Title:                 Infant Baptism Maintained

This document, whose author is unnamed, is a record of a disputation that took place at Ashford in Kent on July 27, 1649 between Samuel Fisher (1605-65) and a group of ministers of the Church of England. The dispute concerned justification for baptizing infants. Fisher, a Baptist minister who later joined with the Quakers, argued against pedobaptism. The document is clearly biased in favor of infant baptism with quotes such as “wretched error of the Anabaptists” and “the Donatists of old [and] the Anabaptists of Germany are examples of God’s judgments.” Theologically speaking, the document references the ideas of limited atonement and predestination. In the Appendix, readers are referred to additional source information including Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.

The document is outlined as follows:

I.          Preface to the Christian Reader

II.         Propositions Agreed Upon

III.       Sum of the Disputation

IV.       Appendix to the Disputation

V.        A Short Discourse Concerning the Means of Opposing Heretics in Disputation and Preaching

Developed from review by Bill Hughes