ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



the Baptist element ultimately prevailed.' Kettering was their stronghold, 

 and from their church there had gone forth the once famous Doctor Gill, a 

 learned and powerful controversialist in the now-forgotten discussions which 

 absorbed the theologians of the time. The denominational spirit was vigorous 

 among Baptists, and much of their strength was spent in the polemic between 

 the Particular or Calvinistic and the Arminian or General Baptists, and in the 

 quite different controversy as to whether other than Baptists should be admitted 

 to the Communion. In 1759 the important Baptist Church of College Lane, 

 Northampton, had dwindled to thirty members,^ and the denomination 

 throughout the county seemed to have but little future. This was 

 changed by the Rev. John Ryland (born 1723, died 1792), who then 

 commenced at Northampton a pastorate which lasted twenty-five years.' The 

 work done by Doddridge in uniting culture and piety among the Independents 

 was now carried out among the Baptists by Ryland, a man of the seventeenth- 

 century type, intensely earnest and a master of fervent rhetoric. He was 

 equally devoted to evangelical orthodoxy and classical study. Both before 

 and during his Northampton life he conducted a large and flourishing school 

 in addition to his pastoral duties, and to him more than to any man of his day 

 was due the preservation of sound scholarship and polite learning among the 

 Baptist and other orthodox dissenters, at any rate in the Midlands. When 

 he left Northampton in 1785, the Baptists of College Lane formed perhaps 

 the most influential Nonconformist society in the county, a position they have 

 generally maintained ; while under the guidance of his erudite and sv^xet- 

 natured son. Doctor Ryland, who succeeded him, the influence and numbers 

 of the Baptists considerably increased in the central and southern part of the 

 county. A similar work to that done by the Rylands for the culture of dis- 

 senters was done for dissenting theology by another Northamptonshire Baptist, 

 Andrew Fuller (born 1754, died 181 5),* who became the minister at the Baptist 

 church at Kettering in 1782, and remained there till his death. At that time 

 the Calvinistic Baptists in Northamptonshire and in most parts of England were 

 far more numerous than those who took their theology from Arminius; their 

 type of religious thought, though not wanting in loftiness, was of a kind tending 

 to restrict their sympathies and work to those whom they considered to be 

 ' the elect.' Fuller did more than any other man to modify this theology in a 

 liberal and evangelical direction. The well-known saying that ' Christ died 

 for all men and not only for the elect,' has often been quoted as indicating 

 Fuller's protest, and the services he rendered to Nonconformity in restoring 

 to its teaching those evangelical ideas which it had largely lost, give him an 

 assured place in the narrative of religion in England.^ 



It was not unnatural that Northamptonshire Nonconformity, which in 

 Doddridge and Fuller had furnished leaders of thought and feeling in liberal 

 and evangelical directions, was now to play a prominent part in the develop- 

 ment of Protestant missions to the heathen. Doddridge had been in close 

 sympathy with the United Brethren, popularly known as the Moravians, 



' e.g. College Lane, though with 'open communion.' 

 ' See ' Church Book ' of Kettering and College St. 



8 Dr. J. Culross, Ike Three Ryknds (1897), which contains full bibliography. 

 * Rose, Biog. Did. (1857), vii, 461. 



' Fuller, The Gospel tvortky of all Acceptation ; J. W. yLorvA, Memoir of Fuller {\%\(>) ; also article on Fuller 

 hy J. E. Ryland ; Encycl. Brit. (7th ed.) 



2 73 10 



