Note 100 — Chapter XI · THE REFORMATION, POLITICALLY CONSIDERED

On the one hand, an influential cleric, Orzechowski, who had married and turned Protestant, reconciled himself to Rome on the death of his wife, having already begun a fierce polemic against the Unitarian tendencies appearing on the Protestant side in the teaching of the Italian Stancari (1550); on the other hand, those tendencies gained head till they ruptured the party, of which the Trinitarian majority further quarrelled violently among themselves till, as in Hungary, many were driven back to the arms of Catholicism. In a Synod held in 1556, one Peter Goniondzki100 (Gonesius)—who as a Catholic had violently opposed Stancari in 1550, but in the interim had studied in Switzerland and turned Protestant—took up a more anti-Trinitarian position than Stancari’s, affirming three Gods, of whom the Son and the Spirit were subordinate to the Father. A few years later he declared against infant baptism—here giving forth opinions he had met with in Moravia; and he rapidly drew to him a considerable following alike of ministers and of wealthy laymen.101