A Spirituality Of The Word: The Scriptures In Early Baptist Life And Thought

By Michael A. G. Haykin

The Baptist movement emerged from the womb of British Puritanism in the early to mid-seventeenth century. The Puritans, in turn, were children of the sixteenth-century Reformation, which had sought to purify the Church of the doctrinal error, superstitions, and idolatry that had characterized Medieval Christianity. Reformation had come to England and Wales during the reign of Henry VIII (r. 1509–47), but it was not until the reign of his son Edward VI (r.1547–53), and particularly his youngest daughter Elizabeth I (r. 1559–1603), that it was placed on a firm footing. After Elizabeth I ascended the throne there was no longer any doubt that England and Wales were firmly in the Protestant orbit. The question that now came to the fore, though, was to what extent the Elizabethan church would be reformed. By the 1560s it was evident that Elizabeth was content with a church that was “Calvinistic in theology, Erastian in church order and government, and largely mediaeval in liturgy.” [1]

It was as a response to this ecclesiastical “settledness” that Puritanism arose, seeking to reform the Elizabethan church after the model of the churches in Protestant Switzerland, in particular those in Geneva and Zürich. In these continental churches there was a distinct attempt to include in the church’s worship only that which was explicitly commanded by Scripture. For instance, John Calvin (1509–64), one of the leading reformers in Geneva, could declare with regard to the worship of the Church that “nothing pleases God but what he himself has commanded us in his Word.” [2] Puritanism experienced such strong opposition from Elizabeth and the established church, however, that by the 1580s and 1590s a number of Puritans had come to the radical conviction that the church in England and Wales would never be fully reformed. They decided to take matters into their own hands and, “without tarrying for any,” [3] separate from the state church and organize their own congregations. It was among these Separatists, as they came to be known, that believer’s baptism was rediscovered, and Baptist congregations subsequently formed in the first half of the seventeenth century.

The earliest Baptist denomination to develop was that of the General Baptists, so called because of their conviction that Christ died for all men and women. Wedded to this conviction was a firm commitment to Arminian theology. By 1630 there were five General Baptist congregations in England with around 150 members. [4] The vitality of these General Baptists mostly petered out in the eighteenth century, so that modern-day Baptists ultimately trace their lineage back to a second Baptist group, the Particular Baptists. [5] So denominated because they upheld the Calvinistic assertion that Christ’s death was solely for the elect, the Particular Baptists did not appear until the late 1630s. By the mid-1640s there were at least seven Calvinistic Baptist congregations, all of them located in the metropolis of London. [6] A third group, the Seventh-Day Baptists, who worshiped on Saturday, were Calvinistic in doctrine, but nowhere near as large a body as either the General or Particular Baptists. [7] By 1660 these three Baptist bodies had established around 200 churches in the British Isles, of which roughly 60 percent were congregations of the Particular Baptist persuasion. [8]

On the other side of the Atlantic, Baptist growth during the seventeenth century was nowhere near as dramatic. Despite transatlantic links with British Baptists, there were only twenty-four Baptist churches in the American colonies by 1700, and from then till the Great Awakening they all but ceased to grow. [9] On the eve of this revival, Baptists in America were, as Winthrop S. Hudson notes, “a small, undistinguished and little-noted religious group.” [10] Their meteoric rise to become eventually the largest religious body in the United States would not take place until after the American Revolution.

Despite the disparity in size between these two Baptist communities, they shared in common a set of distinct convictions, in particular, a deep reverence for the written Word of God and a desire to live under its authority.

Not ... A Dead Letter: The Threat Of The Quaker View Of The Scriptures

Seventeenth-century Baptists found it needful to define their distinctive convictions not only over the various paedobaptist communities to their right, but also against groups on their left, in particular, the Quakers. The Quaker movement arose in the late 1640s when George Fox (1624–91), a shoemaker and part-time shepherd, began to win converts to a perspective on the Christian faith which rejected much of orthodox Puritan theology. [11] Fox and the early Quakers proclaimed the possibility of salvation for all humanity, and urged men and women to turn to the light within them to find salvation. We “call All men to look to the Light within their own consciences,” wrote Samuel Fisher (1605–65), a General Baptist turned Quaker; “by the leadings of that Light...they may come to God, and work out their Salvation.” [12] This emphasis on the light within, which the Quakers variously called the indwelling Christ or Spirit, often led them to elevate it above the Scriptures.

