The history of the doctrine of grace and of scriptural and unscriptural missions is given in the present chapter. It is thought that a connected view of these important subjects will be snore interesting and instructive than the dispersion of this information through the records of nineteen centuries.

Old School, Primitive, or BIBLE BAPTISTS, believe and rejoice in the absolute sovereignty of God, their heavenly Father —in the entire dependence of all His creatures upon Him, both in nature and in grace; a doctrine that leads its adherents to abandon all confidence in creature power, and to exercise a living and a loving trust in the Most High. While they utterly repudiate, on the one hand, that total and wretched perversion of the doctrine of predestination called fatalism (a blind, unconscious, mechanical, necessitated condition of the universe), which, like pantheism, virtually abolishes all human accountability and all distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, and which is the fundamental doctrine of heathenism, Mohammedanism and nature-worship; they equally reject, on the other hand, that rationalism which appears, more or less, in the various forms of Pelagianism, Semi-Pelagianism or Arminianism, Socinianism, Deism, Unitarianism, Universalism, Indifferentism, Skepticism, Materialism, Agnosticism and Infidelity, and which places human reason above the plain declarations of the Bible, either receiving only so much of the inspired Scriptures as can be grasped by the natural understanding, or else, while professing to receive all the Bible, really explaining away and annihilating all the force of the unpalatable and incomprehensible parts. It should be indelibly impressed upon the mind of every thinking person that, while ancient heathen God-contemning civilization fittingly attained its cultured golden meridian in the hideous revelries of Nero’s hymeneal night-banquet on Agrippa’s lake, near the Pantheon, in Rome, the Second Babylon, amidst blazing fireworks and music and rich garments and viands and demoniac pollution, as described by Tacitus, Suetonius and Juvenal-modern God-less civilization reached its logical culmination in the pandemonium of the French Revolution, at the close of the eighteenth century, when carnal reason (which is declared by Paul to be enmity to God) was embodied in the person of a human female, and enthroned upon the altar amid circumstances of Horrid debauchery. Bible Baptists believe, according to the testimony of the Scriptures, #Re 18:4 Isa 48:20 Jer 51:45 2Co 6:17 that many of the Lord’s people, through false teaching and superficial acquaintance with the inspired word, are captives in the Babylonian meshes of incipient rationalism, and that, for their own spiritual welfare, and the glory of God, they should come out and be separate from such unscriptural and ruinous errors, acknowledge Christ as their only Master, and render cheerful and fill obedience to Him.

The leading apostolic church in Greece, to which Paul preached a year and six months, and to which he wrote two of his longest epistles, was the church of Corinth. That church, as appears from those epistles, was troubled with a spirit of rationalistic, self-confident freedom, both in thought and conduct —a spirit seeking after worldly more than after heavenly wisdom. The inspired Apostle severely rebuked that spirit, but it broke out in several Greek churches with redoubled energy after his departure. In the second and third centuries this Hellenistic spirit, in the Alexandrian and Antiochian schools, attempting to combine Pagan philosophy with Christianity, developed what is known as the Greek Anthropology based upon the trichotomy of Pythagoras, Plato, and, after them, of the mass of Greek and Roman philosophers. They taught that man is composed of three distinct elements: 1st, soma, corpus, or bode, the material part; 2d, psuche, anima, or soul, the animal part (including animal life and propensities); and 3d, pneuma, mens, or spirit, the rational part (including the will and the moral affections); {1} and that, of these three elements, only the first two, the body and the soul, were affected by the fall of Adam, the third element, the spirit or will, being as free and pure in all men, when born, as it was in Adam before his fall; and this universal free-will of the human race; can and must take the first step in regeneration, and then the grace of God will meet and help it, arid, if the will continues to co-operate with Divine grace, the soul will be finally saved. This synergistic, or co-operative, or Semi-Pelagian theory of regeneration and salvation, basing the decision of man’s eternal destiny upon his natural free-will, had, for its ablest advocate, Origen (born A. D. 185, died 254), who also taught that men are fallen angels, and that all men, and all the wicked angels, even Satan himself, will be finally saved. Though in point-blank contradiction not only to the general tenor but to the plain letter of the Scriptures, #Joh 1:13,3:3-8 Ro 9:16,11:6 Php 1:6,2:13 Ps 110:3 Jas 1:18 synergism has prevailed throughout the Greek Catholic “Church” for 1,700 years, and still thus prevails; and the result, or rather the concomitance, is that the Eastern or Greek “Churches” are declared by the latest and ablest historians to be “dead,” “decayed,” “petrified.” Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Constantinople, who believed the truth and attempted to teach it in the Greek communion, was five times deposed and finally strangled to death through the intrigues of the Jesuits, and his body thrown into the Bosphorus (A. D. 1638).

