THIRD DIVISION. History of the Development of the Church under Modern European Forms of Civilization. (continued 5)

§ 142.8. For Missions to the Heathen very little was done during this period. The reason of this indeed is not far to seek. The Lutheran church felt that home affairs had the first and in the meantime an all-engrossing claim upon her attention and energies. She had not the call which the Roman Catholic church had, in consequence of political and mercantile relations with distant countries, to prosecute missions in heathen lands, nor had she the means for conducting such enterprises as those on which the monkish orders were engaged. Yet we find the beginnings of a Lutheran mission even in this early period, for Gustavus Vasa of Sweden founded, in A.D. 1559, an association for carrying the gospel to the neglected and benighted Lapps.408

§ 143. The Inner Development of the Reformed Church.

The close connection which all Lutheran national churches had obtained in their possession of one common confession was wanting to the Reformed church, inasmuch as there each national church had drawn up its own confession. The victory of Calvinistic dogmatic over the Zwinglian in the Swiss mother church (§ 138, 7) was not without influence upon the other Reformed national churches; and Calvinism, partly in its entire stringency and severity, partly in a form more or less modified, without expressing itself in one common symbol, formed henceforth a bond of union and a common standard for attacks on Lutheran dogmatics. Quite similar was the origin of the divergence that arose between Zwinglianism and Calvinism in the department of the ecclesiastical constitution. In this case also the victory was with the Calvinistic organization. Its ideal embraced the restoration of the primitive apostolic presbyterial and synodal constitution, together with the church’s unconditional independence of the State. This proved much more acceptable than the theory which, under Zwingli’s auspices, had been adopted in German Switzerland, according to which church government and the administration of discipline were put in the hands of the Christian civil magistrates. A rigid system of ecclesiastical penitential discipline, however, was on all sides applied to the public and private lives of all church members. Under such discipline the community came generally to present a picture of singularly pure and correct morality, and not infrequently we see exhibited a remarkable development of high moral character. It fostered the noble confidence of the martyr spirit, which indeed only too often ran out into extremes and made an unjustifiable use of Old Testament precedents and patterns.―In reference to worship, the Reformed church, with its simplest possible form of service, stripped of all pomp and ceremony, presents the most thorough and marked contrast to the gorgeous and richly ceremonial worship of the Roman Catholic church.―Yet the episcopal Anglican national church (§ 139, 6), in almost all particulars relating to constitution, worship, discipline, and customs, completely severed its connection with the distinctive characteristics of the Reformed church, and allied itself to the traditional forms and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic church. On the other hand, in reference to dogma it approaches in its mediating attitude nearer in several respects to the view of the Lutheran church. But all the more rigidly and exclusively did the Puritans who separated themselves from the Anglican church, as well as the strict Presbyterian church of Scotland, appropriate, and even carry out to further extremes, the rigorism of the Genevan model in regard both to worship and to doctrine.

§ 143.1. The Ecclesiastical Constitution.―Just as in the Lutheran church, the ecclesiastical leaders had been driven by necessity to submit to the so-called super-episcopate of the princes, it also happened here in German Switzerland that, under pressure of circumstances, this power, as well as church discipline and infliction of ecclesiastical censures, was put in the hands of the magistrates. By order of Zwingli and Œcolampadius there were founded in Zürich, in A.D. 1528, and in Basel in A.D. 1530, synods to be held yearly for church visitation. These were to be attended by all the pastors of the city and district, and one or more honourable men should be appointed from each congregation, in order to take up and dispose of any complaints that might be made against the life and doctrine of their pastors. But the intention of both reformers to give this institution a controlling influence in church government and ecclesiastical organization was thwarted in consequence of the jealousy with which the ruling magistrates clung to the authority that had been assigned them in ecclesiastical matters. In Geneva, on the contrary, Calvin’s unbending energy succeeded, after long and painful contendings (§ 138, 3, 4), in transferring from the magistrates the government of the church, together with church discipline and the imposition of censures, to which here also they laid claim, to a consistory founded by him, composed of six pastors and twelve lay elders or presbyters, which was supreme in its own domain, and free from all interference on the part of the civil authorities, while the magistrates were bound to execute civil penalties upon those excommunicated by the ecclesiastical tribunal. The introduction of this presbyterial constitution into Reformed national churches of large extent must have contributed to their further extension and to the maintenance of the national church unity. At the head of each congregation now stood a presbytery, called in French consistoire, composed of pastor and elders, the latter having been chosen either directly by the congregation, or by the local magistrate in accordance with the votes of the congregation, subsequently they were also allowed to add to their own number. Then, again, the presbyters of a particular circuit were grouped into so-called classes, with a moderator chosen for the occasion; and then, also, an annual classical synod, consisting of one pastor and one lay elder chosen from each of the presbyteries. In a similar way, at longer intervals, or just as necessity called for it, provincial synods were convened, composed of deputies from several classical synods; and from its members were chosen representatives to the general or national synod, which constituted the highest legislative authority for the whole national church.409

