Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

spiritual choice for any souls. Hence they, as does the New Testament, have
always left every believer as a free man or woman in Christ Jesus. This
constitutes every believer a ruler in God’s kingdom and every citizen a ruler in
the State. In a former chapter we have seen that Baptists have given the world
religious freedom.
In a recent volume, entitled “The Puritan in Holland, England and America,”
Douglas Campbell, A.M. LL. B., member of the Historical Association, says:
“No words of praise can be too strong for the service which the English
Baptists have rendered the cause of religious liberty. … They have never lost
their influence as a leaven in the land. In purity of life and in substantial
Christian work, they have been surpassed by the members of no other
religious body. Having been the first British denomination of Christians to
proclaim the principles of religious liberty, they were also the first to send out
missionaries to the heathen. … In fact, taking their whole history together, if
the Anabaptists of Holland had done nothing more for the world than to beget
such offspring they would have repaid a thousand fold all the care shown for
their liberties.”
The Nonconformist and Independent, of London, the ablest Pedobaptist paper
in the world, is thus quoted by The Standard, of Chicago:
“To the Baptists must be credited the proud distinction first of doctrinal
relationship to the earliest christians in Great Britain; and secondly, their
priority in asserting the principle of liberty of conscience. Their essential
doctrine was held firmly by the Christian communions which St. Augustine
found in England when he arrived on his missionary enterprise, and no efforts
of his could convert the Baptists to the ecclesiastical polity of the church of
Rome. Coming to a more historical period, ‘it is,’ says Mr. Skeats, in his
‘History of Free Churches,’ ‘the singular and distinguished honor of the
Baptists to have repudiated from their earliest history all coercive power over
the conscience, and the actions of men with reference to religion. … They
were the prolo-evangelists of the voluntary principle. … From the remote
period referred to above, the principles of the Baptists have more or less
permeated and leavened the religious life of England. The Lollards are said to
have held their views. And Wickliffe is claimed as one of the early adherents
of their theory of Christ’s teaching. … They have had to endure
imprisonment, pain and death, for their rejection of the supremacy of the
crown, and their assertion of a doctrine which cut at the very root of
priestism.’”
The New York Tribune recently said:
“THE BAPTISTS HAVE SOLVED THE GREAT PROBLEM. They combine the
most resolute conviction, the most stubborn belief in their own special
doctrines with the most admirable tolerance of the faith of other Christians.”
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