0703a-Progress of Denomination in North America

THE QUIET PERIOD

CHAPTER III.

Progress of the Denomination in North America-Sufferings in New England-Mrs.

Elizabeth Backus-Mrs. Kimball-Virginia-Whitfield’s Preaching-The "New Lights"-Philadelphia Association-Other Associations-Correspondence with London Ministers-Great Revivals-Brown University-Nova Scotia-New Brunswick-Canada. At the commencement of this period there were but thirteen Baptist churches in North America. In the year 1740, the number of churches was thirty-seven, with less than 3,000 members. But in 1790, there were 872 churches, containing 64,975 members. Twenty-five new churches were formed in the first half of the period; in the second half no fewer than 835 churches. This is surely a wonderful increase.

It will be interesting to note the dates of the establishment of the first churches in the several States:- 1703. Welsh Tract, Delaware.

1705. Groton, Connecticut.

1714. Burleigh, Virginia.

1724. Golden Hill, New York.

1727. Perquimans, N. Carolina.

1742. Chestnut Ridge, Maryland.

1755. Newtown, New Hampshire.

1764. Berwick, Maine.

1768. Shaftesbury, Vermont.

1772. Kiokee, Georgia.

1780. Buffalo Ridge, Tennessee.

1781. Nolinn, Kentucky.

1790. Miami, Ohio.

1796. New Design, Illinois. Our Baptist forefathers had a hard struggle in the New England States. The Congregationalists were the "Standing Order," and the support of their ministers was provided for by law, in the shape of a tax, levied on all the inhabitants. They had fled from one establishment, and had set up another! A backward movement had taken place, in the introduction of the "half-way covenant," which filled the churches with men who were strangers to godliness.1 The assessment for ministers’ salaries was rigorously enforced. It was in vain that the Baptists pleaded their conscientious dissent from the "Standing Order," and the obligation under which they lay to support their own ministers. Their oppressors would not listen, nor abate one jot of their demands. The scourge was in their hands, and they applied it without mercy.

"From the year 1692 to the year 1728, the Baptists were everywhere, except in Boston and some few other towns, taxed for the support of Congregational ministers. The fact of their maintaining worship by themselves was not allowed to be a sufficient reason for exempting them from rates to sustain a ministry which in point of conscience they could not hear. For their refusal to pay such rates, we are told that they ’oftentimes had their bodies seized upon, and thrown into the common jail, as malefactors, and their cattle, swine, horses, household furniture, and implements of husbandry, forcibly distrained from them, and shamefully sold, many times at not one-quarter part of the first value.’ And it is added ’that the heavy pressures and afflictions occasioned by these distraints, imprisonments, and the losses consequent thereupon, made many of the Baptists bend, almost ruined some of our people, and disheartened others to such a degree, that they removed, with the remaining effects they had left, out of the Province.’"2 In the year 1728, an Act was passed by the General Court of Massachusetts, exempting Baptists from the tax; but as it relieved the persons only, but left the property still liable, it was of little service. Other Acts were afterwards passed, to be in force for short periods, professedly to give relief; but they were clogged with so many difficulties and obnoxious conditions, that the Baptists continued to suffer, in many places, and for many years. The following letters from Christian women furnish painful illustrations of these statements.Elizabeth Backus, mother of the Rev. Isaac Backus, writes thus to her son:- " Norwich, Nov. 4th, 1752."

"MY DEAR SON,-I have heard something of the trials amongst you of late, and I was grieved, till I had strength to give up the case to God, and leave my burden there. And now I would tell you something of our trials. Your brother Samuel lay in prison twenty days. October 15th, the collectors came to our house, and took me away to prison, about nine o’clock, in a dark, rainy night. Brothers Hill and Sabins were brought there the next night. We lay in prison thirteen days, and were then set at liberty, by what means I know not. Whilst I was there, a great many people came to see me, and some said one thing and some said another. Oh, the innumerable snares and temptations that beset me! more than I ever thought of before. But oh, the condescension of Heaven! though I was bound when I was cast into this furnace, yet I was loosed and found Jesus in the midst of a furnace with me. Oh, then I could give up my name, estate, family, life and breath, freely to God. Now the prison looked like a palace to me. I could bless God for all the laughs and scoffs made at me. Oh, the love that flowed out to all mankind! then I could forgive as I would desire to be forgiven, and love my neighbour as myself. Deacon Griswold was put in prison the 8th of October; and yesterday old brother Grover; and they are in pursuit of others, all which calls for humiliation. The Church has appointed the 13th of November to be spent in prayer and fasting on that account. I do remember my love to you and your wife, and the dear children of God with you, begging your prayers for us in such a day of trial. We are all in tolerable health, expecting to see you. These from your loving mother,"

"ELIZABETH BACKUS."

