Thomas Shepard, the Puritan minister of Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote an introduction to one of the anti-Baptist tracts and expressed concern that Baptist opinions would “gangrene far” if not met with a vigorous defense of infant baptism. Shepard declared that to deny baptism to infants was essentially to refuse God’s covenant blessing on one’s children. The Baptists, he wrote, condemned the finest Protestant churches as illegitimate and set up their own private assemblies, even if they had to use an uneducated man as a minister. They even indulged the “promiscuous prophecies” of
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