According to a document from the Hansard Knollys Society’s first subscription cycle (1845–1846), this volume is a curated “first principles” anthology meant to put early English Baptist voices back into circulation—especially the ones who argued, at personal cost, that the state has no jurisdiction over the soul. It frames that project explicitly as a recovery of Baptist history and as a reminder that Baptists “first assert[ed] in this land… the right of every man to worship God as conscience dictates, in submission only to divine command,” and that they clung to that liberty through imprisonment and persecution.
