At roughly the same time that Particular Baptists began to appear out of the Puritan and Congregational movements in Old England they show up in New England. Several men I have already introduced to you spent time in both places.

For example, Thomas Patient pastored not only in London, Ireland, and Bristol but was also in New England. He migrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s along with thousands of others seeking relief from religious conformity. While there, he concluded that infant baptist was unbiblical. This may have been as the result of hearing a series of sermons in favor of infant sprinkling. He claims in a later writing to not have known anyone to oppose it. But these sermons seem to have put doubts in his mind and he began to study the question. In any case by 1642 he was being accused in the Salem court records “of holding but also fomenting the error that baptism of infants is no ordinance of God and hindering his child from baptism. Gone away.” This makes it clear that he and his wife had at least one child and they refused to have him baptized. And it shows that he once again fled to a freer place from persecution. He eventually returned to Old England where his major work was to be sent to plant churches in Ireland.