“Let us cultivate the most cordial esteem for all that love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. …but let us aim, at the same time, to acquire and retain the most accurate conceptions of religious truth.” Who said this? None other than Robert Hall, Jr., who is sometimes seen as lax in the second of these two admonitions. I am so glad that Pastor Cody McNutt has done a PhD thesis on Hall at Southern, hopefully a progenitor of an intellectual biography of a man who was the first Baptist celebrity of the 19th century (that is, before Spurgeon). He defends it in a few weeks.
For the source of the above quote, see Hall’s “Introductory Preface to the Third London Edition” of his father’s Help to Zion’s Travellers (Boston: Lincoln, Edmands and Co., 1833), xv.