§ 143.2. Public Worship.―Zwingli wished at first to do away with church bells, organ playing, and church psalmody, and even Calvin would not tolerate altars, crucifixes, images, and candles in the churches. These he regarded as contrary to the Divine law revealed in the decalogue, inasmuch as the commandment that properly stood second as a distinct and separate statute, though it had slipped out of the enumeration usual among the Catholics and Lutherans, was understood to forbid the use of images. The churches were reduced to bare and unadorned places for prayer and assembly rooms for preaching, and simple communion tables took the place of altars. Kneeling, as savouring of ceremonialism, was discountenanced; the breaking of bread was again introduced in the administration of the Lord’s Supper as forming an important part of the symbolism; private confession was abolished; exorcism at baptism, as well as baptism in emergencies as a necessary thing, was discontinued; the liturgy was reduced to simple prayers spoken, not sung, and from a literalist purism the usual Vater unser was changed into Unser Vater. The festivals were reduced to the smallest number possible, and only the principal Christian feasts were celebrated, Christmas, Easter, Pentecost; while the Sunday festival was observed with almost the Old Testament strictness of Sabbath keeping.―In securing the introduction of psalmody into the worship of the German Reformed church, John Zwick, pastor at Constance, who died in A.D. 1542, was particularly active. In A.D. 1536 he published a small psalmody, with some Bible psalms set to Lutheran melodies. At Calvin’s request, Clement Marot set a good number of the Psalms to popular French airs in A.D. 1541-1543; Beza completed it, and then Calvin introduced this French psalter into the church of Geneva. Claude Goudimel (§ 149, 15) in A.D. 1562 published sixteen of these psalms with four-part harmonies. He was murdered in the massacre of St. Bartholomew at Lyons, in A.D. 1572. A professor of law at Königsberg, Ambrose Lobwasser, in A.D. 1573 made an arrangement of the Psalter in the German language after the style of Marot. This psalter, notwithstanding its poetical deficiencies, continued in use for a long time in Germany and Switzerland. Zwingli’s aversion to congregational singing was given effect to only in Zürich, but even there the service of praise was introduced by a decree of the council in A.D. 1598. In the other German Swiss cantons they did not confine themselves to the use of the Psalms, but adopted unhesitatingly spiritual songs by both Reformed and Lutheran poets. Among the former, who neither in number nor in ability could approach the latter, the most important were John Zwick and Ambrose Blaurer (§ 133, 3). It was only in the seventeenth century that the Lutheran sister church abandoned her rigid adherence to the exclusive use of Lobwasser’s psalms in congregational singing, when the rise of Pietism, and afterwards the spread of rationalism, overcame this narrow-mindedness.410

§ 143.3. The English Puritans.―The Reformation under Elizabeth (§ 139, 6), with its Lutheranizing doctrinal standpoint and Catholicizing forms of constitution and worship, had been sanctioned in A.D. 1559 by the Act of Uniformity in the exercise of the royal supremacy that was claimed over the whole ecclesiastical institutions of the country. But the Protestants who had fled from the persecutions of Bloody Mary and had returned in vast troops when Elizabeth ascended the throne brought with them from their foreign resorts, in Switzerland from Geneva, Zürich, Basel, in Germany from Strassburg, Frankfort, Emden, entirely different notions about the nature of genuine evangelical Christianity; and now with all the assumption of confessors they sought to have these ideas realized in their native land. Inspired for the most part with the rigorist spirit of the Genevan Reformation, they desired, instead of the royal supremacy, to have the independence of the church proclaimed, and instead of the hierarchical episcopal system a presbyterial constitution with strict church discipline, arranged in accordance with the Genevan model. They also gave a one-sided prominence to the formal principle of the Holy Scripture, adhered rigidly to the doctrinal theory of Calvin and to a mode of worship as bare as possible, stripped of every vestige of popish superstition, such as priestly dress, altars, candles, crucifixes, sign of the cross, forms of prayer, godfathers, confirmation, kneeling at the sacrament, bowing the head at the mention of the name of Jesus, bells, organs, etc. On account of their opposition to the Act of Uniformity, these were designated Nonconformists or Dissenters. They were also called Puritans, because they insisted upon an organization of the church purified from every human invention, and ordered strictly in accordance with the word of God. Their principles, which were enunciated first of all in private conventicles, found a very wide acceptance amongst ministers and people. This movement proved too strong to be suppressed, even by the frequent deprivation and banishment of the ministers, or the fining and imprisonment of their adherents. Amid the severity of persecution and oppression Puritanism continued to grow, and in A.D. 1572 numerous separatist congregations provided themselves with a presbyterial and synodal constitution; the former for the management of the affairs of particular congregations, the latter for the settlement of questions affecting the whole church. Specially offensive to the queen, and therefore strictly forbidden by her and rigorously suppressed, were the prophesyings introduced into many English churches after the pattern of the prophesyings of the church of Zürich. These were week-day meetings of the congregation, at which the Sunday sermons were further explained and illustrated from Scripture by the preachers, and applied to the circumstances and needs of the church of that day.411