At the heart of early Quakerism was the conviction that the Spirit was speaking in the Quakers as he had spoken in the apostles. They did not deny that God could and did speak to people mediately through the written text of Scripture, but insisted that they also knew and enjoyed immediate inspiration like the saints of the New Testament era. [13] In the words of the Quaker theologian William Penn (1644–1718), immediate experiences of the Spirit “once were the great Foundation of both their (i.e., New Testament believers) Knowledge and Comfort, though now mocked at ... with great Derision in a Quaker.” [14] When some Baptists in Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire became Quakers they were quick to assert that henceforth the “light in their consciences was the rule they desire to walk by,” not the Scriptures. [15] In a letter that Isaac Penington the Younger (1616–79), who “remains a prime example of the intellectual sophistication” of early Quaker converts, [16] wrote to fellow Quaker Nathanael Stonar in 1670, Penington told his correspondent that one of the main differences between themselves and other “professors” was “concerning the rule.” While the latter asserted that the Scriptures were the rule by which men and women ought to direct their lives and thinking, Penington was convinced that the indwelling Spirit of life is “nearer and more powerful, than the words, or outward relations concerning those things in the Scriptures.” As Penington noted:

The Lord, in the gospel state, hath promised to be present with his people; not as a wayfaring man, for a night, but to dwell in them and walk in them. Yea, if they be tempted and in danger of erring, they shall hear a voice behind them, saying, “This is the way, walk in it.” Will they not grant this to be a rule, as well as the Scriptures? Nay, is not this a more full direction to the heart, in that state, than it can pick to itself out of the Scriptures? ... The Spirit, which gave forth the words, is greater than the words; therefore we cannot but prize him himself, and set him higher in our heart and thoughts, than the words which testify of him, though they also are very sweet and precious to our taste. [17]

Penington here affirmed that the Quakers esteemed the Scriptures as “sweet and precious,” but he was equally adamant that the indwelling Spirit was to be regarded as the supreme authority when it came to direction for Christian living and thinking. [18]

This desire to live by what they regarded as the dictates of the indwelling Spirit rather than by the written Word sometimes led the early Quakers into quite bizarre patterns of behavior. Probably the oddest has to have been the practice of “going naked as a sign”! [19] One Quaker who appears to have been something of an “expert” in this type of behavior was Solomon Eccles (c.1618–83). When he first went naked in 1659 he asserted that he did so because by “the same spirit [which moved Isaiah and Ezekiel] hath the Lord raised me up, to go as a Sign to this dark Generation.” The practice of “going naked as a sign” was a relatively infrequent occurrence after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, and the introduction of the repressive Clarendon Code which sought to curb, if not eliminate, religious dissent outside of the Church of England. This phenomenon well illustrates the tendency inherent in Quakerism to exalt the Spirit at the expense of the Word.

For Baptists, on the other hand, since the Scriptures were, as a 1651 Particular Baptist tract against the Quakers asserted, “the infallible word of God ... declaring his mind, making known his counsel, being able to make the people of God wise unto salvation,” they were “not to be slighted and undervalued as a dead letter, a bare history, a carnal empty story.” [20] The inspiring work of the Spirit in the authors of Scripture thus was unique and restricted to the past. The Spirit was now illuminating that which he had inspired, and all Christian experience of the Spirit was to be tried by the Scriptures. As the Lincolnshire General Baptist leader Thomas Grantham (1634–92) explained: “When the Quakers tell us that they have the Holy Ghost, and that what they speak they speak as they are moved by the Holy Ghost, etc. Then indeed we say we are to try what they thus tell us, by what the Spirit hath said in the Scripture.” [21]

A succinct summary of Baptist convictions regarding the Scriptures can be found in the Second London Confession of Faith, which would become the classic expression of transatlantic Particular Baptist doctrine until the mid-nineteenth century. [22] This confession was published first in 1677 and then issued again in 1689 following the Act of Toleration which secured religious liberty for trinitarian Dissent—Baptists, Independents or Congregationalists, and Presbyterians, as well as the more radical Quakers. It closely paralleled two other Puritan statements of faith: the Westminster Confession of Faith, the doctrinal standard for both the Church of Scotland and the English Presbyterians that had been issued by the Westminster Assembly in 1646, and the Savoy Declaration, drawn up in 1658 by such leading Independent divines as John Owen (1616–83) and Thomas Goodwin (1600–80). [23]

