tottering day, when many once
eminent churches have been shattered in pieces."--_Cox,
"Sabbath Literature," Vol. I, p. 268._

Francis Bampfield was formerly an influential minister of the Church of
England, and prebendary of Exeter Cathedral, but later pastor of a
Sabbath-keeping congregation meeting in the Pinners Hall, off Broad
Street, near the Bank of England. Calamy said of him:

"He was one of the most celebrated preachers in the west of
England, and extremely admired by his hearers, till he fell
into the Sabbatarian notion, of which he was a zealous
asserter."--_"Non-Conformist Memorial," Vol. II, p. 152._

He was arrested while in the pulpit preaching, and in 1683 died of
hardships in Newgate prison, for the Sabbath of the Lord. An old writer
says that his body was followed to burial by "a very great company of
factious and schismatical people;" in other words, dissenters from the
state church.

Thomas Bampfield, his brother, Speaker of the House of Parliament at one
time, under Cromwell, published a book in defense of the Sabbath of the
Lord. In fact, many published the truth in this manner, and doctors of
divinity and even bishops wrote replies.

"Sabbatarian Baptists," these English witnesses to God's Sabbath were
first called in those times, and then "Seventh Day Baptists." In 1664
Stephen Mumford, from one of these London congregations, was sent over
to New England. He settled in Rhode Island, where the Baptist pioneer of
religious liberty, Roger Williams, had founded his colony. In 1671 the
first Sabbatarian church in America was formed in Rhode Island.
Evidently this movement created a stir; for the report went over to
England that the Rhode Island colony did not keep the "Sabbath"--meaning
Sunday. Roger Williams wrote to his friends in England denying the
report, but calling attention to the fact that there was no Scripture
for "abolishing the seventh day," and adding:

"You know yourselves do not keep the Sabbath, that is the
seventh day."--_"Letters of Roger Williams," Vol. VI, p. 346
(Narragansett Club Publications)._

Through the following century numbers of Seventh Day Baptist churches
were founded in America.[F]

Sabbath keepers were springing up also on the continent of Europe, in
Bohemia, Moravia, Transylvania, and Russia, where here and there Bible
believers saw that tradition had made void one of the commandments of
God. Then, as the events