§ 143.4. Even before the sixteenth century had come to an end an ultra-puritan tendency had been developed, the adherents of which were called Brownists, from their leader Robert Brown. As chaplain of the Duke of Norfolk, he was brought into contact at Norwich with Dutch Anabaptist refugees; and stirred up by them, he began a violent and bitter polemic, not only against the Cæsaro-papism and episcopacy of the State church, but also against the aristocratic element in the presbyterial and synodal constitution. He taught that church and congregation were to be completely identified; that every separate congregation, because subject to no other authority than that of Christ and His word, has the right of independently arranging and administering its own affairs according to the decisions of the majority. Having been cast into prison, but again liberated through the powerful influence of his friends, he retired in A.D. 1581 to Holland, and founded a small congregation there at Middleburg in Zealand. When this soon became reduced to a mere handful, he returned to England in A.D. 1589, and there renewed his agitation; but afterwards submitted to the hierarchical State church, and died in A.D. 1630 in the enjoyment of a rich living. After his apostasy, the jurist Henry Barrow took his place as leader of the Brownists, who still numbered many thousands, and were now called after him Barrowists. Persecuted by the government and harassed by severe measures from A.D. 1594, whole troops of them retreated to the Netherlands, where in several of the principal cities they formed considerable congregations, and issued, in A.D. 1598, their first symbolical document, “The Confession of Faith of certain English People exiled.”―The second founder of the party, a more trustworthy leader and more vigorous apologist, was the pastor John Robinson, who, in A.D. 1608, with his Norwich congregation settled at Amsterdam, and in A.D. 1610 moved to Leyden. He died in A.D. 1625. The fundamental points in the constitution under his leadership were these:

Complete equality of all the members of the church among themselves, and consequently the setting aside of all clerical prerogatives;

Thorough subordination of the college of presbyters to the will of the majority of the congregation, from which circumstance they obtained the name of Congregationalists; and

The perfect autonomy of separate congregations and their independence alike of every civil authority and of every synodal judicature, from which characteristic they obtained the name of Independents.

Synodal assemblies were allowed merely for the purpose of mutual consultation and advice, and when so restricted were regarded as beneficial. With this end in view a Congregational board was appointed to sit in London, which formed a common centre of union. And as in constitution, so also in worship there was a complete breach made with all the traditions and developments of church history. With the exception of Sunday all feast days were abolished. In the assemblies for public worship each individual had the right of free speech for the edification of the congregation. All liturgical formularies and prescribed prayers, even the Lord’s Prayer not excepted, were set aside, as hindering the mission of the Holy Spirit in the congregation.―In order to preserve for their descendants the sacred heritage of their faith, and their native English language and nationality, and in order to save them from the moral dangers to which they were exposed in large cities, but to an equal extent at least inspired by the wish to break new ground for the kingdom of God in the New World, many of their families set out, in A.D. 1620, from Holland for North America, and there, as “Pilgrim Fathers,” amid indescribable hardships, established a colony in the wastes of Massachusetts, and laid the foundations of that Congregational denomination which has now grown into so powerful and influential a church.412

