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Without going back, however, upon the Wycliffites, or even on the Anabaptists that were scattered through England in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, one may date the Baptists as we have now to do with them from the reign of James.
They maintained, as Baptists do still, that in the primitive or Apostolic Church the only baptism practised or heard of was that of adult believers, and that the form of the rite for such was immersion in water; and they maintained farther that the Baptism of Infants was one of those corruptions of Christianity against which there had been a continued protest by pure and forward spirits in different countries, in ages prior to Luther's Reformation, including some of the English Wycliffites, although the protest may have been repeated in a louder manner, and with wild admixtures, by the German Anabaptists who gave Luther so much trouble.
In the reign of Richard II., the poll tax being added to other elements of class discord, labour strikes, takes arms under Wat Tyler, demands fixed rents, tenant right in an extreme form, and the total abolition of serfage. A wild religious communism bred of the preachings of the more visionary among the Wycliffites mingles in the movement with the sense of fiscal and industrial wrong.
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