an attack upon the sacraments was a natural form in which it found expression. After the rising of Luther, the sect of Anabaptists obtained a definite existence on the Continent, and from time to time Anabaptists were persecuted in England. They chiefly came from Holland, and so late as 1575 two Dutch Anabaptists were burned in London.
But there was no organised body of Anabaptists in this country before the year 1611, and they had their origin in a separation from the Independent congregation which took refuge in Amsterdam. Holland was the great home of the Anabaptists, and it was there that they first assumed an orderly and organised form. It is not fair to associate the English Baptists with the fanatical sects that infested Germany in the early part of the sixteenth century. I have shown you that these sects had nothing in common save their objection to infant baptism, an opinion which did not possess much contents by itself. The man who originated the body from which the English Baptists took their rise was a Frisian priest, Menno Simons, whose mind was exercised on the subject of infant baptism. He consulted Luther and Bullinger, and found that though they both agreed in supporting the practice, they did so for different reasons. Meditation on the Scriptures led him to abandon this usage of the Church and join a Baptist community in 1536. There Menno placed himself at the head of those who entirely protested against the violent and fanatical party which rejoiced in personal revelations, despised all knowledge, abolished all books but the Bible, maintained the most extreme form of