§ 143.5. Theological Science.―In A.D. 1523, the grand council at Zürich set up the peculiar institution of prophesying (1 Cor. xiv. 29) or biblical conferences. Pastors along with students, as well as certain scholars specially called for the purpose, were required to meet together every morning, with the exception of Sundays and Fridays, in the choir of the cathedral, where, after a short opening prayer, public exegetical expositions of the Old Testament were given in the regular order of books and chapters, with a strict and detailed comparison of the Vulgate, the LXX. and the original text; and then at the close one of the professors stated the results of the conference in a practical discourse for the edification of the congregation. At a later period theological studies flourished at Geneva and Basel, in the French church at the academy of Saumur and the theological seminaries of Montauban, Sedan, and Montpellier. Sebastian Münster, formerly at Heidelberg, afterwards at Basel, issued, in A.D. 1523, a complete Hebrew lexicon. The Zürich theologians, Leo Judä and others, in A.D. 1524-1529 translated Luther’s Bible into the Swiss dialect, making, however, an independent revision in accordance with the original text. At the instigation of the Waldensians, Robert Olivetan of Geneva (§ 138, 1) undertook, in A.D. 1535, a translation of the Holy Scriptures from the original into the French language; but in so far as the New Testament is concerned he followed almost literally the translation of Faber (§ 120, 8). In subsequent editions it was in various particulars greatly improved, although even to this day it remains very unsatisfactory. Theodore Beza gave an improved recension of the New Testament text and a new Latin translation of it. Sebastian Münster edited the Old Testament text with an independent Latin translation. Also Leo Judä in Zürich undertook a similar work, for which he was well qualified by a competent knowledge of languages. Sebastian Castellio in Geneva endeavoured to make the prophets and apostles speak in classical Latin and in full Ciceronian periods. Most successful was the Latin translation of the Old Testament which Immanuel Tremellius at Heidelberg, in connection with his son-in-law Francis Junius, produced. John Piscator, dismissed from Heidelberg under the Elector Louis VI. (§ 144, 1), from A.D. 1584 professor in the academy founded at Herborn during that same year, published a new German translation of the Bible, which was authoritatively introduced into the churches at Bern and in other Reformed communities. Commentators on Holy Scripture were also numerous during this age. Besides Calvin, who far outstrips them all (§ 138, 5), the following were distinguished for their exegetical performances: Zwingli, Œcolampadius, Conrad Pellican (§ 120, 4 footnote), Theodore Beza, Francis Junius, John Piscator, John Mercer, and the Frenchman Marloratus.―As a dogmatist Calvin, again beyond all question occupies the very front rank. In speculative power and thorough mastery of his materials he excels all his contemporaries. Leo Judä’s catechisms, two in German and one in Latin, in which the scholar puts the question and the teacher gives the answer and explanation, continued long in use in the Zürich church. Among the German Reformed theologians Andrew Hyperius of Marburg, who died in A.D. 1564, takes an honourable place as an exegete by his expositions of the Pauline epistles, as a dogmatist by his Methodus theologiæ, as a homilist by his De formandis concionibus s., and as the first founder of theological encyclopædia by his De recte formando theolog. studio.―The pietistic efforts of the English Puritan party found a fit nursery in the University of Cambridge, where William Whitaker, who died in A.D. 1598, the author of Catechismus s. institutio pietatis, and especially William Perkins, who died in A.D. 1602, author of De casibus conscientiæ, besides many other English works of edification, laboured unweariedly in endeavouring to infuse a pious spirit into the theological studies. Both were also eager and enthusiastic supporters of the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination; but the attempt, through the “Nine Lambeth Articles,” laid before Archbishop Whitgift in his palace in A.D. 1598, and accepted and approved by him, to make this doctrine an absolute doctrinal test for the university was frustrated by the decided veto of Queen Elizabeth.―Continuation, § 160, 6.

§ 143.6. Philosophy.―For the formal scientific construction of systematic theology the Aristotelian dialectic, as the heritage bequeathed by the mediæval scholasticism, continued to exercise upon the occupants of the Reformed professorial chairs, as well as in Lutheran seminaries, a dominating influence far down into the seventeenth century. To emancipate philosophy, and with it also in the same degree theology, from these fetters, which hindered every free movement, and inaugurate a simpler scientific method, was an attempt made first of all by Peter Ramus, who from A.D. 1551 was professor of dialectic and rhetoric in Paris, distinguished also as a polyhistor, humanist, and mathematician, and diligent in disseminating his views from the platform and by the press. As he had openly declared himself a Calvinist, he had repeatedly to seek refuge in flight. After a long residence in Switzerland and Germany, where he gained many adherents, who were known by the name of Ramists, he thought that after the Peace of St. Germain (§ 139, 15), in A.D. 1571, he might with safety return to Paris; but there, in A.D. 1572, he fell a victim to Romish fanaticism on the night of St. Bartholomew.―Continuation, § 163, 1.

§ 143.7. The Reformed church made one missionary attempt in A.D. 1557. A French adventurer, Villegagnon, laid before Admiral Coligny a plan for the colonization of the persecuted Huguenots in Brazil. With this proposal there was linked a scheme for conducting a mission among the heathen aborigines. He sailed under Coligny’s patronage in A.D. 1555 with a number of Huguenot artisans, and founded Fort Coligny at Rio de Janeiro. At his request Calvin sent him two Geneva pastors in A.D. 1557. The intolerable tyranny which Villegagnon exercised over the unprotected colonists, the failure of their efforts among the natives, famine, and want impelled them in the following year to seek again their native shores, which they reached after a most disastrous voyage. All were not able to secure a place in the returning ships, and even of those who started several died of starvation on the way.―Continuation, § 161, 7.413

§ 144. Calvinizing of German Lutheran National Churches.

