What has been said of the polity and discipline of Independents will apply generally to the polity and discipline of the Baptists. These two religious denominations substantially agreed with each other; the main and almost the only difference between them, having relation to the mode of Baptism, and to the recipients of the rite. When Baptist ministers held livings they stood in the same relation to the national establishment as did their fellow Congregationalists, admitting members, exercising discipline, and conducting their business quite independently of the political powers.
John Tombes, an Oxford Bachelor of Divinity of superior ability and learning, and standing high in the estimation of all parties, had felt difficulties respecting infant baptism long before the commencement of the wars. Not receiving answers to certain questions which he proposed on the subject to the Westminster Assembly, he renounced his former practice, and avowed Antipædobaptist opinions. This brought him into collision with some of his parishioners, whilst minister of Fenchurch.[232] Though forfeiting that incumbency for not baptizing infants, he was deemed eligible for the preachership of the Temple, and obtained that honourable post. But he soon lost this preferment also, in consequence of his publishing a treatise on the subject which so much occupied his thoughts. The people of Bewdley, in Worcestershire--his native town--were however allowed to choose him for their minister, and there it was that he held the public dispute with Richard Baxter, already described. Seeing no prospect of any alteration in the Establishment with regard to baptism, he "gathered a separate Church of those of his own persuasion, continuing at the same time minister of the parish." The perpetual curacy of Bewdley having become impoverished by the sale of ecclesiastical property, Tombes received the parsonage of Ross, which he subsequently relinquished for the Hospital at Ledbury. Retaining the Hospital, and removing from Bewdley, he became once more minister of the parish of Leominster, in Herefordshire, the place in which he had held his first preferment. His name appears amongst Cromwell's Triers; a circumstance involving this important consequence, that "the Commissioners agreed to own the Baptists as their brethren, and that if such applied to them for probation, and appeared in other respects to be duly qualified, they should not be rejected for holding this opinion. And hence it came to pass, that at the Restoration several parishes were found to have Baptist ministers fixed in them."[233] Yet throughout this good man's life, after he had embraced Antipædobaptist views, his peculiarities in that respect exposed him to much trouble and sorrow.