the same with ABAPTISTON. ANABAPTISTS, a name which has been indiscriminately applied to Christians of very different principles and practices; though many of them object to the denomination, and hold nothing in common, besides the opinion that baptism ought always to be performed by immersion, and not administered before the age of discretion.

The word Anabaptist is compounded of ἀνα, "new," and βάπτισμα, "a baptism;" and in this sense the Novatians, the Cataphrygians, and the Donatists, may be considered as a kind of Anabaptists in the earlier ages, though not then denoted by this name; for they contended, that those Christians of the catholic church who joined themselves to their respective parties should be rebaptized. But we must not clas under the same denomination those bishops of Asia and Africa, who, in the third century, maintained, that baptism administered by those whom they called heretics was not valid, and therefore that such of them as returned into their churches ought to be rebaptized. Nor do the English and Dutch Baptists consider the denomination as at all applicable to their sect; by whom the baptism appointed by Christ is held to be "nothing short of immersion, upon a personal profession of faith;" of which profession infants being incapable, and sprinkling being no adequate symbol of the thing intended, the baptizing of profelytes to their communion, who in their infancy had undergone the ceremony of sprinkling, cannot, it is urged, be interpreted a repetition of the baptismal ordinance.