Baptists in America: A History

by Thomas S. Kidd

In the early 1760s, Manning and Backus began to develop plans for the college, collaborating with some non-Baptists, including Congregationalist pastor Ezra Stiles of Newport, Rhode Island. Rhode Island had no college and was friendly to the Baptists because of its policy of religious freedom. So in 1764 the College of Rhode Island was opened in Warren. Some Separate Baptists were appalled by the development, thinking that Backus, a college trustee, had sold them out in the name of respectability. One critic wrote, “I cannot see how he, acting faithfully, upon his own declared principles, can long keep his standing as a member of that body the chief of whose principles and views differing so widely from his.” Backus countered that Baptists needed this kind of school to help train more effective pastors, but he admitted that there was danger in associating education with godliness. Baptists should “never imagine to confine Christ or his church, to that, or any other human school for ministers,” he cautioned. Despite initial reservations, by the time the college moved to its permanent home in Providence, in 1770, the school had become widely accepted among both Separate Baptists and those of the Philadelphia Association.