Tristram Dodge and His Descendants in America; With Historical and Descriptive Accounts of Block Island and Cow Neck, L.I., Their Original Settlements (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. ALTHOUGH the holders of Baptist tenets in England were systematically persecuted from the era of the Reformation, Henry VIII., A.D. 1534, by his proclamations, inflicting banishment and death, and by royal commission to Ridley and Gardner of Edward VI., and martyrdom of Joan of Kent and others, they increased in numbers; and for their simple faith were martyred under Mary and especially persecuted under Elizabeth, by proclamation 1560, like that of her father, and by her Acts of Uniformity. They were hunted to the death, fined, whipped, and imprisoned for their religious convictions, like the early Christians. This was continued under James I., by whom in 1612 Edward Wightman, for denying infant baptism, was burned at the stake; followed by the High Commission Court of Charles I., where Laud wreaked his malice on all Dissenters and especially on the Baptists; who, however, like the faithful in the Catacombs of Rome, steadily grew in numbers and power, so that when this century of fruitless coercion and barbarity terminated, and a new era of hope dawned with the Long Parliament, they had, in 1646, forty-six churches in England; seven established in London, of which the first, in Devonshire Court, remains to our day; and enjoyed religious liberty during the Commonwealth; until the Restoration of 1660 found considerable Baptist churches in thirty English counties, six leading towns in Ireland, and very numerous in Wales. Persecution of unexampled 'rigor commenced immediately on the Restoration. Throughout all this period of persecution, the Baptists had held their meetings for worship, often at midnight, in woods or unfrequented places, without announcement, or, if in houses, in unsuspected dwellings. The minister, disguised as a carter, with smock, high boots and w...