Both Presbyterians and Independents adopted the practice of adult and of pædo-baptism by sprinkling. According to the Westminster Confession, “not only those that do actually profess faith in and obedience unto Christ, but also the infants of one or both believing parents are to be baptized.” John Owen remarks, as to the subjects of the rite--“The question is not whether all infants are to be baptized or not. For, according to the will of God, some are not to be baptized, even such whose parents are strangers from the covenant.”[239] Baxter adopted the same view.[240] So did Goodwin, but he considered that the child of a godly person, though not in fellowship with any Church, was entitled to the ordinance.[241] [Sidenote: DEVELOPMENT OF NONCONFORMITY.] Of the importance of a baptismal dedication of infants, Presbyterians and Independents held decided views. Some of the former spoke of the nature and advantages of the sacrament in terms which would be greatly modified by their successors,[242] even as the latter confined its administration within narrower limits than many of the former. The Baptists resembled the Independents in Church polity, except as it regards baptism. They were specially singled out for attack by the High Church party, and their extraordinary sufferings have never been forgotten by their successors. They could not but be winnowed by the winds of persecution. Forty-six Baptist Churches are said to have been in existence in London in the year 1646. The number of them represented at an assembly held in 1689 is but eleven.[243] Supposing the first of these statements to be exaggerated, and the second to be inadequate, allowing that in the former estimate some small groups of worshippers were counted as Churches, although not organized as such, and that there might be more Baptist Churches in London than were represented in the assembly held after the Restoration; further, taking into account the fact that the erection of larger places of worship, after liberty had been conceded, would absorb the fragmentary assemblies common when oppression was rife; still, the comparison even of these loose returns would indicate that the fact of the case is in accordance with the probability, and that Baptists, like Independents, declined somewhat in numerical power. Baptist Churches sprung out of Independent ones, as before, so after the days of Cromwell. For instance, in the year 1633, a number of Baptists in London, who had been members of an Independent Church, swarmed, and settled down into a distinct Baptist community,[244] and in 1667 a Baptist member of the Independent Church in Norwich withdrew from that society, and entered upon the task “of building another house for God.”[245]