Author: Charles F. James

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2015-06-26

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9781330590683

Excerpt from Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia In the year 1886, while pastor of the Culpeper Baptist church, I was drawn into a lengthy controversy with the Hon. William Wirt Henry, which forced me to search for and examine for myself all available original sources of information concerning the struggle for religious liberty in Virginia. There had been manifested at various times and on various occasions a disposition to rewrite the history of that struggle, and to rob our Baptist fathers of the peculiar honor which has ever been claimed for them - that of being the foremost, most zealous, and most consistent and unwavering champions of soul liberty. And not a few of our own young brethren were beginning to question the soundness of that claim, and to count as " Baptist brag" much that was spoken on the platform and published in our newspapers during the "Memorial Campaign" of 1873. Hence, to satisfy my own mind, I determined to go hack of Howell's "Early Baptists of Virginia," to the sources from which he and others had drawn their information-to the Journal of the Virginia House of Burgesses, or General Assembly, and to the writings of those who participated in the struggle. Being convenient to the Congressional Library, in Washington, and our State Library, in Richmond, I seized every opportunity, during the remainder of my stay in Culpeper, to gather from all sources the evidence in this case. I copied everything of value which I could find, making note of book and page, and arranged the material for future use. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.