An address to the Second Baptist Church in Middleborough, concerning the importance of Gospel discipline. [Four lines of Scripture texts]

An address to the Second Baptist Church in Middleborough, concerning the importance of Gospel discipline. [Four lines of Scripture texts]

Table of contents

Title page

AN ADDRESS, &c.

[Page]

AN ADDRESS, &c.

Beloved Brethren,

REASON taught the old Romans, the injustice of condemning any man before he had his accusers face to face, with licence to answer for himself; and revelation saith to Christians, In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established. 2. COR. xiii. 1. And upon personal offences, our Lord requires us to give each brother two opportunities to speak for himself, before he is arraigned before the church; and then says, If he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen Man and a Publican. And he assures us that none have a right to be in his church, who are not become as little children. MAT. xviii. 3, 15, 18. And what holiness would soon prevail in his church, if his laws were obeyed therein! Lordship is of the Gentiles; and by them hath the Holy City, been long troden under foot. MARK x. 15, 42. REV. xi. 2. The church hath been labouring, like a traveling woman, for deliverance from Antichristian Tyranny; and this labour hath now come to a point among our churches, as the following facts will shew.

THE Warren association was formed as a friendly conference, without claiming any jurisdiction over the churches. In September, 1772, they elected me their Agent, to use my best endeavours, by the advice of their committee, to obtain the establishment of equal [Page]religious liberty in this country: And for that end we published these five reasons, in 1773, against complying any longer with the certificate laws of the ruling party in New-England, 1st. Because it implies an acknowledgment, that civil rulers have a right to set one religious sect above another, which they have not. 2d. Because they are not our representatives in religious affairs, and therefore have no right to impose religious taxes. 3d. Because their doing it emboldens the ruling party, to assume God's prerogative, so as to judge the hearts of all who put not into their mouths. 4th. Because the church is presented as a chaste virgin to Christ; and the placeing of her trust and love upon any others for temporal support, is playing the harlot, and so the way to destroy all religion. HOSEA ii. 5. 5th. Because this practice tends to promote envy, hypocrisy, and confusion, and so to the ruin of civil society,* But Mr. Ebenezer Hinds disliked our dropping that practice; and he was so much offended with the language of our memorial against it, to our legislature in 1775, that he did not attend our association again in seven years. He wrote to them in 1779, to reprove them for continuing me as their Agent: To which they returned a respectful answer. He wrote again in like manner, in 1780, when they made him no reply. In September 1781, Moses Thomas went to the association with a complaint against elder Hunt's church, because they had excommunicated him the winter before. This the association took so much notice of, as to publish a Note in their Minutes, that they claimed no jurisdiction in points of discipline; but recommended it to neighbouring churches, that if they were properly applied to, they would afford such assistance as was in their power. Thus matters lay for above eight months, and then three churches were applied to, for assistance in council upon his case, on June [Page]11, 1782; the time when I was obliged, by an appointment in said Minutes, to be in the county of Albany.

OUR church sent deacon Alden, and two more delegates to that council; and elder Hunt's church chose a committee to attend upon them, and to give them what light they could in the affair: Each of the committee were nominated, and then were chosen by the church, by lifting up of hands; until elder Hunt was nominated and seconded, without any objection, and he concluded it sufficient, without putting his own choice to a formal vote. Yet because that formality was omitted, elder Hinds was so earnest to prevent his having liberty to speak before the council, that he accused him of injuring the truth, for saying he was one of that committee. However, two thirds of the council obtained satisfaction that said excommunication was just. But Hinds was so uneasy about it, that he carried a long paper of accusations against Hunt to your church; and Alden brought another to ours; but I refused to read it to our church. In September 1782, elder Hinds went again to our association, to whom another complaint was carried from Moses Thomas, but the moderator did not think proper to read it publickly. Hinds continued so uneasy with Hunt, as to write a letter to the association against him, in September 1783; but it was not read to them. After which I procured a meeting at Ebenezer Nelson's; on January 13, 1784, when Hunt gave Hinds such satisfaction upon all the points that he complained of, that the controversy seemed to be settled betwixt them; until in the evening Hinds again brought up his accusation against Hunt, of his injuring the truth, in saying he was of that committee. Upon which I arose, and said, ‘I solemnly warn you against going on in this way, you will ruin yourself.’ In March following, he came to my house, and told me, he would not take the warning at my hands. On April 26, I wrote to him, and reminded him of the divine rules in MAT. xviii. 4. [Page]LUKE xxii. 26, and then said, ‘It appeared to my conscience, that you indulged a severity towards brother Hunt, that you would not receive as right towards you, from any man in the world.’ To this he wrote an answer on May 1, wherein, after trying to justify his severity, he said, ‘Pray my good friend; don't let that or any other man separate us, as MARK did greater and better men than we.’ To this I replied on May 31, and said, "I am very certain that our chief danger does not lie in that place. It is exactly here, You have from time to time laid complaints before me against your brethren, for which you have broken fellowship with them, and, in the case in hand, with an elder, so as to refuse to hear him preach, without ever allowing me a hearing thereof in a gospel way." This he denied, and wrote to our church for a hearing upon it; and they granted it, on August 11, 1784. But then he refused to state or support any charge against me, and insisted upon my proving the truth of what I had writen, nine miles from my witnesses. This appeared so unreasonable, that our church dismissed the case, to be settled betwixt ourselves, and Hinds went off; upon which deacon Alden arose, and railed at our church, at a high rate, and his holding with Hinds in that line of conduct hath moved him to forsake our meeting for above three years past.

