bowed and
infirm, who hears already the rush of the Dark River,
and looks hourly for the Master's summons to rise and
cross.

XL
BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS.
25 T

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS.

Paul had laid him down to rest on the shores of Asia,
upon the edge of the iEgean Sea, and confronting the
coasts of- Europe. It is in Troas. All around float
memories of Homer, and of the war that, along those
beaches and waters, the hosts and fleets of Greece. had
waged against Asiatic Troy. Between the two coasts,
European and Asiatic, lies the island of Samothrace, with
its towering mountain, about five thousand feet in height,
looking down upon those fields where now Paul slum
bered, and where once Achilles fought and Hector fell.
But classic bards and legends have lost their interest for
the man whom, smitten down on his way to Damascus,
the Christ has transmuted from a persecutor to an apostle.
In the visions of the night, a man of Greek origin stands
before him, and as a hapless seaman from the side of a
sinking wreck might, through night-gusts and driving
rain, shout for aid, ere it should be too late, he cries,
" Come over and help us." It is a cry of need from a son
of Japheth to this consecrated son of Shem. But it is
not a Greek of the old Achaean race ; it is not a scholarly
man wearing the white robe of the Porch or of the
Academe from Athens ; or a stalwart son of Sparta, grim
and rude. He is a man of Macedonia, that part of
291

292 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY,
Greece which had been emerging the latest into fame, and
which then had been distinguished for bravery rather
than intelligence. To the rest of the Greek people the
Macedonians were much like what the stalwart, brawny-
Highlander from his moors and mists would be, com
pared to the rest of the British people — the manufacturers
of Glasgow, or the students of Edinburgh, or the ship
builders of the Clyde, or the men who had banks and
warehouses and docks in London. Under Alexander,
this portion of the Grecian race — these Greek Highland
ers — had hurled themselves into Asia ; and its old
dynasties and populous cities had gone down before the
Macedonian phalanx, as the house of cards in some
nursery goes down before the swoop of the child's arm.
Babylon, Persia, India, had heard the wondrous story of
that invasion, and kept yet the memorials of its rapid
arid irresistible successes. The footprints of that tramp
ing host were on all their proudest and oldest glories.
What has a conquering host, like that which Alexander
led, to do with distrust or need ? Is the mailed warrior
to play the mendicant? Need forgets all ranks. When
a ship goes down, the prince may be glad to touch the
tarry jacket of the cabin-boy. It is ever so ; for secular
honors and advantages may consist with deepest spirit
ual abasement and destitution. Not twenty years have
gone by since the reputed son of a carpenter rose from
a borrowed tomb, under the walls of Jerusalem, to vindi
cate his right to be hailed the Light, Redeemer, and
Judge of the world; and had, according to pledge, sent
out his Pentecostal Spirit, having before selected his apos-

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS. 293
ties and given them charge to evangelize all nations, Gen
tile and Jew alike. Paul is of that Hebrew stock ; has seen
by special revelation that Hebrew Messiah; has become
an apostle, " born out of due time ;" has preached to his
countrymen, the Jews, and to the Asiatic Gentiles as well ;
and now Europe sends her appeal in behalf of her teem
ing Gentile population also. By her stoutest soldiers she
lifts the imploring wail for relief.
If arts could save, Greece had a right to expect salva
tion. If arms could save, the Macedonian, above all other
Greeks, might well arrogate a clear hope of salvation. But
neither arts nor arms ; neither Athenian philosophies nor
Achaean traditions; neither monuments nor libraries, —
could bring peace for the burdened conscience, or light
for the soul that craves and yearns to know God. It was
a voice out of the thick darkness hurling itself toward the
morning light. It was the hoarse shouting of ignorance
and guilt and hopeless sorrow — a need that demands help,
large, prompt, and effectual — a peril that, on the edge of
the reef and under the white breakers, called, trumpet-
loud, for the life-boat to be manned and launched.
It is Europe demanding that Christian Asia should
send its missionary activities thitherward. Paul gathers
that the Holy Ghost, which had for the time obstructed
their further labors in Asia, summoned them over the sea
to Europe. He goes. Nor is his interpretation of the call
unwarranted. The Holy Ghost sets before the Christian
teachers an open door, and this spiritual Alexander has
troops of willing captives to the new faith. In Thessa-
lonica, a Macedonian city, he wins by God's blessing
25 »

294 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
numerous converts ; and when, in a year or two, he has
passed to another part of Greece, and turns to address his
Christian converts in Thessalonica — a church not then
two years old — to them he writes from Corinth his letters,
which form probably the earliest of all the leaves of the
New Testament. Certainly, nothing but the Gospel of
Matthew can claim to be as old; and the date of Mat
thew's composition varies uncertainty from a. d. 50 to
a. d. 60, and has no fixed period ; but the letters to the
Thessalonians were written in a. d. 51 or 52, according to
the most recent chronologists. The vision in Troas had
been the precursor of most glorious triumphs. In holy
gratitude, the apostle exults* over those who received the
word " in much affliction with joy of the Holy Ghost. . . .
For from you sounded out the word of the Lord, not only
in Macedonia and Acliaia, but also in every place your
faith to Godward is spread abroad." In none of his har
vest-fields does the great apostle of the Gentiles seem to
find as much unmingled cause of content as in these first-
fruits of Europe, gathered after his missionary voyage
from Asia. And in his letter to the Roman Christians f
he speaks of the prompt sense of obligation awakened in
these European converts toward their Asiatic evangelizers.
" It hath pleased them of Macedonia and Achaia to make
a certain contribution for the poor saints which are at Jeru
salem. It hath pleased them, verily; and their debtors
they are. For if the Gentiles have been made partakers
of their spiritual things, their duty is also to minister unto
them in carnal things." If a Christ, born in the tents of
* 1 Thess. i. 5, 7, 8. -j- Romans xv. 26, 27.

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS. 295
Shem, has, by apostles bred in the lore and schools of
Shem, been brought to these children of Japheth, the
proselyted mission-field might well, in the sense of fra
ternity and of equity, send back greetings and help toward
the proselyting camp of evangelists and apostles on those
sacred fields of Palestine.
The very first sheets^ earliest in the date of their writ
ing — of this entire New Testament are the story of mis
sionary adventure, launching from one continent to evan
gelize another. They tell how Asia was quitted for Europe
by primitive zeal, and how emphatically the European
converts recognized the new brotherhood thus created, and
that in their common Ransomer they, the kindred of Alex
ander's old legions, owned themselves the debtors to men of
Palestine, the soil whose acres Christ had trod, and whose
people had brought them this wondrous light of salvation.
If the Christian church in our day would forswear for
eign missions as redundant, you will see how she must, in
consistency, tear asunder the volume of the New Testa
ment right through its very heart, rending the Book of
Acts out of the New Testament histories, and shearing
off the Epistles to the Thessalonians first, and then ex
scinding how many others, with these two, out of the In
spired Letters of the New Dispensation.
Yet how strangely, and at a date comparatively how
. recent, have the. Baptists been led to a recognition of this
great Christian duty. Their churches, compared with
others, of little worldly endowment, having lost in Eng
land the position of national influence which they had
won in the days of the Commonwealth and Protectorate,

296 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
they had yet been honored of God with faithful preachers.
From one of these, William Carey— a convert under the
influence of the labors of Thomas Scott, the commentator
— proceeded under God the impulse. The son of the par
ish clerk and parish schoolmaster, under great disadvan
tages he had acquired but the elements of learning, and
was apprenticed to a shoemaker, in consequence of weak
ness that was thought to unfit him for the farm-work to
which he would otherwise have passed. Scott himself wa3
brought from the mazes of Socinianism under the teach
ings of John Newton of Olney, the friend of Cowper ; and
Newton himself, the prodigal, was met at sea and amid the
slave-trade on the western coast of Africa ; how remote and
how unlikely, at every link of good influence, was the long
chain, that yet, in God's good providence, brought the old
gospel down from the hammock, where Newton had at first
swung as a profane and infidel sailor, to the humble shoe
maker's shop, where Carey cobbled, studied, and prayed.
The conquests of Clive at the battle of Plassey had, in
India, converted the traders' company into the beginnings
of an empire. But the British rulers who won the subject
tribes and territory little heeded the language of the peo
ple whom they subjected. Clive, it is said, never learned
any of the Indian dialects proper of the various peoples
whom he led to conquest or reduced to subjection. Of one
among the later great governors-general of India, the Mar
quis of Wellesley, the brother of Wellington, and a man
of large intellect and wide statesmanship, it is told by an
English writer on India,* that, once passing through the
* Mead's Sepoy Revolt.

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS. 297
streets of a great Indian city, a Brahmin, with the dignity
of which some of their number are such masters, cursed
the English viceroy in the name of all the gods of his
country. Wellesley, though described by the narrator as
the haughtiest of viceroys, knew so . little of the lan
guage that he made the lowliest reverence to the Hindoo,
in utter unconsciousness of the true meaning of the salu
tation. It was the aim of the British to appropriate the
revenues and treasures of the Indian colony ; but, to se
cure this, it was matter of policy, in the minds of their
agents generally, to avoid aught that should exasperate
the superstitious prejudices of the people. Many, even
of English settlers, gave offerings to the idol-temples ; and
some, attached to heathen mistresses, gave silent or eager
aid to the pagan oblations of the mothers of their children.
The East India Company was bitterly hostile to all at
tempts to interfere with the faith of the Hindoos. Carey
in his humble shop read the voyages of Cook ; and the
discovery of heathen islands, that only excited the curios
ity of others, awakened his Christian sympathy and com
passion. He constructed for his school-children a rude
map of the globe, describing its population and its various
and erring religions. Become a pastor, but with the small
est stipend, and a father with a growing family, his soul
was drawn out to the desolations of ancient paganism.
He had the friendship of the elder Robert Hall, parent
of the great scholar and orator, a pastor of strong mind
and clear views : of Sutcliffe,' another country pastor, de
vout, sagacious, and earnest; and of Ryland, who had
baptized him ; and of Andrew Fuller, a man of the clear-

298 " LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
est and strongest intellect, gravely, solidly pious, and yet
of few literary advantages. To these, Carey's suggestions
for heathen evangelization seemed visionary, and, rather
to evade the topic, they proposed his putting into written
form his thoughts on the subject. He did so. Called to
preach before his Association, he took as his theme a
prophecy of Isaiah (liv. 2, 3), of the enlarged tent and
lengthened cords that were to take in the Gentiles. In
1792, he preached on it with the two great subdivisions,
" Expect great things from God, and attempt great things
for God." It led to the formation of a missionary soci
ety at Kettering, the seat of Fuller's labors, in October,
1792, and the contributions were £13 2s. 6d. Fuller
was its secretary, Carey was its offered missionary.
The church of the devout Pearce of Birmingham added
a sum of £70, quintupling the original funds. Yet how,
to any other than the simplest, strongest faith, must the
enterprise have seemed one of sovereign absurdity — that
of attempting with these puniest means to assail the faith
of pagan India and a population of, perhaps, one hun
dred and sixty millions.
But the churches enlisted were country churches. The
London Baptists, when consulted, generally stood aloof.
Stennett, to whose pulpit ministrations Howard expressed
such warm gratitude and reverence, could not be brought
to favor it. The elder Ryland, the father of Carey's friend,
a scholar and author, a man of genius and piety, and of
whom the statesman William Windham makes respectful
mention, had cried with some indignation when the proj
ect was by Carey named to him: "Young man, when God

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS. 299
would have the heathen converted, he will do it without
your aid or mine." With small children, his wife averse
to the voyage, his way shut up as to passage in one of the
East India Company's vessels, Carey persisted, and se
cured, at last, embarkation in a Danish keel, his wife
consenting finally to sail if her sister, who was, however,
equally with herself, unbelieving as to the wisdom of the
undertaking, would accompany her. Thus freighted with
discouragement, Carey set sail.
When the question of permitting Christian missionaries
in their possessions came up before the Board of Directors
of that great mercantile body, one of the directors, depict
ing the tumult it would excite, said, that he would see
a band of devils let loose in India rather than a band
of missionaries. Perchance eyes of keener and celestial
vision already saw his wish at work ; for the, population
of India counting but one hundred and sixty millions,
its subordinate deities, according to their own Brahmins,
were in number three hundred and thirty millions, or an
average of two separate deities to every man, woman, and
child of the teeming myriads of the vast region.
The East India Company was a most potent body in its
wealth and its patronage and its parliamentary influence
at home. Burke and Sheridan had assailed one of its
favored governors, Warren Hastings ; and after a trial of
years, marked by the most resplendent exhibitions of tal
ent and eloquence, and after fearful evidence produced of
malversation and oppression, such orators, with such wit-
nessings, had failed to secure his conviction. Charles
James Fox, a statesman of great powers and signal pop-

300 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ularity, had devised, with the aid of Burke, a new charter
by an India Bill. Not that Fox favored missionaries ; for
when consulted, he disapproved them. But the British
Parliament and the nation and the Court were against the
India Bill of Fox, however skilful its framing or vigorous
its advocacy ; and it failed.
On his arrival, Carey found himself shut up, after vari
ous experiments in indigo-culture, to a refuge in the small
Danish settlement of Serampore, an independent region
of small extent, but near the English capital of Calcutta.
Here he set up a press, which in Calcutta even Wellesley
would not then have permitted. His wife became insane ; ¦
his fellow-laborer Thomas also insane. With these sor
rows on either hand under the roof, he went forth to the
baptism of his first convert: Had not the faith of a pres
ent Christ ajid the power of an Almighty Spirit sustained
the laborer, human zeal might well have faltered when in
circumstances so forlorn, after seven years of toil, he led
down his first convert to baptism in Christ's name. But
as he said, he could plod; and plod he did, till God
turned hearts toward him in the India of his chosen res
idence and in the Britain which he was no more to see.
He became a Sanscrit scholar, greater than Sir William
Jones, who had been the first of Englishmen to lead in
that new field. He completed, in the modern and feebler
language of the people around him, a Bengalee Bible, and
its finishing was occasion to him of profound and devout
joy. God gave him fellow-laborers, Marshman and Ward.
The favor of Wellesley, the governor-general, was drawn
toward him. He received, though a Dissenter, an appoint-

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS. 301
ment as professor in the college which Wellesley set up,
without the authority, and even against the protests, of the
East India Company, under whom he acted. Strong in
his own energy and in the friendship of the younger Pitt,
Wellesley persevered, and brought forward also his more
illustrious brother, afterward to be known as the Duke of
Wellington, and who, on the field of Assaye, on Indian
soil, began the fame so emphasized in Spain and on the
field of Waterloo.
But besides the complications encountered thus in the
East India Company, the opponents of missions in the
Edinburgh Review, then the highest organ of British litera
ture, by the witty Sj'dney Smith, commenced an attack on
the whole evangelizing enterprise, as endangering the lives
of every Englishman, and as one that ought to be forth
with and ruthlessly suppressed. Some of the older of us
may recollect a time when the ill words of that great
journal stirred up the wrath of all our country, as it asked
scornfully, "Who reads an American book?" It was a
blessed and Christian revenge on the maligners of mis
sions, which, in God's good providence, the mission and
mission family took upon these their priestly and Parlia
mentary revilers, when a son-in-law of this same Marsh-
man, the gallant Havelock— " every inch a soldier, and
every inch a Christian," as Sir Henry Harding called him
— pushing his way against such overwhelming odds,
relieved Lucknow, and saved to the British Crown, under
God, an empire which Smith had said the missionaries
were sure to overthrow. Putting to silence the ignorance
of foolish men by patient continuance in well-doing is

302 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
apostolic. But it requires apostolic zeal and endurance to
obey a precept so calmly brave. The number of versions
of the Bible that in part or entire Carey and his coadjutors
completed is wondrous. His brother-laborer, Marshman,
framed a Chinese version of the Bible. These may be
superseded, just as Wycliffe's and Tyndal's and Cover-
dale's have been, in our own tongue. But they did a
good work; and nations have been glad for them, and
heaven has been made the richer in its tenantry by their
means, in the converts they have won.
Carey, Marshman, and Ward, of their ' earnings in
various ways, gave to the mission cause to the amount of
£40,000 — probably, when the relative value of money
then and now is considered, nigh $300,000 of our money
at present rates. They reared a college. Bishop Heber,
a churchman and Christian prelate, writing on Indian
soil, publicly lauded the services and character of the
men whom Sydney Smith had so blackened.
American Baptists had purposed to continue as they
had begun, to aid their English brethren by collections
raised here and transmitted thither. But God, in his
gracious arrangements, raised up Adoniram Judson, a
man of high endowments, rare energy, and true piety.
He left our shores a Paedobaptist, studied the Bible, and
on reaching Serampore was a convert to our views of the
ordinances and church. Without further resources from
the Paedobaptist body before sustaining him, he was ad
vised to apply to the English' Baptists. But God put it
into the hearts of him and his fellow-missionary and con
vert, Luther Rice, to appeal to the American churches.

