Thursday 9 April 2020

John Stanford 1754-1834

John Stanford (1754-1834) was an English-born pastor from Wandsworth who, after being ordained in 1781 and serving a church and academy in Hammersmith, went to America in 1786. Beginning as an Anglican he came to Baptist convictions in which he was grounded by Wallin in the Maze Pond church, before leaving these shores. It was in America that he found a calling ministering to society’s outcasts. He became known as “a Son of Consolation” to thousands of the sick and suffering poor, and the victims of vice and crime, to whom he preached the gospel of the grace of God. Credited with originating “perhaps the best penitentiary institution which had ever been devised,” he was eventually visited in one of his ministries by the President of the United States. In addition, governors sought his advice on implementing his institutional reforms. By 1817, Stanford had organised seven schools in the New York State Prison. Education was obviously fundamental to all phases of his ministry and life, yet all was done within the context of sharing the love of Christ and the salvation to be found only in Him. Pastor, teacher, leader and chaplain to New York’s poor and imprisoned, his life might be summed up by the statement, “He lived and died in the noble cause of Christian benevolence.”

Monday 24 February 2020

Another review of Lectures on Primitive Christianity

Lectures on Primitive Christianity, in Doctrine, Experience, Worship, Discipline and Manners, as it appeared in the Church at Jerusalem, in the Time of the Apostles. Also on the Epistle to the Church at Sardis. And on the Faithful in the Days of Malachi. Interspersed with Notes, Reflections and Addresses: With a View to awake a becoming Zeal for the Communion of Saints, in Order and Love
By Benjamin Wallin. 8vo. 5 s, sewed. Keith, &c.
Mr. Wallin, in his Preface, laments the degeneracy of the times, and the great indifference to religious ordinances, which prevails among numbers who preserve some decency of conduct in other respects. “Under these sad circumstances, he says, shall it be thought unseasonable that we advert to the simplicity and zeal of the first Christians, with whom the Lord dwelt, that following the original pattern of piety and brotherly love, we may in like manner rejoice in his presence and blessing?” To these valuable ends, and for the help of young and ordinary Christians, he tells us, he drew up the following papers, in accomplishing which, he adds, “I have consulted several writers in this and the century past, from whom I have found myself obliged, with due respect, to differ in several instances; nor will it offend the ingenuous, that I have freely declared my thoughts, on every point, as it fell in my way; this liberty is granted when the rules of decency are not transgressed,’ This is Mr. Wallin's own account: his design is undoubtedly good, but his work is rather heavy, his style and manner not the most pleasing or inviting, and his sentiments, perhaps, too much restrained and biased by a regard to system and party; at the same time, it must be acknowledged he appears to write with piety, integrity and benevolence to mankind. It would be happy if by this, or any other means, Christianity and its professors could be recovered to the simplicitv and truth of its primitive institution and spirit, from which, it must be allowed, there has been a great departure!
(From The Monthly Review Or Literary Journal Enlarged, 1769)