A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE 



which already had one settlement in Northamptonshire, at Culworth, 

 in 1744. Later they settled at Northampton, 1769 (now extinct), Wood- 

 ford 1787, and Eydon 1775. Their relations with the Independents 

 and Baptists of the county were continuously friendly, and it was from a 

 religious atmosphere in which their spirit must have counted for much that 

 William Carey (born 1761, died 1834), the shoemaker of Paulerspury, after- 

 wards Baptist minister, came forward, in spite of much opposition from older 

 men, to found with Andrew Fuller and Dr. Ryland, in 1792, the Baptist 

 Missionary Society. Missions have never been unknown to Catholic Christi- 

 anity in any age, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had 

 already for nearly a century been promoting Christianity in the English 

 colonies and possessions,' but, with the exception of Moravian missions, 

 general missionary enterprise was unknown to Protestant Christianity when 

 Carey and his friends carried into practice the ideas hinted by Doddridge fifty 

 years before." Of Carey's valuable work as orientalist and missionary in India, 

 where he laboured for forty years, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to 

 speak. The ecclesiastical history of Northamptonshire is concerned only with 

 the fact that the revival of modern Protestant missions began within its 

 borders, and was due to the zeal and piety of dissenters from the Established 

 Church, who found in Carey a representative of great power of mind and 

 character. 



Of the subsequent history of Nonconformity in the county little need be 

 said. Dissenters had as early as 1785 established Sunday schools among them- 

 selves, and the early years of the nineteenth century saw a considerable increase 

 in the numbers and places of worship of the Independents and Baptists. 

 Presbyterianism, as distinct from Independency, had passed away by the end 

 of the eighteenth century. Socinianism, which greatly affected dissent in 

 other counties, has no history in Northamptonshire. Whether from the 

 general type of Nonconformity or from the moderate and conciliating policy 

 of Doddridge, there is no record of any Socinian or Unitarian Society being 

 founded in the eighteenth century. A tradition, which speaks of Unitarians 

 as being the first dissenters to hold religious services at Moulton, near North- 

 ampton, in George II's reign, cannot be verified, and the present Unitarian 

 body at Northampton dates only from 1827. The Quakers, as already de- 

 scribed, have steadily declined in numbers, and this has been especially the case 

 within the last half century. The strict Calvinistic Baptists, who retain the 

 older type of thought unaffected by the teaching of the Rylands and Fuller, 

 have continued to exist in small numbers in three or four places," but other- 

 wise the Independents, the more liberal Baptists, and the Methodists have been 

 the actual representatives of Nonconformity in Northamptonshire during the 

 nineteenth century. While their numbers and actual influence have consider- 

 ably increased, their relative importance has diminished. The revival of 

 spiritual life and earnestness in the Church of England begun in the Evan- 



' In 1 641 William C. Castell, rector of Courteenhall, Northants, had written a pamphlet petitioning 

 Parliament to promote missions to the plantations and colonies. 



■ Ideas like these were then in the air, and the Baptists were only just first. So early as 1783 Venn, 

 Thornton, Wilberforce and others were holding conferences which resulted in the founding of the Church 

 Missionary Society in 1799. Mr. Haweis, the rector of Aldwinkle in this county, is said to have sent out 

 two missionaries at his own cost before 1792. He was one of the founders of the London Missionary 

 Society — an undenominational society, now chiefly supported by Congregationalists. 



' Providence Chapel, Northampton ; the Tabernacle, Wellingborough ; and Irthlingborough. 



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