The Scriptures—The Only Sufficient, Certain, And Infallible Rule

Following the order of the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration, the Second London Confession begins with a lengthy article on Scripture. Apart from an introductory sentence and a concluding phrase it reproduces verbatim the parallel articles of the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration. This introductory sentence, though, is a valuable gauge as to where seventeenth-century Baptists stood with regard to the nature and authority of Scripture. “The Holy Scripture,” it states, “is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving Knowledge, Faith, and Obedience.” [24] “Only,” the first of four terms that have been carefully chosen to describe the nature of Scripture, emphasizes that apart from the Bible there is no other source of ultimate religious authority. The implications of this term are spelled out further on in the Confession. Neither “new revelations of the Spirit—a remark aimed at the Quakers and other radicals like the Muggletonians who asserted that Lodowicke Muggleton (1609–98) alone had the power to properly interpret Scripture [25] —nor the “traditions of men”—a statement which probably has in view the Church of England—can be elevated to authoritative status alongside Scripture. [26] To quote The London Baptist Benjamin Keach (1640–1704), the “Sacred Scripture is our just Confines.” [27]

A second attribute of the Scriptures is that they are “sufficient.” Quaker tracts argued that the written Word by itself was not a sufficient rule for believers, since the Holy Spirit was needed to unlock its meaning. Sufficiency was thus better attributed to the Spirit. [28] While Baptists were quite prepared to concede the need for the Spirit’s guidance in understanding the Scriptures, [29] they feared complete doctrinal confusion would result if the sufficiency of Scripture as a standard for faith was replaced by the Spirit. As the Wiltshire Baptist, Thomas Hicks (d. c. 1688), noted: “Then if George Fox do but say ‘tis reveal’d to him the Earth is flat, it must be believ’d, because I have no rule wherewith to disprove his pretended Revelation.” [30] This opening sentence of the Second London Confession thus proceeds to assert that, while God does reveal himself in ways other than the Scriptures, for instance through the created realm, only Scripture is “sufficient” to “give that knowledge of God and his will which is necessary unto salvation.” [31] Or in the words of Article 1.6 of the confession: “The whole Council of God concerning all things necessary for his own Glory, Man’s Salvation, Faith and Life, is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture.” [32] The written Scriptures are necessary for God to be properly glorified by men and women, as well as being vital for men and women to come to a saving knowledge of God, and then to develop a world-view [33] and lifestyle in accord with their salvation. Thus, from the Baptist point of view, the Quakers were guilty of making an unbiblical cleavage between the Spirit and the Word. As Keach declared in 1681, in a direct allusion to the Quakers: “Many are confident they have the Spirit, Light, and Power, when ‘tis all meer Delusion. The Spirit always leads and directs according to the written Word: ‘He shall bring my Word,’ saith Christ, ‘to your remembrance’” (cf. John 14:26). [34]

The next two terms of this sentence are similar, but not identical, in their import. Scripture is “certain,” that is, it does not contain error. Scripture is also said to be “infallible,” a term that has a long history of usage in Christian theology, and which identifies Scripture as possessing the quality of being entirely trustworthy and reliable. [35]

The strengthening of the opening article on Scripture in the Westminster Confession and Savoy Declaration by the addition of this one sentence in the Baptist confession is almost definitely a response to the threat of Quakerism. But in this emphasis on Scripture as the supreme arbiter for the Christian life, these seventeenth-century Baptists were simply reflecting the broader Reformation and Puritan culture, for both the Reformation and Puritanism were first and foremost movements centered on the Word. [36]

Finally, lest it be thought that the early Calvinistic Baptists, in their desire to emphasize the authority of the Scriptures, went to the opposite extreme and depreciated the importance of the work of the Spirit in the Christian life, one needs to note the words of the Second London Confession 1.5, where it is stated that “our full perswasion, and assurance of the infallible truth” of the Scriptures comes neither from “the testimony of the Church of God” nor from the “heavenliness of the matter” of the Scriptures, the “efficacy of [their] Doctrine,” and “the Majesty of [their] Stile.” Rather it is only “the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our Hearts” that convinces believers that God’s Word is indeed what it claims to be. [37]

