Remembering Abraham Booth (1734-1806)

‘Oh, that Abraham Booth’s God may be my God’, Benjamin Beddome, the great Baptist hymnwriter of the eighteenth century, is said to have exclaimed on one occasion. Andrew Fuller, another Baptist leader of that era, once described Booth as ‘the first counsellor’ of their denomination. These remarks say much about the way that Booth was viewed by his Baptist contemporaries. But not only Baptist contemporaries viewed him highly. The Anglican evangelical Henry Venn was a lifelong friend and admirer, while Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, a remarkable patron of evangelical causes, took the time to come to his ordination in February, 1769. At his death in January, 1806, his friend William Newman said of him that ‘he was a star of the first magnitude. A Protestant, and a Protestant Dissenter, on principle, and one of the brightest ornaments of the Baptist denomination to which he belonged’.

For nearly forty years, Booth filled the pulpit of one of the most prestigious London churches, Little Prescot Street Baptist Church, in what was then a wealthy area of London, home to merchants and professional men. His beginnings, though, were quite humble and in very different circumstances.

Booth was born in 1734 in Derbyshire, but, within a year of his birth, his family had relocated to Nottinghamshire, where his father became a farmer on the Duke of Portland’s estate near the village of Annesley Woodhouse. The younger Booth had no formal schooling and it was his father who taught him to read. In his mid-teens Booth became a stocking weaver and eventually went on to own his own stocking frames.

His conversion came about through the ministry of preachers associated with what was initially a Methodist group based in the village of Barton-in-the-Beans, Leicestershire. By the 1750s many in this group had come to Baptist convictions and Booth himself was baptized as a believer in 1755. The Barton work, along with its various village offshoots, became central to the New Connexion of General (ie Arminian) Baptists, of whom Dan Taylor was the most famous figure in the eighteenth century.

Booth thus began his Christian life as an Arminian. By 1768, though, 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 twentieth-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’. The manuscript came into the hands of Henry Venn, at that time Anglican vicar in Huddersfield, who encouraged its publication.

Booth was rightly unapologetic about the subject of this, his first book. ‘The doctrine of Reigning Grace’, he wrote, ‘is that very truth which God in all ages has delighted to honor; which the Divine Spirit has owned for the information and comfort, for the holiness and happiness of sinful men.’ Booth amply showed salvation by divine grace rules out any attempt to ground salvation in human ‘works or worthiness’. Thus, he argued, people who seek to ground their salvation in grace and works are ‘awfully deceived’. ‘However high their pretences may be to holiness’, he continued, ‘it is plain from the word of God, and may in some degree appear from the nature of the thing, that they take an effectual way to ruin their souls forever, except that very grace prevent, of which they have such false and corrupt ideas. For divine grace disdains to be assisted in the performance of that work which peculiarly belongs to itself, by the poor, imperfect performances of men.’

It was this book that opened the way for his call in September, 1768, to Little Prescot Street. Pastoring this church was a challenge to a man like Booth 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. By the time of his death in 1806, as noted, he had become one of the most trusted theologians in the Calvinistic Baptist denomination. He played, for example, a key role in the encouragement of the Baptist Missionary Society in the 1790s and was often consulted in regard to the society’s affairs during that decade by Andrew Fuller, the society’s secretary. His congregation genuinely adored him for what contemporaries called his ‘unsullied purity and kindliness’. One of them penned a most moving, though brief, tribute in the church minute book after his death: ‘He sought not ours, but us.’

Booth’s love for others is very evident in an influential sermon that he preached against the slave trade on January 29, 1792, Commerce in the Human Species, and the Enslaving of Innocent Persons, inimical to the Laws of Moses and the Gospel of Christ. Now, the great moral blight upon the landscape of the British world in the eighteenth century was the slave trade and its concomitant, slavery. It is noteworthy that Evangelicals of that era like Booth regarded it as important not only to preach the gospel of divine grace but also speak on burning social issues.

Although other European nations were deeply enmeshed in the slave trade, notably the Spanish and Portuguese, by the 1730s the British had become the leading slave-traders in the European world. In the final decades of the eighteenth century they were engaged in transporting some 45,000 slaves a year from the West African coast to the Caribbean and American South. Throughout this rapacious slave-trading history, the English and their fellow Britons were responsible for transporting some 3 million enslaved Africans to the New World!

Before Booth was led to speak out against this horrific institution, a few other Baptist leaders had also preached against it. The Cambridge Baptist leader Robert Robinson – a tireless advocate of religious liberty who sadly ended his days in dubious theological company, that of Unitarians like Joseph Priestley – preached against it in February, 1788. Robinson sought to argue that after the Apostolic era ‘Christians understood that the liberating of slaves was a part of Christianity’, which was rooted in ‘the equal love of God to all mankind’. Nine months later, James Dore, pastor of Maze Pond Baptist Church in London, preached A Sermon on the African Slave Trade, the core argument of which was that the slave trade was a traffic

So popular was Dore’s sermon that it went through three printings within a month. But of all the Baptist sermons preached against the slave trade at this time, Booth’s stands out as a biblical tour de force.