The monergistic or scriptural theory of regeneration teaches that there is but one efficient agent or actor in the renovation of the soul, namely, the Holy Spirit; that the will of fallen man is, like all his other faculties, utterly depraved, and has not the least ability or inclination to act holily until it has been renewed by Divine grace. This view was plainly set forth by Christ and His Apostles, as shown in the texts last quoted. It was first in the Latin Catholic "Church" clearly and powerfully maintained by Augustine (born 353, died 430), the ablest and most spiritual-minded of the so-called "Latin Fathers," who at first was an advocate of synergism, but was led by his deep experience and profound mind and intimate acquaintance with the Scriptures to abandon synergism for monergism. He maintained that the entire human race sinned and fell in Adam, according to the Scriptures, and became utterly depraved, both in will and in all their other powers, the unrenewed will being able to work only external righteousness or morality, but not at all internal righteousness or a spiritual conformity to the Divine law; that the activity of the human will, up to the pint of regeneration, is hostile to God, and cannot co-operate with the Divine agency in the regenerating act, so that the Holy Spirit must take the initiative in the change from sin to holiness, and effect this change by His sovereign and almighty power, as well as preserve the spiritual life thus imparted, in accordance with God’s eternal decree of electing love, to its perfection in heavenly glory, to the praise of the Divine mercy -while others, sinning of their own free will, of which they so much boast, and not caused to sin by God, who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and who is the Sun of righteousness and not of unrighteousness, are justly left to go on and perish in their sins and pride, to the praise of the Divine Justice. Monergism, or Paulinism, or Augustinianism (as this view has been called), was first adopted by the Latin or Roman Catholic "Church," in the Councils of Orange and Valence, A. D. 529, but, except in a few clear and able minds, such as Bede, Anselm and Bernard, was soon practically abandoned, and superseded by a return to the Greek Anthropology and Semi-Pelagianism or Cassianism; and human free-will, in the Roman communion, sank into the Cimmerian darkness of the Middle Ages -a form of Paganism, embracing the authority of the Apocrypha and tradition, monasticism, unqualified baptismal regeneration, transubstantiation, Purgatory, priestly absolution, the meritoriousness of good works, works of supererogation, justification by works as well as by faith, the union of "Church" and State, churchly infallibility and supremacy, withholding the Bible from the masses, burying Divine service in a dead language, penances and pilgrimages, the worship of the Virgin Mary and other dead saints and their images and relics, the horrors of confessional, nunnery, inquisition and crusade, and the sale of indulgences to sin. The order of the Jesuits, founded by Ignatius Loyola, A. D. 1534, has always been thoroughly Semi-Pelagian or Pelagian; and Jesuitism is synonymous with mediaeval Catholicism, hypocrisy, unscrupulousness, mental reservation and amphibology. The Jansenists arose in the Roman Catholic communion about a hundred years afterward, and were Augustinian in doctrine, and earnestly opposed the Jesuits; since 1870 they have been identified with the "Old Catholics," and now number about 60,000. The Roman Catholic Council of Trent (A. D. 1542-1563), in its numerous Canons and Decrees, while jesuitically professing, in its general preliminary statements, to maintain the doctrine of the total depravity of human nature in consequence of the fall, and the necessity of salvation by grace alone, is uniformly Semi-Pelagian in its subsequent detailed explanations, and authoritatively affirms the deadly mediaeval errors enumerated a little while ago. Pope Plus IX., in 1854, officially affirmed the immaculate or sinless conception of the Virgin Mary, who is the peculiar object of Roman Catholic worship, as “the Mother of God” and “Queen of Heaven;” in the Vatican palace the picture of Mary is placed above the picture of the Trinity. The same Pope, in 1864, in the “Syllabus of Errors,” declares that “Church” and State ought to be united, and that the “Church” has the right to use force and temporal power. The Vatican Council of 1870 declares the Pope the successor of Peter, the vicar of Christ, the head and governor of the whole church, the father and teacher of all Christians, the supreme judge of the faithful, and that, when he speaks ex cathedra (or officially), he is infallible in all matters pertaining to faith and morals, and his definitions are irreformable; and those presuming to contradict this declaration are to be anathema (that is, excommunicated and accursed). Semi-Pelagianism, or Pseudo-Christian Pharisaism, or carnal free will, thus reaches its culmination, in the Roman Catholic communion, in substituting the Pope for God. #2Th 2:3,4

The Protestant Reformation was born, apparently, of an intense conviction of the utter sinfulness of man and his radical need of Divine regeneration. As the only antidote to the theoretical Semi-Pelagianism and the practical Pelagianism and the innumerable unspeakable pharisaical abominations of Catholicism, Luther and Calvin, in the sixteenth century, proclaimed anew, in trumpet tones, to the priest-ridden millions of Europe, the great Pauline and Augustinian doctrine of sin and grace —the entire natural equality and total depravity of all men in the eyes of an Infinitely Holy God, the absolute dependence of fallen man upon the sovereign mercy of the Most High, justification by faith alone (solifidianism) —nothing like this old Bible doctrine, when believed, to cut up human pride and merit and pharisaism by the roots, to humble man in the dust before God, to stir him up to heartfelt gratitude for the Divine salvation, to cause him to serve God in spirit from an inward principle of filial love, and to comfort him in trial and despondency. The severest denunciations of the Spirit of God had been uttered by the mouths of His prophets in the Old Testament, against a proud, heartless ceremonialism and legalism, and by Christ and His Apostles, in the New Testament, against a hypocritical pharisaical formalism. Something of the same burning and purifying Spirit doubtless animated the Protestant Reformers, and, under Divine Providence, and in connection with other events, made that great movement the transition from mediaeval to modern history, and the national dawn of universal civil and religious liberty (always advocated by the Baptists); so that today, after the lapse of four centuries, the direct influence of Rome upon the laws and governments of the civilized world is almost totally annihilated for a season. But, instead of a defective reformation, merely, the utter apostasy of Rome, carnalizing and defiling the pure spiritual religion of Christ, and repudiating Him when it set over itself another head, and made its kingdom a worldly one, needed a thorough-going renovation. Rome had become plainly-developed ANTI-CHRIST, and should not have been acknowledged in any sense as a church of Christ. Her subjection to tradition and human authority is a repudiation of Scripture and Divine authority. Choosing to obey man rather than God, she can in no respect be considered a church of Christ, and any derivation or succession from her is a prima facie evidence of the radical unscripturalness of any religious organization. The Protestant Reformers, though real heroes of some great doctrinal truths, were not endowed with sufficient grace or penetration or boldness to recognize this basal truth, and therefore conceded to Rome the attributes of a church of Christ, and retained many of her fatal, unscriptural doctrinal errors and practices —her traditionalism (an unauthorized departure from the written word of God, to which departure there can be no logical limit), her infant baptism, her national membership, her alliance with the State and consequent corruption and exercise of persecution for the purpose of enforcing religious uniformity, her hierarchism, her sacramentalism (the sealing and saving power of ordinances), her substitution of forms for personal piety, and of the authority of the “church” for the authority of the Bible. All these features are perfectly consistent and congenial with papal synergism, Semi-Pelagianism, pharisaism, but totally irreconcilable with the great monergistic, Pauline, Christian doctrine of Divine predestination and election, justification by faith alone, salvation by grace alone. The military followers of the Protestant princes wore embroidered on their right sleeves these letters, V. D. M. I. Ae (standing for Verbum Dei Manet Aeternum, The Word of the Lord endureth forever), to which pure and noble motto it is deeply to be regretted that they did not yield complete fealty.

Baptist Churches have no succession from Rome; they are conformed to and derived from the pure, spiritual, apostolic models presented in the New Testament; their leading principles were held by poor, humble, despised, unchurchy, persecuted sects (like their New Testament prototypes, #1Co 1:26-31 Jas 2:5 Mt 5:3-12 Ac 4:13,24:14,28:22); and it is admitted by candid Romanists, and it is perfectly obvious, that “Baptists are the only consistent and thorough antagonists of their creed, and that Baptist principles are necessary in their totality for the final overthrow of Romanism.”

The inconsistency and defectiveness of the principles of the original Protestant Reformers have, in a spiritual point of view, become more apparent and pronounced with the lapse of time, because seeds of error develop and grow and strengthen, so that very high Protestant authorities have declared Protestantism (like Catholicism) a failure. Sir William Hamilton, of the University of Edinburgh, the inexorable logician and common-sense philosopher, declares that Protestantism has gravitated back toward Catholicism, until the differences are only nominal. Prof. Philip Schaff, of New York, the ablest American church historian, and one of the first Presbyterian scholars of the United States, affirms that so many churchy and Catholic elements were retained by the Reformers that, as a growing consequence, much of present Protestantism must be, considered an apostasy from the position of Luther, Melanchthon and Calvin. Prof. A. A. Hodge, of Princeton, New Jersey, a distinguished Presbyterian theologian, makes the strong remark that the Protestant pulpit of today is as much in need of a thorough reformation as was the Catholic pulpit of four hundred years ago.

Of the three leading Protestant communions, the Anglican was the least reformed, the Lutheran next, and the Presbyterian the most. As Augustine, by his principal doctrine, is a heretic in the Catholic communion, says Prof. Schaff, so Luther, by the same doctrine, is a heretic in the Lutheran communion. Many of the Lutheran clergy have, during the present century, gone back to Rome. The Anglican body, ignoring Scripture and their own early history, have, for the last 250 years, been gradually growing more exclusive, more High-Church, and more Arminian, a strong and increasing party in that communion fondly styling themselves Anglo-Catholics, and many, not satisfied with this, actually deserting to Rome during the last fifty years (since the issuance of the scholastic, sacramentarian, and churchy Oxford Tracts, 1833-1841). A small daughter of the Anglican body, the (Whitefieldian) Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, though retaining some Catholic errors, advocate the Bible doctrine of salvation by grace alone; but a very large daughter, the Wesleyan Methodists, have in the main abandoned the cautious doctrinal reserve of the Semi-Calvinists, James Arminius and Richard Watson, their ablest theologians, and have dangerously approximated a Pelagian anthropology and soteriology, and adopted numerous worldly innovations, so that it has become a common remark that the new-fashioned Methodists are very different from the old. The Presbyterians, except the comparatively small Arminian Cumberland body, have remarkably adhered, by profession, to the scriptural doctrine of human depravity and Divine salvation and Christ’s sole headship of the church; but they have also continued to hold, inconsistently, to the fundamental errors of Catholic infant baptism (or rather rhantism) —a complicated system of church government founded upon worldly wisdom, instead of being founded upon the simple spiritual plan of the New Testament —affiliation with all professed Christians, even with Catholics —and, in Europe, the unspiritual, corrupting alliance between “church” and State, though, in their ranks, this alliance is greatly weakening. Presbyterian Scotland, being further from Rome than are Germany and England, and being a poorer and rougher and less inviting country, and inhabited by a more independent people, suffered from papal interference less than Germany and England. It is not for the lack of sense that the Scotch are predestinarians, for they are noted as the most common-sense and largest-brained people in Europe.

Christian predestinarianism far surpasses Arminianism in its moral results, as history abundantly demonstrates, and as may be seen by comparing the Waldenses with the other Italians, the Huguenots with the other French, the Jansenists with the Jesuits, the Puritans with they Cavaliers, and the Scotch with other Europeans. Predestinarianism is highly promotive of both civil and religious liberty. It represents God as absolute and supreme, and makes all men equal before Him. It develops the power of self-government and a manly spirit of independence, which fears no man, though seated on a throne, because it fears God, the only real sovereign. Its church-constitutions are popular (either Presbyterian or Independent); and its civil governments are representative or republican.

Especially for about a hundred years now has scriptural predestinarianism been undermined, in Europe and America, by professedly religions and by irreligious rationalism, and by infidelity and materialism —by a denial of the fundamental Protestant, Baptist and Bible doctrine of sin and grace, of redemption and justification; by a return to Pelagianism, pharisaism, and pseudo-scientific paganism, so that, if we except some Presbyterians and some Baptists, it would be hard to find any one on earth today believing this old scriptural doctrine; and, in consequence of this almost total departure of true faith from the earth, an equally universal Epicurean laxity of morals prevails. Honesty, the basis of all high character, #Lu 8:15 sincerity, straightforwardness in word and deed, has almost entirely forsaken the human race; simultaneous or successive polygamy is rampant; and crime of every species abounds in the world to an alarming extent, even as Paul predicted that, in the last days, perilous times should come, that men would wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived, lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, heady, high minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God. #2Ti 3:1-4 What increases a thousandfold the darkness of the picture is the Apostle’s concluding characterization of the apostate race —HAVING A FORM OF GODLINESS BUT DENYING THE POWER THEREOF. #2Ti 3:5

This nineteenth century of ours is, above every other century of the Christian era, the century of religious pride and of religious profession. Taking its stand upon the highest Himalayan peak of Pharisaism, it unblushingly declares that all the previous centuries, except perhaps its own nearest kin, the latter half of the eighteenth century, were, comparatively, both in a material and in a religious point of view, know-nothings and do-nothings; that its wise and mighty self has not only civilized the world, but devised and created means and machinery for the rapid evangelization of the entire human race; that, while up to the year 1800 there were then only two hundred millions of Christians in the world, even during the first eighty years of this one century alone, two hundred and ten millions —more than as many again —have been added, making the number now four hundred and ten millions; that just three things are now needed, more prayers, more tears, and more money; that, in the last twenty years, the rapidity of Christianization has increased in a fourfold ratio, so that, at the same rate, in one hundred years more all the world will be converted to God. Let it be ineradically impressed upon every reflecting mind that the increase of crime has run parallel with the increase of religious profession, at least in the United States. It is especially during the past thirty-five years that crime has so greatly increased.

Now this wonderful “evangelistic” movement is said to have been inaugurated, in the home field, by the itinerancies of the Methodists, the Wesleys and Whitefield, about the middle of the last century, and, in foreign lands, by the labors of a few English Baptists at Kettering, England, in 1792. The original conception of modern evangelization, it seems, is mainly due to John Wesley, the father and standard of Methodism, and to Andrew Fuller, the reformer and standard of nineteenth century, or Fullerite, or “Missionary” Baptists.

The inconsistencies of Mr. Wesley’s system are well illustrated by the inconsistencies of his life. While first genuinely converted, as he himself says, by the writings of Martin Luther, the most predestinarian of predestinarians, he came to be the most bitter enemy of predestinarianism, denouncing it as a horrible and detestable doctrine that represented God as worse than the devil, more false, more cruel, and more unjust. And yet Mr. Wesley’s funeral sermon on George Whitefield, the extraordinary predestinarian preacher, commends the latter in the highest terms as “an eminent servant of God, who, in the business of salvation, put Christ as high as possible and man as low as possible, and who brought a larger number of sinners from darkness to light than any other man.” In the application of human wisdom to the organization of a religious society, John Wesley was, as commonly remarked, more like Ignatius Loyola than any other man; he conformed the organization of Methodism more to that of Romanism than that of any other Protestant body; and, accordingly, in nominal numerical success, he has made his society the most powerful rival of Rome. By his famous “Deed of Declaration to the Legal Hundred,” “the Magna Charta of Methodism” (made in 1784, when he was eighty-one years of age), bequeathing the property and government of all his chapels in the United Kingdom to a hundred of his traveling preachers and their successors, on condition that they should accept as their basis of doctrine his Notes on the New Testament and the four volumes of his sermons published in or before A. D. 1771, he surpassed even the worldly wisdom of Catholicism, and made himself not only the infallible but the eternal pope of his society. So his Twenty-five Articles of Religion are declared, in the Methodist Book of Discipline, to be unalterable. This makes Wesley the last and greatest authoritative teacher of the human race, and places him above Christ and His Apostles, as we are required to look through the medium of Wesley at all the Divine teaching, and to accept forever his interpretation of the doctrine and precepts of the Bible. How can any of the dear children of God be willing thus to substitute the headship of a sinful and fallible mortal for the headship of Christ? See #Mt 23:8-12.

As established by Ludwig Keller, the present royal archivist at Munster, in his thorough and authoritative work on “The Reformation and the Older Reforming Parties Exhibited in their Connection,” published at Leipzig in 1885, the evangelical Anti-Catholic Christians from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries, known as Petrobrusians, Henricians, Waldenses, Pikards, Beghards, Beguins, Spirituales, Sabbati, Insabbati, Apostolic Brethren, Poor men in Christ, Friends of God, Mystics and Bohemians, were, in the darkness of the Dark Ages, Arminians. They exalted the Scriptures above all human books, and accepted the doctrine of justification by faith; but they earnestly insisted on the freedom of man’s will to accept or reject the provisions of Divine grace, and emphasized the necessity of imitating Christ in His life of self-denial. The Mennonites of the sixteenth century were also Arminians; but they strenuously maintained the spirituality of the church of Christ, and the necessity of strict Church discipline, and they suffered great persecutions for conscience’ sake.

The earliest Confession of Faith denominated Baptist was published in Switzerland in 1527. While affirming the spirituality of the membership and ordinances of the church, and the unworldliness and the purity of her discipline, it makes no direct statement in regard to the doctrine of grace, though the phraseology of the document seems Arminian. In 1609 an Arminian Baptist "Church" was formed at Amsterdam, Holland, of refugees from persecution in England, and in 1611 they published an Arminian Confession of Faith. In 1633 the first Particular or Predestinarian Baptist Church was formed in London, and in 1639 another; and in 1644 there were seven of these churches in London, and they then published a predestinarian Confession of Faith. In 1656 sixteen churches in Somerset and the adjoining counties published a similar Confession. In 1677 and in 1688, and again in 1689, was published the fullest and most esteemed Baptist Confession of Faith, -in 1689 the ministers and messengers of above a hundred churches in England and Wales meeting in London for that purpose, and, as they say in their prologue, "denying Arminianism." This Confession is published in this volume, and adopts, on the subject of predestination, the strong language of the Westminster (the most esteemed Presbyterian) Confession. The great majority of Baptists in England and America (those called the Particular Baptists in England, and those called Regular or Calvinistic or "Missionary" Baptists in America) still profess to adhere to this old London Confession. Thus from 1523 to 1633 it seems that those called Baptists, so far as we can learn, favored Arminian views, and from 1633 to the present time (1886) the most of those called Baptists have professed to be Predestinarians; as, from 1727 to 1754, the members of the churches in the bounds of what was in 1765 called the Kehukee Association, were General or Arminian Baptists, and were not at all strict in discipline. As Whitefield says, "We are all Arminians by nature." And so, quite often, babes in Christ retain for a while something of this carnal feeling, and have to be fed upon milk, and not, like men, upon strong meat. But "Jesus Christ," says the inspired penman, is "the same yesterday, and today, and forever; and it is a good thing that the heart be established with grace, and not carried about with divers and strange doctrines". #Heb 13:8,9 Still it takes time for even the plants of our heavenly Father thus to grow and be established; and with improper food, administered by unqualified attendants, the plants may remain stunted and feeble for many years. Besides, the growth of plants depends greatly upon the influences of air and light; and so growth in grace depends greatly upon the in-breathing and illumination of the Holy Spirit. If these blessed influences be withheld, the children of God may long remain but babes. These considerations, which should be forcibly impressed upon us by early Baptist history, give us reason to hope that there are many of the dear children of God who have not yet been led to identify themselves with His visible church; who as yet see men as it were trees walking; who, though cleansed by the atoning blood of Jesus, still do not properly give glory to God. #Mar 8:22-25 Luk 17:11-19 Another instructive lesson to be derived from early Baptist history is that all human authority is only fallible and imperfect; and our faith should, therefore, be entirely based upon the infallible Scriptures of inspired truth. We are to call no man on earth our spiritual father or master, but to acknowledge Christ as our only Master. #Mt 23:8-10 Taking the Bible only for their standard, our Baptist predecessors were gradually led from Arminianism to the doctrine of salvation by grace alone; and the same Divine guidance has led the Bible Baptists of today to abandon some unscriptural practices of some former Baptists, such as open communion and affiliation with unbaptized professors of religion, the formation of religions societies based upon money for the evangelization of the world, the substitution of human education for the call and qualification of the Holy Spirit as a preparation for the gospel ministry, having ruling Elders as distinguished from teaching Elders, the laying on of hands upon all believers, shaking hands while singing, inviting mourners to the anxious bench, etc. These unscriptural practices were, many of them, but rarely and occasionally adopted by any Baptists before the present century. Into a few of them even the old Kehukee Association was at times, to a very small extent, inveigled between the years 1803 and 1827. But, as the Scriptures do not, by preceptor example, authorize any of these practices, the child of God, who disregards human tradition and looks only to the written word of God for guidance, cannot indorse, much less idolize, any of these modern innovations. Believing, as he does, in the sovereignty of God’s grace, in the perfection of Christ’s redemption, in the omnipotence of the Holy Spirit, and in the freeness and fullness of God’s salvation towards all who shall be saved, he cannot for a moment suppose that any human means have ever sent, or will ever send, a single soul to glory. Others may fall down before these idols; but, as for him and his spiritual kindred, they fear the fiery furnace heated seven times hotter than usual less than they fear and reverence the God of their salvation, and Him only will they worship.

The eminently pious and learned Baptist ministers, John Skepp (who died 1721), John Brine (who died 1765), and John Gill (who died 1771) —the latter the most learned man that has ever borne the name of Baptist —entertained precisely the same views of the sovereignty and efficacy of Divine grace as are held by the Bible Baptists of today. Though they proclaimed to sinners that they were in danger and on the high road to perdition, they did not call upon all men, whether spiritually concerned or not, to repent and believe the gospel. They dwelt much on the Divine purposes, and on the Bible fact that salvation is of the Lord. This method of preaching and writing was, after their departure, stigmatized as “selfish, hardening, refrigerant, soporific, hyper-Calvinistic, Antinomian.” “Under such instruction,” it is said, “the churches became indifferent to the means of grace, could not engage in efforts for the conversion of souls; they were satisfied with preservation, and did not seek extension, and so the cause declined. Backsliding and coldness affected all religious communities in England. But for the revivalistic labors of Whitefield and the Wesleys, evangelical truth would have well-nigh died out. The effects of their ministry were felt by all denominations.” Mr. Andrew Fuller is claimed to have been the “sledge-hammer” that beat Methodistic fervor into the cold Baptists, and roused both Baptists and Protestants to “send the gospel into heathen lands.”

