High-lights of Strict Baptist History
Charles Breed
16 pages; paperback.
Reprinted for the Strict and Particular Baptist Minister's fellowship, no date c. 1949.
This short, 16 page, pamphlet was written by the first student, and later principal, of the Strict Baptist Bible Institute. The pamphlet is a printed version of a lecture given in 1948 at the Strict Baptist Open Air Mission.
Strict and Particular Baptists were so-called because they were Strict in who they allowed to take communion, held to particular grace and believed in believers' baptism by full immersion. They were strongly calvinistic.
Breed notes in his opening statement that 'Strict Baptist history have never been written'; this was the case in 1948, but now Kenneth Dix has at least partly remedied that. This pamphlet provides, as the title suggests, a few highlights. Breed recounts vignettes of displays of 'amazing courage and glorious heroism'.The Strict Baptists were born out of persecution and many of them paid for their beliefs with imprisonment and even death. It was at a time when any meeting together for worship had to be according to the forms of the Established church: non-conformism was illegal in the seventeenth century.
Although brief this pamphlet provides an insight into the courage, faith and tenacity of the early Strict Baptists in the scriptures and the God of the scriptures. They were also involved in the cause of religious liberty, at the forefront of the abolition of slavery and held a strong commitment to the advancement of education.
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