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS. 303»
Our own body found themselves suddenly called to a
work which they had not planned. It was like Paul's
Macedonian voyage, a Providence beckoning and leading
the blind by a way which they for themselves had not
known. Turned from British India, where Judson was
not allowed by the jealousy still felt against missionaries
to remain, he went perforce to Burmah. It had been
a field for a time tilled by Felix Carey, but who, favored
by the Burmese government, had accepted an appoint
ment as the Burmese envoy to the British Indian govern
ment; thus, as the good father complained, sinking from
a missionary to an ambassador. The younger Carey's
labors had not much facilitated the missionary toils of
Judson. His heroic endurance; his imprisonment; his
impending death in the wars between thejealous Burmese
and British invading armies; the sickness of his wife;
his carrying his nursling babe from heathen door to door,
imploring that some Burmese mother would sustain its
waning, wailing life; his having his great manuscript
version of the Bible rolled up as a log and laid under
his head as a pillow in his prison, to disguise it from
his pagan tormentors and jailers; the death of babe
and mother,— all these are parts of missionary history
familiar to all.
The churches gathered in the Karen people, the death
of Judson's heroic coadjutor, Boardman, who labored es
pecially for them, after being carried in pining consump
tion to see, at the river, the baptism of several con
verted heathen,— these, too, we can but recount hastily;
and the deaths of others of the band ; and the sheaves,

$04 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
large and rapid, they were permitted to gather, are they
not too familiar to bear prolonged recital?
Then came the death of Judson at sea with such un
conquerable exhaustion of bodily strength, and yet such
salient joy of soul, that he felt, with all his ties to home
and life, as he viewed eternity, the joy of a schoolboy
going from tasks and vigils to the old dear homestead.
These are among the illustrations God has given to show
that he loves not his servants to war a warfare at their
own charges or without present and rare refreshments
of spirit by the way.
The English missions were sustained at home by men
of rare worth and power. Fuller, a man of great solidity
and force of mind, had dreaded fashion and wealth as
either sustaining or controlling the missionary work.
As he used grimly to say at the beginning, they had no
"respectable" people to countenance them — no capitalist
in the chair at the annual meetings, to whom orations
might be addressed. Himself a theologian of rare com
pass and force, his word, from pulpit and press, was a
power in the church, and felt occasionally in the English
Parliament even. When some " old Indian " — to use the
British phrase for a wealthy resident of the East returned
to Britain — had begun a war of pamphlets against the
mission, Fuller was prompt to reply, and the man who
encountered him in argument generally bore the marks
of a bludgeon from the encounter. A lover, in his youth
ful impenitent clays, of wrestling, he confessed to a Scot
tish friend, Dr. John Brown, father of the accomplished
author of Rab and his Friends, that his fancy sometimes,

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS. 305
even in the desk, as the eye fell on some stalwart form
moving along the aisle, would ask how such a man would
stand a tussle. When a Prendergast, a member of the
British Parliament, in the course of a heated discussion
of missions, asseverated that he, who had been in India,
knew that Carey preached from a tub in the streets of
Calcutta, and the heathen were so excited that he could
only by flight escape their violence, Fuller, knowing that
it was altogether at variance with Carey's habits and cha
racter, published a letter sturdily denying the truth of
the statement. Prendergast, a noted duellist, inquired of
the good Wilberforce, who in Parliament eloquently and
fearlessly advocated our missions, who this Andrew Ful
ler was, intimating that he intended to challenge him to
an encounter on the field of honor. Wilberforce smil
ingly assured him that he knew Fuller, but that he was
not a man who could be moved to such a conference.
Another of our British worthies was the younger Rob
ert Hall, of whom his tutor, Professor Dugald Stewart,
said, that his style had the excellences of Johnson and
Addison without the faults of either. Sir James Mack
intosh, himself a philosopher and statesman of the high
est order, said, that men could not understand why all
Greece flocked to Demosthenes, until they had listened
to Robert Hall. Bishop Bloomfield, holding the diocese
of London, was recognized, when Greek scholarship ruled
British literature, to be, after the death of Porson and of
Parr, the first Greek scholar of all England. Of him it is
said by his son and biographer, that he was accustomed
to keep the works of Hall on his study-table as a model
26* u

306 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
in his hours of composing. The elder Bulwer, in one of
his fictions, introduces Hall as a wondrous example of
powers highly developed, and pain intense and exhaust
ive meanwhile patiently borne. Greg, a contemporane
ous writer of our own times, and of skeptical views, yet
takes occasion to rate Hall as one of the greatest of the
Christian writers in his time. Now, Hall, though less the
advocate from the press, was the friend and eulogist, of
*bur English Indian missionaries. He threw down the
gauntlet in a very stinging sentence to Smith regarding
his Review, but Smith never ventured to lift the glove and
enter the lists. His friends say, that Smith regretted the
attack, but he never had the grace to withdraw and sup
press it. Intended to pillory its meek victims, it has sur
vived to brand its author as a false prophet — a Balaam,
who cursed as heartily as an Indian Balak could desire
him, but who, less wise than the seer, had forgotten to
ask himself, " How shall I defy whom the Lord hath not
defied?" On our shores we have had, in Thomas Roberts and
Evan Jones and his son, laborers among the Cherokee
Indians, first in their Georgia home and then in their
transfer to the Indian Territory ; and to the latest laborer
the tribes are indebted for a Cherokee translation of the
New Testament. Native laborers of great excellence and
devotedness and of wide usefulness have been raised up.
The Welsh of Britain have sent to the Bretons of
France a laborer who has many years toiled in that
antique and picturesque part of the French territory and
nation, and given them in their own loved Breton dialect

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS. 307
a New Testament. The success in conversions has not
yet been large, but the late distinguished Emile Souvestre
was said in his later days to have invited the visits and
teachings of this faithful missionary.
The labors of Oncken in Germany and their widely-
branching influence over Sweden and Poland and Russia
must be familiar. Not by building on the old founda
tions of the German and Swiss Anabaptists, but in inde
pendent toil and teaching, his great success has under
God's blessing been achieved.
The establishment and increase of Baptist churches in
Sweden, through the efficient labors of Wiberg and his
coadjutors, forms one of the most interesting chapters in
the history of our missions in Europe. More than two
hundred churches and over ten thousand members are
successfully pleading, in that country, for the spirituality
of the churches, such as the Lord designed them to be :
for the observance of the ordinances as he established
them ; and for soul-liberty as the indefeasible heritage of
all Christian men.*
In Greece, our mission has been withdrawn. In Spain,
it trembles, amid the present political convulsions, on the
verge of a temporary suppression, as seems probable. In
* The work in Sweden was first commenced, in 1855, by the Amer-.
ican Baptist Publication Society, who appointed the Bev. Andreas
Wiberg superintendent of colportage. Though meeting with perse
cution and difficulties, the work has gone steadily on, and each year
bears witness to large additions to their churches, while very many of
their numbers are seeking a home and a field of Christian labor in our
own land. — Editor.

308 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Paris and Lyons, after many early discouragements we are
now to all human appearance firmly planted, with more
hopes of success.
To Western Africa, God sent in an early stage Lot Carey
from Virginia, a man of color, but one of heroic mould,
taken away in middle life by a sudden explosion. Our
Southern colored churches are a vast opportunity and a
vast responsibility.
As to the work remaining to be accomplished, it seems to
some Quixotic to look forward to a universal reception of
the gospel. We see naught to secure it but God's grace ; for
that agency we are slow to think any task, however wide,
to be impossible. Carey's project of assailing India seemed,
to casual reason, a fatuity founded on sheer ignorance.
Later observers have learned to think very differently.
The English government, once bitterly inimical, is now
by many of its civil and military appointees warmly
favorable to missions. Sir Bartle Frere, and Sir Henry
Lawrence, and Sir John Lawrence have been among
Christian rulers not ashamed of their faith before the
pride of Brahminism, and not slow to express large
hopes. The worst foe of English domination in the
Sepoy war was the Mohammedan fanaticism. If the
educated Hindoos were to be Christians, they would be
the best safeguard. A Hindoo gentleman of English edu
cation, but without Christian faith, has said of the Mo
hammedans, the old oppressors of his people, that even
now they are three-fourths ruffian and one-fourth volup
tuary in their personal character. If this be a prevalent
judgment, the co-operation of Hindoo and Mohammedan

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS. 309
is not likely to be hearty in uprisings against .British
sovereignty. A revival of Mohammedanism is among the probabil
ities of the age. Some have advocated the recognition of
the prophetic character of the great Arab leader. We see
no ground for the verdict, and no hope of prosperity in
admitting the delusion. Our own church in the last Se
poy war had a converted Mohammedan confessor, Walay-
at Ali, who became a martyr rather than deny Christ at
Delhi, one great focal-point of the revolt.
Dr. Pfander, under the Church Missionary Society, has
had converts of this class. We trust that they may be
multiplied ; but the probabilities are that Mohammedan
ism will make a fierce and bloody end.
So, as to Judaism, some deny the fact of its acceptabil
ity. Our own denomination, in the times of the Common
wealth, had a learned Jew, Du Veil, author of books of
true ability, who became, after passing through Roman
ism, a convert to our views of polit}r. In our own coun
try we had Frey, a man of sincerity and earnestness,
though his judgment was not always equal to his zeal.
The generation that has seen Neander, with his vast erudi
tion, his childlike simplicity, and his deep philosophy, a
humble learner of Christ's gospel, will not believe the im
possibility of similar conversions. The philosophic Men
delsohn resisted the appeals of La vater ; but Mendelsohn's
descendant, the accomplished and most amiable musical
composer, was regarded as a sincere Christian.
We have Infidelity, but its forms are Protean, and its
prophecies, many and confident, have been signally and

310 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
repeatedly confuted in the actual results of Providence.
God has spoken, man may trust. Christ has borne the
weight of the missionary undertaking in his own Incar
nation and Sacrifice and Resurrection and Ascension. All
that remains, in comparison with this, is but petty detail.
We cannot dismiss the hopes of the churches, or relin
quish the task of the churches, without disregarding the
pledges of him who is the Infinite Truth, and the cov
enant of him who wields a Limitless Omnipotence.
One of the great questions of our times is how to recon
cile the two warring classes of "Haves" and "Wants."
In the shape of Socialism and in the dread form of the
Commune, as the late troubles in France saw it inaugu
rated, how fearful is the collision and how inevitable the
general ruin when Labor looks askance on all the gains
of Capital, and when Capital learns to harden its heart
and close its ears against the protests and claims of Toil.
The despotisms of the Old World, in Egypt and India,
have known the fearful effect of Castes, isolated and mutu
ally repellent and distrustful, the one of the other ; but,
amid the advantages and progress of modern civilization,
if castes be formed, men of envious greed on the one side
and obdurate pride on the other side,' it is certain that no
policies can long avert a forcible collision, and the result
of it must be mutual carnage and national devastation.
Visit a prison, however well ordered, and you see in its
tenants, there immured, the men who, in disregard of the
rights, property, liberties, and lives of their fellows, made
their own fancied and passionate Want the law, and then
flung themselves on the resources of their neighbors, the

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS. 311
clan of the "Haves," and proposed or effected such
wrongs and woes, that Society, for its own protection,
must put them within walls and under the charge of
prison-guards. So, in political life, how sure is the result
to be social destruction when the needs of a party or its
leaders trample down the barriers of law.
Commerce has sometimes comforted itself with the
delusion that in its exchanges mutual wants assuredly
and peacefully met and relieved each other, and that the
law of supply and demand, if left with an unchecked
freedom, would bring general abundance and the ease and
welfare of all nations. But when the enterprise of our
own manufacturers and traders sends — as was not many
years since done — casks of New England rum in the same
keels that bore to the Turk and his Christian subjects New
England missionaries, was the free-trade healthful or bale
ful ? When Christian Britain has forged, in her Birming
ham workshops, idols for the East Indian market ; or raised
on Indian soil opium to be forced, under British treaties
and British fleets, upon the reluctant and protesting hea
then of China, was the free " supply " to the idolatrous
and diseased " demand " honorable to the national name
or honest to the national creed? When, in years very
recent, vessels in southern seas, to propitiate heathen isl
anders, vessels manned by British commanders and sail
ors, went in quest of human heads — a coveted trophy
prized by some of these islanders as won from others of
their heathen neighbors — and in consequence of the blind
rage of the savages whose shores had thus been invaded,
the noble career of a young English bishop, John Cole-