Elder Hinds made three attempts more to croud that case into our church, without letting me know what it was that he denied in my letter; but not being able to do it, he was forced to grant me a hearing in your church, April 29, 1785; when he owned that he had from time to time informed me of actions that he was offended with in his brethren, and who were censured therefor; but he said my words meant that he had done it before they were censured, and that his doing it was the cause of their censure; a meaning which I never thought of till that day. On May 4, 1785, I wrote a plain state of these facts to your church, and then said, "the main support of Antichrist, from his first [Page]rise to this day, has been by teachers accounting themselves so much greater than the churches, as to unite all their influence against dissenters from their judgments, and then calling in the [...]ular arm to support them, and to enforce all their measures." And I informed you, that as elder Hinds had openly broken fellowship with me, you must not expect that I should join with him again, until he explicitly renounced those evils. This he hath never done; but in general terms he denied that he held them, before our mutual council of Nov. 16, 178 [...], and then denied the truth of facts, in four particulars, without giving a fair opportunity for supporting them by evidence, by which means the council said in their result, that the crimes I had charged him with were not sufficiently proved to them. At the same time they fully justified the result of the council of March 15, 1785, in their condemning your censure upon brother Samuel Nelson and others, because they did not allow that Hinds's confession was equal to the offences that he was judged to be guilty of by your mutual council of Sept. 28, 1784. On May 24. 1786, I wrote to elder Hinds, and stated plainly the four points wherein he denied the truth, before the council of Nov. 16, 17 [...]5, without giving fair opportunity to prove them, and desired that these things might be settled in a gospel way. This he hath not answered; but he hath since been guilty of the followlng evils.

First, He published a pamphlet last summer, called A History of [...], wherein are sundry things, concerning our former separation from the ruling sect in New-England, which are directly contrary to fact.

Secondly, In your church meeting October 8, 1784 he declared that he was sorry he had reported so many that [...], and promised not to do so [...] pamphlet he hath violated that promise to a high degree.

[Page] Thirdly, Though he readily went to the council called by an excommunicated man, June 11, 1782, and tried to debar elder Hunt from the privilege of answering for himself, after which he brought and read accusations against him to your [...] in his absence; yet Hinds hath now accused me of being worse than the heathen, only because I went to the council of June 15, 1784, called by seven of your aggrieved brethren, and heard some complaints against Hinds in his absence, and then adjourned to give him opportunity for answering thereto. p. 8, 9.

Fourthly, In said pamphlet he hath plainly manifested the same temper that he had, when he refused to come to the council of March 15, 1785, at their earnest request, to give them what light he could in cases that were to be laid before them; and now he hath accused them with lying, without so much as subscribing his name to the accusation. p. 11, 12.

Fifthly, Though our church requested a free conference with yours upon the affairs between us, on the 11th. instant, to give and receive light as God should direct, and received a promise of that privilege; yet when we came to the meeting, and I attempted to give the reasons why I could not retract those former charges that I had laid against elder Hinds, he, and a party with him, positively refused to grant me that liberty; I therefore appeal to all your consciences, whether he ought not to be excluded from your communion until he offers gospel satisfaction for the foregoing offences to others, as well as to your injured brother.

Isaac Backus.

Middleborough, Dec. 20. 1787.

