The frequenting of cafes and coffee shops by many modern-day students to study, converse, and plug into the internet is actually tapping into a much older phenomenon that goes back to the late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century coffeehouses of England.
Anne Dutton (1692–1765), a prolific Baptist author who corresponded with many of the leading Evangelical figures of the eighteenth century—including George Whitefield (1714–1770) and John Wesley (1703–1791)— was certain that in the Lord’s Supper “the King is pleas’d to sit with us, at his Table.”
Baptists have been profoundly shaped by a loving interaction with and heartfelt submission to the Bible. In their doctrine, their life together, and their spirituality they have been a people of the Book.
“…in his day, especially among members of his community, the Particular Baptists of the eighteenth century, John Gill may rightly be reckoned, in the words of Lloyd-Jones, ‘a very great man, and an exceptionally able man.'”