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Last Updated on :
Saturday, November 22, 2014

 

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Contents|| Preface || 1 || 2 || 3 || 4 || 5 || 6 || 7 || 8 || 9 || 10 || Thanks || INDEX

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Brethren In Christ
BY ALAN EYRE


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Samuel Hopkins 1721-1803

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Samuel Hopkins was a farmer's boy from the backwoods of Connecticut, which were then still occupied by Indians in warpaint. He graduated from the famous Yale University at the age of twenty. While a student there, he and several other students including Joseph Bellamy, came under the influence of one of the teachers, Jonathan Edwards, who himself had been strongly affected by the doctrines of the Brethren. Though Hopkins became a Congregational minister - at a tiny village, Great Barrington, Mass., where his influence could presumably be minimized -- he was eventually dismissed, ostensibly for "dullness as a sermonizer" and "the very ideal of bad delivery".

For thirty three years after that, this stolid New Englander spent fourteen hours a day in study (if his none too friendly detractors are to be believed), raised eight children and wrote at length on scriptural topics. He indirectly influenced William Channing, leader of the American Liberal Unitarians, who was a neighbour in Newport, Rhode Island. Hopkins was one of the first American christian writers to denounce slavery, a heroic act as Newport was the very centre of the slave trade at the time. His "Treatise on the Millennium" is a substantial, almost exhaustive, work of Biblical scholarship.

 


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