THE END.

Notes

*

My History, vol. 2. p. 278.

↵

§

§

[Page]

[Page]

AN ADDRESS TO THE SECOND Baptist Church, In MIDDLEBOROUGH, CONCERNING THE IMPORTANCE OF GOSPEL DISCIPLINE.

Purge out the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump.

1. COR. v. 7.

Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.

LUKE. xii. 1.

MIDDLEBOROUGH: (COUNTY OF PLYMOUTH,) PRINTED BY NATHANIEL COVERLY. M,DCCL,XXXVII.

Information about this book

Title statement

An address to the Second Baptist Church in Middleborough, concerning the importance of Gospel discipline. [Four lines of Scripture texts]

Backus, Isaac, 1724-1806.

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI :

Date

2011-05.

ID [DLPS]

N15818

ID [TCP]

N15818

ID [STC]

Evans 20213

ID [NOTIS]

APW5676

ID [IMAGE-SET]

20213

ID [EVANS-CITATION]

99011800

Availability

This keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above is co-owned by the institutions providing financial support to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. This Phase I text is available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons 0 1.0 Universal. The text can be copied, modified, distributed and performed, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Series

Early American Imprints, 1639-1800 ; no. 20213.

Notes

(Evans-TCP ; no. N15818)

Transcribed from: (Readex Archive of Americana ; Early American Imprints, series I ; image set 20213)

Images scanned from Readex microprint and microform: (Early American imprints. First series ; no. 20213)

Source

— An address to the Second Baptist Church in Middleborough, concerning the importance of Gospel discipline. [Four lines of Scripture texts], Backus, Isaac, 1724-1806., Second Baptist Church (Middleborough, Mass.)..

Extent

8 p. ; 22 cm. (4to)

Printed by Nathaniel Coverly.,. Middleborough: (County of Plymouth,) [Mass.] :: M,DCCL,XXXVII. [1787]. (Running title: The importance of Gospel discipline.) (Signed on p. 8: Isaac Backus. Middleborough, Dec. 20. 1787.)

Creation

Created by converting TCP files to TEI P5 using tcp2tei.xsl, TEI @ Oxford.

Editorial practices

EEBO-TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and the publisher ProQuest to create accurately transcribed and encoded texts based on the image sets published by ProQuest via their Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). The general aim of EEBO-TCP is to encode one copy (usually the first edition) of every monographic English-language title published between 1473 and 1700 available in EEBO.

EEBO-TCP aimed to produce large quantities of textual data within the usual project restraints of time and funding, and therefore chose to create diplomatic transcriptions (as opposed to critical editions) with light-touch, mainly structural encoding based on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org).

The EEBO-TCP project was divided into two phases. The 25,363 texts created during Phase 1 of the project have been released into the public domain as of 1 January 2015. Anyone can now take and use these texts for their own purposes, but we respectfully request that due credit and attribution is given to their original source.

Users should be aware of the process of creating the TCP texts, and therefore of any assumptions that can be made about the data.

Text selection was based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). If an author (or for an anonymous work, the title) appears in NCBEL, then their works are eligible for inclusion. Selection was intended to range over a wide variety of subject areas, to reflect the true nature of the print record of the period. In general, first editions of a works in English were prioritized, although there are a number of works in other languages, notably Latin and Welsh, included and sometimes a second or later edition of a work was chosen if there was a compelling reason to do so.

Image sets were sent to external keying companies for transcription and basic encoding. Quality assurance was then carried out by editorial teams in Oxford and Michigan. 5% (or 5 pages, whichever is the greater) of each text was proofread for accuracy and those which did not meet QA standards were returned to the keyers to be redone. After proofreading, the encoding was enhanced and/or corrected and characters marked as illegible were corrected where possible up to a limit of 100 instances per text. Any remaining illegibles were encoded as <gap>s. Understanding these processes should make clear that, while the overall quality of TCP data is very good, some errors will remain and some readable characters will be marked as illegible. Users should bear in mind that in all likelihood such instances will never have been looked at by a TCP editor.

The texts were encoded and linked to page images in accordance with level 4 of the TEI in Libraries guidelines.

Copies of the texts have been issued variously as SGML (TCP schema; ASCII text with mnemonic sdata character entities); displayable XML (TCP schema; characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or text strings within braces); or lossless XML (TEI P5, characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or TEI g elements).

Keying and markup guidelines are available at the Text Creation Partnership web site.