Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

Jones quotes a part of this from perhaps a better rendering. Maclaine, translator
of the edition from which I quote, says he has: “sometimes taken considerable
liberties with my author,” thus:
“Before the rise of Luther and Calvin there lay concealed, in almost all the
countries of Europe, persons who held tenaciously to the principles of the
modern Dutch Baptists.” f718
“Religions of the World,” by fifteen eminent scholars, whose names are given,
all, or near all, being Pedobaptists and Romanists, published by Gay Bros. Co.,
14 Barclay street, New York, 1884, says:
“Baptists claim a higher antiquity than the eventful era of the Reformation.
They offer proof in that their views of the church and the ordinances may be
traced through the Paterines, the Waldenses, the Albigenses, the Vaudoise, the
Cathari, and the Poor Men of Lyons, the Paulicians, the Donatists, the
Novatians, to the Messahians, the Montanists and the Euchites of the second
and closing part of the first century to the Apostles and the churches they
founded. … Their claim to this high antiquity it would seem is well founded,
for historians, not Baptists, and who could have no motive except fidelity to
facts, concede it.” f719
Samuel Schmucker says of the Baptists:
“As a sect they never existed … until the rise of Peter Waldo in the twelfth
century who established f717 the sect of the Waldenses among the mountains
of Piedmont. One of the most prominent doctrines of him and his followers
was the impropriety of the baptism of infants and necessity of immersion to
the validity of baptism.” f720
The Athenian Society, of England, over two hundred years ago, and made up
wholly of Pedobaptists, a Society pronounced equal to the famous Royal
Society of which it is said:
“All the endeavors of great men, of all nations and ages, from the beginning
of learning till this time, have not contributed so much to the increase of
learning as the Athenian Society.”
They commenced previous to 1790 a weekly periodical, called the Anthenian
Gazette which name was subsequently changed to the Athenian Oracle. This
work was conducted by a committee of twelve of their most competent men,
selected from the learned professions. Their volumes are quoted with
confidence as authorities by Hannah Adams and other distinguished writers. In
1691 this society was thrown into controversity with the Baptists, respecting
the antiquity of their church, and they affirmed that: “there never was a
separate and distinct congregation of Baptists until about three hundred years
after our Savior.” f721