312 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ridge Patterson, was sacrificed, the islanders requiting on
the Christian Briton the wrongs suffered by themselves
from the trading Britons, was the law of supply and
demand guiltless of that martyr's blood? Had British
traffickers any right to clutch gain in such methods, and
to bring down on their country such cruel requitals ?
So, in the dealings of the civilized with the barbarian
on our own shore, have our Indians, when their lands
tempted our cupidity, found us always mindful of the
faith of treaties and of the laws of common justice ? The
early Puritan worthy, left on the British shores, regretted,
as he said, when told of some Indians slain, that they
had not converted some before they had killed any. In
the early wars of our Revolution, when the Moravian
Indians were so mercilessly butchered in that very colony
which in its early stages and by its first founder, William
Penn, had exhibited such kindliness and studious equity
to the red man, was there not a manifestation of cruel
greed and reckless hate that may well be deplored and
made cause of national humiliation and abasement?
When, in Southern Africa, the boors of Hollander origin
burst in on the peaceful missionary settlement of David
Livingstone, enraged against methods that kept them from
appropriating the lands and herds, and from compelling
the slave-drudgery, of his converts, was there not hugest
wrong ? And in how many wars of this kind in our own
nation has treasure been lavished and life sacrificed, with
a recklessness and profusion that can expect no benedic
tion from God, when good faith and patience and kindli
ness would have been economical and safe? Civilization

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS. 313
and Liberty and Progress are lofty words ; but they can
not hide the enormity and the terrible perilousness of
craving thus — because our fellow-man is of other hue or
of inferior culture — his country and his life, that Ahab
may round out his territories from the confiscated portion
of Naboth.
The gospel brings, in its remedy for these evils, a method
of relief as potent as it is simple. It teaches us to look
upward, seeing in the common Maker and Father the
source of all good. What we have we hold from him, the
pensioners ourselves of his bounty, intended to be the
stewards, in his service, for the behoof of our fellows.
The shepherd-lad who, in the eighth Psalm, looks up
ward from the hillsides of Palestine, and, watching the
stars, exclaims, " When I consider thy heavens, . . . the
moon and the stars, what is man that thou art mindful
of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him "
(Psalms viii. 3, 4), saw, centuries ago, that the highest
glory of his race was that they had a God mindful of
them, and " visiting " them by revelations and ultimately
by his Incarnation. He belongs, when brought into that
school, to a class who have as their loftiest privilege a
Maker to be their Caretaker, " mindful " in his providence
of their meanest needs ; and if in his government " visit
ing " them with seasonable checks and reproofs and chas
tisements, yet also, with these, adding high benedictions
and intertwining the great boon of a Redeemer, human,
atoning, and restoring; and preparing them by his lessons
and grace to " visit " himself ultimately in the heaven of
yet higher glories. Thus schooled, David came to be the
27

314 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
champion of his people, as, before him, a Joseph had been
the blessing of all Egypt, and a Moses the guide of the
Exodus and the leader toward the Promised Land. The
men who know what they have in God know also what
they need or want, and what is the common necessity
and what the common refuge of their contemporaries and
countrymen — a knowledge and a fear of the same God.
In the gospel, which finishes the Bible, and rounds the
discoveries of our needs and the rent-roll of our privileges,
man is taught, that in God's grace are set before him and
before his whole race the loftiest hopes and the gravest
duties. He is proffered in Christ a free pardon and a
finished righteousness ; and the command then comes to
the regenerated believer, " Freely ye have received, freely
give." You hold, by the law of grace from heaven ; you
keep, by the law of graciousness toward earth. Loved of
Christ, you are in his strength to love your neighbor, the
forlorn, the remote, the savage, the unloving, and the
naturally unlovely. Their want, in the depth of their
ignorance and the blackness of their wretchedness, is an
appeal to your Christian compassion. Thus taught, the
want of our fellow-mortals demands no impossible com
munity of goods, no fanciful and immoral socialism, that
would sacrifice liberty, progress, and order, the peace of
the household, and the advance of the nation. But as
Brainard, in the smoky wigwam of the savage, fetid and
dark, consoled himself in God, and received strength to
endure and to witness and to win ; as Henry Martyn, the
prize-man of an English university, stood amid the chat
tering and benighted beggars of Hindostan, serene, loving,

BAPTISTS AND MISSIONS. 315
and compassionate; as Judson, expelled from British
India and driven in upon heathen Burmah, after suffer
ing inconceivably from hope delayed and sacrifices pa
tiently borne, became, in critical days, a translator and
a mediating ambassador in the interests of the British
people who had once expelled him, and of the Burman
people who had but recently ordered his butchery, repay
ing to Christian and to heathen wrongers their ill-doings
by kind doings, — did not each of these holy men — Brain
ard, Martyn, and Judson — show how the Haves may
most winningly and most heroically turn, in some
critical season, upon the clan of the Wants, and in
Christ's own temper and in Christ's train put down evil
by good, and overcome misconstructions and enmity and
greed and outrage by the love that beareth all things and
hopeth all things and endureth all things ?
Prayer, against which many in our times are so unrea
sonably prejudiced, is the longing of a filial want on the
earth, appealing with boldness and gladness and rever
ence to a parental have upon the throne of heaven. It
is but want feeling its needs lessened and its woes re
lieved and its gloom irradiated, in the very act of
approach. It has obtained grace for grace, and in the
answers it receives it becomes a true member of the great
tribe of the Haves. With God around and God before it,
it inherits in Christ all things.
Thus taught, the Christian becomes more diligent,
cheerful, and successful. His prayers, aided by a free
Spirit and built on a sure Scripture, take hold on the
prophecies and are upheld by the providence of an

316 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
almighty Ruler and a Parent of unerring prescience and
of exhaustless beneficence.
Among these prophecies of ancient date, but wliich
modern history, instead of falsifying, is, through each age,
verifying with fresh increments of evidence, is the pledge,
ancient as the fields not yet. dry from the receding deluge,
that Japheth shall dwell in the tents of Shem. The Eng
lish-speaking people possess at this day how broad a belt
of territory in their regions and colonies. Over how large
a belt of the seas, daily widening, is their commerce, daily
mending its speed, spreading its fleets ; and, in the sail
ors that man them, extending its influence among all peo
ple. The great possession of the people thus favored
is the Bible, that tells not only of the past — of their
origin, but of the future — of their terrene and their eter
nal destiny. Of that book, the Christ is the great Theme
and Radiance.
When Japheth is become more and more lord of the
Haves, in his acquaintance with the old homes and litera
tures of Shem, and especially in his knowledge of this the
Christ, born of Hebrew lineage on the soil of Palestine,
how singular has been the experience that unexpectedly
burst upon the scholars of a former generation, out of
missionary explorations in part, if not in the chiefest
measure. It was the discovery that the Sanscrit, the old
and most perfect and refined language of the world, was
the language of Japhethian conquerors of India, and
Japhethian settlers of Europe as well; that though
Hebrew was of Semitic, the Greek and the Latin and the
old Gothic were of kin to the tongues of the writers of

BAPTISTS _AND MISSIONS. 317
the Veda. When men would have, some of them, forgot
ten it, others of them perversely disputing it, he brought
them to see that of one blood had been the settlers of the
far West and the settlers of the far East.
When our Lord contemplated his sacrifice, he said that,
lifted up, he would draw all men unto him. Hebrew,
Greek, and Latin characters were inscribed on his cross,
the language of his own ancestry, the language of what
was then the world's chief literature, and also that of
what was then the world's chief empire. The apostles, of
a Jewish lineage, passed the torch of their testimony to
Gentile bearers; but how little probable did it at first
seem that, amid the divergencies of the weary centuries,
there should be lying hidden the traces of a common
origin. In heart answering to heart as the gospel went on its
way from land to land and from tribe to tribe, how did
each persecution and each heresy but bring up additional
evidences that the nations of mankind, whatever the soil
that they trod and the training that they had received,
were marred by a common sinfulness, but possessed of a
similar conscience, bowed by common needs and suscep
tible of common hopes, and ultimately capable of becom
ing, all barriers and partition-walls thrown down, one in
Christ. Their traditions, their tongues, their nursery-tales,
even, told around so many fires in so many dialects,— all
of the original tongues and all of the acquired dialects
were proved capable of moral agglutination into the
Christian church, and of delight in the one redemption,
and of fraternity entire and inseparable in the one Re-
27*

318 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HLSTORY.
generating Paraclete. God has not left himself without
witness as to man's need of him, and as to his compas
sionate yearnings toward the obdurate and desperate
prodigal, far as his wanderings had been, yet surveyed
and cared for by the Father's providence, yet solicited in
the promises of Holy Writ, and yet sought out by the
missions of Christian men.
The share of our churches in their days of compara
tively smaller means, in the translation and circulation
of the Scripture, has been early and has been widespread.
In the Sanscrit, in the Bengalee, in the Burmese, in the
Chinese, in the Cherokee, in the Karen, in the Breton of
these later generations, we have, as a people, borne our
testimony and witness. And yet how much remains to
be perfected, and how much to be supplemented, in the
growing largeness of the diffusion and in the closer faith
fulness of the exposition. Christ, in the single heart, is
the hope of glory. Christ, in his collected churches, is
the pledge of a worldwide evangelization, and the bond
of a worldwide union.

XII.
BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE.

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE.

Upon an old sun-dial in All Souls' College, one of the
houses in the University of Oxford, is a significant sen
tence. It is a motto coming from the heathen poet Mar
tial : " Pereunt et Imputantur ;" or, in English, as it
might be rendered yet more compactly than in its Latin
original, " Spent, but Charged." The framer of that sun
dial was Sir Christopher Wren, who built, from the ashes
of the Great Fire, the cathedral of St. Paul's at London,
and restored many others of the city churches, gone down
in that conflagration. His thoroughness of construction
in so small a work as this college time-teller for the gowns
men of All Souls has made their dial exact and service
able for nigh two centuries. It has mutely reminded the
student and the idler that moments spent, must yet be
accounted for.* The old Roman epigrammatist and the
renowned British architect have thus but renewed the
solemn admonition that already came pealing down from
yet earlier centuries. The moments that steal so quietly
on are very easily evanished from our memories, like the
falling sand in the hour-glass, and the gliding shadow on
the dial-face ; but they are registered in the book of the
* Burrows's Worthies of All Souls, Lond., 1874, p. 233.
V 321

322 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
divine and eternal retributions. And as with time, so with
property ; as with wealth, so with power and influence ;
as with the body and earth, so with the soul and its im
mortal capabilities. God has put stewardship into the
entire texture 'of human society. " We are members one
of another;" not merely parts of a great community,
political or ecclesiastical ; not merely drops in the grand
current of the nation and the age ; but, as the French
phrase it, we are sharers in the solidarity of a race.
Ed^n_hadjglimpses of us ; Eternity cannot forget us. The
tippler who habitually guzzles his rare and uncertain
earnings at the tavern bar, and also, when he can find
there trust, drinks without present coin, has the liquid
fire soon gulped down the sodden throat; but on the
books of his landlord, and in the wan cheeks of his hun
gry babes, and in the rags of his pining wife, what has
been so soon " spent " by him is for a long and dreary term
"charged" elsewhere. And so the examples and mem
ories of those who are gone before us are a part of our
heritage, to be heeded, and to be used, and to be recalled
in the accounting. The records of the Past are the mon
itions of the Present, and enter into the responsibilities
of the Future. The old pagan poet who wrote the motto
which Wren quoted may have seen and heard Paul, for
aught that we know. Both were at Rome at the same
time, and he may have walked under the Arch of Titus,
as it was in course of erection. The apostle John, his
contemporary, if that teacher had been consulted, could
have told the poet more than he ever dreamed of the
reach and force of Martial's own saying. The Hebrew

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 323
Christians in Rome, jostling Martial perhaps on the walk,
as they flitted past the memorial which the Roman con
querors reared of the Jewish nation's overthrow, the ob
literation of their sanctuary, and the cessation of their
sacrifices, may well have recalled the slighted warnings
of prophet and Psalmist, and the unheeded predictions
of the Master and his apostles, to their own erring and
obdurate countrymen. The opportunity had come — had
gone — but the solemn reckoning for those wasted priv
ileges remained; and the longer it was forgotten, the
vaster and the drearier the huge arrears of guilt : " Spent,
but charged."
Some Catholic writers of France have thought that the
first idea of a philosophy of history began with their
great Bossuet in his Universal History. Others of them
have, more thoughtfully and justly, recognized the truth
that it underlay, centuries before, the work of the re
nowned Latin Father, St. Augustine, and which he called
The City of God. Later European thinkers have dwelt on
the services of Vico and Herder and Hegel to the same
grand idea. An American Protestant might point to our
own illustrious countryman, the elder Jonathan Edwards,
in his History of Redemption, as evolving the same con
trolling thought of a continued purpose and a regular
development in the affairs of the nations, alike those of
the evangelized and the unevangelized. But, in truth, the
great central principle was in Apostle and in Psalmist ages
before Augustine was converted from his Manicheism.
When the inspired David represented the Son, yet to be
incarnate, who, as Lord, was to receive universal and
25*

324 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
divine homage, and all kingdoms and all people were
warned that it was at their peril to withhold the loyal
confession, — even then that second Psalm, brief as it was,
gathered up the webs of the centuries, all dynasties, all
revolutions, all discoveries, into one compact knot of the
inevitable and divine purposes, and the irrefragable and
divine oracles. And when Paul, in his Epistles, spoke
of the Redeemer as the Second Adam, and led back the
thoughts of his reader to the first Adam, head of a com
mon Fall, and thence onward to the Manifest God, as the
Lord and Pledge of a common Redemption in his cha
racter as the Second Adam, the lines were surveyed for
a philosophy of human history — a philosophy true, full,
and divine. A course of rule that began in Eden hurries
not, pauses not, till it rests in the Judgment Day, as the
Second Adam shall then administer the eternal sanctions,
alike of his law and of his gospel. Paradise, Sinai, Cal
vary, dot the centuries as great points ; and they bind the
whole household of man to the expectation of the audit,
as it shall come from the White Throne and the Opened
Books. We " spend," but He " charges."
Man passes. Opportunity passes. The age passes.
But the right and duty and the reckoning do not pass,
and cannot pass, because the word and the God may
not pass away— not one jot of the word, not one attribute
of the God, Perfect and Immutable and Immaculate.
We, as a denomination of Christians, have, in the.
advantages of the time and land where our lot is cast, and
in the memory and inspiriting examples of the fathers
who have preceded us, our new hopes suggested fey each

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 325
added week of life to the toiler, and by each new avenue
for benevolence and usefulness and piety opening before
the furrow of the sower and the sickle of the reaper.
Gone are the fathers, but not their remembrance, or their
influence, or our own indebtedness to God for what the
toils of these fathers earned, the tears of these fathers
bathed, and the blood of these martyrs enriched, and the
faithful cry of these witnesses commended. We have en
tered into the ample and consecrated heritage; and the
Lord is surveying, with a divine tenderness and gentle
ness, each new enlistment of laborers on his acres and in
his vineyard; over which, through its every inch, hovers
the cloud of the prayers which these honored predecessors
sent up ; and under its every clod lies the seed, and from
its every trunk grow the scions, which they so faithfully
and patiently planted.
It was said to have been an utterance, to an American
Baptist, of the late Frederick W. Krummacher, — the royal
chaplain at Potsdam, but more commonly known among
the Christians not only of his own native country, Ger
many, but of Britain and America also, as the author of
Elijah and Elisha,— that in his judgment the Baptists had
" a future."
God has not taught his people to pronounce too con
fidently on the results of coming generations and their
changes as to families and communities, political or ec
clesiastical. Yet there is great cause of gratitude in the
remembrance of fathers who have done worthily ; and of
hope, long as our confidence is not in them or their
graves, but in the God who guided them, and upon whom
28

