baptists
baptists formed one of the main protestant dissenting groups, holding that baptism should be undertaken by adults who could understand the ceremony and its significance, and that it should involve total immersion in water. These views may have been inherited from the 16th-cent. anabaptists, but baptists managed to shed the odium which had attached to the earlier group. The first baptist community was established in London in 1612 and the movement spread rapidly, in Britain and in the American colonies. The writings of John Bunyan in the Restoration period gained for baptists widespread respect. They did little more than maintain their numbers in early Hanoverian England but in the early 19th cent. expanded greatly and by 1851 had more than 2,700 congregations in England and Wales. Of these the large majority were Particular Baptists, who had retained a Calvinist outlook, as against the General Baptists who had moved towards unitarianism. Baptist churches and educational institutions are extremely strong in the United States.
J. A. Cannon
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baptists
