Abstract of Principles

By Basil Manly, Jr, James P. Boyce, John Broadus, E.T. Winkler, William Williams, Louisville, Kentucky. After the idea to found a seminary caught on among Southern Baptists in the late 1850s, Boyce called on his fellow Princetonian Basil Manly, Jr. to draw up the "Abstract of Principles," as Boyce termed it, in 1857. Manly, Jr. and Boyce shared a mind on the necessity of such a statement. Manly took up the task with vested diligence, working for much of the spring of 1858 on the document. When he had authored in draft form the twenty articles that comprised the Abstract, Manly presented his work to the SBC Committee charged with formation of the statement. The group met in May 1858 at the Plan of Organization meeting in Greenville prior to the main Convention meeting. For five intensive days, Manly, Boyce, John Broadus, E.T. Winkler, and William Williams hammered out the document, working from the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, the Westminster Confession, the Philadelphia Confession, and the 1833 New Hampshire Confession. Manly later remembered the occasion with fondness: "Those were memorable days to some at least of those who engaged in them. In the freedom of brotherly discussion, in the warmth occasioned by the contact and collision of ideas of the younger and the older, there was keen stimulus to thought. Every great topic in theology was handled earnestly, freely, and yet reverently." Following the revision sessions, the committee commended the reworked document to the convention. In 1858, a year before Southern opened its doors, the convention accepted the Abstract and instituted it as the seminary's official creed.