326 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
they loyally leaned, in dark days and through hard
conflicts. In the literature of the English tongue it is cause of
profound thanksgiving that God gave to our fathers men
like Bunyan in an earlier day, and Keach in an inferior
grade ; and in a later day, the learning and biblical and
rabbinical lore of Gill ; the clear and massive theology of
Andrew Fuller ; John Foster among the greatest essayists
of the tongue in the solidity of his material, though over
laid by the heaviness of his style; and among our Scottish
brethren, Robert Haldane and Archibald McLean; in
Ireland, Alexander Carson, the warm-hearted and keen-
eyed, with a Damascus blade that he was not slow to
draw. In the Welsh pulpit, the name of Christmas
Evans became known, not only to the principality and
the men using its old Celtic tongue, but to all English-
speaking Christians as well, both by the eulogy of Hall on
his power, and by the specimen of his illustrations, as to
Christ's sacrifice, so widely circulated on either side of
the Atlantic.
Suspected, as we sometimes have been, of overlooking
the religious privileges of the household and the force of
the hereditary principle in the transmission of religion,
yet, to a Baptist of Scotland. Christian Britain owes one
of its very best works on this theme. It is Christopher
Anderson, in his treatise on the Domestic Constitution, the
same scholar who wrote laboriously and usefully on
the English versions of the Bible. We had a Benjamin
Davis, a scholar of the old mould', a man of large frame,
but with the simplicity and tenderness of a little child,

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 327
full of Oriental lore, and one of our revisers in the Bible
Commission now in session. In our own country we
have had Baldwin, but, above all, Wayland, a prince
among us as a thinker on moral science, and as a most
eloquent writer on the missionary enterprise when it was
more generally than now held visionary and Utopian.
As a reasoner, and as a biographer, favored with Judson
as his subject, his works must live and win a widening
circle of students. In the walks of public life, we have
had in this land a Nathaniel Macon, whom John Ran
dolph and John Jay pronounced, though of opposite po
litical parties, among the very wisest of the men they had
known, and whom Randolph in his last days called the
best and purest man he had ever met. We have had a
Tallmadge and a Marcy, an Ira Harris and a Richard
Fletcher, among our jurists and judges. In the pulpit
were our chief activities; and there the Mercers and
the Semples and Broaduses, William Staughton, Daniel
Sharp, Baron Stow, Spencer H. Cone, Archibald Maclay,
Duncan Dunbar, Bartholomew T. Welch and Richard
Fuller, not long gone home, and John S. Maginnis — a
loss to theology by his early death — were preachers and
pastors of much usefulness. We have had in the Old
World some eminent converts to our views, like Baptist
W. Noel, of noble family, a chaplain to the queen, the
brother of an earl, once, it is said, proffered an Indian
mitre, which since that day, in the see proffered to him,
has become that of an archbishop. But from all these
advantages conscience brought him to cast in his lot with
a people illustrated, indeed, with the pre-eminent genius

328 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
of a Robert Hall, but among whom his social privileges,
according to the world's usual standard, were greatly
abridged. One of the most startling exhibitions of big
otry that we remember in our day was the bitter scorn
w*ith which our English Congregational brethren turned
upon Noel at this change, as if grieved that, in quitting
the Establishment, he did not pause to cast in his lot with
this portion of the Nonconformist body.
In the development of literature through the religious
press, which in our country has taken on the most won
drous proportions, our own churches have cause for large
exultation before God. As Chalmers remarked in his
time, the journals of these later days contain often ed
itorials that- would, a little time since, have been highly
praised if found forming pages in elaborate volumes.
Yet the periodical, prompt and recurrent, cannot fitly or
exhaustively discuss some topics that must, to be justly
handled, require larger space and longer preparation than
the editor or his allied contributors can command. The
newspaper must and does aid the library. But the
library must still do its share, and in yet larger degrees
than heretofore, to meet the calls of Providence and the
needs of the age.
In provision for education, both secular and theological,
there has been an outlay of generous contribution and
pious sacrifice, and patriarchal devotedness and assiduity,
that may well excite admiration. Nathaniel Kendrick
and Hascall and Sherwood and John M. Peck and others
have graven their names deeply on the hearts of the
churches, and in the pulpit their effective, foresight and

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 329
generosity must have, in continuous supplies of new
evangelists and pastors, strong power.
On missions, our churches bestowed the beginning of
their strength ; and on the Bible, so numerously translated
and so widely scattered, their zeal has sent out its record.
Their work may be revised, but the days of the first
planners will come into remembrance anew hereafter in
Eastern fields ; as now, in English literature, the toils of
recent investigators bring out the services of Wycliffe and
Tyndal, though the foundations of these earlier workers
are overlaid in the minds of ordinary readers by the
structures of more recent laborers. In the West Indian
missions of our English Baptist brethren, when the plant
ers of Jamaica tore down and. burnt the places of worship,
and Knibb's life was. threatened, the dauntless and res
olute man returned to England to make a protest, that
did its large share in extorting, or at least expediting, the
resolve of the imperial government to end slavery and to
pay the millions of the national treasury to compensate
the slaveholder.
The cause of freedom and of democracy is on the ad
vance among the nations ; and far as it spreads it needs
an open Bible, and a true free church, and the free Spirit
from God's large bounty, to make national freedom either I
practicable, genuine, or enduring. Our duties here grow
with our opportunities. We have at this day our mis
sions, English and American, in the very city of Rome,
and under the shadow of the Vatican. Can this last?
Not if the doctrine of the Syllabus be practically en
forced; and pontifical infallibility is pledged, if it can
2S*

330 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
grasp the power, to make the Syllabus the law of Chris
tendom. With each onward plunge of the people, it does
not follow that true or permanent deliverance can come.
It must begin in an enlightened conscience, and an in
formed judgment, and a will regenerate and warped heav
enward. The truth makes free. The Spirit of the Lord
is the great guardian of real enfranchisement. We sup
pose a free church, with its open paths and its open Bibles,
is the Master's own safeguard. In auguries of progress,
apart from his benediction, we have scant trust.
How full of hope is it that the tongue of our British
kinsmen and our own is so rapidly becoming the predom
inant language of commerce and travel and general lit
erary intercourse. But a half century since, the French
seemed likely to be the tongue of refinement and diplo
macy all the world over; Germany next appealed to its
literature and erudition, and hoped to claim the scep
tre. But both, we believe, now admit that the present
aspect is that of the yet-widening currency of the English
tongue wherever commerce, adventure, or education jour
ney round the globe. The Baptists of Britain and Amer
ica speak now to a mass of Englishmen many times more
diffused and more influential than the nations and' cities
addressed by the writers and speakers of the tongue in
the days of the American Revolution.
The poor are coming afresh into the purview of the
statesman and of the man of kindly instincts. It is to
the credit of the British Ritualists, much as we deprecate
their approaches to Rome, that they are endeavoring to
win and attach the poor, whom Methodism and Dissent

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 331
have comparatively allowed to fall out of their sphere of
activity and testimony. But the system of the great
Romish Church has, in its own uncurbed action, and over
the fields it exclusively controls, been the fosterer of the
ignorance, the listlessness, and the ferocity that make
pauperism most terrible to the affluent, and most wretch
ed for the poor themselves.
The gospel must go, with the charity of its Divine
Author, not only to the operatives to whom in early
time the Methodists and the Nonconformists bore it, but
to a lower stratum of society — the homeless and the
schoolless and the listless, who hover between mendicity
and crime. A blessed work opens here ; but it is a vast
burden, and requires a heroic faith to grasp it.
And yet it is in such an age, when the moral side of
man's nature affords the only leverage for the uplifting of
the forlorn and hopeless from their physical degradation,
that Materialism appears most arrogantly on the fields of
mental and physical science. Make it the current faith
of a community ; and if the past history of the races is
to be trusted, freedom, knowledge, order, and prosperity
go down into the general ruin. A godliness that has the
promise of the life beyond is, in fact, the grand recuper
ating energy of the life that now is.
The Bible tells, with a rude energy taught from the
skies, its apostles, and its prophets, of the rust of gold. It
literally rusts not. But morally the rust is a fearful peril
and a tremendous poison. Made the god of the states
man, and where are the patriots who may stand up, when
gold has bought purchasable votes, and fraudulent elec-

332 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
tions, and venal judges, and legislatures that frame absurd
and corrupt laws for those who can reward the perjured
law-makers the most liberally and promptly ? Old Rome,
in her pagan insensibility, perished under such rusting ;
and the nineteenth-century civilization cannot endure, as.
well as did Paganism, the terrible corrosion of gold, thus
made to represent duty and happiness and right. If the
gospel go out, and Materialism take its place, the terrible
picture of the Apocalypse as to Babylon, ripe for her over
throw, would become a sure and wide reality. Some
have doubted the wisdom and equity of studying these
prophetic pages with any idea that Antichrist is to be
identified with religious bodies now laboring. We answer,
that Stuart is worthy of honor for his services in the
cause of biblical study and the many most excellent
students whom he trained. But his readiness to accept
Grotius and the Catholic Hug and the Rationalist Eich-
horn as expositors of Revelation was, we judge, a griev
ous unhappiness. Barnes, though belonging to a school
of Presbyterianism by which Stuart was held as its chief
exegete, deserted, as he commented on the New Testament,
when he reached Revelations, the guidance of Stuart to
accept that of Elliott. So the American editor of that
portion of Lange's great Bible commentary which dis
cusses the Apocalypse has gone over from Stuart to Elli
ott, evangelical, erudite, and, as we think, far more trust
worthy than Grotius, who wrote in Roman Catholic France,
amid the blandishments of Roman Catholic scholars. They
proclaimed at his death, that he was on the verge of join
ing their communion ; and a Jesuit scholar of Holland has

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 333
lately and learnedly argued for the truth of this statement.
Whether this were so or not, Grotius, writing in the French
Court, fixed there as Swedish ambassador, amid Catholic
surroundings, was scarce a candid and competent witness
on the true nature of the New Testament Antichrist.
Is the great Latin Church the only antagonist? Is not
the Greek communion in its present form greatly erring ?
Many, even of missionary laborers on Eastern fields, judge
the prospects of Protestant laborers would be sorely
changed for the worse on Turkish soil should the
Mohammedan give place to the Russian; and students
of prophecy have for generations looked to the Hebrew
prophecies of Gog and Magog as betokening a terrible
peril to the cause of truth on this side.
What is our hope in the collision between the false
forms of religion and the true ? Not in civilization ; not
in political progress; not in the growth of art or the
activity of a press redoubling and cheapening its issues,
like locust-clouds in their wide diffusion. All may be use
ful ; but all these, too, may be baneful, except as they are
guided and upheld by the gospel of the Nazarene. The
Hope of the world came out of the stable and the manger,
out of the carpenter-shop at Nazareth and the tomb bor
rowed from him of Arimathea. All the ages have their
one sure anchorage in that Messiah.
If the church fight the battles of her Head, she must
be content to let him cipher out her resources and dic
tate her policy and campaigns. " Not by might nor by
power, but by my Spirit," saith the Lord of hosts.
She mav not barter away Truth for the sake of a peace

334 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
fallacious and transitory in its date and pernicious in its
results. Of old, the nominal church made, in the shape
of Gnosticism and of Alexandrian Eclecticism, a hollow
peace with Greek philosophy. She was overreached in
the negotiation, and sold herself to bondage and error.
The same nominal church made peace with the Mani-
cheism of the East in some of the old heresies, and what
was the result but shame and crime and moral death ?
It is so yet. The truth of God, biblical, God-given, and
God-guarded, knows no surrender and accepts no leagues.
His word is not to be lowered to man's arbitrary will and
self-confident philosophy.
As Jansenism became scriptural, it became persecuted
and proscribed in France. But as it went under the ban,
it remained, nevertheless, a power. Some of the noblest
results in the French literature — some of the noblest
names in French legislation and jurisprudence — trace
their pedigree to the biblical element, the developed con
science, and the regulated affections which they learned
of the men and women of Port Royal.
So will it be for other tongues and literatures and lands
as well. God's book in its place of supremacy open to
every reader — the schoolbook and the household oracle,
the Scriptures of God— is yet to be the law of all the
nations. He who was transfigured had Moses and Elijah
for attendants there. They spoke of a Law Revealed ; and
that old Law, once dishonored, again Restored. The man
of Sinai, the first Receiver; the man of Carmel, the sec
ond Proclaimer— the two were golden taches annexing
the Christ to the Law, and affixing the New to the Old

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 335
Testament. If Christianity, like her Divine Author and
Head, is to be transfigured, and attract the admiration
and trust of the peopled earth, it must be a Christianity
thoroughly scriptural and thoroughly spiritual. For this
what are the resources? They are, on the earth, in the
asking church ; they are, in the heavens, in the answer
of the Father and the Advocate and the Comforter to the
church thus upward in her gaze, and consistent, contrite,
and patient in her asking. In this sign, Zion conquers.
But the grand encouragement to effort, patient and un
relenting; to a hope which, like Abraham's, hopes against
hope, and refuses to see difficulties, however tall and dire,
when over them divine grace and the Messiah's destiny
summon us, — the permanent ground of confidence for the
Church of the Most High is where Christ, the great Head,
placed it ; and where apostles, after their Lord's ascent to
heaven, found it; and where prophets, before that Lord's
advent, had fixed it. As Malachi embodies it, in the clos
ing leaf of the Old Testament, it is with him, with the
God who planned the campaign and dictated the instruc
tions. Yet had he "the residue of the Spirit."* The
last prophet of the Earlier Dispensation is speaking of the
first formation of our race. God laid the foundation of
human society, not in polygamy, but in monogamy ; the
same plenitude of creative energy that stored the constel
lations on high, and the round planet of our earth with
all the varieties of power, splendor, and faculty in the
animal, vegetable, and mineral world, might have sur
rounded Adam with a train like the harem of Solomon.
* Mai. ii. 15.

