Page:Historical Lectures and Addresses.djvu/72

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"Confession" is a powerful and consecutive statement of almost all the points which are partially insisted on in all revivals of popular religious feeling, but that it was marked by the large-heartedness which came from its Arminian basis. However, Smith's desire for charity could not save him from a breach with his friend Helwys, and Smith died in Holland in 1612 deploring the endless separations which spring from Separatism. In the same year, Helwys and his congregation returned to England, and formed on the basis laid down by Smith the first organised Baptist community in this country. They were Arminian or General Baptists, so called because they held the general salvability of mankind. It was not long before another Baptist body was formed, again by a secession from the Congregationalists. Some members of a London congregation "finding that the society kept not its first principles of separation, and being also convinced that baptism was not to be administered to infants, desired that they might be dismissed from that communion and allowed to form a distinct congregation in such order as was most agreeable to their own sentiments". Accordingly they seceded in 1633, and formed the body of Calvinistic or Particular Baptists who held the doctrines of predestination and election, according to which only particular persons are called to salvation. As this secession had been made only on the point of the mode of administering baptism, that question occupied the minds of the new congregation. They considered what steps they could take to revive this ordinance in its primitive purity, and could find no model in England, because,