John Rippon

John Rippon (1751-1836) was born into a Baptist family in Tiverton. He arrived at the Bristol Baptist Academy in 1769 and three years later replaced the legendary John Gill as pastor of the Baptist church at Carter Lane, Southwark, where he remained the rest of his life. Unlike Gill, however, Rippon was an evangelical Calvinist after the model of Andrew Fuller and John Ryland, Jr. He became one of the leading Baptist figures in London during his long tenure at Carter Lane, which eventually relocated to New Park Street in 1833, where C. H. Spurgeon would later preach. One of Rippon’s early achievements was his work as editor of the Baptist Annual Register from 1790 to 1802, the first periodical to chronicle the activities of the Particular Baptists and their involvement in the evangelical revival in England and America, as well as in India and Sierra Leone through the work of the BMS. Rippon was also a well known hymn writer, with his Selection of Hymns (1787) going through twenty-seven editions in his lifetime. He was the Baptist Union’s first chairman in 1813, and was a consistent advocate of Baptist unity. He also published a work on the life of John Gill (1838), as well as a short history of Bristol Academy. Rippon’s influential Baptist Annual Register (1790-1802) was the first periodical produced solely to promote the work of the Particular Baptists, both in England and America.  He was an important hymnodist as well, publishing A selection of hymns (1787) that went through twenty-seven editions in his lifetime.  A leading advocate of Baptist unity throughout his life, he became the first chairman of the Baptist Union in 1812.  The reference in the above letter is to Rippon’s A discourse delivered at the Drum Head, on the Fort, Margate, Oct. 19, 1803, the day of the general fast, before the volunteers, commanded by the Right Hon. William Pitt (1803), in which Rippon, much to the chagrin of Flower and Joseph Fox, dedicated the discourse to Pitt.  Rippon hoped that the leaders of the war and of the Volunteer Corps would be “as celebrated for their urbanity, their valour, and every martial and christian virtue, as they are for their illustrious [Colonel Pitt], a man renowned by his friends for talents and influence which have made half a globe tremble, and of whom there is but one expectation-that having been great in the cabin­et, great in the senate, always great; he will, if necessity shall require, be also great in the field; and, under the blessing of God, without which talents are trifles, be rendered, with all the staff, not an honour to his own country, and to half the nations only, but a distinguished ornament and long continued blessing to the whole globe! (34-35). He closed by praising George III, again to Flower’s dismay, for having “several times” “indulged” the Protestant Dissenters with “an enlargement of their religious liberties.”  He thanked God that England had  “the best of earthly monarchs” (35).   Flower attacked Rippon in his notes to Aspland’s sermon, regarding Rippon’s use of Samuel Stennett’s hymn, “The Christian Warfare,” and Phillip Doddridge’s hymn, “The Christian Warrior Animated and Crowned,” as “scandalous profanation” and perversion (“Preface” 47).  To Flower, Rippon’s sentiments in the sermon were nothing short of “execrable, “contemptible,” and hypocritical.  Using the kind of rhetoric that earned Flower his reputation as an outspoken radical, he writes of Rippon, “What will the christian world, yea, what will the world in general say, when they are informed that the Rev. gentleman has, for many years past, notoriously been in the habit of severely reprobating the measures of the very statesman, whom he now so disgustingly flatters!  Were the Almighty, in his judgments, to permit the Corsican Usurper successfully to invade this country, what is there to prevent the suspicion being entertained, that there are men who would follow the example of the French priests, change their colours, and congratulate the tyrant as the chosen instrument of God, raised up to ‘beautify’ the world!  Does the preacher suppose, that the drum-head, and the pulpit, are pecul­iarly privileged places, from whence, truth, common sense, consistency, integrity, and decency, may be banished at pleasure!” (“Preface” 447). See Ken R. Manley, Redeeming Love Proclaim: John Rippon and the Baptists, Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 12 (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004); Sharon James, “John Rippon (1751-1836),” in The British Particular Baptists, ed. Michael A. G. Haykin, 5 vols (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptist Press, 1998-2019), 2:57-75.