Fuller, ANDREW

Fuller, ANDREW, an eminent Baptist theologian and controversialist, was born, the son of a small farmer, at Wicken, Cambridgeshire, February 6, 1754. He had his education at Soham free school, but at an early age had to turn to farm-work. In his seventeenth year he became a member of a Baptist church at Soham, and soon began to speak with such acceptance that in 1775 he was chosen pastor of a congregation there. His small stipend of £21 per annum he endeavoured to increase by keeping, first a small shop, and then a school. In 1782 he removed to a pastorate at Kettering, in Northamptonshire. His treatise, The Gospel worthy of all Acceptation (1784), involved him in a warm controversy with the ultra-Calvinists, but showed him already a theologian of rare sagacity and insight, and still rarer fearlessness and sincerity. On the formation in 1792 of the Baptist Missionary Society by Dr Carey and others, he was appointed its secretary, and he devoted henceforward the whole energies of his life to its affairs. His controversial treatise, The Calvinistic and Socinian Systems examined and compared as to their Moral Tendency (1793), was attacked by Dr Toulmin and Mr Kentish; but Fuller replied vigorously in his Socinianism Indefensible (1797). Other works are The Gospel its own Witness (1797), an onslaught on Deism, and Expository Discourse on the Book of Genesis (1806), besides a multitude of single sermons and pamphlets. He died May 7, 1815. His complete works were collected in 1831, and re-issued in 1845 with a memoir by his son.