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THE ORIGIN OF THE
BAPTISTS
www.baptistpillar.com/bd0239.htm
INTRODUCTION
The following
will prove a very acceptable historical contribution to the masses of the people. It will be to history a sort of
elementary work, yet replete with historic facts, and the biographies of the leading witnesses of Jesus in the
darkest ages of the world.
In this little
work, the general reader will find, traced by a graphic pen, the bold outline of the history of the people now
called Baptists. Like an experienced woodsman, the author has blazed the rough and bloody track of our people back
into the wilderness, even into the "remotest depth of antiquity," but in these dark depths he loses not, like
Mosheim, their "trail," but pursues it until it leads out into the unclouded light of the first century, where he
finds the footsteps of the apostles and the Son of God himself, mingling with those of the first Christians,
leading still back toward the banks of the Jordan, upon which the colors of the new kingdom were first unfurled,
and a people to receive the coming Son were first prepared by his herald, John.
Some may object
to the mode selected by the author in pursuing his inquiry, and, because it is novel, regard it as unnatural and
unphilosophical.
Such an objection
is not well founded. The author designed this for the outline of an original investigation of his subject, and he
has therefore selected the more real and genuine method of procedure.
Says Rawlinson:
"In every historical inquiry it is possible to pursue our researches in two ways; we may either trace the stream of
time upward and pursue history to its earliest source, or we may reverse the process, and, beginning at the
fountain-head, follow down the course of events in chronological order to our own day. The former is the more
philosophical, because the more real and genuine method of procedure; it is the course which, in the original
investigation of the subject, must, in point of fact, have been pursued; the present is our standing point, and we
necessarily view the past from it, and only know so much of the past as we connect more or less distinctly with
it." (Bampton Course, 1859, Lecture ii, p. 49.)
This work is
timely, and we think will be gladly received by the masses, since it furnishes them, in a condensed form, with
authentic historical facts, with which to meet the questions and charges every day cast into their faces by the
descendants of those who murdered our ancestors: "Where did the Baptists come from?" "Baptists originated with
Roger Williams, and their baptisms with his informal baptism." "Baptists at best are but the descendants of the
fanatical Anabaptists of Munster, and have no history before their day," and other like charges. Multitudes of our
people have never been furnished with the facts of history with which to disprove these charges. They have ever
opened at the third of Matthew, and triumphantly pointed to a body of Baptists in Judea, gathered by "John the
Baptist," and to the Church on the Mount of Olives, to which Christ gave the commission to the Church at Jerusalem,
and to all the Churches planted by the apostles, all manifestly Baptist Churches; but the thick darkness of
eighteen centuries, to the multitude, rolls between the apostolic period and the present.
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