The Pulpit—A Place Of Nurture, Of Fire And Light [38]

Given this estimation of the Scriptures, it is not surprising that preaching was regarded by the Calvinistic Baptists as the preëminent aspect of worship. For instance, in the association records of the Northern Baptist Association, which was composed of Baptist churches in the old counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Durham, we read the following answer to a question raised in 1701 as to who may administer the ordinances of the Lord’s Supper and baptism: “Those Persons that the Church approves of to Preach the gospel we think it safe to Approve likewise for ye Administering other Ordinances Preaching being the greater work.” In 1703, when a similar question was asked, it was stated that “those whom the Church Approves to preach the Gospel may also Administer the Ordinances of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper Preaching being the main and principal Work of the Gospel.” [39] Is this biblical? Yes indeed. As the apostles said in Acts 6:3 when a serious contention arose regarding the care of the Greek-speaking Jewish widows in the Jerusalem church: “It is not right that we should neglect the Word of God in order to wait on tables.”

The architecture of early British Baptist churches also spoke of this emphasis on the preached word in worship: the central feature of these simple structures was the pulpit.

In the words of D. Mervyn Himbury, early Baptist chapels were “meeting houses designed for preaching.” [40] These meeting-houses were generally square or rectangular structures, some of them from the outside even resembling barns. Thus, one critic of the Baptists and their fellow dissenters in the early nineteenth century could describe their faith as “the religion of barns”! [41]

Inside the meeting-house the pulpit was made prominent and was well within the sight and sound of the entire congregation. Sometimes a sounding board was placed behind the pulpit so as to help project the preacher’s voice throughout the building. There was a noticeable lack of adornment in Baptist meeting-houses, with nothing to distract the attention of the worshipers. During the following century, the eighteenth, large clear windows were provided so that light was available to all to read the Scriptures as the Word of God was expounded. [42]

Given the prominence attached to preaching by verbal and architectural statement, it should be no surprise to find leading Baptist preachers from this early period emphasizing that good preaching required hard work and preparation. Hercules Collins (d. 1702), the pastor of Wapping Baptist Church, London, from 1676 till his death, could state in his The Temple Repair’d (1702) that “he doth the best Work and the most Work, that labours most in his Study, with a dependance upon God for a blessing.” [43 ]While Collins was well aware that ultimately it was the Spirit that made men preachers of the Gospel—”tho it be granted,” he wrote in the same work, “that human literature is very useful for a Minister, yet it is not essentially necessary; but to have the Spirit of Christ to open the Word of Christ is essentially necessary” [44] —yet study was still vital. There were some, he noted, that “think it unlawful to study to declare God’s Mind, and will contemptuously speak against it, as if we were to preach by Inspiration, as the prophets and apostles of old did.” In response to such reasoning, Collins cited 2 Timothy 2:15 and asked “What can be a better Confutation of those Men than [this] Text? Which commands Ministers to study to shew themselves good Workmen.” [45]

Finally, it should be noted that the Calvinistic Baptists of this era never lost sight of the fact that, just as it is the Spirit alone who makes preachers, so it is the Spirit who alone can empower the words of the preacher and make them efficacious to the winning of the lost and the building up of God’s people. Benjamin Beddome (1717–95), though from the next century, well expressed the views of the seventeenth-century Baptists when he declared: “Ministers lift up their voice, and God makes bare his arm; ministers persuade, and God enables, nay, constrains, men to comply.... Ministers stand at the door and knock; the Spirit comes with his key, and opens the door.” [46]

Concluding Thought

Now, the culture in which we live and move today is particularly hostile to the idea that there is indeed such a thing as “the truth.” Its delight in relativism and its desire to count as rubbish all metanarratives can never be embraced by a people who have long been convinced that the pages of Scripture do indeed contain a metanarrative that is the truth and which has for its focus God’s work in the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. In our culture, proclaiming this metanarrative through the medium of preaching will inevitably be counter-cultural. But this would not be the first time Baptists have had to row against the stream of their culture. As one famous seventeenth-century Baptist, John Bunyan (1628–88), put it, when describing his preaching: “I have really been in pain, and have as it were travailed to bring forth children to God; neither could I be satisfied unless some fruits did appear in my work: if I were fruitless, it mattered not who commended me; but if I were fruitful, I cared not who did condemn.” [47]

About the Author

Dr. Michael A. G. Haykin is professor of church history, Heritage Theological Seminary, Cambridge, Ontario, and editorial director, Joshua Press, Dundas, Ontario. He is the author of The Spirit of God (E.J. Brill, 1994), One Heart and One Soul (Evangelical Press, 1994), Kiffin, Knollys & Keach (Carey Press, 1997), and John Gill (E.J. Brill, 1997). Dr. Haykin’s special area of research is eighteenth-century British Baptist history.

