baptists

Baptists formed one of the main protestant dissenting groups, holding that baptism should be undertaken by adults who could understand the ceremony, and that it should involve total immersion in water. These views may have been inherited from the 16th-cent. anabaptists, but baptists managed to shed the odium which had attached to the earlier group. The first baptist community was established in London in 1612 and the movement spread rapidly. The writings of John Bunyan in the Restoration period gained for baptists widespread respect. Baptists did little more than maintain their numbers in early Hanoverian England but in the 19th cent. expanded greatly and by 1851 had more than 2, 700 congregations in England and Wales.