Before we close this brief notice of the rise and early progress of the Baptist denomination, it may be remarked in connection with their conspicuous advocacy of the fullest religious toleration, that they furnish a striking example of the union of such advocacy with the maintenance of dogmatic Christianity in that which may be termed its most evangelical form. And, indeed, the same remark is applicable to many of the Independents. Nor can there be any question respecting the originality of the doctrines of religious liberty as held by the Baptists, for it is manifest that they derived them neither from the teaching of antiquity, nor from the writings of learned and gifted contemporaries. Their sentiments on the subject can by no means be considered as the expression of the genius and spirit of the age in which they lived: for intolerance was at the time all but universal in England and throughout the continent of Europe. So far as they were indebted to history for their principles of freedom, the debt was due to the sufferings of their fathers--for as Bayle says, the sect "boasts of a great number of martyrs: its martyrology is a large volume in folio."[231] And no doubt the discipline of pain in their own experience had a share in both their intellectual and moral culture, and that much of the grand lesson which they were enabled to teach had been learned in the school of affliction. The love of liberty and the endurance of oppression constituted the inheritance which they had derived from their spiritual ancestry. What has been said of the polity and discipline of Independents will apply generally to the polity and discipline of the Baptists. These two religious denominations substantially agreed with each other; the main and almost the only difference between them, having relation to the mode of Baptism, and to the recipients of the rite. When Baptist ministers held livings they stood in the same relation to the national establishment as did their fellow Congregationalists, admitting members, exercising discipline, and conducting their business quite independently of the political powers. [Sidenote: _Tombes--Jessy._]