THE

GENERAL BAPTIST MAGAZINE.

The General Baptist Denomination: its
Capabilities and ork.

OUR near future, as a Christian Commonwealth, is bright as a spring morning, and radiant with the triple promise of more work, more difficulty, and more success. Signs of activity abound. The skill of the architect and the strength of the builder are in constant demand. Pastors were never more loved or better cared for. Local Preachers and Sunday School Teachers are not only eager for their vocations, but willing to undergo prolonged drill that they may fill their callings with efficiency. Our co-operation is hearty, sincere, and enthusiastic.

Therefore we enter the New Year with many happy omens around us, and many bright hopes within us. Not that we are, or have, all that we could wish; but we do wish to be, and do, all we ought, and we honestly purpose and energetically labour to translate our wishes into corresponding deeds. There is a deeper and deepening interest in our work, and a confidence in our possibilities of usefulness such as have not been surpassed for a long time. We greet the first morning of 1877 with unabated interest in our common duties and enlarged expectations of our Father's gracious blessing.

Of the far-off future we know nothing. It is deep as Hades. We cannot fathom it. It is high as heaven. We cannot attain to it. Nor need we try. The Lord and Head of the church is mindful of His own, and will teach our successors, to the last generation, their special work as He now teaches us. The duty that is next us is imperative; and the immediate prospect claims our attention, mainly because it may cast some light on our capability for service and the best way of using it.

No one can look into the annals of our "body" for the last fifteen or twenty years without seeing that we are stronger to-day in all the elements of power than we ever were; in faith and hope, in energy and resource, in supple force and intelligent fearlessness. The pages of this Magazine for 1859, and for some years onward, are replete with lugubrious laments about our decline, and desponding proposals for a speedy dissolution. A fierce storm of despair, a veritable cyclone of denominational scepticism, threatened our existence. Men were going about saying we had lived too long, and asking for somebody in sheer pity to bury us. Therefore on the urgent but not over heroic theory of "any port in a VOL. LXXIX.-NEW SERIES, No. 85.-JANUARY, 1877.

storm a proposition for union with the Particular or Calvinistic Baptists was not only stated and advocated, but actually became the topic of the annual letter read at the Halifax Association in 1862 by the Rev. J. Baxter Pike; and such was the despair of ourselves into which we had fallen, so thorough our participation in the general blight that overtook the faith of the church in all creeds, and so complete our ignorance of the actual condition of the Particular Baptists, that if the leaders of that incoherent denomination had only given us the faintest encouragement we should have performed the Japanese Trick with inimitable dexterity and surprising cleverness.

But that favourable sign was withheld. We were compelled to go our own way and now the subject of the union is not so much as named amongst the possibilities of our near future. We came to understand the Particular Baptists better, and to appraise ourselves a little higher. We saw that they were not one "connexion," but a series of " connexions" under one "denomination;" not a "body" with a well defined and easily discoverable head, speaking with one voice, but three or four "bodies," separated by prodigious differences, though agreeing on baptism; or to speak more accurately, not even agreeing about baptism altogether, but only on one or two aspects of it. It appeared, therefore, that if we wished really to unite with the Particular Baptists we should have to choose amongst the Strict Baptists, the Spurgeonic Baptists, and the section which, in the absence of a better term, I may call the Miscellaneous Baptists who find their visible centre in the Colleges of Regent's Park, Bristol, and Rawdon, and the Baptist Missionary Society, -an election that seems to have been given up in a despair which drove out of us our despair of ourselves. MR. SPURGEON, recognizing such divisions, said, "towards his General Baptists friends he had friendly and loving feelings; but he recognized the District Union brethren (i.e. the Strict Baptists) as being even closer akin." Possibly they were; but we can honestly say that though we have friendly and loving feelings towards the strictest of the strict, and the most exclusive of exclusive Baptists, still we should recognize Mr. Spurgeon as being in nine-tenths of his sermons and nearly all his works much closer akin.

For the present, however, and for some distance in the future, it is now felt we must keep to our own boundaries. No doubt there are changes further afield. The bases of denominationalism are altering. Slowly and silently the churches are rebuilding Christian organizations on new lines. Those lines are less theological and more utilitarian, and their course will be determined more by the fitness of churches to nourish the spiritual life of certain classes of the people than by interpretations of ordinances and theories of the Divine Nature. We expect a day when the Baptist Union shall gather into itself all the Baptists of the kingdom and form them into one solid, compact, and thorough federation; nay more, we anticipate a time when the Congregational churches of the land shall so completely understand baptism that it shall cease to be a divisive element. But that hour is not yet; and the work of to-day cannot be done by overlooking present needs and possibilities, and leisurely dreaming of splendid futures at an immeasurable distance.

It is generally admitted that we have an immense advantage in this rapidly organizing age, in that we are already a FEDERATION. Our

THE GENERAL BAPTIST DENOMINATION.