The Cryptocalvinist controversies conducted with such party violence proved indeed in vain so far as winning over to Philippist Calvinism the Lutheran church as a whole was concerned (§ 141, 10, 13); but they did not succeed in hindering, but rather fostered and advanced, the public adoption of the Reformed Confession on the part of several national churches in Germany or their being driven by force to accept the Calvinistic constitution and creed. The first instance of a procedure of this sort is to be found in the Palatinate. It was followed by Bremen, Anhalt, and in the beginning of the next century by Hesse Cassel and the electoral dynasty of Brandenburg (§ 154, 3).

§ 144.1. The Palatinate, A.D. 1560.―Tilemann Hesshus, formerly the scholar and devoted admirer of Melanchthon, had been banished by the magistrates as a disturber of the peace from Goslar, and then from Rostock, on account of his reckless and severe administration of church discipline. At Melanchthon’s recommendation, the Elector Ottheinrich of the Palatinate called him as professor and general superintendent to Heidelberg, in A.D. 1558. Here he came into collision with his deacon William Klebitz. The latter had produced, on the occasion of his receiving his bachelor’s degree, a thesis in which he vindicated a Calvinizing theory of the Lord’s Supper, whereupon Hesshus condemned and suspended him, in A.D. 1559. But Klebitz would not move. Passion on both sides developed into senseless fury, which found expression in the pulpit and at the altar. The new elector, Frederick III. the Pious, A.D. 1559-1576, sent both into exile, and obtained an opinion from Melanchthon, which advised him to hold by the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians x. 16, “the bread is the communion of the body of Christ.” The elector, who had long been favourably inclined to the Reformed doctrine and worship, now introduced, in A.D. 1560, into all the churches of his domains a Reformed order of service, had altars, baptismal fonts, images, and even organs removed from the churches, filled the professors’ chairs with foreign Calvinistic teachers, and in A.D. 1562 had the “Heidelberg Catechism” composed by two Heidelberg professors, Zach. Ursinus and Gaspar Olevianus, for use in the schools throughout his territories.414 In respect of that simplicity which befits a popular manual, in power and spirituality, it is not to be compared to Luther’s “Short Catechism,” but it is certainly distinguished by learning, theological genius, Christian fervour, and moderate, peaceful spirit, and deserves in an eminent degree the acceptance which it has found, not only among the German, but also among the foreign Reformed churches. Calvin’s doctrine of predestination is avoided, and his theory of the Lord’s Supper is taught in a form approaching as near as possible to the Lutheran view, but the Roman Catholic mass is characterized as execrable idolatry. The introduction of this catechism, however, completed the severance of the Palatinate from the Lutheran church. Brenz in Stuttgart attacked its doctrine of the supper; Bullinger in Zürich and Beza in Geneva defended it with passionate eagerness; and the conference arranged by the elector to be held at Maulbronn, in A.D. 1564, between the theologians of the Palatinate and of Württemberg, during its six days’ discussions increased the bitterness of parties, and made the split perpetual. The Lutheran German states, irritated by the secession of the elector, complained of him to the Diet of Augsburg, in A.D. 1564, that he had broken the religious Peace of Augsburg by the forcible introduction of Calvinism. He answered in defence, that he had not himself read Calvin’s works, and was therefore not in a position to know what Calvinism was; that at Naumburg, in A.D. 1561 (§ 141, 11), he had subscribed the Augustana, more correctly the Variata, and still adhered to the confession he then made. The diet then did not venture to interfere with him, and was satisfied with a simple expression of disapproval. By the introduction of presbyteries by the order of the elector, in A.D. 1570, for the administration of church discipline, Olevianus embroiled himself in controversy with the electoral councillor and professor of medicine at Heidelberg, Thomas Erastus (§ 117, 4), who would much rather have the Zürich church order introduced (§ 143) than the Zwinglian theory of the supper. This idea he very persistently pressed, but without success. Although himself a member of the ecclesiastical council, he yet fell under its ban, along with Neuser and Sylvanus (§ 148, 3) as suspected of unitarianism, but this charge has never been proved against him. In A.D. 1510 he settled in Basel, and died there, in A.D. 1583, as professor of moral philosophy. His controversial treatise, “Explicatio gravissimæ quæstionis, utrum excommunicatio mandato nitatur divino, an excogitata sit ab hominibus,” was published after his death. Beza answered in two dissertations: “De presbyteriis” and “De excommunicatione.” Notice of his theory was now taken in England and Scotland, and among the names of sects in these countries during the seventeenth century we find that of Erastians. At this very day all subordinating of church government under the authority of the State is commonly styled Erastianism.415―The reign of Louis VI., A.D. 1576-1583, a zealous friend of the Formula of Concord, was of too short duration to secure the complete restoration of Lutheranism throughout his dominions. The count-palatine, John Casimir, who conducted the government as regent during the minority, systematically drove out all Lutheran pastors and trained up his ward Frederick IV. in Calvinism.―Continuation, § 153, 3.