Mr. Fuller is described by his adherents as a clear, plain, practical, judicious, powerful, profound theologian -"the Franklin of theology." As he is honestly admitted by learned "DD’s" and "LLD’s" among modern Baptists to be their "standard," it is eminently proper for us to examine, at least briefly, his life and labors. He was born in 1754 and died in 1815. His parents were poor, and he had only the barest rudiments of an English education; yet the Fullerite or New School Baptists, notwithstanding the case of Mr. Fuller, and the fact that all real scholars admit that every one of the Apostles except Paul was unlearned, consider a fine classical education almost indispensable for a successful preacher, and, in the number of their theological colleges in the United States (21), they surpass all the Protestants, and equal the Roman Catholics. From his fourteenth to his sixteenth year Mr. F. says that he had two or three spurious conversions, and, in his sixteenth year, a genuine conversion; and this saving conversion of one called "the grandest champion of Christianity," took place, be it noted, during the universal prevalence of hyper-Calvinistic views among the Baptists -views which he devoted the most of his life to denouncing as not only "false Calvinism," but "false religion," "more dangerous than irreligion." But for the hyper-Calvinism in his own heart, making him feel that he needed some previous qualification to come to Christ, he reckons that he might have found rest sooner than he did; but Divine drawings enabled him to overleap this barrier. He confesses that he was "saved by mere grace, in spite of himself, by free grace from first to last."  He declared that he "never had any predilection for Arminianism, which appeared to him to ascribe the difference between one sinner and another, not to the grace of God, but to the good improvement made of grace given us in common with others, and that his zeal for the doctrine of grace increased with his years;" and his dying declarations are that "all he had done needed forgiveness; that he trusted alone in sovereign grace and mercy; that he was a poor guilty creature, but Christ was an almighty Savior; that the doctrine of grace was all his salvation and all his desire; that he had no other hope than from salvation by mere sovereign efficacious grace, through the atonement of his Lord and Savior; that with this hope he could go into eternity with composure." The preacher of his funeral said that "he died a penitent sinner at the foot of the cross." In his writings, Mr. Fuller admits that "the Scriptures clearly ascribe both repentance and faith to Divine influence;" and he professes himself to be a strict Calvinist or predestinarian. Notwithstanding this admission and profession, and his attributing, both in conversion and in death, all his salvation to the mere, free, sovereign, efficacious grace of God, he maintains that the prophets, and Christ, and His Apostles, gave the most unlimited invitations to unconverted hearers of the gospel, and so should all gospel ministers do; that the obligations of men to repentance and faith are universal; that man’s inability is not proper or physical, but only figurative or moral; that man is able to comply with all that God requires at his hand; that all his misery arises from his voluntary abuse of mercy, and his willful rebellion against God; that it is not a want of ability, but of inclination, that proves his ruin; that men have the same power, strictly speaking, before they are wrought upon by the Holy Spirit as after, and before conversion, as after; that the work of the Spirit endows us with no new rational powers, nor any powers that are necessary to moral agency." He allows that "these principles may be inconsistent with the doctrines of grace," but he maintains that "both are scriptural and therefore true" -that "we must receive both the general precepts and invitations of Scripture, and the declarations of salvation, as being a fruit of electing love." Though in one article admitting that the evidence of our inter hunger, thirst, labor, heavy laden, etc., do not denote spiritual desires, and do not mark out the persons who are entitled to come to Christ." In accordance with this Fullerite principle, I myself heard the most learned Fullerite in North Carolina declare, in preaching upon #Isa 55:1, that the address of the prophet applied to every human being, for that all men thirst after something. While at times apparently delighting to stigmatize "hyper-Calvinism" as "Antinomianism," and inconsistent with genuine conversion, Mr. Fuller admits that some adherents of this system may have true religion; and, in another article, he declares that all men by nature are real Antinomians, for Paul says that the carnal (or unrenewed) mind is enmity against God, not subject to His law, neither indeed can be. William Huntington, S. S. (sinner saved), is regarded by many genuine Baptists in England and America as one of the most spiritual writers of the present century; but Mr. F. says that he never saw any marks of genuine religion in his writings. I am glad to see that, in one place, Mr. Fuller, the standard of the New School Baptists in England and the United States, declares that he "never imagined himself infallible."  In this candid statement all Bible Baptists will heartily agree with him, especially after having read the perfectly fair exhibition of his inconsistencies just given. The Bible, however, such Baptists do believe to be infallible, and therefore not to contain any pair of Mr. Fuller’s inconsistencies, as truth cannot be inconsistent with itself: Many of Mr. Fuller’s expressions, in regard to the ability and power of the unrenewed mind, go far beyond the Arminianism of James Arminius, John Wesley and Richard Watson, who declare that the unrenewed will and all the other faculties of the unrenewed mind are dead in trespasses and sins. Paul declares that "the carnal mind cannot be subject to the law of God;" that "the natural man cannot know the things of the Spirit of God;" and Christ declares that "the world cannot receive the Spirit of truth;" and that "no man can come to Him except the Father draw Him." What then shall we think of Mr. Fuller’s fine-spun metaphysics about unrenewed human ability? How can any believer in the Scriptures believe a word of it? It is the superficial declaration of the Roman Catholic Council of Trent that Divine commands necessarily imply human ability -just as though man had never fallen. Though man has fallen and become unable to obey the commandments of God, the nature and law and requirements of God are unchanged and unchangeable. The gospel addresses of the Scriptures are addressed, we believe, to gospel characters -to those persons who have spiritual life, hearing, needs and appetites. These limitations are either directly expressed or implied by the circumstances. Even the letter of the word, where there is any fullness of narration, and the dictates of common sense teach this important fact. Inspired men could, far better than we, read the hearts of those whom they addressed; and they addressed hearers of different characters, and therefore used sometimes the imperative and sometimes the indicative mood. God’s under-shepherds are directed, not to create, but to tend the flock. I cannot conceive what benefit can be supposed by a believer in sovereign and efficacious grace to be derived from universally and untruthfully extending the comforting spiritual addresses of the gospel to those declared in the Scriptures to be dead in trespasses and sins -Christ expressly forbids that pearls should be cast before swine. #Mt 7:6 Unless the Spirit of God first come and impart Divine life and light to the hearer, such addresses will be forever and totally vain. The imperative mood has no more power than the indicative mood, in the mouth of a preacher, to awaken the dead to life. No language or labor of man, and no fact in creation or providence, independently of the Divine Spirit, has the slightest efficacy to take away the sinner’s heart of stone and give him a heart of flesh. I do not deny that persuasion that some of his hearers are spiritually alive, and that he may not then properly address them in the imperative mood.

