RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Baptists
Many of the Waldenses and the Bohemian Brethren (qq-v.) rejected infant baptism and practised believers' baptism, but they seem not to have disfellowshiped their pedobaptist brethren and laid no stress upon immersion; while in the rejection of judicial oaths, magistracy as allowable for a Christian, capital punishment, and warfare, they put an interpretation on the Scriptures that modern Baptists do not approve. The historical relations of modern Baptists to the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century are close and direct. English Puritanism and Brownism (see Browne, Robert), from which English Baptists sprang, were themselves products in part at least of the Anabaptist movement. A still more direct influence was exerted by the Mennonites of the Netherlands upon the English refugees that there became antipedobaptist (1609 onward). Anabaptists were the forerunners of modern Baptists in rejection of infant baptism and insistence on believers' baptism, in insisting on the sole authority of the Scriptures, in their efforts to secure and maintain regenerate church membership, in pleading for liberty of conscience and the separation of Church and State; but nearly all Anabaptists rejected oaths, magistracy, warfare, and capital punishment, all were anti-Augustinian in their anthropology, many were chiliastic, many were antitrinitarian, some were pantheistic and antinomian, many were communistic, and none (so far as is known) insisted on immersion as the exclusively valid act of baptism (see Anabaptists).
I. The English Baptists. — 1. Rise of the General Baptists: John Smyth (q.v.) became a Puritan as early as 1590 but continued in the Established Church until 1606, when he led in the organization of a separate congregation at Gainsborough, the members of which covenanted together " to walk in all his [God's] ways, made known or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavors, whatsoever it might cost them, the Lord assisting them." In 1606 or 1607 they fled from persecution and settled in Amsterdam. They did not unite with the older Puritan church in Amsterdam, of which Francis Johnson and Henry Ainsworth (qq.v.) were pastor and teacher, but were on terms of fellowship with this body. In his reply to Richard Bernard's Separatists' Schism, published some months after his arrival, Smyth expressed the pro-
. foundest aversion to " Anabaptists,"
Smvth &d wh°m he classed with Papists, Arians,
his Cong-re.
and " other heretics and anti-Chris-
gation. tians," whose " prayers and religious exercises " could not be acceptable to God. By this time he had reached convictions in favor of pure Congregationalism as against the presbyterial practise of Johnson. He soon took issue with " the Ancient Brethren of the Separation " as regards the use of the book [Bible] in reading, prophesying, and singing in church meetings, declaring it to be " no part of spiritual worship " and hence " unlawful "; he objected to the " triformed presbytery " (pastors, teachers, and rulers) as "none of God's ordinance but man's device"; and insisted that " in contributing to the church treasury, there ought to be both a separation from
them that are without, and a sanctification of the whole action by prayer and thanksgiving." He is reported by some of his contemporaries to have objected to the use of translations of the Bible and to have insisted " that teachers should bring the originals, the Hebrew and Greek, and out of them translate by voice." He had evidently become hypersensitive regarding anything that savored of human additions to divine prescriptions.
Prejudice against the Anabaptists seems for some time to have hindered the application of Smyth's principle to infant baptism, but late in 1608 or early in 1609 it was borne in upon him that if the Church of England was apostate (as his Separatist brethren agreed), then its ordinances were invalid, and that infant baptism was wholly without Scripture warrant and so in any case to be rejected. Accordingly he and his followers dissolved their church, disowned their baptism (Smyth repudiating also his ordination), resolved to introduce anew believers' baptism and to effect a completely new church organization with the New Testament as their only guide. Smyth seems to have first administered the ordinance to himself and then to the rest of the company. Then as baptized believers they effected a new organization with Smyth as pastor. They now felt Organized ^mPeuec^ to protest against the church New of Johnson and Ainsworth as " a false
Church. church, falsely constituted in the baptizing of infants, and their own unbaptized estate." When charged with inconsistency and changeableness, Smyth insisted that a change for the better is always in order, and that not to change so long as complete conformity to Scripture has not been attained " is evil simply; and therefore that we should proceed from the profession of Puritanism to Brownism, and from Brownism to true Christian baptism, is not simply evil and reprovable in itself, except it be proved that we have fallen from true religion." In answer to the charge of " Se-baptism " he claims that there is as much warrant for believers baptizing themselves as there is for setting up a true church (which his Separatist opponents professed to have done), inasmuch as a " true church can not be erected without baptism," and that " any man raised up after the apostasy of Antichrist " may " in the recovering of the church by baptism, administer it upon himself in communion with others." He further justifies self-administered baptism on the ground, among others, that " in the Old Testament every man that was unclean washed himself; every priest going to sacrifice washed himself. Every
master of a family ministered the Passover to himself and all of his family." He adds: " A man can not baptize others into the church, himself being out of the church. Therefore it is lawful for a man to baptize himself together with others in communion, and this warrant is a plerophory for the practise of that which is done by us."
As Puritans, Separatists, and Mennonites practised affusion at this time and as no issue was raised in the controversial literature called out by this new movement among English Separatists or in the later negotiations between these English anti-
Baptists