Persecution and martyrdom are perennial features of the Church’s existence in this world, a fact borne out by numerous New Testament passages (see, for example, Jesus’ words in John 15:18–21 or the early church’s experience in Acts 14:19–22).[1] Between 1660 and 1688, the Puritans knew well the reality of Jesus’ and passed through the experience of the early Church words as they knew what it was be a community under the cross. In this period of time, the government of England passed what is known as the Clarendon Code, a series of acts designed to destroy the viability of the major Puritan bodies in England and Wales, namely, the Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists. It needs noting that the Quakers also found themselves in the fire of persecution.
Consider, for example, William Mitchel (1662–1705), who was born 350 years ago this year. Mitchel was a tireless Calvinistic Baptist evangelist in the Pennines from the Rossendale Valley in Lancashire to Rawdon in neighboring West Yorkshire. Born in 1662 at Heptonstall, not far from Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, nothing is really known about Mitchel’s upbringing. His conversion came at the age of nineteen after the death of a brother. Within four years of his conversion, he had begun to preach as an itinerant evangelist with the aim to “chiefly set forth the exceeding rich and free grace of the gospel, which toward him had been made so exceeding abundant.” Mitchel preached anywhere he could get an audience, in the Pennine mountains, in fields or in woods. And though he was not a polished speaker, crowds would throng to hear him. Many came out of mere curiosity, while others came to scoff. But, later when their hearts and consciences had been impacted by Mitchel’s gospel preaching, they confessed, “the Lord is with him of a truth.”
However, according to the Second Conventicle Act (1670), part of the Clarendon Code, what Mitchel was doing was illegal. This act specifically forbade any one over the age of sixteen from taking part in a religious assembly of more than five people apart from those ministers sanctioned by the Church of England. The act gave wide powers to local magistrates and judges to suppress such meetings and arrest whomever they saw fit in order to achieve this end. Mitchel was twice arrested under this law during the reign of James II (r.1685–1688). On the first occasion he was treated with deliberate roughness and spent three months in jail. On the second occasion he was arrested near Bradford and imprisoned for six months in York Castle.
The enemies of the gospel who imprisoned Mitchel thought they were shutting him up in a dismal dungeon. To Mitchel, though, as he told his friends in a letter written from York in the spring of 1687, the dungeon was a veritable “paradise, because the glorious presence of God is with me, & the Spirit of glory & of God rests on me.” Here Mitchel is quoting from 1 Peter 4:14 where Peter is seeking to encourage his readers to stand firm in the midst of what he calls a “fiery trial,” the sharing of “Christ’s sufferings,” and being insulted for the very Name of the One they love (1 Peter 4:12−14). Mitchel also knew all of these things first-hand—and even as God the Holy Spirit was with the people of God in their trials in the first century, so he was with Mitchel.
Mitchel later wrote that Holy Spirit sustained him by giving him such a “glorious sight of [God’s] countenance, [and] bright splendour of his love,” that he was quite willing to “suffer afflictions with the people of God, & for his glorious Truth.” Having been sweetly drawn to a biblical understanding of who God is and to the “glorious Truth” of his Word, Mitchel was enabled to stand firm for the gospel.
In a letter to a certain Daniel Moore during this same imprisonment, Mitchel wrote that he had heard that James II had issued a Declaration of Indulgence, which pardoned all who had been imprisoned under the penal laws of the Clarendon Code. Whether this was true or not, he told Moore, ‘the Lord’s will be done, let him order things as may stand with his glory.” This sentence speaks volumes about the frame of mind in which Mitchel had approached his time of imprisonment. He was God’s servant. God would do with him as he sovereignly thought best. And Mitchel was quite content with that, for, in his heart, he longed above all for his life to shine forth for God’s glory.
But Mitchel was also deeply driven by a love for perishing sinners. After release from his second imprisonment in 1687, Mitchel did not hesitate to resume preaching throughout the valleys and towns of the Pennines. Why did he do this? Well, as he told Richard Core, a fellow minister of the gospel, it was because the conversion of one poor soul is “more worth than the whole world, yea than all the riches, honours, profits and pleasures of it, in which the whole world glories.”
Mitchel died in 1705, leaving behind a great testimony of the work of the Spirit of God, who, in a time of persecution, had given him a passion for the glory of God and a love for the souls of the men and women.
1 An earlier version of this article appeared in Tabletalk in August of 2012 and is used here by permission.