William Cathcart, in his recently published “Baptist Encyclopedia,” says that Mr. John Gill “knew more of the Bible than any one else with whose writings he is acquainted; that he was a man of great humility, and one of the purest men that ever lived; that, in his ‘Body of Divinity,’ the grand old doctrines of grace, taken unadulterated from the Divine fountain, presented in the phraseology and with the illustrations of an intellectual giant, and commended by a wealth of sanctified Biblical learning only once in several ages permitted to mortals, sweep all opposition before them, and leave no place for the blighted harvests, the seed of which was planted by James Arminius in modern times. In this work, eternal and personal election to a holy life, particular redemption from all guilt, resistless grace in regeneration, final preservation from sin and the wicked one, till the believer enters , and the other doctrines of the Christian system, are expounded and defended by one of the greatest teachers in Israel ever called to the work of instruction by the Spirit of Jehovah.” He adds that Mr. Gill’s “commentary is the most valuable exposition of the Old and New Testaments ever published.”

Well, after the bones of this wonderfully gifted servant of God had been laid safely in the grave (in 1771), Mr. Andrew Fuller began to ponder upon the expediency of making a change in Baptist tactics, and offering salvation freely to all sinners without distinction. After four years’ rumination his views on this subject became entirely changed, and he wrote them in an essay entitled “The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation,” which he did not venture to publish, however, till 1782, seven years after it had been written. This publication involved him in a bitter controversy of twenty years with some of his Baptist brethren, including Mr. Abraham Booth, a London Baptist minister, and the learned and able author of that admirable work, “The Reign of Grace;” but it is stated that “the ability and force of Mr. Fuller’s pamphlet ultimately prevailed,” and his views were adopted by the majority of those professing the Baptist name. These views, Mr. Fuller says, were different from those held by the Baptists during the most of the eighteenth century, but were like those entertained by Bunyan and the other old Baptist writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But it should be remembered that Bunyan, though we cannot doubt a child of God, yet did not have perfect light on all subjects, and was an open communionist, and at times did not seem very well established in doctrine; and, so far as we know, all calling themselves Baptists in the sixteenth and in the early part of the seventeenth century were Arminians, whose example furnishes a poor precedent for the imitation of Bible Baptists. The actual result of Mr. Fuller’s methods has been, not to effectuate the eternal salvation of a single sinner (for Christ is the only and complete Savior of His people), but to increase largely the number of those professing, while unhappily not possessing, true religion.

In 1784 Mr. Andrew Fuller read a pamphlet on the importance of general union in prayer for the revival of true religion, written by Jonathan Edwards, President of the College of New Jersey; and in the same year he read a poem by John Scott on the cruelties of the English in the East Indies. In this manner he was led to recommend prayer meetings the first Monday evening of every month for the extension of the gospel, and to urge the formation of a moneyed religious society for sending a mission to India. The first Baptist Missionary Society was thus formed at Kettering, England, Oct. 2, 1792, and the first collection for its treasury, amounting to £13, 2s. and 6d., was taken up. Mr. Fuller was chosen and remained its secretary till his death, traveling almost continually through the British Isles, and pleading for the mission cause, and charging the society nothing for his services. He makes the following remarkable statement in his writings: “Our undertaking to India really appeared to me, on its commencement, to be somewhat like a few men who were deliberating about the importance of penetrating into a deep mine which had never before been explored. We had no one to guide us; and, while we were thus deliberating, Carey, as it were, said: ‘Well, I will go down if you will hold the rope.’ But before he went down he, as it seemed to me, took an oath from each of us at the mouth of the pit to this effect, that, while we lived we should never let go the rope. You understand me. There was great responsibility attached to us who began the business.” All this looks far more like faith in men and in money than faith in God. Instead of approving, the Scriptures utterly condemn all confidence in the flesh. Can it be possible that such fleshly confidence as that to which Mr. Fuller makes such full and candid confession was the source of modern Baptist and Protestant missions? If his language has any meaning, it would seem so. Again: Mr. Fuller makes the astonishing statement that his own “church was in a famished condition of spiritual life, and found no salvation except in becoming identified with mission, work”! Alas that the mission idol should be substituted for Christ!

This remark of Andrew Fuller is paralleled by a remark of the Methodist “Bishop,” George F. Pierces of Georgia, substantially as follows; “the question is —not so much how can the heathen be saved unless we send them the gospel, but —how can we ourselves be saved unless we send them the gospel?” If the essence of this remark is not idolatry, I confess that I do not understand the meaning of the term. How different is this declaration from the preaching of the Apostle Peter in #Ac 4:10-12!

