Part I deals with Booths life and personality. Part II (next issue) will comment on the movements he was involved with, his major writings and his significance for Calvinistic Baptists. 

The eighteenth century is remembered, rightly, as the century of the great evangelical revival. However, the mid-part of the century is remembered as a time of stagnation for many Calvinistic Baptist churches. While the extent and influence of hyper-Calvinism can be overplayed, it is undeniable that all too many preachers felt inhibited in proclaiming the free offer of the gospel because of what Andrew Fuller was to describe as a ‘false Calvinism’. Although the scene was not uniformly bleak (for example the Bristol Academy turned out a steady stream of pastors who combined robust Calvinism with evangelistic fervour) the number of Calvinistic Baptist Churches in England dropped from about 220 (1715-1718) to 150 (in the early l 750s). Fuller famously commented: ‘Had matters gone on but for a few years, the Baptists would have become a perfect dunghill in society.’

Excerpt from ‘The Life of Abraham Booth’, Reformation Today, November-December 2006, no 214, pp. 13-22.