Learning About Early English Baptists

"It is noteworthy that the first half of the eighteenth century had been devoted more to consolidation and organization than to evangelism. This was typical of English dissenters generally. Their preoccupation with theological problems, chiefly Christological and ethical, together with the development of a censorious spirit, did not produce a warm evangelistic ministry. The spiritual awakening so desperately needed by the country came, not from dissenters, but from Anglicans like Whitefield and the Wesleys, beginning about 1738."

This summarizes well both the General and Particular Baptists in England in the 18th century.

--Torbet, A History of the Baptists, p. 71.