Richard Coppin

Richard Coppin (active 1646-1659) was an English radical preacher and pamphleteer of the Civil War and Interregnum period. After leaving the Church of England around 1648, he preached itinerantly in Berkshire, the west Midlands, and Kent, teaching that all people would ultimately be saved and interpreting the Fall and Last Judgment allegorically. Contemporaries linked him with the Ranters, and he was repeatedly prosecuted under the Blasphemy Act of 1650, serving a six-month imprisonment from late 1655. His writings, including Divine Teachings (1653), The Exaltation of All Things in Christ (1649), and A Blow at the Serpent (1656), make him one of the earliest English advocates of universal restoration.

An early treatise by Richard Coppin, the Commonwealth-era spiritualist preacher who became the most persistent English advocate of universal restoration in the 1650s: all things, fallen in Adam, are to be raised and exalted in Christ. Coppin is the direct link between the radical sects of the English Revolution and the later universalism of Relly's London — Relly's Sadducee Detected, bound in this collection's copy of Salvation Compleated, is an answer to his works. The scan is from the British Library's copy.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)

Coppin's collected Divine Teachings, whose first part — A Hint of the Glorious Mysterie of the Divine Teachings — appeared in 1649 with a preface by the Ranter Abiezer Coppe, and drew on Coppin the first charges of blasphemy for teaching that God will bring all out of the fall. The 1649 first printing has not been freely digitized (it survives in EEBO); this is the 1653 edition from the British Library's copy, containing the Hint with the treatises that grew from it.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)

Coppin's "gentle answer from Maidstone Prison": his account and defense of the public disputes at Rochester Cathedral that led to his imprisonment under the Blasphemy Act, restating against his accusers the doctrine that Christ's victory undoes the serpent's work in every man. It was remembered — London universalists of the 1760s reprinted it twice, and those reprints are also on the Internet Archive. The scan is from the British Library's copy.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)