§ 144.2. Bremen, A.D. 1562.―In Bremen the cathedral preacher, Albert Rizæus von Hardenberg, long lay under suspicion of favouring the Zwinglian theory of the sacraments. He publicly repudiated the Lutheran doctrine of the ubiquity of the body of Christ, which his colleague John Timann had defended in his treatise, “Farrago sententiarum ... de cœna Domini,” of A.D. 1555. Upon this there began a lively controversy between them. All the pastors took Timann’s side, but Hardenberg had a powerful supporter in the burgomaster Daniel van Büren, and an opinion obtained from Melanchthon in A.D. 1557 also favoured him by counselling concession. Through his refusal to subscribe a confession of faith in reference to the supper submitted to him by the council, the excitement in Bremen was increased, and spread from thence over all the provinces of Lower Saxony. Timann died in A.D. 1557. His place as champion of the Lutheran doctrine of the supper was taken by Hesshus, who had been driven out of Heidelberg in A.D. 1559, and had almost immediately afterward been called to Bremen. He challenged Hardenberg to a public disputation, which, however, did not come off, because the new Archbishop of Bremen, Duke George of Brunswick-Lüneberg [Lüneburg], forbade Hardenberg to take part in it, and instead of this brought the matter before the league of the cities of Lower Saxony. The league held a provincial diet at Brunswick, in A.D. 1561, where Hardenberg was removed from his office, yet without detracting from his honour. He went now to Oldenburg, and died in A.D. 1574 as pastor at Emden. Hesshus had left Bremen in A.D. 1560, having accepted a call to Magdeburg, and from thence continued his controversy with Hardenberg. His successor in Bremen, Simon Musæus, no less passionately than he insisted upon the expulsion of all adherents of Hardenberg, and had indeed managed to get the council to agree to the proposal when things took a turn in an altogether different direction. Büren, in spite of all opposition, became the chief burgomaster in A.D. 1562. Musæus and other twelve pastors were now expelled, and also the councillors who were in favour of Lutheranism felt that they could do nothing else than quit the city. By foreign mediation an understanding was come to in A.D. 1568, by which those who had been driven out were allowed to return to the city, but not to their offices. All the churches of Bremen, with the exception of the cathedral, which obtained a Lutheran pastor again in A.D. 1568, continued in the possession of the Reformed party.―But Hesshus was in A.D. 1562 expelled also from Magdeburg, as well as afterwards from his position as court preacher in Neuburg, in A.D. 1569, and from his professorship at Jena in A.D. 1573 (§ 141, 10), on account of his passionate and violent polemics. He was also expelled from his bishopric of Samland, in A.D. 1577, as a teacher of error, because he had ascribed omnipotence, etc., to the human nature of Christ etiam in abstracto. He died in A.D. 1588 as professor in Helmstadt.

§ 144.3. Anhalt, A.D. 1597.―After the death of Prince Joachim Ernest four Anhalt dynasties were formed by his sons, Dessau, Bemburg, Köthen, Zerbst. John George, first head of the family of Anhalt-Dessau, reigned on behalf of his brothers, who had not yet come of age, from A.D. 1587 till A.D. 1603, and married a daughter of John Casimir, the count-palatine. After having refused to sign the Formula of Concord, he began the Calvinization of the land in A.D. 1589 by striking out the exorcism, and then, in A.D. 1596, he put the Reformed church order in place of the Lutheran. Soon after this Luther’s catechism was set aside, and in A.D. 1597 a document was produced, consisting of twenty-eight Calvinistic articles with a modified doctrine of predestination, which all the pastors under pain of banishment from the country, were required to subscribe. The most active agents in this movement were Caspar Peucer (§ 141, 10), who had been expelled from Wittenberg, and the superintendent Wolfgang Amling of Zerbst. In A.D. 1644, however, Anhalt-Zerbst returned to the old Lutheran Confession, under Prince John, who had been trained up by his mother in the Lutheran faith.

III. The Deformation.

§ 145. Character of the Deformation.

