politan baptistery at Constantinople still stands at
the side of the mosque which was once the patriarchal church of St Sophia;
and many others, in Syria, have been made known to us by recent researches,
as also have some belonging to the churches of North Africa. In France the
most famous early baptistery is St Jean at Poitiers, and other early
examples exist at Riez, Frejus and Aix. In England, a detached baptistery
is known to have been associated with the cathedral of Canterbury.

See Hefele's _Concilien_, _passim_; Du Cange, _Glossary_, article
"Baptisterium"; Eusebius, _Hist. Eccl._ x. 4; Bingham's _Antiquities of the
Christian Church_, book xi.

(W. R. L.)

BAPTISTS, a body of Christians, distinguished, as their name imports, from
other denominations by the view they hold respecting the ordinance of
baptism (_q.v._). This distinctive view, common and peculiar to all
Baptists, is that baptism should be administered to believers only. The
mode of administration of the ordinance has not always been the same, and
some Baptists (_e.g._ the Mennonites) still practise baptism by pouring or
sprinkling, but among those who will here be styled _modern_ Baptists, the
mode of administration is also distinctive, to wit, immersion. It should,
however, be borne in mind that immersion is not peculiar to the modern
Baptists. It has always been recognized by Paedobaptists as a legitimate
mode, and is still practised to the exclusion of other modes by a very
large proportion of paedobaptist Christendom (_e.g._ the Orthodox Eastern
Church). We shall distinguish here between two main groups of Baptists in
Europe; the Anabaptists, now practically extinct, and the modern Baptists
whose churches are in nearly every European country and in all other
countries where white men reside.

I. THE ANABAPTISTS

The great spiritual movement of the 15th and 16th centuries had for its
most general characteristic, revolt against authority. This showed itself
not merely in the anti-papal reformation of Luther, but also in the
anti-feudal rising of the peasants and in a variety of anti-ecclesiastical
movements within the reformation areas themselves. One of the most notable
of these radical anti-ecclesiastical movements was that of the Zwickau
prophets, (Marcus Stuebner, Nikolaus Storch and Thomas Muenzer): the most
vigorous and notorious that of the Muenster Anabaptists. Although they have
been called the "harbingers" of the Anabaptists, the char