Religious Tract Society

Religious Tract Society was founded in 1799 and led by the Baptist minister, Joseph Hughes, along with Independent ministers George Burder and Matthew Wilks, and Rowland Hill of Surry Chapel. Hughes would also be the leading force behind the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804. It operated for some time from offices in 56 Paternoster Row. Contributors to the tracts were evangelicals from all sects, but nonconformists played a significant role, although many contributors will never be identified because their tracts were published anonymously. As John M’Clintock and James Strong noted in 1894, the Society’s ‘object was defined to be the publication of “those grand doctrinal and practical truths which have in every age been mighty through God in converting, sanctifying, and comforting souls, and by the influence of which men may have been enabled, while they lived, to live to the Lord, and when they died to die unto the Lord.” “It has given a Christian literature to nations just emerging from barbarism. Its publications have passed the wall of China, and have entered the palace of the Celestial emperor. They have instructed the princes of Burmah, and opened the self-sealed lips of the devotee in India. They have gone to the sons of Africa to teach them, in their bondage, the liberty of the Gospel. They have preached Christ crucified to the Jew and also to the Greek; while in the home land they have continued to offer the truths and consolations of religion to soldiers, to sailors, to prisoners, to the inmates of hospitals, and, in short, to rich and poor in every circumstance of life.” See M’Clintock and Strong, entry in Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, 12 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), 10.513-14.