336 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
Seeking a goodly seed, the Framer of the race built mar
riage, honored, equal, and holy, into the corner-stone of
human society, from no lack of power on his part, but
because "he sought a holy seed." So, in revelation, the
infinite fulness of that Informing Spirit, who furnished
the existing oracles of Scripture, might have made the
volumes of our Bible numerous as the tomes that crowd
the shelves of the Boodhist. Their sacred books are
many times in size the volumes of our Old and New
Testaments. God might have sent a new apostle every
week in each of the twelve months of the year, and dic
tated a fresh Apocalypse for every library haunted by the
meditative plodder, and for every theological school visited
by the eager student. He had, unexpended and exhaust-
less, " the residue of the Spirit." With all this unused
wealth behind him, he made the tome he would have
man consult to be portable. Though, through centuries
and across continents, its various materials were slowly
carried together, they were found symmetric and consist
ent. The divine indenture tallied through the various
ages of patriarch, prophet, and evangelist, in the unity
of its temper and genius, and in the divine oneness of its
lessons ; yet, out of all these several and independent
authorships, came a volume which a few pennies could
buy, and which a week's study could read through from
cover to cover. No lack of material was there in his om
niscient and infinite wisdom ; but lack of capacity in the
scholar's mind and in the toiler's leisure rendered merci
fully the book so compendious, yet incomparably compre
hensive. It took hold of the child and the sage : the bar-

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 337
barian fresh from his cannibal-feast, and the philosopher
gray and wrinkled from perusal of the Old World philos
ophies, found alike, in the one tome, what revealed their
wound, and met their need, and unveiled their God. And,
in the resurrection of that God, the Incarnate, sympathiz
ing, suffering, atoning, and subduing — the Forerunner,
Advocate, and Welcomer of all his flock — he stood, the
ever-present Lord of the common household, and spread
before the soul of each reader truths that might gladden
and astonish and satisfy the intellect of an Edwards or a
Pascal. A Bunyan, grimy from his tinkering, or when
spent after filling up the stint of laces that was to win the
wife's and children's bread, could Catch, as the light came
through prison-bars on the worn page, glimpses, bright
and clear, of the Delectable Mountains and of the Heav
enly City, as he prayed, wept, and pondered. And as the
Holy Ghost, Creator, Enlightener, Restorer, Renewer, and
Sanctifier, observed thus certain just rules, and made cer
tain fit reserves, in his work for the first family, and again
in his work on the divine Scriptures for the universal
household of the faith, — so that same Divine Agent
has his own reserves for the hour of his down-rush,
and for the season of the uprising and forthbreaking of
his earthly Zion. Pentecost did not exhaust his full
effluences. The promises never grow stale.
When an impenitent and obdurate Judaism went down
in the terrible siege of Titus; when an imperial and
world-grasping Paganism of the proud Roman domination
was stormed and was sapped and was exploded by the
faith of the early Christian confessors, martyrs, and itiner-
29 w

338 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ant missionaries, the grace, thus bestowed of Heaven, and
thus witnessed on the face of the earth, left, in the Heav
enly Paraclete, a store of all wisdom and all power and
all goodness yet to-be drawn upon by the generations to
come after.
And so, in modem missions, when the wise of the
world, and the worldly-wise in the nominal church, invited
mankind to hoot at the absurdity, temerity, and ruinous
revolutionary madness of going with a Bible and a Christ
to men who had inherited a Paganism that was already
old in the days of Daniel, or to other heathen, men who
were wife-slayers, child-murderers, and devourers of human
flesh ; when the universities that called themselves Chris
tian, and the governments that called their bills and laws
by the years of the advent, and took oath in their law-
courts on the record of pristine missionary activity and mis
sionary triumph ; wheli the Christian synods that deemed
themselves inheritors of the work of the Reformers pro
nounced gravely and indignantly, that civilization must
go in advance of evangelization, and that steam and gun
powder should shoot ahead of the Spirit of the living
God to make his work feasible, — he who is wont "by
the things that are not, to bring to naught the things that
are," waited not for reviewers and East India Companies
and Assemblies to settle, in their wise fashion, what were
Jehovah's prerogatives, and what might be in reason
allowed him for their legitimate path of display. He
came down. Out of the numerous and merry nursery-
flock of a country pastor, he called the Wesleys; out of the
tap-room of an inn kept by a widowed mother, he sum-

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 339
moned a Whitefield ; out of the cradle of a parish-clerk,
who was withal parish-schoolmaster, poor in store and
narrow in hopes, he took a child ; out of the cobbler's
stall where that child learned an irksome trade, and
learned it but imperfectly, he, the Able and the Unerring,
brought a Carey. He sent the laborers, endued with grace
and zeal and culture of his supplying, over the wide field ;
and the destitutions of home Paganism in Britain, and the
vaster desolations of Indian Paganism in the ancient East,
were met. Yes ; incredible and preposterous as such prov
idences seemed to the wise men, he left the gainsayers to
piece together, as they best might, the fragments of their
own exploded vaticinations; and to gather and hide, as
they could, the blunted barbs of what they had deemed
their irresistible wit. For the gospel, in spite of them,
blazed out of the collier's mine, and out of the cotta
ger's hut, and out of the homes which recent suttees had
robbed of a mother. Civilization to precede Christianity ?
He who waits not for man proved, with a gracious and
emphatic effusion of his Spirit, that when capitalists said :
"Why, they have no funds;" and when scholars said:
"Why, they have no learning;" and when rulers and
parliamentary orators exclaimed: "Why they have no
prudence; and if suffered, the empire has no security.
Banish them, deport them, bridle them;" when clerical
satirists exclaimed, giggling at the idea of being wiser
than these egregious fanatics: "Choke them off, as you
would the weasel found in your hen-roost,"— he, the Un-
waiting, proved that he was in no mood to brook these
interruptions. India, roused from the slumbers of weary

340 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
ages, heard, inquiringly and tolerantly, and at last grate
fully, the men, poor but devout, who had heard, over the
turmoil and prattle of colleges and parliament-houses
and cabinet-halls and review-parlors, the still small voice
which said : " Yet had he the residue of the Spirit."
Ay! The Jehovah who had commissioned the first
writers was but awaiting the contrite and trustful and
grateful readers. He " had that residue," and he meant
to use it, let governors-general do their mightiest — let
grave assemblies resolve to their own most sage self-con
tent against its admissibility — let keen witlings sharpen
their nibs and write down their most pungent gibes and
their most oracular of predictions. The Father— had he
not covenanted with the Son that the heathen should be the
Christ's inheritance? The Son— had he not, after clutch
ing the dragon and bearing Sin and rending Death as he
mounted victoriously to his reascended and native skies,
said to his flock — a few poor and sad men, earth-hunted
and hell-hounded men as they were — " Lo, I am with you
always to the end of the world"? So wait for the Spirit
from the Father. And when the Paraclete, promised by
Father and Son, comes down, where are the literatures —
where the statesmanlike polities, however subtle and far-
sighted — where the ancient and inveterate idolatries —
where the philosophies, Gnostic, Eclectic, or Rational
istic, of whatever race, of whatever age, — that shall wrench
away the urn which he is emptying out, and that shall
beat back the descending torrents of the Spirit as he
sends them on their mission of evangelization and en
franchisement? He gave the command, and great was

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 341
soon the company of those publishing the glad news.
The world cried "Wait;" but when the Christ had said
"Go," there were those— blessed be his name for the
prompting and the heartening of them— who thought it
better to hearken to God than to man — better to face the
vast odds and to do the Christ-commanded task, in the
Christ-covenanted strength. And now we challenge the
world to pause from its rash presagings — presagings as
fully and as shamefully falsified by to-day's history as
have been the last year's prognostications told by some
gypsies for stolen money to some credulous pilferer and
blunderer, whom they cheated alike of funds and of
hopes. We challenge the world to pause from its ill-
omened threats of defeat for the Bible, and to answer
honestly : Would they call back again the widows' burn
ing piles which missionary zeal has quenched? Would
they fling into the Ganges the babes whom missionary
compassion and tenderness have persuaded the mother to
spare? Would they call in the Bibles which these teach
ers have translated, and these converts have studied to
their own spiritual renewal ? Would they for the evan
gelized restore the paganized? No; from too many a
shore and a tribe, insular and continental, comes back
the testimony, It is God's work, and wondrous in our
eyes. If his hand be in it, Gamaliel's counsel may be
the most prudent; for who can fight against God?
And it is the recurrent testimony of ages, widely parted
in the history of the nations and the churches, that when
there has been strong prayer and simple faith, the secular
aspect of the nations has been most strangely and sud-
29 *

342 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
denly altered. It is the intimation of the Old Testament
and of the New, that where God's Spirit sends out
his laborers, he also permits, in judgment and trial, the
great Adversary often to awaken new zeal and to exhibit
a fanatical energy in withstanding, maligning, and, if it
may be, suppressing, the work and testimony of God. He
who let loose the evil spirits and the false prophets on the
Court and about the Cabinet of Ahab ; he who launched,
by a wise permission, the Sabean and the Chaldean on
Job, — may, in equal rightfulness and equal infallibility
of purpose, let loose all the blasts of error and all the
tempests of human enmity against the cause of his truth,
his love, and his churches. But he means it only as he
meant the successful enchantments of the Egyptians
when Moses was preparing the Exodus ; as he allowed the
sons of Sceva to parody and rival the exorcisms of his
own apostles. The Exodus lay behind the ineffectual
resistance of Abaddon. The conversion of pagan Rome
went on whilst Nero was beheading Paul, and whilst Do-
mitian had pent up the last surviving apostle at Patmos.
Error and Scandal, and false Philosophy and Science that
would affect Materialism or Pantheism, and would bid us
hold our Jehovah mute, till they have settled his right to
speak — that would, very superciliously, bid us take our Im-
manuel out of the way, till their microscope and solar prism
and telescope and crucible have fixed the rights of the
world's Moulder and the world's Wielder and the world's
Redeemer and the world's Judge to have a hearino-.  an
these ma}' arise, may tower, and may threaten. But their
right is that of Sanballat to hinder the building of the tem-

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 343
pie by Nehemiah. Opposition may tease, may require vig
ilance ; but as to its inculcating despair, why should it do
that in a world whose moral face Christianity has, by the
confession of Infidels themselves, so wondrously altered ?
God does not prevent the battling of Hell against his Son's
heavenly empire, but he does forbid that the churches
should lose heart, as if the contest were any strange thing,
and had found him unaware and unprovided.
We are to remember, again, that in the revulsions of the
age changes occur, so sudden and so widespread, that the
simplest Christian may well expect immense revolutions
yet to break forth. It is in this line of recent precedents,
as it is also in the line of very ancient predictions. A
nation born in a day is an omen of the old Hebrew seer.
It can be in our own time all the more easily credited.
Would our fathers have believed Japan could be wrenched
open, as in our days it is ? On the face of Europe, what
political alterations of the map have been witnessed by
men here with locks not yet blanched by fifty years? On
the face of Africa, how has exploration been pushed,
boldly often, and in some cases as successfully as boldly?
In Asia, how has the empire of Britain been threatened,
and been restored ? On our own continent, how recently
did the interests of republican government seem trembling
on the verge of possible revolution and social convulsion?
Sudden and strange have been the deliverances.
But vast forces remain to be subdued, and it may to the
secular thinker seem that the vast obstacles and enmities
need to be eliminated. Take tne parallel to the waste
where Moses, the exile, is keeping sheep for his father-in-

344 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
law in Midian. Take it to the Christian church, returned
from the burying of Stephen, and ask how they shall sup
ply the vacancy thus cruelly made ; and how they shall
counteract the red-handed fanatic Saul, strong in the
high priest's confidence, and intent in every region to
secure fresh victims from Christ's fold. "Spent," but
" charged." The dying prayers of a Jacob have not been
obliterated from the heavenly registers ; and Moses shall
yet call down the ten plagues, marshal the twelve tribes,
and head the Exodus. The prayers of Stephen to a Christ
seen at the right hand of the Father are in remembrance ;
and on the way to fresh martyrdoms, God will strike
down the raging wolf of the tribe of Benjamin, and trans
mute him into one of the leaders and watch-dog guardians
of his own flock. Though as yet he rage against them, it
is in God's purposes, that it shall be a flock multiplied
by that converted persecutor's epistles, supplications, and
appeals; by the wide circuit of his apostolate, and by the
bright lustre of his heroic martyrdom. Do not fret
because God is invisible, and requires your faith visible
to be in him the Invisible. Do not impute your own pet
tiness and imbecility to the Almighty, who stretched the
wide skies in their glory. " Yet has he the residue of the
Spirit." Creation, Scripture, and providence— none of
them have yet emptied him.
It is, again, a teaching of Holy Writ that the Divine
Illuminator, although more gloriously and especially the
Author of conversion and evangelization, is yet as well
also the True Source of all mental illumination and ad
vancement in the individual and the community. Arts

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 345
and discoveries and inventions are in the keeping of the
Divine Paraclete. We suppose Watt, Franklin, Fulton,
Stephenson, and Morse — each man who has benefited his
race by some new glimpses into Science and some new
application of its secrets in Art — has had, for this world,
a mission and a helping that was from that higher world.
How far the pathway of discovery and advancement in
the material sciences may go, we cannot conjecture. But
it is a principle of these oracles that from One Great Cause
come the wise counsellor and the skilful worker. The
agencies may be skeptical and atheistic as to their own
personal creed, but the Almighty Father of lights can
carry forward his work serenely over such opposition and
athwart such instrumentalities, just as in those methods
by which Elizabeth of England and her Cabinet pene
trated and counterworked the alien plots that sought her
life and the overthrow of her throne. All God's foes play,
unconsciously, the part of spies in behalf of the very Ruler
against whom they plot.
Above all, God's word bids the churches look to a higher
degree of energy and sacred enterprise, as it shall be de
veloped in individual believers or entire communities in
the favored generations of our race. " The feeble shall be
as David, and David as the angel of God."* It is not so
much a multiplication of the host as a renewed descent
of the sevenfold energies of the Holy Ghost upon the
warriors. What the amount of the residue which God
has in the forces that he is yet to draw upon, we may
infer from the width of his covenant; it takes in all lands.
* Zech. xii. 8.

