Modern Baptist Heroes and Martyrs by John Prestridge and published by Classics.
Humanity has always been powerfully moved by two forces, the gregarious or crowd-forming and the individualistic. The first force for centuries proved the more powerful, and the young and weak elements of humanity became crowded together. Such crowds afforded opportunities for the self-aggrandizement of the strong and base and cunning. In such relations the story of man’s inhumanity to man is full of tears and blood. Slavery of body and mind and soul prevailed. Those members of the crowd who possessed organizing skill, political and financial cunning, herded the people and imprisoned, fleeced and slaughtered them as their greed and vanity dictated. Truly those were long and dark ages.
But the other force in humanity had to be reckoned with, the individualistic. People after all were found not to be sheep and God was over and in them. There are no more interesting or instructive parts of history than those where individuals, open-faced and with heads uplifted, began to question and to defy the arbitrary sway of the crowd-forming force. That questioning and that defying were the first green leaves of the coming glorious harvests.
History is the record of the struggle, bitter and unceasing, between these two forces, the crowd-forming and the individualistic. These make the anvil and the hammer with which God undertook to forge out members for a new order of society, the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth. God seems to value above all tears and chains and groans and martyrs graves, the outcome of struggle. He avows in inspiration that His favourites, those who shall sit with Him upon His throne judging the nations, are the overcomers.