"MR. BACKUS,-I understand that you are collecting materials for a Baptist History, in which you propose to let the public know how the Baptists have been oppressed in Massachusetts Bay. This is to let you know that in the year 1768, in a very cold night in winter, about nine or ten o’clock in the evening, I was taken prisoner, and carried by the collector in the town where I live, from my family, consisting of three small children, in order to be put into jail. It being a severe cold night, I concluded, by advice, while I was detained at a tavern in the way to jail some hours, to pay the sum of 4-8 L. M. [i.e. Legal Money], for which I was made a prisoner, it being for the ministerial rate. The reason why I refused paying it before, was because I was a Baptist, and belonged to the Baptist Society, in Haverhill, and had carried in a certificate to the assessors, as I suppose, according to law. Thus they dealt with a poor widow woman in Bradford, the relict of Solomon Kimball, late of the said town;-at whose house the Rev. Hezekiah Smith was shamefully treated by many of the people in Bradford, who came headed by the sheriff, Amos Mulliken, at a time when Mr. Smith was to preach a sermon in our house, at the request of my husband, and warmly contended with him, and threatened him if he did preach. Mr. Smith went to begin service by singing, notwithstanding the noise, clamor, and threats of the people. But one of their number snatched the chair, behind which Mr. Smith stood, from before him. Upon which my husband desired Mr. Smith to tarry a little, till he quelled the tumult; but all his endeavors to silence them were in vain. Upon which my husband desired Mr. Smith to begin public service; which accordingly he did, and went through then without further molestation.

"MARTHA KIMBALL."

"Bradford, Sept. 2nd, 1774."

"N.B. The above I can attest to. It may be observed, that the tavern whither they took me is about two miles from my house. After I had paid what they demanded, then I had to return to my poor fatherless children, through the snow on foot, in the dead of the night, exposed to the severity of the cold."3 In the other New England States, Rhode Island excepted, the Baptists met with similar treatment. The Rev. Mr. Marshall, for instance, who laboured in Connecticut, was put in the stocks for preaching in another minister’s parish, and afterwards sent to jail, for "preaching the Gospel contrary to law." The tongue of slander was busy against them, and they were "everywhere spoken against." Unrighteously taxed, unlawfully imprisoned, the butts of all men’s ridicule, they quailed not, nor did they slacken in zeal or effort; and God wonderfully blessed them. Their success was great also in Virginia. After the revival under Whitfield and his associates, many Baptist ministers itinerated in that State, and so preached that multitudes believed and were converted. Persecution soon broke out. Several of the ministers were arrested. "May it please your worship," said the lawyer, " these men are great disturbers of the peace; they cannot meet a man on the road, but they ram a text of Scripture down his throat." As they would not promise to desist from preaching, they were committed to prison, to which they went cheerfully, singing as they walked through the street, Dr. Watts’s hymn, "Broad is the road that leads to death." This was in the county of Spottsylvania, in the year 1768. The same course was pursued by the magistrates in other parts of the State. About thirty ministers, besides many exhorters and others who manifested Christian earnestness for the salvation of souls, were imprisoned, some of them repeatedly.4

"The magistrates, in all parts of the Commonwealth, impelled and directed by the State clergy and their more zealous friends, commenced a relentless annoyance of the people, and a heartless persecution of the ministers of our churches.

Attempts were made to set aside the Toleration Act, and old and obsolete laws were hunted up, and essays were made to enforce their provisions. Assessments were prosecuted with new vigilance; fines were imposed and collected; meetings were disturbed and violently dispersed; and pastors, and other ministers, were arrested, dragged before the courts, browbeaten, and ignominiously punished. All this, and more, is acknowledged by the ministers and historians of the ’State Church’ themselves. Dr. Hawks, for example, says:-’No dissenters in Virginia experienced, for a time, harsher treatment than did the Baptists. They were beaten and imprisoned, and cruelty taxed its ingenuity to devise new modes of punishment and annoyance. The usual consequences followed. Persecution made friends for its victims; and the men who were not permitted to speak in private, found willing auditors in the sympathizing crowd, who gathered round the prisons, to hear them preach from the grated windows. It is not improbable that this very opposition imparted strength in another mode, inasmuch as it at least furnished the Baptists with a common ground on which to make resistance.’"5"In all the prisons where our brethren were incarcerated, they preached daily from the windows to the crowds who there assembled to hear them."6

