History
Seventh Day Baptists trace the beginning of their movement to coalescing factors during the decade of the 1650s in England. These factors included the continuing Baptist movement in England, English language publications about the Sabbath in the early 1600s, and a relative freedom of religion from state interference in Oliver Cromwell's commonwealth. Once the factors had coalesced, individuals associated with the movement chose to accept punishment meted out by the State rather than renounce their Sabbath conviction.
The first recorded Seventh Day Baptist meeting was held at The Mill Yard Church in London in 1651 under the leadership of Dr. Peter Chamberlen. However many Seventh Day Baptists believe that it had originated in 1617 with John Trask and his wife. They believe that the records for this were lost in a fire.
The first Seventh Day Baptist church in America was at Newport, Rhode Island in December 1671. Samuel and Tacy Hubbard, two members of the First Baptist Church of Newport, pastored by John Clarke (1609–76), withdrew from that church and joined with Stephen Mumford, a Seventh Day Baptist from England, and 4 others, covenanting to meet together for worship, calling themselves Sabbatarian Baptists. Mumford, for his part, arrived in Rhode Island in 1665, and was mentioned as an advocate for seventh-day Sabbath in many records of that time. Other churches rose in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and soon spread north into Connecticut and New York, and south into Virginia and the Carolinas. Seventh-day Sabbatarianism also emerged among the Germans at Ephrata, Pennsylvania, founded in 1735. Ephrata was incorporated as the German Religious Society of Seventh Day Baptists in 1814, and the site where their community was founded came to be known at the Ephrata Cloister. The Seventh Day Baptist General Conference was organized in 1801.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)