Abraham Booth

Abraham Booth (20 May 1734 – 27 January 1806) was an English dissenting minister and author, known as a Baptist apologetical writer.

Life Booth was born at Blackwell, near Alfreton, Derbyshire, on 20 May 1734; while he was young, the family moved to Annesley Woodhouse, Nottinghamshire, where his father had taken a small farm as a tenant of the Duke of Portland. The eldest of a large family, Booth worked on the farm to age 15, with sporadic schooling. Then, working on a stocking-frame, he was able to support himself and get some further elementary education. He opened a school at Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire.

Baptist preachers interested Booth in religion, and in 1755 he was baptised by immersion, and began to preach in the Midland counties. In 1760, when the Baptists first gathered into churches, Booth became superintendent of the Kirkby Woodhouse congregation, but not their pastor. He changed views, from General Baptist to Particular Baptist, and seceded. Soon after, he began to preach on Sundays at Sutton-in-Ashfield, Chesterfield, and elsewhere in the Midland towns and villages, still keeping his school. In the 1790s Booth preached in the abolitionist cause, and joined the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. The Baptist Education Society was founded around 1804 by Booth and others. It led, in 1810 after his death, to the setting up of Stepney Academy in East London.

Booth died on 27 January 1806, aged 71, having been a minister 50 years. A marble tablet was erected to his memory in the Prescot Street chapel, where he had been pastor 35 years. William Jones's Essay on Abraham Booth was published at Liverpool, 1808. This book grew to two volumes, 2nd edition, 1787; and was followed by A Defence of Pædobaptism Examined, 1792. In 1796 he published Glad Tidings to Perishing Sinners, which went to four more editions, and in 1805 Pastoral Cautions.

Other works were:

Essay on the Kingdom of Christ, 1788 (two later English editions and one Boston (US); it was also translated into Welsh, and published at Aberystwyth, 1810). Commerce in the Human Species, published by the Abolition Society, 1792. The Amen to Social Prayer, 1801, 2nd edition, 1813. Divine Justice essential to the Divine Character, 1803. Elegy on James Hervey;

and funeral sermons and addresses. Booth also edited several editions of Samuel Wilson's Manual on Baptism. He wrote articles published in the Baptist Magazine for 1809 and 1810. In his last days, when unable to preach, he wrote essays, and two days before his death one on The Origin of Moral Evil; these were published in Posthumous Essays, 1808.

Booth's works were collected and published in three volumes, London, 1813, as The Works of Abraham Booth, excluding his writings on pædobaptism. In 1829 his Pædobaptism Examined was republished in four volumes, by the committee of the Particular Baptist Fund.

Family On turning 23, Booth married Elizabeth Bowmar, a farmer's daughter. She died four years before him, and he left several children.