A History of the Baptists: From John the Baptist through The American Baptists

The author devoted years to the examination of the subject of Baptists history, Truth only is changeless, and only as any people have held to the truth in its purity and primitive simplicity has the world had an unchanging religion. The truth has been held by individual men and scattered companies but never in an unbroken continuity by any sect as such. Sect after sect has appeared and held it for a time, then has destroyed itself by mixing error with the truth; again, the truth has evinced its divinity by rising afresh in the hands of a newly organized people, to perpetuate its diffusion in the earth. It is enough to show that what Christ's churches were in the days of the Apostles, that the Baptist churches of today find themselves. The truths held by them have never died since Christ gave them, and in the exact proportion that any people have maintained these truths they have been the true Baptists of the world. The writer therefore, refused to be bound in his investigations by an iron obligation to show a succession of people who have held all the principles, great and small, of any sect now existing--no more and no less. A lamentable lack of intelligence exists amongst us in regard to our origin and principles as Baptists. This book is written for the purpose of putting within the reach of all such facts as shall inform them of their religions history and what it cost the fathers of our faith to defend the same.