Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

William R. Williams, says:
“Rastell, one of the judges of England in the days of Queen Mary, has
preserved in his Entrees legal documents, coming down, some of them, from
his grandfather, Sir John More, a justice of the King’s Bench, and father of
the illustrious chancellor, Sir Thomas More. In this volume, Rastell has
preserved a Latin writ, sending over to the bishop for judgment, according to
the canon law, three several groups of Lollards who all rejected infant
baptism. … One who had personally known Wickliffe and sympathized with
early Lollardism in England, but afterwards left that communion, gave as the
reason, that among other errors the Lollard followers of the Great Reformer at
Lutterworth rejected the baptism of infants.” f742
Of early English and other Baptists:
“They were the inheritors of the labors of Huss and Jerome, of British
Lollards, of Wickliffe and Waldo, and laborers yet earlier than these, whose
memories and whose rewards are safe with God whom they meekly and
faithfully served, and then went down unrecorded by their followers to a
forgotten or a dishonored grave.” f743
Whether Wickliffe was a full fledged Baptist may be a little doubtful; but that
he inherited the doctrine and the life of previous and contemporaneous
Baptists, and gave them a great movement forward is clear, filling England
with Baptist views and true Baptists. As Neal remarks:
“If Wickliffe himself did not pursue the consequence of his own doctrine so
far, yet many of his followers did, and were made Baptists by it. … All our
historians agree in affirming that the doctrine of Wickliffe spread very
extensively throughout the country; inasmuch that according to Knighton, a
contemporary historian, ‘more than half the people of England embraced
them and became his followers.’” f744
This is almost the equivalent to saying “more than half the people of England,”
following Wickliffe’s teachings to the consequences, became Baptist churches.
“That the denial of the rite of infants to baptism was a principle generally
maintained among the Lollards or followers of Wickliffe, is abundantly
confirmed by the historians of those times. Thomas Walden, who wrote
against Wickliffe, terms this reformer ‘one of several heads who arose out of
the bottomless pit for denying infant baptism, that heresies of the Lollards of
whom he was the ringleader.’” f745
Neal shows how Wickliffe received his doctrine by succession from the
Baptists before him:
“Walsingham, another writer says, ‘it was in the year 1381 that the damnable
heretic, John Wickliffe, received the cursed opinions of Berengarius,’ one of
which unquestionably was the denial of infant baptism.” f745