Learning gentleness

In recent days, I have been again impressed with the significance of a name that was well-known among British evangelicals in the last decades of the long 18th century, but today is mostly forgotten, namely, that of Abraham Booth (1734–1806).

The son of a Nottinghamshire farmer, Booth became a stocking weaver in his teens. He had no formal schooling and was compelled to teach himself to read and to write. His early Christian experience was spent among the General, i.e. Arminian, Baptists, but by 1768 he had undergone a complete revolution in his soteriology and had become a Calvinist. Not long after this embrace of Calvinism he wrote The Reign of Grace, from Its Rise to Its Consummation (1768), which the 20th-century Scottish theologian John Murray regarded as ‘one of the most eloquent and moving expositions of the subject of divine grace in the English language’.

It was this book which opened the way for his call to Little Prescot Street Baptist Church, Goodman’s Fields, in what was then a wealthy area of east London, home to merchants and professional men. Pastoring this church was a challenge to a man who had limited educational opportunities. Booth, though, more than rose to the challenge, in time mastering Greek, Latin and French, the first two taught to him by a Roman Catholic priest.