This Day in Baptist History
November 26 The Word of God, the Dictates of Conscience Made Me a Baptist Scripture: Acts 24: 14-27 John Holcombe was born in 1762. When he was still a child, his family moved from Virginia to South Carolina. By eleven years of age, he completed all the education to be received from a living teacher. He had a naturally inquiring mind which desired knowledge of every kind. He especially dwelt on the vast number and grandeur of the heavenly bodies. At the commencement of the Revolutionary War, Holcombe was quite young. However, he was...
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November 25 From One Generation to Another Scripture: Matthew 16:16-18 Two previous entries have focused expressly on the Wightman family of England and early America. Valentine Wightman was born April 16, 1681, in Rhode Island. On February 10, 1702, he married Susannah Holmes, who was the granddaughter of the Reverend Obadiah Holmes who had been severely whipped at Lynn, Massachusetts, and the great-granddaughter of Roger Williams, the dauntless apostle of freedom of conscience. Mr. and Mrs. Valentine Wightman surely came from Baptist...
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November 24 Swallowed Up in the Will of God Scripture: Matthew 26:37-46 Susanna Mason was born in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, in 1724 or 1725. Her great-grandfather had been a soldier in Oliver Cromwell’s Roundhead Army. The families were Baptist in background. She was converted in 1745, joined the Separate church, and maintained her Baptist convictions when she married Isaac Backus. Backus, not fully persuaded of Baptist principles relating to pedobaptism at that time, was aware of her views when he asked her to marry him. Later he became...
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November 23 Any Truth Rationalized to an Extreme Becomes a Heresy Scripture: Matthew 15:1-14 In the early eighteenth century, many General Baptists embraced extreme liberalism in the form of Arian and Socinian views. They had been influenced by the apostasy of the state churches. Between 1715 and 1750 the General Baptists experienced a severe decline—the number of their churches fell from 146 to 65. The winds of false doctrine are dry and deadly, withering the spiritual vitality of the body. During the same period, there were winds of...
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November 22 A Summary of the Influence of Separate Baptists Scripture: Psalm 68:10-11 My personal admiration for the “Separate” Baptists has exhibited itself on many pages of this volume, and I am forced to concur with George Washington Paschal in his statement, “I make bold to say that these Separate Baptists have proved to be the most remarkable body of Christians America has known.” 1 I further agree with Paschal that had the Baptist cause in America continued under the domination of a strong Calvinism, such as the Particular...
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November 21 When the Shoe Is on the Other Foot Scripture: Psalm 94 Soon after Elisha Paine was ordained into the gospel ministry in May of 1752, he was seized by the authorities of Windham, Connecticut, on November 21, 1752, and imprisoned because he failed to pay a tax to the state church minister. In defending liberty of conscience and putting forth the necessity of maintaining neutrality between the church and the state, Baptists often had to remind the Congregationalists of the time when the “shoe was on the other foot,” and their...
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