SMYTH (or SMITH), JOHN (c. 157o-1612), English non conformist divine, commonly called the Se-baptist, was born about 157o, and was educated at Christ's college, Cambridge, where he proceeded M.A. in 1593. He was probably vicar of Hutton Cranswicke in the E. Riding of Yorkshire from 1593 to 1600, when he was elected lecturer or preacher of the city of Lincoln, an office of which he was deprived in Oct. 1602. Becom ing connected with the Separatist movement he joined the Gains borough church, and became its pastor'. With Thomas Helwys, John Murton (or Morton) and others, he migrated to Amsterdam at the end of 1607 to escape religious persecution, and in that city practised as a physician, and became the leader of "the second English church." (See CONGREGATIONALISM.) Under Mennonite influence he became a Baptist (see BAPTISTS). But he and his company were then faced by the dilemma that their own infant baptism did not count, and Smyth solved the problem by first baptizing himself (hence the name Se-Baptist), probably by affusion, and then administering the rite to Helwys and the others. Afterwards they decided to join the Mennonites, who
were suspicious of a man who had never held one position for long, and demanded a statement of doctrines, which he gave them in twenty articles written in Latin, and in The Last Book of John Smyth, called the Retractation of his Errors, together with a con fession of faith in ioo Propositions. Smyth himself died of con sumption in August 1612. Helwys and Morton returned to Eng land, and established the first English Baptist churches.
See J. H. Shakespeare, Baptist and Congregational Pioneers (London, 1906) ; H. M. Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims. (Lon don and Boston, 1906). (A. J. G.; X.)