Loving God and Neighbor with Samuel Pearce

Michael A. G. Haykin, Jerry Slate

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781683592709
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The love of God and neighbor is the heart of the Christian faith. Forgotten saint Samuel Pearce teaches us how to live a life faithful to the greatest commandment. Pearce was a Baptist pastor known in eighteenth-century England for his moving preaching and strong, pious character. In his short life, he supported believers in his own parish as well as in the many cities where he preached and helped send missionaries. Yet his personal faith, founded on the "holy love" of God, formed his most compelling witness to the world. By getting to know Pearce's story, readers will learn from his example what it looks like to love God and neighbor—in good times as well as challenging and seemingly mundane ones.The Lived Theology series explores aspects of Christian doctrine through the eyes of the men and women who practiced it. Interweaving the contributions of notable individuals alongside their overshadowed contemporaries, we gain a much deeper understanding and appreciation of their work and the broad tapestry of Christian history. These books illuminate the vital contributions made by these figures throughout the history of the church.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In the history of God’s people, there have been a number of individuals who seem to have packed decades of spiritual maturity into a few short years of life. There is a spiritual intensity about such men and women that make them utterly unforgettable to their contemporaries. Such, for example, were David Brainerd (1718–1747), Ann Griffiths (1776–1805), Robert Murray McCheyne (1813–1843), and Jim Elliot (1927–1956); and such was the subject of this biography, Samuel Pearce (1766–1799). The name of Samuel Pearce rarely appears in histories of Christian spirituality, though it most definitely should. His life and thought represent the best of late eighteenth-century Baptist piety. His memoirs, drawn up in 1800 by Andrew Fuller (1754–1815), one of his closest friends, went through a significant number of printings and editions on both sides of the Atlantic in the course of the nineteenth century. Fuller especially focused on Pearce’s piety and concluded that the “governing principle in Mr. Pearce, beyond all doubt, was holy love.” In fact, for some decades after his death it was not uncommon to hear him referred to as the “seraphic Pearce.”

William Jay (1769–1853), who exercised an influential ministry in Bath for the first half of the nineteenth century, has this amazing remark about Pearce’s preaching: “When I have endeavoured to form an image of our Lord as a preacher, Pearce has oftener presented himself to my mind than any other I have been acquainted with.” He had, Jay went on, a “mildness and tenderness” in his style of preaching, and a “peculiar unction.” When Jay wrote these words it was many years after Pearce’s death, but still, he said, he could see his appearance in his mind’s eye and feel the impression that he made upon his hearers as he preached. Ever one to appreciate the importance of having spiritual individuals as one’s friends, Jay has this comment about the last time that he saw Pearce alive: “What a savor does communion with such a man leave upon the spirit.”1 This biography is written on the assumption that if Pearce’s life could be a blessing to Jay as he recalled aspects of that life, such a blessing is equally available to modern readers of Pearce even though they have not had Jay’s privilege in knowing Pearce when he walked this earth. Pearce’s life, shaped as it was by “holy love,” has much to teach modern-day believers in our world today.

This book is a joint effort between a historian and a pastor. Pearce was first and foremost in his service to Christ a pastor, and it is vital that a pastoral element inform any account of his life. But his day is not our day: things have changed. “The past is a foreign country—they do things differently there,” and Pearce’s life needs to be recalled accurately in its historical context. Professor Michael Haykin had been gathering material for a biography of Pearce for over twenty years when Pastor Slate contacted him in April of 2012 about a biography he was contemplating on Pearce. From this initial contact came this volume. The reader needs to know that this is not what is called a definitive life of Pearce; there is more that could be said. But the authors deem his life so important for the modern day, filled as it was with “holy love,” that they felt it needful to get this small study into print.

Chapters 1 through 3, written by Michael Haykin, cover Pearce’s life from his first breath in his native Devon to the pastorate of Cannon Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, England. The remaining chapters cover key elements or themes in his ten-year ministry at Cannon Street, his sole pastorate: his marriage to Sarah Hopkins (chapter 4); his political views (chapter 5); his perspectives on pastoral ministry (chapter 6) and on theology (chapters 7–8); and his passion for missions, illustrated in his desire to go to India as a missionary (chapter 9) and in his preaching trip to Ireland (chapter 10). Of these chapters, Jerry Slate, Jr., wrote the bulk of chapters 5 and 9; Michael wrote chapters 4 and 10; and chapters 6 through 8 were a joint effort. The final chapter, chapter 11, deals with the last three years of Pearce’s life and was mostly written by Jerry.

When Pearce was called to the pastorate at Cannon Street, he asked for an annual vacation leave of six weeks, so that he might visit his father (his mother had died when he was very young) in Plymouth. It is appropriate that both authors have dedicated this book to their respective fathers.

