II. RECOGNISED SECTS AND THEIR LEADERS.--In the general welter or anarchy of opinion there were, of course, vortices round particular centres, forming sects that either had, or might receive, definite names. Edwards, when systematizing his chaos of miscellaneous errors and blasphemies, apportions them among sixteen recognisable sorts of Sectaries; but old Ephraim Paget, who had preceded Edwards had been much more hazy. By jumbling the English Sectaries with all he could recollect of the German Sectaries of the Reformation and all he could hear of the Sects of New England, he had made his list of Sects and subdivisions of Sects mount up to two or three scores. Using Edwards and old Ephraim, with hints from Featley, Prynne, and Baillie, but trying to ascertain the facts for ourselves, we venture on the following synoptical view of English Sects and Sectaries in 1644-5:-- BAPTISTS, OR ANABAPTISTS:--These were by far the most numerous of the Sectaries. Their enemies (Featley, Paget, Edwards, Baillie, &c.) were fond of tracing them to the anarchical German Anabaptists of the Reformation; but they themselves claimed a higher origin. They maintained, as Baptists do still, that in the primitive or Apostolic Church the only baptism practised or heard of was that of adult believers, and that the form of the rite for such was immersion in water; and they maintained farther that the Baptism of Infants was one of those corruptions of Christianity against which there had been a continued protest by pure and forward spirits in different countries, in ages prior to Luther's Reformation, including some of the English Wycliffites, although the protest may have been repeated in a louder manner, and with wild admixtures, by the German Anabaptists who gave Luther so much trouble. Without going back, however, upon the Wycliffites, or even on the Anabaptists that were scattered through England in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, one may date the Baptists as we have now to do with them from the reign of James.----The first London congregation of _General Baptists_, or Baptists who favoured an Arminian theology, had been formed, as we have seen (Vol. II. p. 544), in 1611 out of the wrecks of John Smyth's English congregation of Amsterdam or Leyden, brought back into their native land by Smyth's successor Thomas Helwisse, assisted by John Murton. Although there are traces of this congregation for several years after that date, it seems to have melted away, or to have been crushed into extinction by the persecution of its members individually; so that the Baptists of whom we hear as existing in London, or dispersed through England, after the opening of the Long Parliament, appear to have been rather of the kind known as _Particular Baptists_, holding a Calvinistic theology, and generated out of the Independent congregations that had been established in London and elsewhere after Helwisse's and on different principles (Vol. II. pp.