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churches, like other Congregational churches, Baptist and Independent, are spiritual republics; but we have the merit of being federalized as are the States in America, and the Cantons in Switzerland; so as to be free from what is purely individual and strictly local, but bound together for the common good and for the promotion of common objects. This confederation of spiritual republics is the church polity of the future. Independents are strenuously working for it. Baptists are groping after it too, if haply they may find it. We have it. It is part and parcel of our being, and is more pervasively felt now than for many years past. Our members join, not only the church at A. or B., but the General Baptist Association; and come by church-membership into a position to take part in all our work-our College, Missions, Building Fund, Hymn Book, Magazine, and everything that belongs to us. Our solidarity gives every church member a voice in the management of our federal work.

Nor can we disguise from ourselves, at this time of day, the vast possibilities for good we have in our scriptural, broad, and anti-Calvinistic creed; a creed that does not lie dead in men's minds, but still excites keen interest, and must always do, because it comes home to men's hearts, and matches their most living and operative ideas. We are not publicly identified with a creed whose principal items we have long ago surrendered, nor are we compelled to strain our consciences to get ourselves within the bounds of certain formularies. We preach the actual and real and unreserved universality of salvation as to its source in the Father's love for all; as to its means, in the Son's sacrifice for all; and as to its application, in the Spirit's convincing work for all. And this universalism is in perfect accord with that universal kinship of souls so widely felt to-day. We reject the dogma that might makes right, and that because God has power, therefore He has the right to destroy His creatures, irrespective of their opportunities and privileges. Our gospel is a gospel of righteousness-righteousness at work to save. It is not merely a private consolation, it is a living passion to redeem. It exalts the social, and debases the selfish, and fills with an unquenchable ardour "to join the choir invisible

Whose music is the gladness of the world."

With such capabilities of blessing the world as these we are bound to maintain to the uttermost our denominational integrity, to perfect whatever is lacking in our machinery, and to concentrate our work, in the main, along our denominational lines. We are sure this is the duty of to-day; and never yet was to-day's duty well done without preparing for the duty of the morrow. We are sure this is the right course; and the right is, in the sum of things, the useful.

We are nearly 25,000 strong, and we have yet to try the height and pitch to which we are capable of rising. We have not done our best by a long way. 25,000 CHRISTIANS ! I look at the figures with delight as I remember that every healthy and resolute Christian is a divine potency, carrries the key to unlock human hearts, is a soul-magnet in a world of souls to draw souls to the soulsaving Saviour. Let our aim be, Each one at his best for God and men. The spiritual really rules the world. Thought and love govern. Men are more than nations. A few saints in Judea more than the populations

of empires. Men and women filled with love to Christ, steeped in it, speaking it and living it-these are the world's princes. Humanity owes much to its heroes, its men of genius, its Gideon, its Leonidas, its Newton, its Paul; but after all it is the Christian men and women who do their little work, week in week out, and do it bravely, lovingly, and well, who live pure and helpful and soul-filled lives, who add to the mass their own spiritual victories and acquisitions ;-it is these unknown but heroic souls who raise the average piety to a higher scale, and give to the average usefulness a purer tone.

Next, let us try to make each individual church the best instrument men can get hold of for nourishing faith in God, reverence, conscience, hope, joy, courtesy, sympathy, and neighbourliness. The church is designed to be a kindly genial light, scattering its healing beams on the weak and weary, guiding the wayfarer into the paths of peace, and sunning all souls into a fuller and richer gladness.

And with each member at his or her best, and each church at its best, our corporate work will be easy, happy, and successful.

We step into the New Year with hope, then, for the God of Hope is with us. We are not the disciples of Schopenhauer, who taught that this is the worst of all possible worlds, but of Jesus Christ, who is saving the world, bad as it is, and shall finally triumph in His redeeming work. Brethren, let us be of a good heart. The Lord will not fail us; and resting on Him, "they can conquer who believe they can."

Ripley.

New Year's Day.

Spem bonam certamque reporto.

HAIL! Birthday common to us all,
Our souls spring up to live anew,
With high resolve to rend the thrall
Of falsity till life be true.

JOHN CLIFFORD.

We draw a fresh pure breath of hope;
The spirit thrills with coming joy,
Dilating to its boundless scope,
Disdaining time, and earth its toy.
With greetings ringing in our ears
Are echoes from the glory-land,
They beckon us from splendid spheres
Who passed the spot where now we stand.

Fair darlings of our younger days,

Dear Mothers with the saintly throng;
And angels from their realms of praise,
They watch our steps, and call us on.

The past shall bury the dead past;
We, for the royal future made,

Are moving to its gateway fast,
Are for it gloriously arrayed.
Dim-eyed, gray-haired, at last we plod,
But souls are infinitely young:
O summer, heaven, angels, God,

Swift as the days we come, we come.

E. HALL JACKSON.