Prof. Saurat suggests that the Mortalist ideas were driven out of England some time subsequent to the Act of Uniformity and survived in the U.S.A. He discusses at considerable length the connections between the Christadelphian body and the remnants of the Mortalists. Referring to Robert Roberts’ biography of John Thomas, he comments: “Robert Roberts
. . gives no indication of the origin of the ideas put forward by the founder of the modern English sect (i.e. John Thomas), whose reading and spiritual affinities are not discussed. If we can remember that the only meeting of Mortalists of which we can find historical traces was an Anabaptist meeting, the most reasonable hypothesis is that of survival of Mortalist ideas within some Anabaptist community in the United States.” Obviously in this comment the Professor ignores Dr. Thomas’s reading of the most important Book of all, that which had the greatest moulding influence on his thought development. None the less, there is undoubted evidence of believers preaching the Truth as it is in Jesus in North America as early as the eighteenth century, and there seems no reason to doubt Prof. Saurat’s suggestion that these had antecedents in the Anabaptists of Europe. There is also evidence that Dr. Thomas had contact with some of them during his formative years in the United States. It is more than interesting to us to know that there were preachers in that country advocating the true Hope of Israel several decades before the writing of “Elpis Israel”. Many of these were itinerant “missionaries”, having no roots, and without the official backing of any established community. An American (non-Christadelphian) writer, refers to this period (the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century) thus: “The proclaiming of the gospel of the Kingdom of God to be established on the earth . . . was by means mainly of itinerant preaching. It was a grueling and hard life. Method of travel was varied. Not infrequently it was by horseback, stage coach, canal boat, river steamer . . . or plain walking. These men frequently would meet with brethren in conference at various places. Outside of normal hardship and suffering from travel and exposure, the preacher would often be down with swamp fever, typhoid fever, lung fever, and other sicknesses caused by the exposures and bad water. Despite these, he carried on and attempted to maintain his appointments. He was poor (oftentimes extremely so), as far as material goods were concerned, but rich in his faith of the return of Jesus Christ to set up His Kingdom upon the earth, raise the saintly dead, and change the living to a life of immortality.”
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One