CHAPTER 2

“Life in a Dear Dying Redeemer”

Like the Carthaginians in the ancient world and the Venetians in the Renaissance, the English created a society based on their dominance of “the watery part of the world,” as Herman Melville once described the earth’s oceans. Beginning with Elizabethan naval warriors like Francis Drake (c. 1540–1596)—a deeply committed Protestant—by the eighteenth century the English had become a world power primarily through their control of the seas. And central to this rule were ports like Plymouth in Devon.

The rise of Plymouth, the birthplace of Samuel Pearce, to a position of national prominence paralleled England’s emergence as an imperial maritime power. Occupying a strategic position at the western end of the English Channel and possessing one of the world’s largest natural harbors, Plymouth became a strategic port in England’s commercial ventures with southwest Europe and the new world across the Atlantic. These commercial transactions were also intimately tied to England’s wars with Spain, Holland, and France over maritime hegemony. The British Admiralty invested substantial sums in building new docks and fortifications in Plymouth during the latter half of the eighteenth century, when Britain was almost constantly at war. While ordinary commerce and woolen manufacture remained significant sources of income, naval requirements brought lucrative contracts to Plymouth suppliers. Not surprisingly, eighteenth-century Plymouth saw a fivefold increase in the number of inhabitants. In the same period, the general population of England only doubled. Most of the demographic growth was concentrated in the new suburb of Dock, which attracted thousands of shipyard workers, and by 1801 it was larger than Plymouth proper.

Eighteenth-century visitors to Plymouth expressed a variety of opinions about the city. Stebbing Shaw (1762–1802), a topographer who came in 1788, pronounced it “a most flourishing and able port.” He then contrasted the “vile and almost dangerously narrow” streets and buildings of old Plymouth with Dock, “which surprised us with a very large display of spacious streets, intersecting each other at right angles.” Houses in this suburb, however, were “slightly built, either of plaster or slate stone, abundantly got hereabouts, and will not bear a minute inspection.”1 Robert Southey (1774–1843), celebrated English Romantic poet and biographer of John Bunyan, Oliver Cromwell, and Horatio Nelson, praised the “beautiful country” surrounding Plymouth and Dock, but judged both cities “as ugly as can well be imagined.”2 The physician and botanist William George Maton (1774–1835), visiting in the mid-1790s, found Plymouth “an ill-built, disagreeable place, infested with all the filthiness so frequent in seaports” but admired its size and busyness—“from the bustle and continual passing of people we could fancy ourselves in the outskirts of London.”3

Conditions for people in Plymouth, like everywhere else in eighteenth-century Britain, depended on socioeconomic status. Plymouth’s elite consisted of well-established county, naval, professional, and commercial families. These wealthy residents enjoyed a comfortable—even luxurious—lifestyle, centered around concerts, assemblies, theaters, and literary societies. At lower levels, however, Plymouth was a diverse, cosmopolitan society with a fluctuating population of foreigners, sailors, and other immigrants. Diversity was particularly noticeable during the century’s many wars. Andrew Brice from nearby Exeter described the inhabitants of Plymouth in 1759 in his topographic dictionary, The Grand Gazeteer, “as polite, genteel, religious and worthy a people as those enjoyed by any other place.” However, in wartime, he continued, the town is filled with newcomers from “Ireland, Cornwall and other parts,” men who were “rapacious … [and] lewd,” and they, along with what Brice called “half-mad Jack Addles from the sea,” filled the town with “sharping [swindling], tricking, debauchery, pride, insolence, profaneness, impurity with impudence.”4

Plymouth was initially hostile to gospel preaching during the early days of the Great Awakening. A mob assembled to welcome George Whitefield (1714–1770) in 1744. On this visit there was even an attempt to murder Whitefield, but he was soon preaching to large and attentive congregations. Returning five years later, he remarked on the “strange alteration in the people since I came first here.… Many were then awakened and truly converted.… Plymouth seems to be quite a new place to me.” The Anglican evangelist praised God for the “great increase.”5 John Wesley (1703–1791), who first visited in 1746, also experienced both mob violence and much blessing, but by the 1770s, such disorder had virtually ceased.

THE PLYMOUTH BAPTISTS

Samuel Pearce was born in Plymouth on July 20, 1766, to William (d. 1805) and Lydia Pearce (d. 1766/1767), both devout Baptists. His mother died when Samuel was an infant, so he was raised by his father, a deacon in Plymouth’s Baptist church, and grandparents. Initially, after the death of his mother, he went to live with his paternal grandparents at Tamerton Foliot, a village about five miles north of Plymouth. When he was between eight and ten years old he returned to his father’s care in Plymouth and began attending the town’s grammar school.

