§ 163.3. =The English Baptists.=--The notion that infant baptism is objectionable also found favour among the English Independents. Owing to the slight importance attached to the sacraments generally, and more particularly to baptism, in the Reformed church, especially among the Independents, the supporters of the practice of the church in regard to baptism to a large extent occupied common ground with its opponents. The separation took place only after the rise of the fanatical prophetic sects (§ 161, 1). We must, however, distinguish from the continental Anabaptists the English Baptists, who enjoyed the benefit of the Toleration Act of William III., of A.D. 1689, along with the other dissenters, by maintaining their Independent-Congregationalist constitution (§ 155, 3). In A.D. 1691, over the Arminian question, they split up into Particular and General, or Regular and Free Will, Baptists. The former, by far the more numerous, held by the Calvinistic doctrine of _gratia particularis_, while the latter rejected it. The Seventh-Day Baptists, who observed the seventh instead of the first day of the week, were founded by Bampfield in A.D. 1665.[480]--From England the Baptists spread to North America, in A.D. 1630, where Roger Williams (§ 162, 2), one of their first leaders, founded the little state of Rhode Island, and organized it on thoroughly Baptist-Independent principles.[481]--Continuation, § 170, 6.
§ 163.4. =The Quakers.=--=George Fox=, born A.D. 1624, died A.D. 1691, was son of a poor Presbyterian weaver in Drayton, Leicestershire. After scant schooling he went to learn shoemaking at Nottingham, but in A.D. 1643 abandoned the trade. Harassed by spiritual conflicts, he wandered about seeking peace for his soul. Upon hearing an Independent preach on 2 Peter i. 19, he was moved loudly to contradict the preacher. “What we have to do with,” he said, “is not the word, but the Spirit by which those men of God spake and wrote.” He was seized as a disturber of public worship, but was soon after released. In A.D. 1649 he travelled the country preaching and teaching, addressing every man as “thou,” raising his hat to none, greeting none, attracting thousands by his preaching, often imprisoned, flogged, tortured, hunted like a wild beast. The core of his preaching was, not Scripture, but the Spirit, not Christ without but Christ within, not outward worship, not churches, “steeple-houses,” and bells, not doctrines and sacraments, but only the inner light, which is kindled by God in the conscience of every man, renewed and quickened by the Spirit of Christ, which suddenly lays hold upon it. The number of his followers increased from day to day. In A.D. 1652 he found, along with his friends, a kindly shelter in the house of Thomas Fell, of Smarthmore near Preston, and in his wife Margaret a motherly counsellor, who devoted her whole life to the cause. They called themselves “The Society of Friends.” The name Quaker was given as a term of reproach by a violent judge, whom Fox bad “quake before the word of God.” After the overthrow of the hopes of the Saints through the dissolution of the Short Parliament and Cromwell’s apostasy (§ 155, 2), many of them joined the Quakers, and led them into revolutionary and fanatical excesses. Confined hitherto to the northern counties, they now spread in London and Bristol, and over all the south of England. In January, A.D. 1655, they held a fortnight’s general meeting at Swannington, in Leicestershire. Crowds of apostles went over into Ireland, to North America and the West Indies, to Holland, Germany, France, and Italy, and even to Constantinople. They did not meet with great success. In Italy they encountered the Inquisition, and in North America the severest penal laws were passed against them. In A.D. 1656 James Naylor, one of their most famous leaders, celebrated at Bristol the second coming of Christ “in the Spirit,” by enacting the scene of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. But the king of the new Israel was scourged, branded on the forehead with the letter B as a blasphemer, had his tongue pierced with a redhot iron, and was then cast into prison. Many absurd extravagances of this kind, which drew down upon them frequent persecutions, as well as the failure of their foreign missionary enterprises, brought most of the Quakers to adopt more sober views. The great mother Quakeress, Margaret Fell, exercised a powerful influence in this direction. George Fox, too, out of whose hands the movement had for a long time gone, now lent his aid. Naylor himself, in A.D. 1659, issued a recantation, addressed “to all the people of the Lord,” in which he made the confession, “My judgment was turned away, and I was a captive under the power of darkness.”