That in a spiritual movement so powerful as that which the Reformation called forth enthusiasts and extremists of various sorts should seek to push forward their fancies and vagaries is nothing more than might have been expected. But that such excrescences are not to be charged against the Reformation, as constituting an essential part of it, may be shown from the way in which the Reformation and the Deformation are constantly put in antagonism with one another. The starting point is clearly the same in the one case as in the other; namely, opposition to and revolt against the debased condition of the church of the age. But the Reformation distinguishes itself completely from the very first from the Deformation, often joins its forces even with those of Catholicism in order to secure the overthrow of what it regarded as a false and dangerous development; and so generally we find the champions of that movement manifesting as bitter a hatred toward the Protestant reformers as toward the Romanists. Its origin is to be explained by the tendency inherent in human nature, when once embarked on a course of opposition, to rush to the extreme of radicalism, which showed itself in this case partly in the form of rationalism, partly in the form of mysticism. The Reformation recognised the word of God in Holy Scripture as the only rule and standard in matters of religion, and as a judge and arbiter over tradition. The rationalistic spirit in the deformatory movement, on the other hand, subordinates Holy Scripture to reason, and estimates revealed truth in accordance with the supposed requirement of logical thought. The Reformation offers opposition to the Catholic deification of the church, but the Deformation goes the length of contesting the divinity of Christ (Antitrinitarians and Unitarians). On the other hand, the mystical side of the Deformation, which not infrequently amounts to a more or less clearly expressed pantheism, may be regarded as an extreme and exaggerated statement of the reformers’ demand for a more spiritual conception of the religious life in opposition to the externalism of Romanism. It places alongside of the word as expressed in Holy Scripture what it calls an inner illumination by the Holy Spirit as an equally high or even a higher kind of revelation, despises the sacraments, as well as all public or external forms of Divine worship. A third deformatory tendency, and that indeed which during the Reformation era was most powerful, is represented by Anabaptism. The ultra-reformatory endeavours of the movement aimed, not only at directing the private and ecclesiastical life of the individual Christian, but also at reconstructing, according to what it regarded as the apostolic standard, the whole fabric of the social and civil life. It derived its name from the demand for rebaptism which was made as a consequence of the denial of the usefulness and validity of infant baptism. This was, indeed, the one common term of its confession, in which its members, giving way in many directions to individualistic subjective peculiarities, were required to agree. Adult baptism was thus made the characteristic note of their community as a distinct sect.

The Catholic notions prevailing during the Middle Ages as to the manner in which heretics ought to be treated were so firmly held by the Protestants, that even Calvin without hesitation, in A.D. 1553, delivered over one who denied the doctrine of the Trinity (§ 148, 2) to be punished by the civil authorities. Their sentence of death by fire at the stake was carried out under his sanction and that of almost all the notable reformers of the day, Bullinger and Farel, Beza and Viret, Œcolampadius, Bucer, and Peter Martyr, even Melanchthon and Urbanus Rhegius. At an earlier period indeed Luther had occasionally, roused to indignation by what he beheld of the horrors of the Inquisition, opposed the idea that heretics as such should be punished with torture and death, and gradually he secured the victory in Protestant theory and practice for the view that heretics as such should neither be compelled to retract nor be put to death, but rather should be brought to a better mind and put out of the way of doing harm by imprisonment or banishment.

§ 146. Mysticism and Pantheism.

Besides the true evangelical mysticism within the church, which Luther throughout his whole life esteemed very highly as a deepening of the Christian religious life, and which the Lutheran church had never ruled out of its pale, an unevangelical as well as thoroughly anti-ecclesiastical mysticism broke out at a very early period in quite a multitude of different forms. In the case of Schwenkfeld this tendency, though characterized by very decided hostility to the church, occupied an advantageous position, as well by the attitude which it assumed to theology as from the quiet and sober manner in which it conducted its propaganda. Agrippa and Paracelsus are representatives of a mysticism with a basis in natural philosophy, which was wrought out into fantastic forms by Valentine Weigel in his theosophy. Sebastian Franck drew his mysticism from the fountains of Eckhart’s and Tauler’s writings; and Giordano Bruno, by his wild, almost delirious mysticism, culminating in the boldest pantheism, won for himself the fiery stake. The French Libertins spirituels embraced a sublime antinomian pantheism, while the Familists, who appeared at a later period in England, were banded together in the service of an apotheosis of love like the members of one family.

