Note 603 — Chapter II

The difference in treatment may be seen at a glance by comparing the articles on Anabaptism in the second (1877) and in the third (1896) edition of Herzog’s Realencyclopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche. Some eminent historians, however, still cling to old ideas; for example, Edward Armstrong, The Emperor Charles V. (London, 1902), who justifies the treatment his hero meted out to the Anabaptists—roasting them to death before slow fires—by saying that “whenever they momentarily gained the upper hand, they applied the practical methods of modern Anarchism or Nihilism to the professed principles of Communism” (ii. 342). No one who has examined the original sources could have penned such a sentence.