346 LECTURES ON BAPTIST HISTORY.
We may infer it from the merits of the Atoning Victim ;
he is " the Lamb of God, without blemish and without
spot." We may argue it from the breadth of the Satanic
sway; all adverse power, however old, vast, and deeply
rooted, is to feel the overbearing energies of the God who
has consecrated the planet to the reward of his own De
scending and Incarnated and Self-sacrificing Son.-
The great secret of Nelson's success at sea and of Napo
leon's victories on the land was the turning of one point
of irresistible and overbearing force on the weaker centre
of the lines of the antagonist. Now, God is the mightiest,
whatever the point in the great array of Earth's errors
and idolatries and infidelities which he may choose to
assail. He were not a champion adequate to win right
fully and wear justly the title of King of saints if he
were not fully armed with the skill and the power, in this
garnered reserved force, this residue Spirit, to choose well
the point of onset, to abide well in sovereign patience the
musterings and the vauntings of the foes. "When the
enemy cometh in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall
lift up a standard against him." Paine vaunted that he
had hewn down the trees of Scripture; priests might
plant them, but they would not grow again. Yolney
wrote his Ruins. In their original France, and in Cath
olic Spain, and in English India, and in South America,
the nominally Catholic, how assiduously has the work
been circulated. Strauss was hailed, how jubilantly.
Renan, with all his grace of lore and style, has uttered
his voice. But from any of these latter, can we expect a
more vigorous or enduring resistance than came from the

BAPTISTS AND THE FUTURE. 347
Bolingbrokes, the Tyndals and the Humes, the Voltaires
and the Diderots, many of these last, intellectually, not
only the peers, but far the superiors, of the more recent
opponents? No; the line is to be drawn long, and closely
serried. But in the centre, foreseen from the eternities —
in.its very seat of defiance and audacity — it is to be pierced
by the " reserved forces " of this Spirit. And the line
broken, as in Trafalgar or in Waterloo, the rout will be
speedy and irretrievable. The stars in their courses
fought against Sisera. The stars in their courses fight
for our Redeemer, and, like that light which flamed over
his Bethlehem manger, are all loyal to the Captain .of our
salvation. On the side of man's weakness and vast re
sponsibilities, there is much to appal in the motto of
Wren's sun-dial: "Spent, but charged." But there is a
glad and bright side, when Faith looks away from man
to man's Maker and Helper. The gospel presents a Sa
viour of infinite sufficiency and competency and worthi
ness. The blood of his cross has a perpetuity of influ
ence, outspreading itself from the past to the yet future
¦eternity, and, like its Divine Shedder, "from everlasting
to everlasting." In the purpose of the Father, surveying
the certainty of its flow and the efficacy of its grace, it is
that of the Lamb of God slain from before the foundation
of the world. His merits exhaustless and his sympathies
constant and infinite, his people look to his blood once
shed, his priesthood once taken up and ever prevalent,
his omnipresence flooding our divisions and insuffi
ciencies, and they cry in that aspect, "Spent," freely and
divinely, his redeeming strength and righteousness, and

348 LECTURES ONT BAPTIST HISTORY.
" charged." The Father eyes it, the Spirit follows it, the
Son administers it. Providence is in his controlling,
guiding grasp. The last retributions of the last day
are dispensed by this Elder Brother, laden with our sor
rows, bearing our sins, and charged with the needs, the
hopes, and the prayers of his people. Because he lives
they also live, not only to subdue the world, but to inherit
Paradise. Zion's destinies are embedded into the throne
of God, and knitted into the heart of Christ.

INDEX.

Aaron, 176.
Aberpergwm, residence of Williams' fam
ily, 210.
Abelard, 213.
Abraham, all nations to be blessed in
him, 15 ; his covenant with God, 59.
Absalom, 92.
Absolutism, Christian thinkers in con
flict with, 258.
Acts of the Apostles, symmetry of, 73.
Africa, exploration of,pushed, 343 ; South
ern, outrages of Holland boors in, 312 ;
Western, Baptist mission in, 308.
Agabus, prediction of, 43.
Ahab, 178.
A Kempis, 135.
Albert, Prince, a statuette of, 283.
Albigenses, 112 ; moral excellence of,
126.
Alexander, empire of, 39; bis Macedo
nian phalanx, 292.
Allegory, successful, its essence, 263.
Allen Apsley, 242.
Alva, 127, 144, 233.
Ambrose, Lisle Philippe, 121.
Ames on Theology, 250.
American Baptists, missions of, 302.
Amphitheatres of antiquity, 41.
Anabaptists, described by Dryden, 143 .
drowned in Holland, 246; in Switzer
land and Holland, 247 ; of the Vosges,
161 ; origin of the name, 145 ; still used
in Germany and Switzerland, 160;
connection with Munster revolt, 154.
Anchieta, 133.
Anderson, Christopher, on domestic con
stitution, 326.
Andrews, 93 ; his sermons, 271.
Angus, 93. 30

Annas demands the crucifixion, 60.
Antichrist, Mahomet, 121; the lloman
church, 119.
Antichrists within the church, 142.
Antioch, 73.
Ape of God, Satan, 29, 104.
Apocalypse, its imagery from Old Testa
ment, 112.
Arch of Titus, 75, 322.
Areopagttica, Milton's, 224.
Argonauts, 41.
Ariauisra, 187, 249.
Ark, of Noah, and of Moses, 29.
Armada, Spanish, 233.
Arminiuu or Remonstrant party, 170,
187.
Arnold, Angelique, 135.
Arnold, Dr. Thomas, of Rugby, 286.
Arts and arms cannot give peace to con
science, 293.
Asia, help sent by European converts to
brethren in, 294; invasion of, by Mace
donians, 292.
Assaye, battle of, 301.
Atterbury, Bishop, 107.
Augustus, his empire, 39 ; reforms of
65; voted a god by Roman Senate, 51.
Augustine, 279; Confessions of, 58; his
work, The City of God, 323 ; on the sal
vation of unbaptized infants, 85.
Bacon, Lord, 212, 258.
Bachelordom as a reward, 43.
Baillie, 214.
Baldwin, 327.
Ban, 123.
Bancroft, 208.
Baptism, assumption of regeneration by,
83; compared to the deluge, 81; in

350

INDEX.

Jordan, 27; of Holy Ghost, 28; Pascal
on, 96 ; penitents' acknowledgment in,
30; pledges given at, 98; relation to
regeneration, 77; rightful recipients
of, 83; significance of, 78; views of
Waldenses and Lollards on, 126; was
it known before John ? 27.
Baptist literature, 328; their missions,
190, 295, 306, 329; soldiers reproved by
Sir Matthew Hale, 216 ; women, 242.
Baptists accused of Rationalism, 171;
clergymen of the Established Church
join, 536; early annals of, 143; encour
aged to new hopes, 325; General, in
cline to Arianism and Socinianism, 240;
hold that the Spirit is not inherited,
131 ; in the British fleet, 241 ; in Crom
well's army, 236; in Virginia and New
England, 110; Lipsius' definition of,
171 ; of Holland, their origin, 128 ; one
of the two witnesses in the Apoca
lypse, 111; Particular, 188; Presbyte
rians and, 271; Rationalism and, 187,
189; under proscriptive prelacy, 271;
their views in British army and navy,
214 ; Ypeij and Derinout's, 171.
Barclay, 244.
Barlow, Bishop, 274.
Barnes, on Revelation, 332.
Barrow, 170.
Baxter, Richard, 57, 225, 236, 237; on
the New Toleration, 215 ; Sir Matthew
Hale a friend of, 272.
Bayley, Bishop, his Practice of Piety, 271.
Beausobre on the Manichees, 142.
Bedford, its special interest, 280.
Bedford, Earl of, on Roman Church, 120.
Bengel on the millennium, 158.
Beza, 210.
Bible, abolished in France, 253; a letter
from an absent parent, 179 ; Carey's
Bengalee, .300 ; England and Holland
owe their greatness to, 253; great in
fluence of, in the English Revolution,
231; has a peculiar structure, 10; in
dividual right to study, 255; influence
on the United States, 9; Mennonite,
144; share of Baptists in translation
and circulation of, 318 ; to be read by
the light of Holy Spirit, 254; transla
tions by Baptists, 329 ; Vacherot thinks

will be outgrown and superseded, 10 ;
versions by Carey and associates, 302.
Bisset, Andrew, 237.
Blake, 218, 242.
Bloomfield, Bishop, opinion of Robert
Hall, 305.
Boardman, Judson's associate, 303.
Bodin, 205.
Boodhist books, 336.
Book of Sports, 269.
Borromeo, 135.
Bossuet, 126 ; allows the prevalence of
immersion, 80 ; Universal History, 323.
Boston, Unitarianisra resisted by Bap
tists in, 189.
Brainard, David, 209, 314.
Breda, Declaration of, 244.
Brethren, Plymouth, 218.
Brissot, 154.
British, constitution, 231 ; empire in In
dia threatened, but restored, 343; Par
liaments, 56 ; policy in India, 297.
Broadus, 327.
Bronte, Charlotte, on a pilgrimage, 266.
Brown, Dr. John, 304.
Bruis, Henry de, 128.
Buchanan, George, 200.
Buckle, feasted on Pilgrim's Progress, 267.
Bulwer, the elder, opinion of Hall, 306.
Bunsen, 150.
Bunyan, 225, 244, 263, 326; as a boy, 269;
a Particular Baptist, 188 ; appeal by his
wife, 273; a swearer, 270; De Morgan on,
264; his Calvinism, 276 ; his controver
sy with Edward Fowler, 170, 275; his
doctrine, 271 ; his experience, 271 ; his
felicity as an allegorist, 264; his por
traitures, 274, 278 ; in the army, 269 ; in
prison, 272, 280 ; joins Giflford's church,
270; lived in an age of changes, 269;
Lord Chancellor Campbell's opinion
of, 276 ; love for bell-ringing, 269 ;
marriage, 270; not. a drunkard, 270;
on the Quakers, 244; probably in royal
army, 269 ; reading, 271 ; repudiates
court patronage, 245; saved from death
on his post, 270 ; said to be responsible
for Venner's revolt, 154; thoroughly
evangelical, 250; wife's dowry, 270; his
death, 275 ; his monument in Bunhill
Fields, 276.

INDEX.

351

Burke, 184, 299.
Burmah, Judson in, SOS.
Burnet, 170, 184.
Burton, story of eighteen heads of John
Baptist, 34.
Butler, Bishop, 1S7 ; his Analogy, 170, 276.
Butler, Samuel, author of Hudibras, 220.
Caiaphas, 60, 74.
Calvin, 157, 210.
Camden, 211.
Camisard, 156.
Campion's, account of baptism in Ire
land, SO.
Canonization of saints, 209.
Carey, Felix, 303.
Carey, Lot, 308.
Carey, William, 108, 296, 339; Fuller's
defence of, 305 ; missionary sermon of,
298; sails for India, 299; settles at
Serampore, 300.
Carlyle, 137, 239.
Carlyle, Mrs., gives a copy of the Pil
grim, 282.
Carson, Alexander, 191, 326.
Carthage, synod of, 84.
Castes, evil effects of, 310.
Catacombs, refuge of the early Chris
tians, 55.
Catholic Emancipation Bill, 67.
Catholics, true piety of, 135.
Cavour, Count, 204.
Celestial Railroad, by Hawthorne, 286.
Chalmers, 193, 328; his opinion of But
ler's Analogy, 276.
Chambers, Domestic Annals of Scotland, 242.
Champagny,Comtede, 129; history of the
Jewish State and Roman Empire, 54.
Charles L, 269; and Colonel Harrison,
237 ; united by marriage with Roman
Catholics, 257 ; value of the Bible in
the time of, 254.
Charles II., 86 ; aided by a Quaker, 273 ;
his chaplain, 184; a Roman Catholic
secretly, 257.
Cheeseborough, Miss, book on Mennon
ites, 161.
Cheever on Pilgrim's Progress, 265.
Chemnitz, 147.
Childhood, a new' era for, inaugurated
by Christ, 46.

Chillingworth, 254.
Choate, Rufus, on Standfast at the river,
107.
Christ, 15, 46, 47, 48, 49, 56, 59, 60, 105,
109, 317.
Christ's peddlers, 146.
Christians' estrangement from the world,
mistaken view of, 161.
Christian thinkers in conflict with Ab
solutism, 258.
Christianity, its introduction a great
moral revolution, 9; means of its
power, 335 ; its resources, 335.
Church, duty of the, 101 ; simulated by
corrupt bodies, 142; spirit of worldly
aggrandizement in, 103; ultimate lot
of, 115 ; unity of, 101 ; what it is, 95.
Churches indifferent to prophecies con
cerning error, 187 ; of the New Testa
ment, 98.
Church history, 91.
Citizens in Christ's empire begin with
regeneration, 73.
Civilization not to precede Christianity,
339.
Clarendon, 241 ; obtains pension for Law-
son's family, 242.
Clark, Adam, 128.
Claudius, Emperor, his singular boon, 43 ;
pelted by crusts of bread, 43; twice
married and divorced, 43.
Claudius Matthias, 185.
Clive, 107 ; conquests of, in India, 296.
Coin minted when Titus conquered Pal
estine, 77.
Coke, Sir Edward, 211, 212, 245.
Coleridge, 178, 249 ; on the Pilgrim, 265.
Coligny, 156.
Collard, Royer, 155.
Colleges in India, 301, 302.
CoUegiants or Rhynsburgers, 247.
Columbus, Christopher, 10, 14.
Commerce the welfare of nations, 311.
Commonwealth of England, 231.
Commune in France, 308.
Compromises for peace, 333.
Condorcet on Pascal's Thoughts, 183.
Cone, Spencer H, 327.
Conrad van Beuningen, 247.
Constantine, city of, 42; on baptism, 84.
Convulsiounaires, 155.

352

INDEX.

Cooke, Dr., 191.
Cornelius on the revolt of Munster, 153.
Cotton, John, 220.
Cotton, Mather, 208.
Covenant of Christ with his flock, 59;
of God with Abraham, 59.
Coverdale, 302.
Cowboys of West Chester, 162.
Cowper, 225.
Cox, Bishop, 120.
Cox, son of the bishop, 236.
Cromwell, 214, 217, 232 ; breaks up Rump
Parliament, 239; curse of, 239; stops
the Waldensian massacre, 234.
Cross of Christ, its shamefulness, 52.
Crusades, 14.
Cudworth, 170.
Cum Towey, birthplace of Roger Wil
liams, 210.
Cumberland, 170.
D'At.embekt, 133.
Daniel's imagery of the kingdom of God,
55; prophecy of the millennium, 150,
Dante, 124.
D'Aubigng, Merle, 193.
David, 313 ; promised a sure throne and
a divine progeny, 15.
Davis, Benjamin, 326.
Dead Sea, 19.
Dean, 228.
Death-warrant of Charles, its signers, 239.
Defender of the Faith, title bestowed, 86.
Defoe, his characters, 278.
Deism, or Naturalism, 170.
De Laune, 244.
Deliverer from the East, 44.
De Morgan, Prof., on Bunyan, 264. '
Dent's Plain Man's Pathway, 271.
Dermout, 128, 172 ; on Baptists, 171.
De Sacy, 135.
De Tocqueville, 103.
Diderot, 133, 347 ; Encyclopasdia, 185, 253.
Dominic, rule of, 226.
Domitian, 154.
Donatists, 129.
Doubting Castle, 195.
Draft Riots, 163.
Dryden, on Episcopal and Roman
churches, 143 ; his White Hind, 264.
Dudith, 187.

