The Anabaptists and their Stepchildren - by F.N. Lee The
Anabaptists were various sixteenth-century sects. They all
repudiated infant baptism. They baptized -- and often rebaptized
-- adults alone. Such Anabaptists as were trinitarian, generally
did so by pouring. Unitarian Anabaptists, however, did so
largely by a novel single submersion (at variance with the
sprinkling previously practised by the Early Church till A.D.
250ff). In the Middle Ages, the ritualistic Romanists had
usually baptized by total immersion. The Protestant Reformers
alone re-asserted Biblical baptism. Such is baptism only of
believers and their babies and their other children. It is
baptism also precisely by way of Scriptural sprinkling. The
Baptists are the (equally antipaidobaptistic) stepchildren of
the Anabaptists. Baptists, however, have baptized by single
submersion -- at least ever since about 1638. In this, they have
followed Mediaeval Romanism -- and repudiated both the
Protestant Reformation and most Anabaptists. In modern tim