Notes

1. Walton, Robert C., The Gathered Community (London: The Carey Press, 1946), 59.
2. Parker, T. H. L., trans. Daniel I (Chapters 1–6). Volume 20 of Calvin’s Old Testament Commentaries (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans; Carlisle, Cumbria: Paternoster Press, 1993), 130.
3. These words come from the title of an influential book written by the father of the Separatist movement, Robert Browne (c. 1550–1633): A Treatise of Reformation Without Tarrying for Anie (1582).
4. For the story of the General Baptists up to 1660, see B. R. White, The English Baptists of the Seventeenth Century. Rev. ed. (Didcot, Oxfordshire: The Baptist Historical Society, 1996), 15–58.
5. Hudson, Winthrop S., “By Way of Perspective.” In Baptist Concepts of the Church. A Survey of the Historical and Theological Issues Which Have Produced Changes in Church Order (Chicago/Philadelphia/Los Angeles: Judson Press, 1959), 16–17.
6. For the full story of the emergence of the Calvinistic Baptists from the Puritan-Separatist matrix, see especially B. R. White, The English Baptists; Kenneth R. Manley, “Origins of the Baptists: The Case For Development from Puritanism-Separatism.” In Faith, Life and Witness: The Papers of the Study and Research Division of The Baptist World Alliance 1986–1990, William H. Brackney with Ruby J. Burke, eds., (Birmingham, Alabama: Samford University Press, 1990), 56–69.
7. On the Seventh-Day Baptists, see Bryan W. Ball, The Seventh-day Men: Sabbatarians and Sabbatarianism in England and Wales, 1600–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
8. White, B. R., The English Baptists, 7–10; William Henry Brackney, The Baptists (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1994), 9.
9. McBeth, H. Leon, The Baptist Heritage (Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press, 1987), 200. For links between the British and American Baptists, see Hudson, “By Way of Perspective,” passim; William H. Brackney, “Hands across the Waters: Transatlantic Interrelationships in the Emerging Community of Baptists 1626–1927” (Unpublished paper given at the International Conference on Baptist Studies, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, August 14, 1997).
10. Wood, James E., ed., “Baptists, the Pilgrim Fathers, and the American Revolution.” In Baptists and the American Experience (Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Judson Press, 1976), 26. See also the comments of William G. McLoughlin, Soul Liberty: The Baptists’ Struggle in New England, 1630-1833 (Hanover/London: University Press of New England, 1991), 5–6.
11. On Fox, see especially H. Larry Ingle, First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
12. Cited Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 33. For a discussion of Fisher’s approach to Scripture, see Dean Freiday, The Bible: Its Criticism, Interpretation and Use in 16th and 17th Century England (Pittsburgh: Catholic and Quaker Studies, 1979), 97–102.
13. Underwood, T. L., Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist-Quaker Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 26–27; 32–33.
14. Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, 26.
15. Reay, Quakers, 34.
16. Greaves, Richard L., and Robert Zaller, eds., “Penington, Isaac (the Younger)” by J. W. Frost. In Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1984),III:23.
17. Letters of Isaac Penington. 2nd. ed., Reprint. (London: Holdsworth and Ball, 1829), 202–03. For access to these letters I am indebted to Heinz G. Dschankilic of Cambridge, Ontario.
18. See also the remarks by Richard Dale Land, “Doctrinal Controversies of English Particular Baptists (1644–1691) as Illustrated by the Career and Writings of Thomas Collier” (Unpublished D. Phil. thesis, Regent’s Park College, Oxford University, 1979), 205–11. In the words of Richard Bauman (Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 38): “The Quakers were intensely devoted to the Bible, not as a source of traditional authority, but as historical validation of the patterns and dynamics of their own charismatic prophetic mission.”
19. For an excellent study of this phenomenon, see “Early Quakers” and “Going Naked as a Sign.” In Quaker History, (1978), 67:69–87. The following paragraph is indebted to this study. See also Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few, 84–94.