Booth’s sermon opens with a statement that is redolent of the eighteenth-century values. Incumbent on every human being, according to Booth, is the duty ‘to adore our Almighty Maker, to confide in the Lord Redeemer, and to exercise genuine benevolence toward all mankind’. He went on to maintain that ‘genuine benevolence’—an eighteenth-century buzz-word in philosophical and literary circles—needs to be shown by all people to other human beings in so far as they are ‘social beings, surrounded with multitudes of…[their] species’. In fact, Booth is convinced that the promotion of ‘this cordial affection for our neighbours’ is part of ‘the great end of an evangelical ministry’. Booth goes on to emphasize that Evangelicalism is intimately tied up with ‘the exercise of moral justice, of benevolence, and of humanity’, and it is on this basis, and not that of promoting civil and political liberty, that he is prepared to take a public stand against the slave trade, ‘the stealing, purchasing, and enslaving of innocent persons’.

Booth especially argued that the slave trade was inimical to the ethical teaching of Christ. Christians are to love their enemies and do good to them that hate them (Luke 6:27). ‘If our sovereign Lord requires benevolence and active love to our enemies, surely’, Booth reasoned, ‘he cannot require any less to those who are not our enemies, which would certainly include the Africans, who are unknown to the slave traders prior to their being enslaved.’ The London Baptist pastor also cited the so-called Golden Rule, Matthew 7:12, All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them, to show that at the heart of gospel ethics is benevolence towards others.

The doctrinal teaching of Jesus also stands in marked contrast to the thinking that informs the slave trade. According to Booth, the gospel is ‘the doctrine of divine benevolence to man – of mercy to the miserable, and of grace to the unworthy’ – a fine summation of his earlier The Reign of Grace. Through the gospel God seeks to do good to sinners, ‘Jews and Gentiles, Europeans and Africans, without any difference’. What a contrast this is to the slave trader, whose profession seeks to ‘diversify and propagate human misery’ and is one ‘completely fitted for universal abhorrence’.

Booth knew that there would be some who would respond to what he has said by objecting that slavery was a central feature of the economy of the Graeco-Roman world, yet the New Testament nowhere condemns it. At this point in his sermon Booth rightly admits that there is no explicit condemnation of slavery in the New Testament. Yet neither is there any mention of gladiatorial games, which were ‘extremely bloody and wicked’. The fact that slavery, like these Roman blood sports, violates the general moral principles of the Scriptures is sufficient warrant to argue as Booth has done. Moreover, Booth notes that if the Apostolic Church had expressly attacked slavery, there was the danger that the civil government would have seen Christianity as a revolutionary movement and taken violent steps to eradicate it.

It is noteworthy that Thomas Clarkson, a key slavery abolitionist, considered Booth’s sermon one of the most important documents in the early stages of the anti-slavery movement.

Booth’s sermon concluded with some pointed directions as to how Christians can be involved in the fight against the slave trade. First of all, Booth mentioned prayer ‘for the interposition of Providence to abolish the detestable traffic in man’. Such prayer, Booth rightly felt, was intimately linked to praying for ‘the enlargement of our Lord’s visible kingdom among men’. Since the Africans were ‘naturally as capable of being made the spiritual subjects of Jesus Christ’ as Europeans, and due to the fact that the slave trade hindered the propagation of Christianity among them, it was only right for Christians to pray for it to come to an end. In an early memoir of Booth, William Jones recalled how ‘the cries and tears of the oppressed Africans pierced every fibre of his [ie Booth’s] soul – their pitiable case took deep hold of his heart, and became much the subject of his entreaties at the throne of grace, both in public and private’.

Booth not only preached and prayed about the end of the slave trade, he also took an active role in sending petitions to Parliament in order to effect its end and collecting monies to aid in the fight. Not surprisingly, then, Booth emphasized in his sermon that alongside prayer there should also be action, ‘prudent, peaceable, and steady efforts, in order to procure the total abolition of that criminal traffic, and of the cruel slavery consequent upon it’.

It was Booth’s fellow Baptist Caleb Evans, the Principal of Bristol Baptist Academy, who said in a sermon that he preached on 16 August 1775, with regard to the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘When we pray for the advancement of this kingdom, if we are not willing to do all we can to advance it, our prayers cannot be genuine, they are hypocritical.’ Booth would have been in full agreement. The union of word and deed in his life stands as a powerful model for us in our very different day – yet still one of great human distress and need – to follow.