Editor’s Note: This is the second article in Dr. Haykin’s rebranded and relaunched monthly column, The Weight of History.
My training as a historian was that of an intellectual historian, an historian of ideas. But I have found myself in the past thirty years or so becoming a biographical historian, that is, one who does history through the medium of biography. I am increasingly aware that the study of people must be central to our study of the past. And while I am very conscious of the dangers of “celebrityism”, it cannot be denied that significant portions of the Bible contain the lives of men and women who are clearly presented as people to emulate, such as in Hebrews 11. The Bible never presents these people (apart from our Lord Jesus) as flawless saints—they are all flawed saints—nevertheless they had qualities that we should strive to imitate. See, for instance, Philippians 3:17: “Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.”
One person whose life I have come back to time and again is Samuel Pearce (1766‒1799) of Birmingham, England. Part of my interest in him is because he pastored for ten years in the town where I was born, Birmingham. (My favourite football team that I follow a little is Birmingham’s Aston Villa!) More significantly, he was also a Baptist and close friends with William Carey (1761‒1824) and Andrew Fuller (1754‒1815), both lifelong subjects of study for me. And then his marriage to Sarah Hopkins (1771‒1804) is, without a doubt, a model for us in our day of marital confusion and breakdown. In what follows, this second article for my renewed column, The Weight of History, I look at the way he was remembered by another pastor, the celebrated Congregationalist minister of Bath, William Jay (1769‒1853).
William Jay’s reminiscences
A sizeable portion of the published autobiography of Jay is devoted to his personal reminiscences of various famous contemporaries—figures such as John Wesley (1703‒1791), John Newton (1725‒1807), Hannah More (1745‒1833), and William Wilberforce (1759‒1833)—and some not so well known. Today, among the latter would be numbered Samuel Pearce, who was the minister of Cannon Street Particular Baptist Church in Birmingham from the summer of 1790 till his death on October 10, 1799, at the age of 33.1 Jay opened his recollection of Pearce with these remarkable comments on his preaching:
It may seem saying much, but I speak the words of truth and soberness,—when I have endeavoured to form an image of our Lord as a preacher, Pearce has oftener presented himself to my mind than any other I have been acquainted with … [H]is delivery was distinguished by mildness and tenderness, and a peculiar unction derived not only from his matter but his mind. I cannot accurately convey the appearance and impression he made, yet I can see the one, and feel the other, even at this great distance of time.
If, after days of drought, in a summer’s evening, you have viewed from your window the rain from heaven, not falling in a pouring torrent, but in a kind of noiseless distillation, every drop soaking in, and sure to be useful, … that emblem would aid you a little in conceiving of the mode and effect of his address.2
A second notable reminiscence took place in either 1797 or 1798. Pearce was with Jay when the latter preached to the Baptist congregation at Battersea, then a village four miles upstream from London on the southern shore of the Thames and where Jay’s friend Joseph Hughes (1769‒1833) was the minister. Jay especially recalled Pearce’s prayer on this occasion. He “was the first Baptist minister,” Jay noted, that “I ever heard use the Lord’s Prayer,” which he did as he led the congregation in prayer before Jay preached.3
This proved to be the last time that Jay had the pleasure of Pearce’s company. The following day, an acquaintance had provided a carriage to drive them both back to the city with two other people. Pearce and Jay, however, wanted to use the trip back to converse in private. They thus decided to hire a wherry, a light, shallow-draft river boat, to take them as far as the stairs at London’s Blackfriars Bridge. Jay recalled that their conversation had been focused on heaven, which Pearce described in what was for him a characteristic train of thought: it was “a place and state of blessed and endeared society,” in other words, a holy gathering of friends “with Jesus at the Head.” Recalling this time together over three or four decades later, Jay noted: “what a savour does communion with such a man leave upon the spirit!”4
