The Seventh-day Baptists.
Last week we gave out of the London Christian Shield, from the pen of Eld. Jones, a brief statement concerning the Seventh-day Adventists. In this number of the REVIEW, we give his record of early Seventh-day Baptists, which we copy from the London Baptist of March 13, 1874. Enveloped as early Baptist history is by circumstances of poverty and persecution, Baptists of the present day are thankful to be able to trace the practice of their principles through the ages down to apostolic times. That small part of the Baptist family who observe the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath are also able to follow their distinctive practice back through the centuries to the primitive church. In the Eastern Churches, the Armenian, the Nestorian, and Abyssinian, many, from the earliest times to the present, have observed the seventh day. In the Western Church, also, there have been included adherents of the unchanged Sabbath. According to Erasmus, there were Sabbatarians in Bohemia, who kept the seventh day. From references by old authors, one is led to believe that in the beginning of the sixteenth century, in Germany, Holland, and England, as well as in Bohemia, there were Anabaptists who observed the original Sabbath. In 1585, John Stockwood wrote of the “manifold disputations among the learned, and a diversity of opinion among the vulgar people and simple sort, concerning the Sabbath day and right use of the same, some maintaining the changed, and some the unchangeable, obligations of the seventh-day Sabbath.” In Chambers’ Cyclopedia, Art. “Sabbath,” Vol. 8, 1866, the Bohemian Sabbath observers and others are thus referred to:— “Accordingly, in the reign of Elizabeth, it occurred to many conscientious and independent thinkers (as it had previously done to some Protestants in Bohemia) that the fourth commandment required of them the observance, not of the first, but of the specified seventh day of the week, and a strict bodily rest as a service then due to God. They became numerous enough to make a considerable figure for more than a century in England, under the title of ‘Sabbatarians,’ a word now exchanged for the less ambiguous appellation of ‘Seventh-day Baptists.’” Among the first advocates of the seventh-day Sabbath in England, about A. D. 1610–20, appears one Lackson, or Jackson, who taught that the day named in the law should be observed. The converts to this view were John Trask and wife, William Hillyard, Christopher Sands, Mrs. Mary Chester, Mr. Hebden, and the Rev. Mr. Wright. Mrs. Chester and Mr. Hebden were imprisoned for advocating the Saturday Sabbath. Mrs. Chester, upon being converted to the Church, was released from prison; but twelve months after she was set at liberty, she relapsed into her former errors! Trask was tried in 1618, when Bishop Andrews argued against him at length, one of the charges being that “Christians were bound to observe the Jewish Sabbath.” The sentence executed upon Trask was to be “set upon the pillory in Westminster, and from thence to be whipped to the Fleet, there to remain prisoner.” Upon his renouncing the Sabbath, he was released from prison, and wrote “A Treatise (1620) of Liberty from Judaism, or an Acknowledgment of True Christian Liberty.” Mrs. Trask kept a private school, and had, as assistant, a Sabbath-keeper. She refused to teach on the Sabbath, and, being thus brought into notice, was arrested and imprisoned. Pagitt (p. 209) says:— “His wife, Mistress Trask, lay for fifteen or sixteen years a prisoner for her opinions about the Saturday Sabbath, in all which time she would receive no relief from anybody, notwithstanding she wanted much, alleging that it is written, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ Neither would she borrow. She deemed it a dishonor to her head, Christ, either to beg or to borrow. Her diet for the most part of her imprisonment—that is, till a little before her death—was bread and water and roots and herbs—no flesh, nor wine, nor brewed drink. . . . She charged the keeper of the prison not to bury her in church or churchyard, but in the fields only, which was accordingly so done. So there was an end to her sect in less than half a generation. ’Tis true, it begins of late (1661) to be revived again, but yet faintly. The progress it makes is not observed to be much; so that all gangrenes of spirit with which the times are troubled, as yet it spreads little, and therefore it is hoped a short caveat, such as this, may suffice against it.” Thus about 1620, Sabbath observers seem to have been terrified into quiet seclusion, only to gather strength soon to become more settled in their confidence, and especially so as they became more numerous. Theophilus Brabourne appears as a writer in behalf of the Sabbath in 1628, 1630, and 1632. Cox says: “Brabourne is a much abler writer than Trask, and may be regarded as the founder in England of the sect first known as Sabbatarians, but now calling themselves Seventh-day Baptists.” James Ockford, a follower of Brabourne, issued a work in 1642, entitled “The Doctrine of the Fourth Commandment” (Sabbath and Sunday, page 184). Cawdrey and Palmer, in 1652, wrote of him and his work as follows:— “But before we conclude this chapter, we shall take a brief survey of what a later Sabbatarian hath written, being it seems unsatisfied, as well he might, with all that hath been said by the bishop (White’s answer to Brabourne) and others in his way, in answer to the Sabbatarian arguments. One James Ockford, as we hinted above, hath revived the quarrel, and makes use of his adversaries’ weapons to beat themselves withal. There hath been sharp confutation of his book by fire, it being commanded so to be burnt, as perhaps it well deserved.” The organization of Seventh-day Baptist churches may not date earlier than 1620. The records, letters, and brochures, of those times of infuriated destruction and torment, are mostly lost. The absence of notice of meetings is perhaps to be accounted for in the necessity for private worship; for those early reformers were not theorizers merely; had they been, the martyr-stake and scaffold would not have passed into history. Each took the Bible to himself, and each sought to practice his belief of it, and that practice was sure to merit the too common distinction of those times. There was a grip in the dash of the enemy which told in the obliteration of everything that would transmit to posterity a fragment of the hated sect. The ordinary accident of fire happened to many a scrap of writing that would be invaluable now in fixing the date of the organization of a single church. The first book of the Mill-yard church shared the fate of the meeting-house in 1790. The late minister, W. H. Black, F. S. A., who was ever on the keen scent for old things, thought it probable that this church was organized about 1623. The Sabbath publications of that period excited attention all the more because of the increasing number of adherents, and the boldness of some who, for their faithfulness against what they considered popish error, suffered fines, imprisonment, and death. It was one of the hardest things to kill. Men die, but principles live. The conscience may be fettered, but the word of God is not bound. The thing was looked upon as infectious, and the infected as turbulent and dangerous, hence the writers make note of it as the “old quarrel,” and the “revival of it,” etc., from 1585 to 1661. We may be sure that the persecuted and lonely met, two and three and more, to worship God, and to claim the presence of the Son of God, and that pure worship, simple and spiritual, became the act of the organization of many a small company meeting in secret for fear of the secular-religious power. Names, places, and precise dates, are unknown, but the inheritors of the faith (few now in Britain) are found increasing in numbers in the wide domain of prairie, hill, and mountain, of the free land whose shores are laved by the Atlantic and Pacific.