Adoniram Judson, Jr.

"Like his impatience for minor scuffles, Judson was also irritated with those who were so fearful of worldliness that they cut themselves off from the world and did not engage it for the sake of Christ’s coming kingdom. Emily recorded his conversation with a visitor during his dying days.

Judson said, “At the risk of being written down a bigot,” he condemned the insular nature of the Plymouth Brethren because their doctrine had “ruined” their “usefulness in this world.” He said, “Their influence goes to discourage and paralyze all missionary enterprise.” He went on to assert that sometimes “when seekers after sanctification attain to a certain degree of spirituality, they are peculiarly liable to fall into errors of form.”

He charged that “instead of sitting down at the Saviour’s feet, and drinking in his words, they go away to furnish themselves with swimming bladders, the work of their own invention.” Judson went on to say that when Satan finds Christians so separated from the world that they are not susceptible to its temptations, Satan then “dons this sheep’s clothing of Plymouth Brethrenism.” Unable to woo the Christian to worldliness, Satan “puts a veto on the man’s usefulness, to the serious detriment of hundreds of thousands of others.”

Sources

• Wayland, Heman Lincoln, and Francis Wayland. A Memoir of the Life and Labors of

Francis Wayland. New York: Sheldon & Co., 1867. 2:365-66.

• • via A Supreme Desire to Please Him: The Spirituality of Adoniram Judson, by Evan Daniel Burns. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015. p. 225.