96-1900);
G. Tumbuelt, _Die Wiedertaeufer_ (Bielefeld, 1899); _The Baptist Handbook_
(annually); _The Baptist World Congress_, 1905; _The Religious Census of
London_ (1904).

(N. H. M.)

4. _United States of America._--The first Baptist Church in America was
that founded in the Providence settlement on Narragansett Bay under the
leadership of Roger Williams (_q.v._). Having been sentenced to banishment
(October 1635) by the Massachusetts Court because of his persistence in
advocating separatistic views deemed unsettling and dangerous, to escape
deportation to England he betook himself (January 1636) to the wilderness,
where he was hospitably entertained by the natives who gave him a tract of
land for a settlement. Having been joined by a few friends from
Massachusetts, Williams founded a commonwealth in which absolute religious
liberty was combined with civil democracy. In the firm conviction that
churches of Christ should be made up exclusively of regenerate members, the
baptism of infants appeared to him not only valueless but a perversion of a
Christian ordinance. About March 1639, with eleven others, he decided to
restore believers' baptism and to form a church of baptized believers.
Ezekiel Holliman, who had been with him at Plymouth and shared his
separatist views, first baptized Williams and Williams baptized the rest of
the company. Williams did not long continue to find satisfaction in the
step he had taken. Believing that the ordinances and apostolic church
organization had been lost in the general apostasy, he became convinced
that it was presumptuous for any man or company of men to undertake their
restoration without a special divine commission. He felt compelled to
withdraw from the church and to assume the position of a seeker. He
continued on friendly terms with the Baptists of Providence, and in his
writings he expressed the conviction that their practice came nearer than
that of other communities to the first practice of Christ.

In November 1637 John Clarke (1609-1676), a physician, of religious zeal
and theological acumen, arrived at Boston, where, instead of the religious
freedom he was seeking, he found the dominant party in the Antinomian
controversy on the point of banishing the Antinomian minority, including
Mrs Anne Hutchinson (_q.v._) and her family, John Wheelwright (_c._
1592-1679), and William Coddington (1601-1678). Whether from sympathy with
the persecuted or aversion to the persecutors