The Apostles were commanded by Christ to “go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” Scripture prophecy makes it certain that, in God’s own best time, the Apostles, by their writings, will go into all the world, and a heavenly kingdom will take the place of all earthly kingdoms. #Mt 24:14 Re 11:15 The Apostles must have understood Christ’s commandment to them better than subsequent uninspired men have understood it; but there is no clear Bible evidence, and, as admitted by all scholars, no other reliable evidence that the Apostles personally preached the gospel outside of the Roman Empire. By the dissemination of the Greek language and civilization, and by the multiplication of the facilities for travel under the mighty dominion of Rome, the providence of God had gradually prepared the way for the apostolic preaching of the gospel, at the same time that the Spirit of God lead prepared a people to hear and be benefited by such preaching. No doubt the genuine future evangelization of the world will take place in a similar way. Not by such nineteenth-century machinery as unscriptural alliances, upon a money basis, of the world and the nominal “Church,” but by the providential assemblage of people from all nations at Jerusalem to hear the preaching of the Apostles, by persecution, by visions of the day and the night, by special communications of the Holy Spirit forbidding the Apostles to go in certain directions and commanding them to go in others, and by the Holy Spirit preceding and accompanying the Apostles, the gospel was preached throughout the Roman Empire. And during the early succeeding centuries, by social and commercial intercourse, by persecution, by conquest, by captivity, by slavery, by enlistment in the Roman armies, the inscrutable wisdom of God, which is able to overrule evil for good and make the wrath of man praise Him, diffused the light of saving truth, to some extent, among the barbarian nations dwelling on the borders of the Roman Empire. And during the Dark Ages the Cathari, the Patarenes, the Paulicians, the Albigenses, and the Waldenses, being persecuted in one country, fled to another, as commanded by Christ, and went in every direction preaching the word. #Mt 10:23 Ac 8:1-4 And in modern times the Baptists have suffered the most religious persecution, and have been driven from country to country, preaching the gospel.

The Roman Catholic Popes, in order to aggrandize themselves, sent missionaries from time to time to convert various tribes to their own heathenish superstitions, trustworthy historians affirming that many of these heathen tribes were far more moral than the Catholics themselves. The most zealous and “successful” foreign missionaries of the pope hove been the three monastic orders of Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits. The first two orders originated in the thirteenth, and the last in the sixteenth century. Vowing perpetual poverty, chastity and obedience (to the General of the Order, or to the pope), these powerful organizations, equaling the ancient proselyting Pharisees, and utterly eclipsing all subsequent Protestant societies in zeal and apparent sincerity, have in the last six centuries victimized hundreds of millions of the human race, exterminating, by means of the Inquisition, millions of so-called heretics at home, and Catholicizing, by means of compromises with paganism, countless multitudes of poor deluded heathens in foreign lands. Of these three monastic orders, the Jesuitical has been the most zealous and “successful.” Founded in 1534 to check and overbalance the Catholic losses by Protestantism, suppressed, because of their intolerable abominations, in 1773, by the pope, Clement XIV., who died by poison in 1774, and restored by Pope Pius VII. in 1814, this nefarious order, the most powerful and the most missionary institution that ever existed on earth, has thoroughly undermined all the foundations of human morality, and, in a word, made Jesuitism equivalent to diabolism. The Protestant Reformers, Luther and Calvin, never thought of sending missionaries to the heathen, Luther denouncing with great emphasis the worldly methods of prosecuting missions; and Calvin, in his comment on the final commandment of Christ to His Apostles, #Mt 28:19 saying nothing whatever of missions to the heathen. It is, therefore, admitted in the article on “Missions” in the second volume of the Schaff-Herzog “Encyclopaedia of Religious Knowledge,” published in 1883, that “A CHURCH MAY HAVE A VIGOROUS SPIRITUAL LIFE, AND YET NOT PROSECUTE MISSIONARY ACTIVITY; AND A CHURCH MAY BE ACTIVE IN MISSIONARY OPERATIONS, AND YET BE SPIRITUALLY DEAD.”

It has now been about ninety-four years since the grand new impetus given to Protestant missions by the organization at Kettering, England, in 1792, of the first Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel amongst the Heathens; and, to show what is claimed to be the present result of Baptist and Protestant Missions, I will give some remarkable statements of a Fullerite Baptist, Mr. W. F. Bainbridge, who for ten years was pastor of the large “Missionary” Baptist “Church” at Providence, Rhode Island, and who, with his wife and son, and “provided with cordial credentials from Secretaries of all the leading Foreign Missionary Societies of America,” during the years 1879-1881 made a “Universal Survey” of the foreign mission-field, traveling 50,000 miles, and visiting more than a thousand missionaries, and upon his return published a book entitled “Around the World Tour of Christian Missions.” It is declared by leading, able and most extensively circulated religious periodicals of different denominations in the United States that “no work on this subject so complete and reliable has ever before been published in America or Europe;” that “the information contained in it is full, fresh and timely;” and that “it is unquestionably the most valuable contribution thus far made to the standard literature of Christian Missions.” I would be glad if every Old School Baptist had a copy of this book.

It may be had for two dollars per copy by mail, postage prepaid, from the publishers, D. Lothrop & Co., Boston, Mass. It is an invaluable treasury of recent facts in regard to Modern Missions. {2}

After having spied out the vast new “promise lands,” Mr. Bainbridge brings back, as he says, “a joyful Caleb report,” declaring that “the whole world is becoming Christian with bewildering rapidity,” and that during the past generation this rapidity has wonderfully increased; and he anticipates that the coming century will witness a grand progress towards “the Millennium, a decided check to the evil of intemperance, an overwhelming advance upon scientific unbelief, and the attainment of a far higher spiritual life among the myriad ranks of the Universal Church.” And yet the book contains many statements, as we shall show, hard to reconcile with these strong declarations and bright anticipations.

Mr. Bainbridge regards Greek and Roman Catholics as benighted idolaters, and admits that Protestants (including Baptists) constitute but one-twelfth of the human race; he does not state what very small proportion of Protestants give any credible evidence of their genuine Christianity. Mr. B. says that more than two-thirds of the Christian Church are practically anti-mission, contributing neither prayers nor money to the support of missions, and he would at times almost despair of Christianity but for evidence that this indifference is due chiefly to want of information. 

This statement is in accordance with the following tract, sent me by Mr. H. A. Tupper, of Richmond, Secretary of the Board of Southern Baptist Foreign Missions:

Missionary Tracts No. 18.