Stephen Freeman

Stephen Freeman (d. 1836) entered Bristol Baptist Academy in 1783 on Broadmead Funds from Little Wild Street, London; in 1787 was sent to Honiton by Caleb Evans, the Academy’s President, at the request of the Bridge chapel, a mixed Dissenting congregation of Arians and Calvinists, which had been without a pastor for seven years.  During that time the church had worshiped with the Presbyterians (Unitar­ians) in their chapel, but upon the death of the Presbyterian minister, the two congregations united under the Baptist name, the congregation having become predominantly Unitarian by this time under the leadership of Freeman.   Even before he left Bristol, he had departed from the strict Calvinism of his upbringing.   As Murch notes, “Freeman partook of the spirit of inquiry which prevailed among the students, and, before he left, became a decided Unitarian. This circumstance was satisfactory to the church; they had always confined their worship to One God—the Father—and were fully prepared to be led into what they now regard as ‘all truth.’ The services of Mr. Freeman were so acceptable, that the meeting-house was soon found too small” (History, 321-22).  A plan was set in place to enlarge the chapel, but Freeman left before it was completed.  He came to London in 1790 and established a boarding school at Ponder’s End, near Enfield in Middlesex, associating himself with the General (Unitarian) Baptists.  About the same time he published a translation of A Sermon on the Judgments of Mankind, by the late Rev. Charles Chais, Minister of the French Church at the Hague, intended as a specimen of a translation of a volume of sermons by the same author (1790). In the Advertisement, dated from London, 1 November 1790, Freeman writes, “Some who are acquainted with the Translator, and know him to be of sentiments very different from the Author’s on the speculative points of Theology, may be somewhat surprised at his translating and publishing the Sermons of a Calvinistic Divine.  It may suffice for the present to say, it is done with propriety; because they are designed to establish more firmly the moral and devotional duties of religion, and to impress the heart more deeply with a sense of their excellence and importance.  Should sufficient encouragement be given to publish the whole volume, the Translator will then be able to explain himself more fully on this and some other points.” On 30 May 1792, at the annual meeting in London of the General Assembly for General Baptists, Freeman was approved “as a proper Person to instruct young Men who have Abilities for the Ministry.” The Assembly’s records show that he only trained one ministerial student, receiving funds from the Assembly in 1794 and 1795; he even preached at the Assembly in 1795 (Whitley, Minutes, 2:209, 214, 217).  Nevertheless, Freeman took in many young men as boarders in his academy, including the fifteen-year-old William Brodie Gurney in 1793. Gurney later described Freeman as

a good teacher and interested in his pupils.  He was at first an Arian, but, I apprehend, like many others trusting to his own reasoning and rejecting the teaching of that Spirit which leads the humble inquirer into all truth, he ultimately settled down in the cold and comfortless system of Unitarianism.  After a short time he found that he could not pleasantly to himself attend an Independent meeting-house, and we therefore worshiped in the schoolroom, Mr. Freeman reading sermons with sentences erased which included doctrines he no longer believed.  Several of my class-fellows and associates were from Unitarian families. It is no matter of surprise, therefore, that under such circumstances, I left school quite satisfied that, whatever weak enthusiasts might think, those who were free from prejudice must be Unitarians.  About this time I heard Dr. Priestley preach his farewell sermon [1794], and this made a strong impression upon me.  In the year 1795 my mind became uneasy under a sense of sin. I had frequently felt alarm after doing what I knew to be displeasing to God; many of the sermons of Mr. Dore [Gurney’s pastor at Maze Pond] had convinced me of the evil of sin, but the recurrence of temptation, and the indulgence in what I knew to be wrong, weakened the power of conscience.  At length a sermon from the words, ‘He that hath this hope in Him purifieth himself even as He is pure,’ was sent home to my mind, and showed me my awful condition in the sight of God.  I found I could not get rid of the humbling views which that sermon had given to my mind.  From this time I determined that I would devote myself to God and give up all that was displeasing in His sight. About the same time my views became more clear as to the necessity of the influence of the Holy Spirit to renew and strengthen the heart.  Still I was extremely unhappy, from doubts whether the interpretations which I had been used to hear given to Scripture by Mr. Freeman, or those which I received from the ministry of Mr. Dore, were corr­ect.  I was occasionally much perplexed; and I once told a friend of Mr. Freeman’s, who, however, had not gone to the same length as he, that under the deep sense of sin which possessed my mind, I could obtain no relief from the Unitarian views I had formerly received, and I thought of reading some works on the subject.  He said, ‘I, too, have felt considerable doubts of late as to the soundness of these views, and I have determined to read through the New Testament, turning as I proceed to the Old, and marking in parallel columns all the passages which support or oppose the doctrine of the Trinity and the Atonement by Christ, and I really am surprised to find so few which, dispassionately viewed, support our system.  I think if you do this, in a spirit of prayer, it will enable you to form a correct opinion, and prevent you from being entangled in the reasonings of men.’ I followed his advice, and thus was relieved from the doubts which had preyed upon my mind, and had prevented my receiving fully the truth of God.  The result was pretty much the same with the good man of whom I have spoken.  (Salter, Some Particulars, 61-64)

Mrs. Freeman (1766-1826), a friend of Eliza Flower, was the former Polly Kite. Though raised an Anglican, upon her mother’s second marriage she was sent to live in the home of a Calvinistic Dissenting minister in Ponder’s End, near Enfield, where she remained for the next sixteen years. “He would fain have instilled into her mind all the peculiar doctrines of the sect to which he belonged,” the writer of her obituary notes, “But her plain good understanding revolted from them” (Monthly Repository 21 [1826]: 693). After her marriage to Freeman, she became a committed Unitarian. Both Eliza Gould and Benjamin Flower would have known of Rev. Freeman during his tenure as pastor in Honiton, at which time Eliza was attending the Baptist church in Bampton and Benjamin attending the Steps Meeting in Tiverton. Another possibility is that Eliza Gould came to know the Freemans during her stay in London with the Gurneys in 1797 (their son, William Brodie, had recently attended Freeman’s school). Freeman remained at Enfield through 1835 and was well known within Unitarian circles in London (Murch, History, 322).  In 1794, Anthony Robinson, a classmate of Freeman’s at Bristol Baptist Academy, requested George Dyer’s address in London from Freeman, a friend of Dyer’s as well (Robinson to Dyer, 18 March 1794, Dyer Collection, Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge.). Freeman represents another example of the tight Dissenting community in which the Flowers lived and moved and the transition of a number of Bristol Baptist Academy students during the 1780s from orthodox Calvinism to Unitarianism.

For more on Freeman, see A. Farquharson, The History of Honiton (Exeter: A. Farquharson, 1868), 29-30; Jerom Murch,  A History of the Presbyterian and General Baptist Churches in the West of England (London: Hunter, 1835), 321-22, ; W. T. Whitley, Minutes of the General Assembly of the General Baptist Churches in England, 2 vols.  (London: Kingsgate Press, 1909-10), 2:209, 214, 217; William Henry Gurney Salter, ed. Some Particulars of the Lives of William Brodie Gurney and His Immediate Ancestors. Written Chiefly by Himself (London: Unwin, 1902), 61-64.