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 act of the individual concerned, and could not possibly be accomplished for him by another. Infant baptism was therefore objectionable to them, not only because they found it to be neither taught by precept nor warranted by example in the Scriptures, but because it was essentially an impertinence, the anticipatory doing by others of that which it was alike the privilege and the duty of every believer to do for himself. As an act performed without faith, it was to them null and void. Hence they always resented the name Anabaptist (re-baptisers), and protested that it was a complete misnomer, since they administered the first and only real baptism—the baptism of a believer—and that the so-called baptism of an unbeliever is no baptism at all, but an empty and meaningless form. As Hübmaier pithily put it for all of them, "Water is not baptism, else the whole Danube were baptism, and the fishermen and boatmen would be daily baptised."

There was but one other principle on which all Anabaptists were agreed: the supremacy of the Scriptures as a rule of faith and practice. They rather assumed than asserted a doctrine of