A quick check has revealed that Maria Hope (1789-1866) was associated with Byrom Street Chapel in Liverpool and among a number of her nephews, there were two called Samuel Pearce Hope and William Carey Hope.
She was only 26 when Fuller wrote to her. She must have met Fuller on a trip he took to Liverpool, probably on one of his fund-raising trips for the BMS that kept him away from home for up to a quarter of the year.
In January 1815, only a few months before the death of Andrew Fuller—when Britain was gearing up for its decisive showdown with the French dictator Napoleon—the Baptist leader decided to answer an enquiry about his life, his early religious impressions and conversion, from “a friend in Liverpool.” That was the very way that I described his correspondent in my The Armies of the Lamb: The spirituality of Andrew Fuller (Joshua Press, 2001), p.75. I had no more information, though, about the person in question.
Imagine my delight and amazement when this afternoon—through the help of my good friend Dr Grant Gordon—I was able to identify this correspondent as “Miss Maria Hope” of “Hope Street, Liverpool.” Grant alerted me to a letter of Fuller’s best friend John Ryland Jr., in which Ryland talks about his writing of his friend’s memoir after Fuller’s death. The letter is written to Maria and Ryland talks about the letters that Fuller had written to her.
Wowsers! What a find! I must say: it was incredible to read the letter.
Here is a fascinating audio slideshow on the BBC site of the studies of writers and poets by Eamonn McCabe entitled Writers’ Rooms. There is an idea here for someone to do Pastors’ Rooms!
HT: Justin Taylor
Dr. Michael Haykin was recently interviewed by the Christ the Center panel on the Reformed Forum podcast. The focus of the interview was upon the importance of reading and studying the early church fathers. You can access the episode in which Dr. Haykin was interviewed here.
I never cease to be amazed at the animosity that some Christians show to the writings of Andrew Fuller. You would think they were reading the works of one of his arch-opponents, the deist Thomas Paine!
As for me, I must wholeheartedly agree with the recent evaluation of the eighteenth-century Baptist divine by Dr. David Bebbington, who is convinced of Fuller’s “extraordinary importance in the history of theology” (e-mail to the author, March 11, 2009).
Spring 2008 issue
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Our next issue (volume 10) will feature articles on the Puritans and will be published in the near future.
Dr. Haykin answers this question in a guest blog post on the blog: I Will Build My Church . . . In Ireland. The same article has been posted in pdf format on this site’s “Paper” page.