20. Underhill, Edward Bean, ed., “Heart Bleedings for Professor Abominations.” In Confessions of Faith, and Other Public Documents, Illustrative of the History of the Baptist Churches of England in the 17th Century (London: Hanserd Knollys Society, 1854), 304.
21. Christianismus Primitivus (London, 1678), 50; Primtivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, 22.
22. For the text of this confession, see William L. Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions of Faith, Rev. ed., (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1969), 241–95.
23. While most of the articles in the Savoy Declaration are taken word for word from the Westminster Confession, there are a number where the authors of the Savoy Declaration have either altered the wording or added brand new articles. For some of these changes, see Peter Toon, Puritans and Calvinism, (Swengel, Pennsylvania: Reiner Publications, 1973), 77–84; Robert W. Oliver, “Baptist Confession Making 1644 and 1689” (Unpublished paper presented to the Strict Baptist Historical Society, March 17, 1989), 11–12.
24. Second London Confession 1.1 (Lumpkin, Baptist Confessions, 248). Helpful in analyzing this sentence has been L. Russ Bush and Tom J. Nettles, Baptists and the Bible: The Baptist Doctrines of Biblical Inspiration and Religious Authority in Historical Perspective (Chicago: Moody, 1980), 65–72.
25. On Muggleton, see William Lamont, Puritanism and Historical Controversy (Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 27–40.
26. Second London Confession 1.6 (Baptist Confessions, 250).
27. Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, 20.
28. Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, 24.
29. Lest it be thought that seventeenth-century Baptists, in their desire to emphasize the authority of the Scriptures, see below, 82–83.
30. Primitivism, Radicalism, and the Lamb’s War, 25.
31. Second London Confession 1.1 (Baptist Confessions, 248).
32. Second London Confession 1.6 (Baptist Confessions, 250).
33. So Bush and Nettles interpret “faith” in the opening sentence of the Second London Confession (Baptists and the Bible, 68).
34. Tropologia: A Key to Open Scripture-Metaphors (London: Enoch Prosser, 1681), II:312.
35. Tropologia, 70. For this definition of the term “infallible”, see J. I. Packer, “Infallibility and Inerrancy of the Bible.” In New Dictionary of Theology, Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and J. I. Packer, eds. (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity, 1988), 337.
36. “Doctrinal Controversies”, 205.
37. Second London Confession 1.5 (Baptist Confessions, 250). For the importance of balance in this area, see the remarks of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Authority (1958 ed.; repr. Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1984), 62–4.
38. This description of the pulpit is that of Michael J. Walker, Baptists at the Table: The Theology of the Lord’s Supper amongst English Baptists in the Nineteenth Century (Didcot, Oxfordshire: Baptist Historical Society, 1992), 7. While Walker’s description is of the Baptist pulpit in the nineteenth century, in many ways it is also true of eighteenth-century Baptist preaching.
39. Copson, S. L., Association Life of the Particular Baptists of Northern England 1699–1732 (London: Baptist Historical Society, 1991), 89, 95. Italics added.
40. British Baptists. A Short History (London: The Carey Kingsgate Press Ltd., 1962), 141.
41. Greene, John, Reminiscences of the Rev. Robert Hall, A.M. (London: Frederick Westley/A. H. Davis, 1834), 25.
42. Helpful in this discussion of early Baptist architecture has been John Davison, “The Architecture of the Local Church.” In Local Church Practice (Haywards Heath, Sussex: Carey Publications, 1978), 179–90.
43. “Baptist Preaching in Early 18th Century England,” 12.
44. McBeth, H. Leon, A Sourcebook for Baptist Heritage (Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press, 1990), 113.
45. Sourcebook., 113.
46. Beddome, Benjamin, “The Heavenly Calling.” In Sermons Printed from the Manuscripts of the late Rev. Benjamin Beddome, A.M. (London: William Ball, 1835), 111, 116. The final sentence of this quotation is taken directly from the Puritan author Thomas Watson (d. c. 1686). See his A Body of Divinity (1890 ed.; repr. London: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1965), 221.
47. Owens, W. R., ed., Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners 290, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1987), 72–73.