John Collett Ryland, Daniel Turner, and A Modest Plea

One of the catalysts for the communion controversy among Baptists in the late eighteenth century was a work entitled A Modest Plea for Free Communion, whose authorship from the beginning has been a bit of a mystery. It was published separately by two different authors using their own pseudonyms, Candidus and Pacificus. Research since its publication in 1772 has slowly revealed the identities of the authors as well as tracked down copies of the once-rare work. This article presents new archival research that sheds still more light on the authorship of this important work.