John Saltmarsh, having studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge, became a Church of England minister at Heslerton in North Yorkshire in the late 1630s, then, for a very short time, at Brasted in Kent in 1645, but he gave up each position in turn because of his disenchantment with tithes. In the Civil Wars, he was a chaplain in the army of Thomas Fairfax, where he advocated religious toleration, liberty of conscience, and freedom of speech, but was accused of antinomianism. In June 1646, he preached at St Mary's after Oxford had been taken by the army. According to Richard Baxter, who was shocked by his influence, John Saltmarsh and William Dell were the dominant voices in the army's move to a more radical Protestantism, particularly over the doctrine of free grace. On the title-page of his Free Grace, Saltmarsh alludes to a spiritual crisis he had experienced some twelve years previously (about 1634), now resolved because his conscience has been relieved of the burden of the Mosaic law. With such views, he naturally attracted the attention of the Presbyterian heresy-hunters of the 1640s, Samuel Rutherford, in his Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist (1648), noting 'the antichristian doctrine of John Saltmarsh and Will. Dell' on the title-page. Saltmarsh, in his turn, attacked the Presbyterians (when they had power) for opposing toleration – when only a few years earlier they had pleaded for it on their own behalf. He, like Dell, denying that degrees or ordination should be the qualification for ministry, pleaded instead for 'the infinitely abounding Spirit of God'. Consequently, in his popular works, he showed himself a master-teacher, shunned show of scholarship. |
