rit of Christ and from His Word. Carey had left his ancestral church
at a time when the biographer of Romaine could declare with truth that
that preacher was the only evangelical in the established churches of
all London, and that of twenty thousand clergymen in England, the
number who preached the truth as it is in Jesus had risen from not
twenty in 1749 to three hundred in 1789. The methodism of the Wesleys
was beginning to tell, but the Baptists were as lifeless as the
Established Church. In both the Church and Dissent there were
individuals only, like Newton and Scott, the elder Robert Hall and
Ryland, whose spiritual fervour made them marked men.

The Baptists, who had stood alone as the advocates of toleration,
religious and civil, in an age of intolerance which made them the
victims, had subsided like Puritan and Covenanter when the Revolution
of 1688 brought persecution to an end. The section who held the
doctrine of "general" redemption, and are now honourably known as
General Baptists, preached ordinary Arminianism, and even Socinianism.
The more earnest and educated among them clung to Calvinism, but, by
adopting the unhappy term of "particular" Baptists, gradually fell
under a fatalistic and antinomian spell. This false Calvinism, which
the French theologian of Geneva would have been the first to denounce,
proved all the more hostile to the preaching of the Gospel of salvation
to the heathen abroad, as well as the sinner at home, that it professed
to be an orthodox evangel while either emasculating the Gospel or
turning the grace of God into licentiousness. From such "particular"
preachers as young Fuller and Carey listened to, at first with
bewilderment, then impatience, and then denunciation, missions of no
kind could come. Fuller exposed and pursued the delusion with a native
shrewdness, a masculine sagacity, and a fine English style, which have
won for him the apt name of the Franklin of Theology. For more than
twenty years Fullerism, as it was called, raised a controversy like
that of the Marrow of Divinity in Scotland, and cleared the ground
sufficiently at least to allow of the foundation of foreign missions in
both countries. It now seems incredible that the only class who a
century ago represented evangelicalism should have opposed missions to
the heathen on the ground that the Gospel is meant only for the elect,
whether at home or abroad; that nothing spiritually good is the duty of
the unreg