Dunbar, Duncan, 327.
Duncan, Lord, 191 ; Martin, 147, 246.
Dunkers, 161, 247.
Dutch, naval engagement (1665), 241.
Du Veil, converted Jew, 309.
Dyer, 192.
Dykes, 236.
East India Company and the religion
of Hindoos, 297 ; on missions, 299.
Eck, 147.
Edinburgh Review on Carey, 301.
Edward VI., England under, 253.
Edwards, Jonathan, 195, 209 ; History of
Redemption, 323.
Egypt, grain-ships from, at Rome, 43.
Eliot, 232.
Elijah, 66, 178 ; errand to the widow of
Zarephath, 49; reproduced in John
Baptist, 23.
Elisha's healing of Naaman, 49.
Ellicott, 93.
Elliott On the Millennium, 157, 332.
Elizabeth, Queen of England, 265; re
ceived baptism by immersion, 80 ; the
Bible in the time of, 253.
Encyclopasdia of Diderot, 185.
English language, prevalence of, 330.
English missions in India, 304.
Encouragement to effort, 335.
Erskine on dispersion of the Jews, 61.
Eucharist, administered to infants, 98.
Europe asking missionaries of Asia, 293.
Evangelization of India, 107.
Evans, Christmas, 326
Evelyn, 236.
Ewing, Greville, 191.
Faerie Queen, Spenser's, 264.
Faith, the channel of regeneration, 72.
Fanatics of Westphalia, scum of the
Reformation, 162.
Farrar, 93.
Fathers of Baptist Church, 326.
Featley, 216.
Fenelon, 135.
Fisher, Bishop, 96.
Fisher, Samuel, 236.
Fletcher, Richard, 327.
Florence, Coury, treatise on The Slate of
Unbaptized Infants, 85.

INDEX.

353

Foster, James, 18S, 249
Foster, John, 326.
Fowler, controversy with Bunyan, 169.
Fox, Charles James, and India Bill, 300.
Fox, George, 245.
Foxe, John, 206.
France, revolution in, 20, 67 ; Reign of
Terror, 142.
Fratres Poloni, 250.
Free, Bible and church among Americans
and English, 249; church needs the Spir
it of God, 221, 226 ; press, 224 ; school, 225.
Freedom, requirements of, 329.
French prophets, 156.
Frere, Sir Bartle, 30S.
Frey, 309.
Fuller, Andrew, 189, 195, 297, 326; an
swers to pamphlets against Indian mis
sions, 304 ; on the Holy War, 266 ; sec
retary of missionary society, 298.
Fuller, Richard, 327.
Future of the Baptists, 325.
Gale, 188.
Gaussen, 192.
Gentile converts, 73.
Gentiles, invasion of Jerusalem by, 61.
Germany, Peasant War of, 143.
Gibbon's History of Rome, 54.
Gibraltar held by Britain, 42.
Gifford, Bunyan joins his church, 270.
Gill a Particular Baptist,.188, 326.
Gilpin rewrites the Pilgrim, 267.
Gnostic, 142.
Goffe, the regicide, 239.
Gog and Magog, 333.
Gold, rust of, mentioned in the Bible, 331.
Golden calf, 176.
Goldsmith on Samuel Johnson, 264.
Gospel, 50, 314 ; for the lowest, 331 ; the
only remedy for social evils, 313.
Grantham, 249.
Greece, Baptist mission in, 307.
Greek Church more feared than Turks,
333.
Greg, opinion of Robert Hall, 306.
Grevillc, Ewing, 191.
Grotius, a Catholic, on Revelation, 332.
Gualter, 121.
Guizot's Notes to Gibbon, 54.
Gunpowder Plot, 233.
30* :

ILvnAKKUK, a prophet of the Pen, 18.
Hailes, Lord, answer to Gibbon, 54.
Halbertsma, 248.
Haldane, Robert, 75, 191, 326.
Hale, Sir Matthew, 216 ; his love of bell-
ringing, 269.
Hall, Robert, the elder, friend of Carey,
297 ; the younger, 126, 192, 305.
Hampden, 232.
Hansard Knollys, 236.
Harding, Sir Henry, opinion of Have-
lock, 301.
Harris, Ira, 327.
Harrison, General Thomas, 218, 237;
hopes for millennial kingdom, 240;
Walter Scott, unjust to, 277.
Harvey, 217.
Hascall, 328.
Has*-, 130; account of martyrdom of
Baptists, 159 ; on the men of Munster,
157 ; on Rationalism, 176.
Hastings, Warren, trial of, 299.
Havelock, 108, 301.
Haves and Wants of society, 310.
Hawthorne's Celestial Railroad, 104, 286.
Hindoo gentleman's opinion of Moham
medanism, 308.
History of Redemption, by Edwards, 323.
Heber on Indian missionaries, 302.
Hebrew parallelism, 20.
Hefele, 84.
Hegel, 323.
Helps, Sir Arthur, 184.
Henrietta Maria, evil counsellor of
Charles I., 257.
Henry, Matthew and Philip, 190.
Henry IV., of France, 134, 156, 257.
Henry VIII., 86.
Herder, 323.
Herod and John Baptist, 21, 24.
Herodian family, immorality of, 21.
Herodias, 24.
Hewletts, the, death of, 243.
Heylin, 112.
Hobbes, 120, 125, 233, 258.
Holcroft on Pilgrim's Progress, 266.
Holland and Britain, connection be
tween, 248 ; refuge of Protestants, 235.
Holy Ghost, 72; calls Paul to Europe,
293; necessary to life and growth of
Christian Church, 251 ; reserves of, 337.

354

INDEX.

Holy War, Bunyan's, 194; and Pilgrim's
Progress compared, 268.
Hooker, the judicious, 175.
Horn, George, 219.
Howard, John, 298 ; a hearer of Baptists,
281; visits Bedford jail, 281.
Hubmeier, Balthasar, 147; his martyr
dom, 148 ; his wife drowned, 149.
Huguenots, 155.
Humanity, with Bunyan, Rousseau, and
Milton, 278.
Hume, 136; on prophecy, 17.
Hurd on the millennium, 157.
Huss, 109, 145.
Hutchinson, Colonel, 218, 237; Mrs., 242.
Idols made in England for India, 311.
Ignorance fostered by the Romish
Church, 331.
Immersion practised by Holland and
Switzerland, 247.
Indenture on old English deeds, 11.
Index and Inquisition, authority of, 256.
India, Carey's mission in, 296 ; conquests
of Clive in, 296 ; evangelization of, 107 ;
Unitarian mission in, 188.
Indians, North American, 312.
Individualism of Baptists, 157.
Infant baptism rejected by Hubmeier,
147 ; rejected by Rothraan, 152.
Infants, unbaptized, state after death, 84.
Infidelity confuted by actual results of
missions, 310.
Inscription on the cross, 317.
Interpretation, apostle's rule for, 12.
Irish massacre, 283 ; avenged, 239.
Irving, Edward, 218.
Isaiah, predictions of, 16, 17, 18.
James I., 269; Bible in the time of, 2S3.
James II., 86; and Kiffin, 243; indul
gence to Nonconformists, 245 ; Roman
Catholic, 257.
Jansenius, influence of, 334; on the sal
vation of unbaptized infants, 85.
Janus, temple of, closed, 39.
Japan now open, 343.
Japheth in the tents of Shem, 316.
Jay, John. 327.
Jefferson on Nathaniel Macon, 23.
Jeffreys, 86, 225, 243.

Jenner, 217.
Jeremiah's horn, 136.
Jerome of Prague, 109, 145.
Jesuits' response to Pascal, 133.
Jesus baptized, why? 27; continues and
deepens the work of John, 45.
Jews, possibility of conversion of, 309;
their dispersion, 61, 178 ; their polity,
105; their State and the Roman Em
pire, by Champagny, 54.
Job, 29.
Jogues, 133.
John the Baptist, 9, 18; childhood and
youth of, 17 ; closes O. T. and opens N.
T., 35; long-standing prophecy con
cerning, 14, 17; tradition of his eighteen
heads, 34; why meet such a death ? 25.
John the Evangelist, 31, 71, 72; warning
of persecution, 142.
John, King of England, 14.
John of Leyden, 163.
Johnson, Samuel, as writer of fables, 264.
Jonah, his preaching, 18.
Jones, Evan, and his son, missionaries
to Cherokee Indians, 306.
Jones, Sir William, 300.
Jonson, Ben, 220.
Joost, Van Vondel, Mennonite poet, 246.
Josephus, History of Jerusalem, 53 ; testi
mony to profligacy of the times, 20.
Joshua, 66.
Judson, Adoniram, 302, 315, 327 ; goes to
Burraah, 303 ; death, 304.
Julia dies iu exile, 42.
Julius Caesar, empire of, 39.
Kalee, her necklace, 34.
Karens, churches among the, 303.
Keach, 244, 326.
Kelyng, Judge, hostile to Bunyan, 272.
Kendrick, Nathaniel, 328.
Kettering, missionary society at, 298.
Kiffin, William, 243.
Kingdom of Christ, 52; of God, 39, 94;
imaged by Daniel, 55; "within you,"
spiritual, 45, 68.
Knertz, his work Sabbata, 247.
Knibb, 329.
Knipperdoling of Munster, 162.
Knollys, Hansard, 326.
Knox, John, 210.

INDEX.

355

Kossuth, 33.
Krummacher on future of Baptists, 325.
Labor and capital, 310.
Lacy, 156.
La Fayette, 154.
Lamb, tbe, the Temple and Sun of New
Jerusalem, 30.
Lambert, General, 237.
Lamennais, 213.
Last day, retributions of, 348.
Latimer, Hugh, 129, 204.
Latitudinarian, divines, 169; origin of
the name, 170 ; school, 254.
Laud, Archbishop, 107, 170, 235.
Lavater, 309.
Laws and lawmakers, 56.
Lawgiver, Christ, 57.
Lawrence, Sir Henry, 218, 308 ; Sir John,
30S.
Lawson, Yice-Admiral, 218, 241, 242.
Laymen occupy the pulpit, 236.
Lee, Ann, 156, 157.
Leicester, Earl of, 211.
Leighton, 125.
Leipsic, battle of, 187.
Lentball, 239.
Lessing on Rationalists, 186.
Lewis, Tayler, on the Holy War, 265.
Leyden, tailor of, 153.
L'HSpital, 205.
Liberty, 222.
Lightfoot, 188.
Lilburn, Robert and John, 237.
Lincoln, Bishop of, 212.
Lindsay, 192.
Lipsius' opinion of the Baptists, 171.
Livingstone, David, 312.
Lloyd, Bishop, 112.
Locke, 205.
Lollards, British, 111, 145; rejected in
fant baptism, 126 ; writ against, 86.
Lord's Supper, 99.
Louis XIV., 156; absolutism of, 254;
dislike to Conrad van Beuningen,
247.
Loyola, 133.
Lucknow, relief of, 301.
Lucy, 237.
Luther, his Epistle to the Galatians, 271 ;
preceded by the Waldenses, 145.

Lycurgus, reforms of, 65.
Lyons, Baptists in, "308.
Macaulay censures John Mason Neale,
268; opinion of Paradise Lost and Pil
grim's Progress, 250, 268.
Macedonia, appeal from, 291.
Macedonians, description of, 292.
Machaerus, 26.
Mackintosh, Sir James, 209 ; opinion of
Robert Hall, 305.
Maclay, Archibald, 327.
Maclean, Archibald, 326.
Macleod, Norman, 193.
Macon, Nathaniel, a Baptist, 23, 327.
Madagascar, martyrs cheered by Bun
yan's Pilgrim, 284.
Magdalen, 48.
Maginnis, John S., 327.
Magna Chart a, 14.
Maine, Sir Henry, 103; on Roman em
pire, 40.
Malachi, 10; prophecy of John, 13, 37,
Malta held by Britain, 42.
Malvenda, 121.
Man, how to be free, true, and noble, 23;
not sprung from mollusk or ape, 23.
Manicheans, 142.
Manicheism, 334.
Manning, Archbishop, 119, 122.
Mansel on the Gnostics, 143.
Marat, 142, 154.
Marcy, 327.
Marriage, compulsory in Rome, 43 ; dis
credited in Rome, 42 ; integrity of, vin
dicated by Christ, 47.
Marshman, 300 ; Chinese Bible, 302 ; con
tribution of money to missions, 302.
Martensen on the millennium, 158.
Martial, 321, 322.
Martin, 145.
Martyn, Henry, 209, 314.
Martyrdom of a Baptist maiden, 159; of
a Baptist in Switzerland, 160 ; of Hub
meier, 148; of Hubmeier's wife, 149;
of Tauber, 147.
Martyrs, 135, 206; Foxe's Booh of 271.
Mary, Bloody, her sorrows, 253.
Mary Queen of Scots, 256, 265.
Massacres of Waldenses and Irish, 234
Massey, Gerald, on Bunyan, 266.

356

INDEX.

Masson, 213.
Materialism, 331.
Matter, M., on the Gnostics, 143.
Matthew's Gospel, date of, 294.
Matthew Henry, 190.
Matthias, Claudius, 185.
MSde on the millennium, 157.
Mediterranean, Napoleon's opinion of, 40.
Melchizedec, 29.
Mendelssohn, 309.
Menno, 147,246.
Mennonite Bible, 144.
Mennonites, 128; and Arianism, 187, 190;
call sprinkling baptism, 246 ; in the
Valley of the Shenandoah, 161; of
Southern Russia, 161 ; their connection
with Quakers, 244 ; their decline in Hol
land, 248.
Mental illumination, source of, 344.
Mercer, 327.
Metaphors, caution concerning, 263.
Methodism, beginning of, 109; con
demned by Established Church, 110.
Micah, predictions by, 16.
Michel Angelo, 82.
Mill, John Stuart, on the miracles, 177.
Millenarianism denounced by Church
of England, 157.
Millennium, 151.
Milman's notes to Gibbon, 54.
Milton, John, 214, 218, 234; a Socinian,
250; his idea of humanity, 278; his
third wife a Baptist, 250 ; on free press,
224; whipping-boy for Moses, 252.
Miracles, not incredible, 177.
Missal iu place of the Bible, 253.
Mission of Robert Haldane to India, 192.
Missions, Baptist, 329 ; modern, God's way
in, 338 ; would any have their work un
done? 341.
Missionary work, necessity of, enforced
by New Testament, 295 ; opinion of
East India Company on, 299.
Moderatism, 193.
Mohammedanism, its revival probable,
309 ; foe of English in India, 308.
Monck, 247.
Monmouth's rebellion, 243.
Montague, Lord Sandwich, removes Bap
tists from fleet, 240,
Montanists, 129.

