Particular Pilgrims

Bernard Foskett was born on March 10, 1685, in North Crawley. That is a small town about 50 miles north-north-west of London. His father, William, was a local magistrate, which tells us Bernard grew up well-off and Anglican. He was schooled privately at home and excelled at his studies. So he was sent to London to train as a doctor. One of his successors at Broadmead reported that the young Mr. Fo...

Since I have called Anne’s letter writing her most important and best work, I want to give you a few samples. These were written approximately 275 years ago. So the language and style are different. Some social conventions have dramatically changed. But her grasp of Scripture and her heart of concern and love for God’s people still reach across the years to our profit. Covenant Baptist Theological...

Anne’s view of the nature of baptism is high, historically confessional, and Scriptural. This Particular Baptist woman used Reformed, puritan, and Baptist terminology in a time when non or anti-sacramentalism was growing. And so she can be a help to us today. Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary is a Confessional Reformed Baptist Seminary Providing affordable online theological education to help...

Anne Dutton’s “Thoughts on the Lord’s Supper” is a wonderful piece of doctrine and devotion. Her view of the Table retains the richness of the predominant Particular Baptist understanding of the Supper from the previous century. She is very much a baptized puritan in her perspectives and practice. There is no mere remembering an absent Christ here! Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary is a Confes...

"Anne Dutton also wrote against Sandemanianism and its antinomianism. Her work on this was fifty years ahead of Andrew Fuller’s more thorough and famous work against it. However, her short letters must have been useful to some against this confusing distortion of saving faith."   Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary is a Confessional Reformed Baptist Seminary Providing affordable online theo...

As a writer in the middle 1700s, Anne Dutton had several personal advantages. First, her maturity was well known to her acquaintances. She began writing for an audience in her early 40s by which time she displayed both spiritual and theological sobriety. She didn’t write about trivialities; she was always orthodox. God used her upbringing, diligent personal study, and connections with sound pastor...

One of the more unusual Particular Baptist women of the 1700s in England was Anne Dutton. Today, she is not well known, but in her time she was widely admired as a prolific theological writer and as friend and occasional foe of prominent evangelical preachers. Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary is a Confessional Reformed Baptist Seminary Providing affordable online theological education to help...

Knowledge of his early life, education, marriage, children, travel, health, appearance, outside interests, politics, and a myriad of other things remind us that he was like us. Often at least a few of these things profoundly affected his ministry. And the trials, weaknesses, disappointments, sins, and failures of his life, help us to look to Jesus as the only perfect Shepherd. We should honor and...

"We know that Fawcett had been asked to preach for Gill when he fell ill. Then after he died, Fawcett was asked to become Carter Lane’s pastor. He seriously considered the request, sought counsel from others, and the next year finally agreed. We also know that Fawcett got ready to move but when the time came to leave his flock, he couldn’t break his ties with them. He decided to stay and apparentl...

In our last episode we learned of the early religious influences on John Fawcett and then of his conversion. Under God, it came through the word of truth preached by an Anglican priest named George Whitfield. One of the great emphases in his preaching was the need to be born again. In the state-supported religion of the day, Christianity was often equated with morality. The law was given out but t...

It’s time to sketch a short biography of John Fawcett, the pastor-poet we’ve been learning about. Despite the fact that he hasn’t been studied with the kind of depth as other Baptist leaders from the 18th century, we know quite a bit about him because upon his death, one of his sons wrote a memoir.

I have introduced you to several of John Fawcett’s writings – especially his sermons and devotional works. But he was also a fine hymn writer. Several of his better productions are still sung today. He believed in singing psalms and hymns in public worship, not merely for private edification. The Baptist churches in his day, that is in the latter 1700’s, would have predominantly sung the psalms an...

I want to introduce you to more works from the pen of John Fawcett, the Baptist pastor from the north of England in the later 1700s. In almost 100 episodes of Particular Pilgrims, we have found only a few authors producing what could be called “many” publications. Benjamin Keach was one but the list is short. In the 1600s it could be difficult for non-conformists to publish. This began to ease in...

I want to introduce you to John Fawcett, another one of the many excellent evangelical pastors from Particular Baptist life in 1700s England. I plan to give you his biography soon, but first, I’d like to review one of his many writings, this one entitled “The Constitution and Order of a Gospel Church Considered”. What a typical 18th-century title! This was first published in 1797 when Fawcett was...

At roughly the same time that Particular Baptists began to appear out of the Puritan and Congregational movements in Old England they show up in New England. Several men I have already introduced to you spent time in both places. For example, Thomas Patient pastored not only in London, Ireland, and Bristol but was also in New England. He migrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s along...

If anyone today has heard of Benjamin Beddome, it is probably as a hymn writer. A few of his compositions are still in hymnals today. For example, in the Trinity Hymnal, Baptist Edition, there are three of his selections. There are two in the new Trinity Psalter Hymnal. One thing this writing of hymns for worship proves is that he believed congregational singing to be a part of God’s public worshi...

Benjamin Beddome was appreciated as a fine preacher by his congregation and his gift in this regard was widely admired in the Particular Baptist churches and beyond. We have seen that it was his preaching and the blessing of God upon it that caused the Bourton church to pursue him as their pastor. But there were other admirers. Robert Hall, Jr., perhaps the premier Baptist preacher of the next gen...

When Benjamin Beddome became the pastor at Bourton-on-the-water, one of the first things he aggressively pursued besides preaching was catechizing. He aimed for the simple but thorough and deep teaching of his congregation and their children from the Scriptures through the Baptist Catechism. The use of a catechism had been part of Particular Baptist life since their emergence from puritan dissent....

When we left Benjamin Beddome last episode, he had been set apart to preach by the London Baptist church where he was a member. The year was 1740. He immediately got busy in that work, though only 22. He returned to the rural and small town area of his birth and began to preach throughout it. Although well educated in many senses, he was undoubtedly raw in exercising his preaching gifts. His fathe...

One of the frequent misconceptions of English Particular Baptist life in the 1700s is that it was captive to a hyper-Calvinistic ethos that led it into decline. To a degree, this was true in some places, including central England and London. But the extent has often been exaggerated or misjudged. There are many counter-examples including the life and ministry of Benjamin Beddome and his father, Jo...

I’ve had several people ask the question – at what age did the early Particular Baptists immerse believers? Back then, did a person have to be a certain age to qualify for baptism? I’m thankful for this question for several reasons. First, it’s one I’ve wondered about and studied for years. Second, the answer from history is quite different from much of the modern practice of believer’s baptism. A...

In the last 20 years there has been a resurgence of interest in Anne. One of the best studies is called “To Express the Ineffable: the hymns and spirituality of Anne Steele” by Cynthia Aalders. It was published by Paternoster Press in 2008 as part of a series on Baptist history and thought. There are many useful books in that list. But I often find these kind of studies to be out of touch both his...

It’s time now to turn to the writing of Anne Steele with a focus on her religious poetry and hymns. As already mentioned, Anne wrote in various forms including letters, psalms and hymns, poems for specific occasions, and prose essays on a number of specific subjects.

In exploring the life of Anne Steele, there are many events common to much of Baptist life at the time, for example, the close knit even guarded church communities, the close family ties, the frequency of death and sorrow. But the Steeles were unusual to some degree in that they were financially well-off. They lived what we might call an upper middle class lifestyle.

Anne Steele was born to William and Anne Steele during the second week of May, 1717. She joined an older brother, William, in their ancestral home called Grandfathers. A few years later another brother was born, Thomas. But this was to be a time of grief not joy because mother Anne died of childbirth complications and Thomas followed her to the grave a few weeks later. It is likely that father Wil...