Irritated beyond measure at this boldness, their enemies resorted to various expedients to check it. "In some cases," says Benedict, "drums were beaten in he time of service; high enclosures were erected before the prison windows; matches, and other suffocating materials, were burnt outside the prison doors." But all was in vain. The servants of God would preach, and the people were equally determined to hear. Converts were multiplied; new churches sprang up all over the State: "so mightily grew the Word of God, and prevailed." The great increase of our denomination took place after the year 1740. In the fall of that year Whitfield landed at Newport, Rhode Island, and commenced that course of Evangelical labour in the United States which was productive, under the Divine blessing, of such remarkable results. The revival at Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734, had already prepared the minds of the people, in some measure, for a general outpouring of the Spirit. It was graciously vouchsafed, and so glorious was the manifestation, that "in the term of two or three years thirty or forty thousand souls were born into the family of heaven in New England."7 Some of the converts joined the existing churches, but a large number formed separate churches, requiring satisfactory evidence that the candidates for communion were the subjects of regeneration. This New Testament rule had been departed from by the "Standing Order;" and the New Lights, as they were called, determined to reinstate primitive principles in their proper place. The natural effect was that many of them became Baptists. The new converts were "fervent in spirit." They thirsted for the salvation of souls. Unexampled efforts were immediately employed for the spread of the Gospel. Some went from house to house in their respective neighborhoods, "warning every man and teaching every man," and exhorting all to turn to the Lord. Pious ministers were stirred up to unusual exertion, and old Christians renewed their youth. "The Lord gave the word; great was the company of them that published it." They were not all suitably qualified for the work, as we should now judge; mistakes were committed, and measures of doubtful propriety adopted, in some places; but such things might be expected in times of great spiritual excitement. It cannot be denied that the laborers were generally men of God, "full of the Holy Ghost and of faith." They had deep convictions of the evil of sin, and of the peril of a rebellious state. The love of God in Christ overpowered their souls. Their views of the solemn realities of another world were vivid and heart-affecting. They "set the Lord always before" them, and walked as in the sight of the judgment-seat. Their earnest appeals made the stouthearted tremble, awed many a reprobate into silence, and wrung tears from daring and hardened offenders. Tens of thousands bowed before the majesty of truth.

Some of the most powerful preachers emigrated to other States; and wherever they went, the floods of blessing poured over the land. Virginia was remarkably indebted to their labours. In 1768 there were but ten Baptist churches in that State; in 1790 there were two hundred and ten. The Carolinas and other States in the South were also visited by the New Lights, and marvellous effects followed. As soon as the Baptist churches became sufficiently numerous, they proceeded to combine in Associations, which arrangement has proved eminently conducive to the prosperity of the body. Carefully guarding against the assumption of ecclesiastical power, and avoiding all interference with the affairs of individual churches, the ministers and delegates who assembled from time to time exercised a brotherly supervision over the Baptist cause, and often "devised liberal things" on its behalf. Personal edification was promoted by the religious services; Christian friendship was renewed and extended; important questions of doctrine and practice were discussed, and advice given in difficult cases; weak and destitute churches were assisted; and plans for the wider diffusion of Gospel truth were originated. Almost all our denominational enterprises may be referred to the influence of these Associational gatherings. The Philadelphia Association was the first of the kind. It was formed in the year 1707. "This Association," says Dr. Samuel Jones, in his Century Sermon, "originated in what they call General and sometimes Yearly meetings. These meetings were instituted as early as 1688, and met alternately in May and September, at Lower Dublin, Philadelphia, Salem, Cohansey, Chester, and Burlington, at which places there were members, though no church or churches were constituted, except Lower Dublin and Cohansey. At these meetings their labours were chiefly confined to the ministry of the Word and the administration of Gospel ordinances. But in the year 1707, they seem to have taken more properly the form of an Association; for then they had delegates from several churches, and attended to their general concerns. We, therefore, date our beginning as an Association from that time, though we might, with but little impropriety, extend it back some years. They were at this time but a feeble band, though a band of faithful brothers, consisting of but five churches, viz. those of Lower Dublin, Piscataway, Middletown, Cohansey, and Welsh Tract. There were at that time but these five in North America, except Massachusetts and Rhode Island."8 This Association is still a large and flourishing body, notwithstanding the numerous offshoots which it has given out. There are seventeen other Associations in the State.