Moody, Lady, 242.
Moravians, 145.
More, Sir Thomas, 205
Morley, Life of Voltaire, 186.
Mormons, American Christianity not
responsible for, 156.
Mornay, 156.
Moses, 29; his prophecy of Israel's dis
tresses and Christ's coming, 16.
Mosheim, 128.
Motto on old sun-dial at All Souls' Col
lege, Oxford, 321.
Munster, madmen of, 143 ; the Reforma
tion in, 152.
Miinzer, Thomas, 150.
Murray, Sir George, 252.
Naaman, 49.
Napier, 247.
Napoleon I., 191 ; opened a career to all
talents, 141 ; opinion of the Mediter
ranean Sea, 40.
Napoleon III., 9.
Nazarene, the, 70.
Neale, Charles, presents the Pilgrim to
his sou, 267.
Neale, John M., recasts the Pilgrim, 268.
Neander, 93, 309; concerning the Wal
denses, 125; opinion on free press, 225.
Nebuchadnezzar's dream, 55.
Newcome, 238.
Newman, John Henry, 97.
New Testament the beginning of church
history, 94; Breton translation of, 306 ;
Cherokee translation of, 306 ; supple
ments the Old, 13, 57.
Newton, John, led Thomas Scott from
Socinianism, 296.
Newton, Sir Isaac, 247; Arian errors of,
250; treatise on Daniel, 111.
Nicodemus, 69.
Nicolai, 185.
Niebuhr on the Peasants' War, 150.
Noel, Baptist W., 327.
Offer, Geokge, on the originality of
Bunyan's Pilgrim, 285.
Old Testament requires tbe New, 13.
Oliver Cromwell, 210 ; his Protectorate,
231.
Oncken, labors of, 307

INDEX.

357

Opdam, Admiral, 241.
Opposition, God often permits, 342 ;
never should cause despair, 343.
Ordinances, to change, a dangerous as
sumption in the church, 83.
Pagan mysteries, purification by water
and blood in, 29.
Paganism, its overthrow accounted for
by human causes, 54.
Paine, Thomas, his boast, 346.
Palestine, a dependency of Rome, 44.
Palmer, Herbert, 215.
Paradise, Sinai, Calvary the great points
in history, 324.
Paris, Baptists in, 308.
Parker, Theodore, on Bunyan, 267.
Parliameuts, British, 56.
Parr, 305.
Particular Baptists, 188.
Pascal, Blaise, 96, 135, 279; on Truth and
Liberty, 222 ; Thoughts of, 58, 183.
Passover, 25.
Patrick, Bishop, his Pilgrim, 285.
Patteson, John Coleridge, murder of, 311.
Paul, his exultation over European
converts, 294; in Rome, the centre of
Gentile civilization, 73 ; vision at
Troas, 291.
Paulicians, 129.
Paulus, 93, 186.
Peasants' War of Germany, 143; Vol
taire, Niebuhr, and Bunsen on, 150.
Peck, John M., 328.
Peddlers, Christ's, early Christians, 146.
Pelagius, 213.
Patriarchal faith honored by Moses, 29.
Penn, William, 203; and Indians, 312.
Pentecost, 251.
Pepys, 240.
Persecutions under Charles II., 244.
Peters, Hugh, 213.
Pfauder, Dr., 244, 309.
Philosophy of history, 323; in Paul's
Epistles, 324.
Philosophy of Thought, 258.
Pike, John G., 188, 249.
Pilgrim's Progress, 58, 195; changes be
tween first and second editions, 169;
Holy War and, compared, 268; in blank
verse and rhyme, 268 ; its perfect orig

inality; 285; its theology, 265; lan
guages into which translated, 283-285;
rewritten by Gilpin, 267; spurious
third part of, 277; undervalued, 267;
Westminster Review on, 264.
Pillar of Hercules, 41.
Pitt, younger, 301.
Plain Man's Pathway, by Dent, 271.
Plassey, battle of, 296. *
Plato, his theory of a republic, 142.
Plymouth Brethren, 218.
Poor Men of Lyons, 123.
Pope, 107; lines on Foster, 188.
Porson, 305.
Port R >yal, men and women of, 334.
Posthumous fame won by Bunyan, 283.
Powell, Vavasour, 243, 244.
Practic* of Piety, by Bishop Bayley, 271.
Prayer, concerts of, 195 ; defined, 315.
Prelacy hostile to Baptists, 271.
Prendergast, slanders against Carey, 305.
Prerogatives of Christ as a King, 56.
Presbyter, Milton's definition of, 215.
Presbyterian influence on Baptists, 271.
Presbyterians and Rationalism, 190.
Present, disposition to place it above the
past, 183.
Press, free, 224.
Pressense, 93.
Priestly, 192; impression made on him
' by Cave of Despair, 266.
Prophecy fulfilled, 316; necessity for the
study of, 157.
Prophecies are miracles, 178.
Prophets of the Pen and of the Voice, 18.
Proudhon, 142.
Purgatory, Hubmeier's simile, 148.
Purification in pagan mysteries, 29.
Puritanism, New England, 279.
Puritans, 107; England's prosperity un
der, 353; freedom identified with, 235;
reviled, 220; Roger Williams and, 212.
Pyramids, 41.
Pym, 232.
Quakers and Charles IT., 273; their re
lation to Baptists, 243.
Quick, meaning of, 158.
Rabble of Rome, 51.
Racine, a saying of, 24.

358

INDEX.

Eainerius, 125.
Randolph, John, 327.
Eastell, 126.
Rationalism among Mennonites and Qua
kers, 248 ; Baptists accused of, 171, 187 ;
Hase and Saisset on, 176; modern
meaning of, 174; of Germany, 184; Ro
man Catholicism and, 193; scandalizes
scoffers, 186; similarity to Latitudi-
narianism, 191; uncertainty of, 196;
what has been done to resist it, 189.
Reason, its province, 177 ; the postman,
delivering us God's message, 180; wor
shippers of, 259.
Reform Bill, the, 67; needed, 65.
Reformation, false, strengthens evil, 153.
Regeneration, belief or faith in Christ,
72 ; beginning of citizenship in Christ's
empire, 73; contains the pledge of last
ing reform, 68 ; John's statement of, 72 ;
relation to baptism, 73; the grandest
reform, 70.
Reign of Terror in France, 142.
Religion of Protestants, Bible, as read by
light of Holy Spirit, 254; not a matter
of heritage, 73.
Religious liberty, 204 ; origin of the doc
trine, 216.
Religious press, 328.
Remission of sins, how intimated by
John Baptist, 25.
Remonstrants, 170, 187.
Renan, 93, 346.
Repentance, baptism an expression of,
27 ; preached by John Baptist, 25.
Republic, its aspect in other countries,
142.
Reschi, 133.
Restoration, the, in England, 254.
Revolution, a means of reform, 66; in
America, 162 ; in France, 67 ; of 1688,
246 ; to be expected, 343 ; vice jostles
virtue in, 142.
Rhynsburgers, or CoUegiants, 247.
Rice, Luther, appeals to American
churches, 302.
Richard Coeur de Lion, 14.
Ritualists, British, care for the poor, 330.
Roberts, Thomas, missionary to Indians
306.
Robespierre, 142, 154.

Robinson, Robert, 192 ; his advice, 279.
Rochester, 178.
Rogers, martyr, 206.
Rolls, " written within and without," 50.
Roman Church described by Dryden,
143 ; fosters ignorance, 331.
Roman empire, 40; foretold by Daniel,
40, 44; history of, by Gibbon, 54; wide
sweep of, 41.
Romans, Paul's Epistle to, 294.
Rome, the centre of Gentile civilization,
73 ; reforms of Augustus in, 66 ; will
testify to the truth of Christ's warn
ings, 53.
Rothinan, assumes prophetical gifts, 152.
Rousseau, 253, 278; his Social Contract
and his life, 20.
Rover Collardy 155.
Rum, sent by England to the Turks, 311.
Rump Parliament broken up, 239.
Russian or Mohammedan, 333.
Rust of gold, 331.
Rutherford, Samuel, 215.
Ryland, baptized Carey, 297.
Ryland, the elder, on missions, 298.
Saceament, 101.
Saints, canonization of, 209.
Saisset, 176.
Saladin, 14.
Sanhedrin, 69; demands crucifixion of
Christ, 60.
Sanscrit, language of Japhetian con
querors and settlers, 616.
Satan, the "ape of God," 29.
Schleiermaeher, 126.
Scott, Thomas, and William Carey, 296.
Scott, Sir Walter, does justice to Bunyan,
277; unjust to General Harrison, 277.
Scum of the Reformation, 162.
Seeker, Archbishop, 107.
Secular power aiding the church, 106, 111.
Seekers, 218.
Self-sufficiency bars from God, 174.
Selden, 215, 245.
Semler, 186; reads the Pdgrim, 266.
Semple, 327.
Sepoy war, 308.
Sep-p, 93, 173.
Serampore, Carey at, 300.
Shakers, 156.

INDEX.

359

Sharp, Daniel, 327.
Shenandoah, Mennonites in the Valley
of, 161.
Sheridan, 299.
Sherwood, 328.
Simon Magus, 95.
Simon Peter, 95.
Simonds, Baptist pastor at Bedford, 281.
Smith, John, 170.
Smith, Sydney, attack on missions in In
dia, 301 ; Robert Hall throws down the
gauntlet to, 306.
Smithfleld, 233.
Smollett, 209.
Social problems, how to be solved, 23;
sins dealt with by John the Baptist, 21.
Socialism in France, 310.
Socinus the Younger, 187.
Socinianism, 170.
Soul-liberty, Williams's doctrine, 212.
Southey, Robert, 203, 208, 240.
Southey on Pilgrim's Progress, 266.
Souvestre, Emile, 307.
Spain, Baptist missions in, 307 ; Stuart's
intrigue for an alliance with, 256.
Spanish Armada, 233.
Sparta, reforms of Lycurgus in, 65.
Special deliverance of Bunyan, 270.
Spenser, his Faerie Queen, 264.
Spinoza, 258.
Spira, Francis, JAfe of, 271.
Spirit, Holy, makes free, 224, 330 ; pledge
of unity and liberty, 165; residue of,
with God, 339, 340.
Sprugel, 149.
Standfast's address, Rufus Choate on, 267.
Stanley, Dean, and the Bunyan memo
rial, 282; quotations from Bunyan, 286.
Statues to Bunyan in London and Bed
ford. 282.
Staughton, William, 327.
St. Bartholomew, 233.
St. Benve, 85.
Stennett, Dr., does not favor missionary
societies, 298 ; Howard's letter to, 281.
Stephen the martyr, 155.
Stewart, Dugald, 305.
Stow, Baron, 327.
Strafford, 232.
Strauss, 93, 186, 346; his book not sup
pressed, 235.

Stuart on Antichrist follows Hug and
Eichhorn, 332.
Stuyvesant, 242.
Success, secret of Nelson's and Napo
leon's, 346.
Suez Canal, 42.
Sully, 156.
Suicide not a character of Bunyan, 277.
Sun-dial in All-Souls' College, motto on,
321.
Supply and demand, question of, 311.
Sutcliffe, 297.
Sutton, Amos, 249.
Sweden, Baptist churches in, 307.
Swift, 107.
Swiss Confederacy, 232.
Syllabus, 329.
Sylvester, Pope, 123.
Sylvester de Sacy, 155.
Synod, 103.
Tacitus, on general expectation of a De
liverer, 44.
Tailor of Leyden, 153.
Tallack,'243.Tallmadge, 327.
Tarshish, ships of, 41.
Tauber, Casper, 147.
Taylor, Dan, 188, 249.
Taylor, Jeremy, 205.
Temple, the veil rent, 59.
Tertullian, 129.
Testament, New, 13, 57, 59.
Teyler Society, 173.
Theodosius, erroneous idea of baptism, 84.
Thessalonica, Paul in, 293.
Tholuck, 187.
Tiberius' divorce and marriage, 42.
Tillotson, 170.
Titus, 48, 74 ; arch of, 75, 323.
Tombes of Bewdley, 236.
Toplady, 188.
Toulmin, 249.
Tradition, 31, 255.
Tregelles, 135.
Trelawney, 67.
Troas, Paul's vision at, 291.
Tyndall, 329.
Unbaptized infants, 84.
Unitarian mission in India, 188.

360

INDEX.

United Netherlands, 232.
Universal History, Bossuet's, 323.
Ussher, Archbishop, 57, 215.
Vachebot, M., on the Bible in the U. S., 9.
Vane, the younger, 214, 217, 219.
Van den Hove, Anna, 88.
Van der Kemp, 173.
Van Tromp, 241.
Vatican, Baptist missions near, 329.
Veda, language of its writers, 816.
Veuema, 128, 144.
Venner, outbreak under, 154.
Vericour, 151.
Vespasian began the Coliseum, 74.
Vicarious punishment in training royal
pupils, 252.
Vico, 323.
Victoria, Queen, gives a statuette of
Prince Albert, 283.
Virgil, supposed borrowing from He
brew prophecy, 44.
Volney, his Ruins, 346.
Voltaire, 133, 203 ; comments on Pascal's
Thoughts, 183 ; Morley's IAfe' of, 186 ;
on the Peasants' War, 150.
Wagenaar, Dutch historian and Col-
legiant, 248.
Walayat Ali, converted Mohammedan,
309.
Waldenses, 112; antiquity of, 123: mas
sacre of, 233 ; motto of, 144 ; views on
baptism, 126.
Waldo, 145.
Wallace, Lady, baptism of, 242.
Wasted privileges, a solemn reckoning,
323.
Warburton, Bishop, 191.
Ward, 300, 302.
Waterloo, battle of, 187.
Watson, Bishop, 275.
Way of Salvation, by Fowler, 275.
Wayland on tbe missionary enterprise
327.
Welch, Bartholomew T., 327.
Wellesley, Marquis of, cursed by a Brah
min, 296 ; favors Carey, 300 ; would not
permit press in Calcutta, 300.
Wellington, Duke of, in India, 301.

Welsh missionary in Breton, 306.
Wesley, 109, 338; his dying words, 227.
West, Benjamin, picture of Cromwell
breaking up Parliament, 239.
West Indian mission, 329.
Westminster Assembly on toleration, 24.
Westminster Review on Pilgrim's Progress,
264.
Whately, Archbishop, 204, 208.
Whichcote, 170.
Whipping-boy, 252.
Whitefield, 109, 225, 339.
Whiston, Joseph, 240; William, 111, 188.
Wiberg, Rev. Andreas, 307.
Wilberforce, 305.
Wild, 241.
William III., 146, 211, 244.
Williams, Roger, 203, 208, 279 ; banish
ment from Rhode Island, 213; goes
over to Seekers, 218; his book burned
in England, 214 ; his coffin disinterred,
220 ; his family, 210.
Windham, William, 298.
Wingate, hostile to Bunyan, 272.
Witherspoon's Ecclesiastical Characteris
tics, 191.
Woburn Abbey, 280.
Wolff, Joseph, distributes the Pilgrim in
Arabia, 284.
Women, Baptist, 242.
Wren, Sir Christopher, 82 ; sun-dial built
by, 321.
Wycliffe, 18, 86, 110, 145, 329 ; concerning
the Ban, 124 ; proffers the Bible to Eng
land, 253 ; his " poor parsons," 108.
Wy ttenbach on Pilgrim's Progress, 266.
Xaviek, 133.
Ximenes substitutes sprinkling for bap
tism, 80.
York, Duke of, 241.
York and Canterbury, archbishops of,
106.
Ypeij, 128, 172; and Dermout, on Bap
tists, 171.
Zaeians, disciples of John, 32.
Zwingle, 145.

1