To these remembrances of Pearce, the editors of Jay’s autobiography appended two quotations from the first edition of Andrew Fuller’s biographical memoir of Pearce that had been published in 1800, a few months after Pearce’s death.5 The first was from a letter of William Ward (1769‒1823), which was written in January, 1799, a few months prior to his taking sail for India as a missionary where he would labour with William Carey for over two decades. Among the things that Ward remarked about Pearce, whom he had gotten to know quite well in Birmingham in the closing months of 1798, was this notable statement: “I have seen more of God in him than in any other person I ever knew.”6
The second quote came from Fuller himself and is found in the final chapter of the Memoirs in which Fuller summed up the character of his friend:
There have been few men in whom has been united a greater portion of the contemplative and the active; holy zeal and genuine candour;7 spirituality and rationality; talents that attracted almost universal applause, and the most unaffected modesty; faithfulness in bearing testimony against evil, with the tenderest compassion to the soul of the evil doer; … deep seriousness, with habitual cheerfulness, and a constant aim to promote the highest degree of piety in himself and others, with a readiness to hope the best of the lowest.8
Given Pearce’s “outstanding spirituality,”9 it is not surprising that following the publication of Fuller’s memoir, he became known to many of his contemporaries as the “Seraphic Pearce”.10 Pearce died at what seemed to be a very young age, but, to many of those who knew him, he seemed to have condensed a lifetime of holy living and ministry into the decade that he was at Birmingham.
He was, and is, a man to imitate.
1 The Autobiography of The Rev. William Jay, ed. George Redford and John Angell James, 2nd ed. (London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1855), 374‒378. Pearce died of tuberculosis (consumption).
2 Autobiography of The Rev. William Jay, 374. For a similar perspective about Pearce as a preacher, see F. A. Cox, History of the Baptist Missionary Society, From 1792 to 1842, 2 vols. (London: T. Ward & Co., 1842), I, 51‒52: “His pulpit exercises were full of heart, and free in language. They were, indeed, declamatory more than argumentative; but singularly pathetic and persuasive. At times, he would rise into raptures, and glow like a seraph; and notwithstanding the disadvantage of a voice which failed him in his most animated moments, his oratory was irresistible.”
3 Autobiography of The Rev. William Jay, 375. Hughes became the pastor of the Battersea church in 1797. See John Leifchild, Memoir of the Late Rev. Joseph Hughes, A. M. (London: Thomas Ward and Co.; G. East, 1835), 151‒166. Hughes’ friendship with Pearce is mentioned ever so briefly on pages 162‒163.
4 Autobiography of The Rev. William Jay, 375.
5 Andrew Fuller, Memoirs Of the late Rev. Samuel Pearce, A. M., [1st ed.] (Clipstone: J. W. Morris, 1800). On Fuller’s life and authorship, see especially Paul Brewster, Andrew Fuller: Model Pastor-Theologian, Studies in Baptist Life and Thought (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2010); and Peter J. Morden, Life and Thought of Andrew Fuller (1754‒1815), Studies in Evangelical History and Thought (Milton Keynes, England: Paternoster, 2015).
6 Autobiography of The Rev. William Jay, 377‒378. This quotation is from Fuller, Memoirs Of the late Rev. Samuel Pearce, [1st ed.], 208‒209.
7 Fuller is using the term “candour” here in an archaic meaning of “freedom from bias.” See William Little, et al., The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles, rev. and ed. C. T. Onions (1933, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), s.v.
8 Autobiography of The Rev. William Jay, 377‒378. This quotation is from Fuller, Memoirs Of the late Rev. Samuel Pearce, [1st ed.], 245.
9 E. F. Clipsham, “Pearce, Samuel,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 43:286.
10 See, for example, The Life and Letters of John Angell James, ed. R. W. Dale, 3rd ed. (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1861), 67; John Angell James, An Earnest Ministry the Want of the Times, 4th ed. (London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1848), 272. The phrase appears to have originated with Pearce’s friend, John Ryland: see Ernest A. Payne, “Samuel Pearce” in his The First Generation: Early Leaders of the Baptist Missionary Society in England and America (London: Carey Press, [1936]), 46.
