Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

Dr. Wall also says:
“France seems to have been the first country in the world in which baptism by
affusion was used ordinarily to persons in health, and in the public way of
administration. … From France it spread, but not until a good while after, into
Italy, Germany, Spain, etc., and last of all, into England.” f501
As late as John Wesley’s time, 1736:
“He refused to baptize, otherwise than by dipping, the child of Henry Parker,
unless the said Henry Parker and his wife could certify that the child was
weak and not able to bear dipping; and added to his refusal that, unless the
said parents would consent to have it dipped, it might die a heathen.” f502
To the universality of immersion in the Episcopal church, up to and at the
Reformation, like testimonies can be added almost ad infinitum. Surely, these,
which no authority contradicts, must be superabundant. Any one desiring more
testimonies is referred to Conant’s Baptizein, Robinson’s History of Baptism,
Edinburgh Encyclopedia, J.T. Christian on Baptism, etc.
In view of the foregoing, to say the Baptists of England, before, up to and at
the time of John Smyth, were not immersionists, involves the following
incredible things: First, that, though claiming to follow only the Bible, they
were not as obedient to it as the creed-ridden Episcopalians, who never
permitted affusion for adults, but only for sickly infants. Second, that we have
the strange somersaults of Baptists, who were then affusionists, becoming
immersionists, while Episcopalians, who were then immersionists, have
become affusionists! We, therefore, find the writers and others, who were
contemporaneous with the Baptists of England, in the sixteenth century,
universally, whenever they mention the matter, speaking of them as:
“Dippers.” Dr. Featley, one of their bitterest enemies, who eagerly seized on
anything he could to make them opprobrious, and who lived between 1582-
1645, and who wrote the bitter work entitled, “The Dippers Dipt; or, the
Anabaptists Plunged Over Head and Ears,” at a disputation in Southwark,
between 1641-1645 — in the language of Dr. Armitage —
“Never accuses the English Baptists of substituting dipping, or some other
practice which they had previously followed. He gives not one hint that in
England they had ever been anything else but ‘Dippers,’ an unaccountable
silence if they had practiced something else there within the previous fifty
years.” f503
Fuller knew the English Baptists only as immersionists. He says: “These
Anabaptists, for the main, are but ‘Donatists’ new dipped.” f504
Of John Smyth’s baptism, which bears on the point before us, Armitage says: