Samuel Pearce, Birmingham, to Samuel Etheridge, Bullion Office, Bank of England, London, 20 April 1796.

Dear Sir

  By a Letter from Bror Fuller to Mr King, (Treasurer to the Mission Socy) which Mrs K. put into my hands yesterday, I find, that you have kindly advanced £70 on the Society’s behalf, & which Mr Fuller desires may be remitted to you without delay. This wd most certainly have been done by this days post, had Mr King been at home’ but as he is out on a Journey, I hope it will not prove inconvenient to you to wait 3 or 4 days longer—He is fully expected to return by next Saturday at farthest, & then you may depend on a remittance. I thought it necessary to say thus much, lest you shd suspect that your kind advance had not been acknowledged wh the speed it undoubtedly demands.

  I hope you & Mrs E. are preserved in the sweetest enjoyment of evangelical hopes & pleasures. The affliction of your good Lady makes this peculiarly desirable, for when flesh & heart fail, it is GOD alone who can strengthen the heart, and support the sinking spirits of our feeble nature.

  Most affectionately so I embrace this opportunity of acknowledging the pious satisfaction I enjoyed in your Society when last in Town—My agreeable interviews wh you on earth have enlarged my prospects of celestial pleasures, where our communion shall neither be damped by affliction, nor interrupted by local removals.

  Dear bror Savage is gone to glory before us; “but thro the grace of our Lord Jesus Xt we hope to be saved even as he.” I was much affected wh the news of his death, not only on my own acct, & the acct of the Society he so much befriended, but on your acct also. In our path thro life, tho we meet wh so many travellers, & we hope wh many who are going to Zion wh their faces thitherward; yet, it is not often that we meet wh men, whose openness of mind, steadiness of attachment, & spirituality of temper, invite our friendship wh such force & sweetness as our departed Friends—What a mercy, my dear Sir, that we have one friend who never leaves us nor forsakes us!  To him, I trust, we commend each other in our warmest devotions, that guided by his counsel we may at length meet in Glory.

  Dear bror Swain is also removed—my heart bleeds wh his flock, his family, & his friends. There are not many such men of God in Israel. I knew him intimately, & felt an unusual oneness of Soul wh him—but we must submit—The Lord is righteous in all his ways. Ever yours in the indissoluble bonds of grace

                                                                             S. Pearce

Birmingham Apl  20th –96

Text: Timothy Whelan, Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1741-1845 (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2009), pp. 82-83 (annotated version); also MAM PLP 81.63.1, John Rylands University Library of Manchester. References above to Samuel Etheridge, deacon at the Baptist meeting at Little Prescot Street, Goodman’s Fields, London; Thomas King (1755-1831), deacon at Cannon Street in Birmingham and treasurer of the BMS; James Savage, BMS India House counselor; and Joseph Swain (1761-96), minister at the Baptist meeting at Walworth. Pearce's notice of the untimely deaths of Savage and Swain foreshadows his own untimely death in 1799.