Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

Brown, Wickenden and Dexter. … This church is now the First Baptist
church of Providence.
(4.) The parent church, under Olney, gradually dwindled away, and became
extinct about the year 1718, some seventy years from its origin.
(5.) No church was formed from. Olney’s after the division already
mentioned, and no ministers are known to have gone out from it. Olney’s
baptism, whether valid or invalid, was not propagated.
(6.) Nearly a century passed before the church formed from Olney’s began to
colonize, in 1730.
(7.) None of its ministers, or the ministers of the churches formed from it,
received their baptism from Williams, or from any one whose baptism
descended from his.
(8.) The Baptist churches of America could not have descended from Roger
Williams, or from the temporary society which he formed.”
By relying on what I have shown all concede to be unreliable — the records of
the first church of Providence — Benedict attributes to the old Williams and
Olney organizations what is true of only the church established by Wickenden,
Brown and Dexter, viz., the honor of being the “prolific mother of many
Baptist communities.”
As J.R. Graves wrote:
“It cannot be shown that any Baptist church sprang from the Williams affair.
Nor can it be proved that the baptism of any Baptist minister came from
Williams’ hand.” f898
Reuben A. Guild, L.L. D., Librarian of Brown University, and one of the most
reliable historians of Baptist affairs in Rhode Island, says:
“In regard to whether churches have gone out from the First Church of
Providence by letters of dismission, I cannot say. In the early days everything;
was primitive. For near seventy years the church had no meeting house …
kept no records, etc., etc.”
Dr. Guild being an ardent advocate of the First Church claims this is a virtual
concession that no one can show that any church or preacher ever originated
with Roger Williams and his society. f899
In April, 1889, Dr. Caldwell, pastor of the First Church of Providence said:
“We celebrate, after all, an unknown day; there is no record of the exact date
of our beginning.” Adlam says:
“Comer, the first and for the earliest history of our denomination, the most
reliable of writers, ascribes distinctly and repeatedly this priority to the