As he entered his teen years, he also would have known the nurturing influence of Plymouth’s “sturdy Baptist community,” whose history reached back well into the seventeenth century. The heritage of these Baptists is displayed in the character of one of their early ministers, Abraham Cheare (d. 1668). During the Great Persecution from 1660 to 1688 of Christian communities that did not belong to the Church of England, Cheare was arrested, treated cruelly, and imprisoned on Drake’s Island, a small island in Plymouth Sound. Fearful that his flock might compromise their Baptist convictions to avoid persecution, he wrote many letters to his church during his imprisonment. In one of them he cited a pithy remark from the Irenicum (1646) of Puritan author Jeremiah Burroughs (c. 1599–1646). “I desire to be a faithful minister of Christ and his Church, if I cannot be a prudent one,” Burroughs stated, according to Cheare. “Standing in the gap is more dangerous and troublesome than getting behind the hedge, there you may be more secure and under the wind; but it’s best to be there where God looks for a man.”6 Cheare was one who “stood in the gap”: he died in 1668, while a prisoner for his Baptist convictions.

After Cheare’s death, the church was without a pastor until 1687, when they called Robert Brown, but he died in February 1688—within three months of his arrival in Plymouth. After preaching for two months, a Mr. Warner received a call to be the next pastor, but he declined it. The church then called Robert Holdenby, a pastor from Ireland—but Holdenby sought to leave after only five months with the church, though he did not actually leave until a year later, in the summer of 1690. Finally, Samuel Buttall, who represented the church at the 1689 national gathering of the Particular Baptists in London, was appointed pastor, and he pastored the Plymouth Baptists through 1698.

Over the next five decades, the church struggled to stay afloat. They had at least eight pastors, but none stayed for any length of time. Part of the problem was the church’s failure to provide an adequate salary for their pastor; there was also disunity among the members. Then, in the providence of God, when Whitefield came to preach in Plymouth in 1744, one of those converted through his ministry was thirteen- or fourteen-year-old Philip Gibbs. In time, he began attending the Baptist church in nearby Kingsbridge. He later said that what won him to Baptist principles was not so much the preaching of the Kingsbridge pastor, Crispin Courtice (d. 1768), but the love that he saw in the Baptist congregation.

Baptized as a believer, Gibbs soon began speaking in public and was eventually invited to fill the pulpit at Plymouth, where he was ordained the pastor of the church on September 20, 1749. The church building was full as the congregation listened to the customary ordination sermons—one to the newly ordained pastor and one to the congregation—and Gibbs’s confession of faith, which took twenty-five minutes for him to read. In eighteenth-century Baptist circles, when a pastor was ordained, he was expected to write a personal confession of faith, even though the Second London Confession of Faith (1677/1688) was the denomination’s doctrinal standard.

Within two years of Gibbs’s ordination, the Plymouth Baptists had rebuilt their meetinghouse, and the congregation had increased from a handful of members to five hundred or so. The church faced challenges in the 1760s, however, and Gibbs began to think about finding another pastorate. The Baptist church in Truro, Cornwall, made Gibbs an especially attractive offer. Wisely, though, Gibbs decided to ask the advice of the Western Association, to which the Plymouth congregation belonged. The ministers of this association felt that Gibbs should stay at Plymouth, which he did. In the next thirty years of Gibbs’s ministry—he died in 1800—the church experienced great blessing and numerical growth. In 1773, for example, after a gracious revival, twenty-three people were converted, baptized, and brought into the membership of the church.

Pearce returned to Plymouth from his grandparents’ home about a year after this local revival, and he would have sensed the revived spiritual atmosphere in the church. As Pearce came into his teen years, however, he consciously spurned the rich heritage of both his godly home and the Plymouth Baptist community. According to his own testimony, “several vicious school-fellows” became his closest friends, and he set his heart on what he would later describe as “evil” and “wicked inclinations.”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: “Life in a Dear Dying Redeemer”
• Chapter 3: “A Zealous Lover of Christ”
• Chapter 4: “Labors of Love”
• Chapter 5: “My Lovely Sarah”
• Chapter 6: “Meddle Not with Political Controversies”
• Chapter 7: “Call Forth the Fruitfulness”
• Chapter 8: “Salvation Entirely by Grace”
• Chapter 9: “The Religion of the Heart”
• Chapter 10: “I Ever Wish to Make My Savior’s Will My Own”
• Chapter 11: “Surely Irish Zion Demands Our Prayers”
• Chapter 12: “The Religion of the Cross”
• Appendix: William Jay’s Recollection of Samuel Pearce
• Further Reading
• Works Cited
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index