Note 210 — Chapter XIII

The question, which has been asked, with some emphasis, as if it vitally affected the Baptist churches in this country: “By whom was Roger Williams baptized?” has no practical importance. All whom he immersed were, as Pedobaptists must admit, baptized. The great family of Baptists in this country did not spring from the First Church in Providence. Many Baptist ministers and members came, at an early period, from Europe, and thus churches were formed in different parts of the country, which have since multiplied over the land. The first Baptist church formed in the present State of Massachusetts, is the church at Swansea. Its origin is dated in 1663, when the Rev. John Miles came from Wales, with a number of the members of a Baptist church, who brought with them its records. It was, in fact, an emigration of a church. Of the 400,000 Baptist communicants now in the United States, a small fraction only have had any connection, either immediate or remote, with the venerable church at Providence, though her members are numerous, and she has been honored as the mother of many ministers. The question, discussed in the preceding pages, disturbed, for a while, the first English Baptists. They had no clerical administrator, who had himself, in their view, been baptized. Some of them went to Holland, and were baptized by Baptist ministers there. “But,” says Crosby, (vol. i. p. 103,) “the greatest number of the English Baptists, and the more judicious, looked upon all this as needless trouble, and what proceeded from the old Popish doctrine of right to administer sacraments by an uninterrupted succession, which neither the Church of Rome, nor the Church of England, much less the modern dissenters, could prove to be with them. They affirmed, therefore, and practised accordingly, that after a general corruption of baptism, an unbaptized person might warrantably baptize, and so begin a reformation.” These examples, however, cannot justify a departure from the usual practice of our churches at the present day, when the ministry is regularly established.