8. There is an unpublished ms. (sermon or lecture) in Backus's hand at the American Baptist Historical Society in Rochester, New York, entitled, “Thots about Laying on of hands. Feb. 1764.” It is probable that this was brought by Backus to this conference and read to the assembled members of the Association. Backus used three lines of argument to indicate that the ritual of laying on of hands was at best an optional or circumstantial one which ought never to be a bar to communion: First, because while the Bible describes Jesus'“laying hands on some distrest objects and healing them. … I haven't discovered any precept of his in joining ye laying on of hands upon all believers as a standing ordinance in his Church.” Second, while Paul, Ananias, and the Apostles “laid on hands in ordinations” and on several “extraordinary” occasions the very exceptional nature of these occasions proved that the practices were “peculiar to ye apostolick age.” Third, the injunctions in Hebrews 6: 1–2, “Which I take to be ye great hinge on which ye whole Controversy turns” had been taken, out of context, as a summary of Christian principles and practices while in fact it was a description of how to go on “unto perfection” by leaving behind this and other doctrines and practices mistakenly carried over from “the Old Testament dispensation by Jewish converts; and here Backus relied upon extensive quotations from “ye pious & learned Dr. Gill” of England to prove that in this letter to the Hebrews Paul was not instructing them about the necessity of laying on of hands but against it.
Backus used the occasion also to warn these New Light Calvinistic Baptists that when the Sixth Principle prevailed among the pre-Awakening Baptists of Rhode Island, it caused them to decline from the orthodox Calvinism of Roger Williams so that these “Old Baptist churches” were now “very dark about the doctrines of free grace and very negligent as to ye daily practice of devotion and piety.” Backus's accusation would make an interesting study, for it is clear that the Baptists of Rhode Island did become very lax in practice and Arminian in doctrine after 1656 when the laying on of hands began to prevail among them.
Backus had to fight constantly against the unsophisticated literalism of the Baptists and there are two other unpublished manuscripts attacking this Sixth Principle on similar grounds in the American Baptist Historical Society, one dated as late as 1788.
