Topic Archives: General History

JOHN BUNYAN AT THE FUNERAL OF HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH THE QUEEN MOTHER There could be no greater contrast then the funeral services of the Queen Mother and that of her grand-daughter-in-law, Lady Diana the Princess of Wales. The Order of Service for Tuesday 9 April 2002 at 11.30 in Westminster Abbey has just been […]

ALLEN GARDINER COMMEMORATED They were the first Protestant missionaries to attempt to make Christ known to the indigenous people of South America. In Faith Cook’s “Singing in the Fire” (Banner of Truth) the heroic story of Captain Allen Gardiner is recorded, as one of fourteen biographical sketches. It is the most accessible record of that […]

OTHERS LABOURED: WE ENTERED INTO THEIR LABOURS As a congregation we inherited a living tradition of historic Christian teaching enfleshed in the lives of hundreds of people across the Principality. When I returned to Wales from three years’ study in America in 1964 I did not come into a wilderness. I came into a prepared […]

CHRISTIAN SOCIETY IN AMERICA: GOD WILL DIRECT THE BULLET! When the Mayflower began her nine weeks’ voyage across the Atlantic in September, 1620, the intention of her passengers was ‘to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia’ under which description they had in view land around Manhattan Island at the mouth of […]

IF THEY DO NOT DO WHAT IS RIGHT, THERE MAY BE A MIGHTY BATTLE Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was born at ‘Grasmere’ near Lexington, Kentucky, one hundred and fifty years ago this year on 5th November 1851. He died in February 1921 12 weeks after the death of Abraham Kuyper and 22 weeks before the death […]

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF STEPHEN CHARNOCK by William Symington Stephen Charnock, B.D., was born in the year 1628, in the parish of St. Katharine Cree, London. His father, Mr. Richard Charnock, practiced as a solicitor in the Court of Chancery, and was descended from a family of some antiquity in Lancashire. Stephen, after a course […]

The Puritans and Revival Christianity by Iain Murray Following as it did so closely upon the Reformation it is not surprising that the Puritan movement in England believed so firmly in revivals of religion as the great means by which the Church advances in the world. For the Reformation was itself the greatest revival since […]

THE CHURCH IN NORTHERN RUSSIA In a recent edition of the Spectator (28 July 2001) Anne Applebaum describes a visit to Vortuka, north of the Arctic Circle where roses do not grow. There are no daisies or lilies; no sunflowers or geraniums, just a few wild flowers which spring up in the very short, very […]

The Death of Thomas Bilney by J. H. Merle D’aubigne; [Thomas Bilney, ‘whose conversion had begun the Reformation in England’ was, in God’s hands, the instrument of Hugh Latimer’s conversion. The story of his life ‘in strength and weakness’, leading to his martyrdom in 1531, is eloquently recorded in The Reformation of England, volumes 1 […]

[This is the first of a five part series originally published in the Banner of Truth magazine under the title “Thomas Hooker and the Dctrine of God.” This portion was in Issue 195, December 1979, pp. 19-29.] Among the multitude of Puritan books which have survived the 17th Century The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan […]

[In 1985 the Banner of Truth published the 6 volume Works of John Newton. The most valuable volumes are those that contain the famous letters of Newton and the Olney Hymns. Volume IV consists of fifty sermons by Newton on the texts used by Handel in his oratorio “Messiah.” Newton had an uncertain relationship with […]

The Forest of Dean is a good base from which to visit sites connected with George Whitefield in Gloucestershire. I took some photographs of the old Bell Inn, the inside and outside of St Mary de Crypt, RodboroughTabernacle (with Whitefield’s walking stick and chair), Whitfield’s Tump (spelt without the middle ‘e’) on Minchinhampton Common and […]

John Newton and William Cowper lived for many years in the little town of Olney in Buckinghamshire. The town is in the middle of a triangle of larger towns with Northampton to the north-west, Bedford due east, and Milton Keyes due south. These two men both wrote hymns, some of them the most outstanding in […]

I [Geoff Thomas] first saw Dr Koop in Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia in 1961. He was an elder, and bore a striking resemblance to the pastor at that time, Mariano Di Gangi. He was a surgeon in the Children’s Hospital, Philadelphia. Then I heard of him again when his son was killed rock-climbing one […]

SESSION 1 The Conference commenced with the 300 men singing the metrical version of Psalm 65, and with prayer. Iain Murray then explained to the Conference that the sickness of Dr Robert Godfrey of Westminster Seminary, California, had prevented his attendance, and that Dr Sinclair Ferguson would speak instead of him. John Marshall opened a […]

The history of God’s work in Scotland is profuse and brimming with manifestations of God’s power and grace. In my twenty-five years of ministry here it has been my privilege when time and opportunity afforded to take visiting preachers on ‘the grand tour.’ From the castle at St Andrews in the north-east to the various […]

During Easter Week Alec MacDougall of Trinity Baptist Church Gloucester took myself and my nephew David on a history tour of that city. We saw the memorial church, built on a site where George Whitefield preached in the open air. I would guess it was built as a Presbyterian chapel. It’s URC now – and […]

Modern historians who are sympathetic to Roman Catholicism such as Eamon Duffy have sought to rewrite the history of the Reformation in England. They deny that Protestantism found a welcome response in the hearts of the people. They suggest that it was merely a few eccentrics and some hopeless recusants who had become Calvinists who […]

Two hundred years ago was the beginning of the golden age of missionary expansion from Europe and North America. At that time there were 174m professing Christians in the world which had a population of 730m. So Christians set up missionary societies. The first was founded in 1794, plainly called the Missionary Society. This became […]

This letter arrived from Paul Williams, the pastor of an Evangelical Church in Swindon, which triggered off a chain of thought. “Yesterday Ruth and I had some time off and went to Bristol. We were taken by friends to the George Muller museum there, and also saw for ourselves the vast orphanages. What a joy […]

The Place of the Reformation in the History of Christianity Merle d’Aubigne made a distinction between the history of Christianity and the history of the Church. In an address delivered in 1832 at Geneva he said, There are two histories, there is what we may call the “History of the Church,” that is of human […]

Swanwick Conference Centre January 11-14. The opening session was chaired by David Kingdon. The first paper was given by Geoff Thomas. On January 6th was the 150th Anniversary of the conversion of Charles Haddon Spurgeon in 1850 in Artillery Street Primitive Methodist Church, Colchester and the theme of the paper was an examination of true […]

THE LIBERATION The shock waves of this action went through the country. They were at war, a nation conquered by the Nazis, and what was their General Assembly doing but virtually excommunicating one of their most famous men. Eight days later, on August 11, a meeting was convened in a church at The Hague to […]

There were some weaknesses in Abraham Kuyper. 1. Kuyper’s approach to the Bible was not uniformly helpful because his preaching was not that of the careful exegete. At times his sermons were more like lectures than expository addresses. He would, for example, seize on single words in a text like ‘rooted’ or ‘grounded’ and use […]