055. BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

BAPTISTS AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY In England, as appears from the testimony of John Knox, there were Anabaptists who claimed entire freedom of conscience in 1560, twenty-two years before the "Confession" of the Congregationalist, Robert Browne. And in Rhode Island, in 1636, the Baptist Roger Williams instituted the first government on earth organized upon the principle of absolute freedom to all belief and practice not conflicting with good order and morals. So Baptists first announced the principle of religious liberty in Switzerland; Baptists first advocated it in England; a Baptist first established it in America.

Here too, I prefer to let others speak for us. John Locke, a hundred years before our American Independence, declared that "The Baptists were the first and only propounders of absolute liberty, just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty." Of Roger Williams, George Bancroft says:

He was the first person in modern Christendom to assert the doctrine of liberty of conscience in religion. . . Freedom of conscience was from the first a trophy of the Baptists.

John Fiske, referring to the views of Roger Williams, writes thus:

Such views are to-day quite generally adopted by the more civilized portions of the Protestant world; but it is needless to say that they were not the views of the seventeenth century, in Massachusetts or elsewhere. And Leonard Bacon says of Baptist churches:

It has been claimed for these churches that, from the age of the Reformation onward, they have been always foremost and always consistent in maintaining the doctrine of religious liberty. Let me not be understood as calling in question their right to so great an honor. And yet with a great price have they obtained this freedom. Their history is written in blood. Hundreds of Baptists have been hanged, drowned, burned at the stake, often leaving such testimony as Terwoort the Fleming gave in England in 1575: "They who have the one true gospel doctrine and faith will persecute no one, but will themselves be persecuted." In this land, which Baptists more than any other denomination of Christians have made a land of liberty, we have a great advantage in being able to point back to a glorious history of faithfulness in spite of persecution. Having brought the Christian world so far toward the acknowledgment of the principles of our faith, we may take courage as we look forward to the future.

Fourthly: It is our Baptist advantage that, in spite of small beginnings, frequent persecutions, and unpopular doctrine, we have multiplied more rapidly than any other body of Christians in America. The blood of the martyrs has certainly been the seed of the church. Exclusion from the privileges of the ruling order has thrown our people back upon the promise and the power of Christ. When Hezekiah Smith was "warned off from God’s earth" by the sheriff of Haverhill, Massachusetts; when Obadiah Holmes was whipped unmercifully in the streets of Boston ; when Baptists who would not have their infant children baptized were fined two thousand pounds of tobacco in Virginia,—these barbarities only made them more spiritual and more intent upon the salvation of men’s souls. Their steadfastness and faith began to impress the whole population. After the great revival under Edwards and Whitefield there came a great reaction in New England, and the orthodox churches were in imminent danger of going over to Unitarianism. But, though scores of orthodox ministers apostatized, not one Baptist minister forsook the faith, and not one Baptist church became Unitarian. On the contrary, the Baptist churches and ministers stood as an immovable rock in Boston, until the tide of heresy ebbed, and the danger was past. That faithfulness revealed to thousands the strength of our Baptist position, and the weakness of pedobaptism. There resulted a new searching of the Scriptures. We entered on a period of marvelous growth and progress.

Mr. Vedder, in his excellent "Short History of the Baptists," has called the years from 1776 to 1845 "the period of missions and of expansion." It is doubtful whether any body of Christians ever grew so rapidly. In 1776, Baptists numbered not more than one in one hundred of the population; in 1892 they number one in twenty-one. At the close of the Revolutionary War, we had only three churches west of the Alleghenies ; now we have twenty-one thousand five hundred and forty. Our fifty thousand members have, in little more than a century, become three million two hundred and sixtynine thousand. While the five millions of population which the country had in 1776 have increased twelvefold, the fifty thousand Baptists have increased sixtyfold. Like our beloved and honored Methodist brethren, we have sought to win the people, and to preach the gospel to the poor. We have not often had an "apostle to the genteels," but we have had many missionaries on the frontiers. And a blessing has attended our work. We stand next to the Methodists in point of numbers in America, but our ratio of increase during the last few decades has been nearly two per cent, greater than theirs. If we continue to advance at the present rate, we shall soon outstrip them; while the Congregationalists and Episcopalians with but oneseventh, and the Presbyterians with but one-third of our numbers, have but little chance of outstripping us.¹

We have multiplied marvelously not only at home but abroad. This is the centenary year of Baptist missions to the heathen. Just a hundred years ago William Carey’s zeal and energy led to the establishment of the English Baptist Missionary Society. It is not eighty years since our American Baptist missionary work began. And yet in these four-fifths of a century we have reached a point where we count seventy-four mission stations, four hundred and seventeen missionaries, two thousand and thirty native pastors and helpers, one thousand four hundred and fifty-nine mission churches, and one hundred and sixty-three thousand eight hundred and eighty-one members,—results more than twice as great as any other Prot estant missionary body can show, and yet results achieved by contributions on our part amounting, alas, to not more than one-third to one-half what other single denominations contribute and expend. To estimate what has been accomplished we must remember also the marked decline in the number of infant baptisms in Pedobaptist churches,—amounting to a decrease of more than one-third in fifty years. Here is evidence that our protest against this unscriptural and pernicious practice has made deep impression upon our brethren in other folds: and that, as the separation of Church and State has been effected in America largely by Baptist instrumentality, so the abolition of that infant baptism which ever tends to the merging of the Church in the State may yet follow, if Baptists are faithful to their Lord. It is not too much to say that the remarkable increase of our numbers where we have been thus faithful, and the gradual disintegration of our churches where as in England the Baptist principle has been compromised, gives us a great advantage in our proclamation of the unadulterated truth of Scripture.