§ 146.1. Schwenkfeld and his Followers.―Among the mystics of the Reformation period hostile to the church, Caspar Schwenkfeld, a Silesian nobleman of an old family, of the line of Ossingk, holds a prominent and honourable place as a man of deep and genuine piety. At first he attached himself with enthusiasm to the Wittenberg Reformation; but as it advanced his heart, which was exclusively set upon an inward, mystical Christianity, became dissatisfied. In A.D. 1525 he met personally with Luther at Wittenberg. The friendly relations that were maintained there, notwithstanding all the divergences that became apparent on fundamental matters and in the way of looking at things, soon gave place on Schwenkfeld’s side to open antagonism. He expressed himself strongly in reference to his dissatisfaction with the Wittenberg reformers, saying that he would rather join the papists than the Lutherans. Even in A.D. 1528 he had been expelled from his native land, and now began operations at Strassburg, where Bucer opposed him; and then, in A.D. 1534, in Swabia, where he encountered the vigorous opposition of Jac. Andreä. In every place he set himself in direct antagonism, not only to the German, but also to the Swiss reformers, and engaged in incessant controversies with the theologians, working steadily in the interests of a reformation in accordance with his own peculiar views. He died in A.D. 1561 at Ulm, and left behind him in Swabia and Silesia a handful of followers, who, in A.D. 1563, issued a complete edition of the “Christian Orthodox Books and Writings of the Noble and Faithful Man, Caspar Schwenkfeld,” in four folio volumes. Expelled from Silesia in A.D. 1728, many of them fled into the neighbouring state of Lausitz, others to Pennsylvania in North America, where they found some small communities. What Schwenkfeld so keenly objected to in the Lutheran Reformation was nothing else than its firm biblico-ecclesiastical objectivity. Luther’s adherence to the unconditional authority of the word of God he declared to be a worship of the letter. He himself gave to the inner word of God’s Spirit in men a place superior to the outward word of God in Scripture. All external institutions of the church met with his most uncompromising opposition. In a manner similar to that of Osiander (§ 141, 2), he identified justification and sanctification, and explained it as an incarnation of Christ in the believer. Rejecting the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum, he taught a thorough “deifying of the flesh of Christ,” having its foundation in the birth by the Virgin Mary, regenerated in faith and completed by suffering, death, and resurrection; so that in His state of exaltation His Divine and human natures are perfectly combined into one. Infant baptism he condemned, and affirmed that a regenerate person can live without sin. In the Lord’s Supper according to him everything depended upon the inward operation of the Spirit. The bread in the sacrament is only a symbol of the spiritual truth that Christ is the true bread for the soul. He laid special emphasis on John vi. 51, and regarded the τοῦτο of the words of institution not as the subject but as the predicate: “My body is this;” i.e. is bread unto eternal life.416

§ 146.2. Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Weigel.―Agrippa von Nettesheim, who died in A.D. 1535, a man of extensive and varied scholarship, who boasted of his knowledge of secret things, led an exceedingly changeful and adventurous career as a statesman and soldier, taught medicine, theology, and jurisprudence, lashed the monks with his biting satires, so that they had him persecuted as a heretic, contended against the belief in witchcraft, exposed mercilessly in his treatise De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum the weak points of the dominant scholasticism, and in opposition to it wrought out in his book De occulta philosophia his own system of cabbalistic mystical philosophy.―A man of a quite similar type was the learned Swiss physician Philip Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus of Hohenheim, who died in A.D. 1541; a man of genius and a profound thinker, but with an ill-regulated imagination and an over-luxuriant fancy, which led him to profess that he had found the solution of all the mysteries of the Divine nature, as well as of terrestrial and super-terrestrial nature, and that he had discovered the philosopher’s stone. These two continued to retain their position within the limits of the Catholic church.―Valentine Weigel, on the contrary, who died in A.D. 1588, was a Lutheran pastor at Schopau in Saxony, universally respected for his consistent, godly character and his earnest, devoted labours. His mystico-theosophical tendency, influenced by Tauler and Paracelsus, came to be fully understood only long after his death by the publication of his practical works, “Church and House Postils on the Gospels,” “A Book on Prayer,” “A Directory for Attaining the Knowledge of all things without Error,” etc.; and down to the nineteenth century he had many followers among the quiet and contemplative throughout the land. While utterly depreciating as well the theology of the church as all sorts of external forms in worship, he placed all the more weight upon the inner light and the anointing with the Spirit of God, without which all teaching and prayer will be vain. In man he sees a microcosmus of the universe, and man’s growth in holiness he regarded as a continuation of the incarnation of God in him. He still allowed a place to the doctrine of the church as an allegorical shell for the knowledge of the soul to God and the world, and from this it may be explained how he was able unhesitatingly to subscribe the Formula of Concord. Bened. Biedermann, who was for a long time his deacon, and then his successor in the pastoral office, sympathised with his master’s views, and subsequently made vigorous attempts to disseminate them in his writings. On this account he was deposed in A.D. 1660.417

§ 146.3. Franck, Thamer, and Bruno.―Sebastian Franck of Donauwört, in Swabia, a learned printer and voluminous writer in German and Latin, for some time also a soap-boiler, had attached himself enthusiastically to the Reformation, which for several years he served as an evangelical pastor. Subsequently, however, he broke off from it, condemned and abused with sharp criticism and biting satire all the theological movements of his age, demanded unrestricted religious liberty, defended the Anabaptists against the intolerance of the theologians, and sought satisfaction for himself in a mysticism tending toward pantheism constructed out of Erigena, Eckhart, and Tauler. Among his theologico-philosophical writings, the most important are the “Golden Ark, or Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil,” and especially the 280 spirited “Paradoxa, i.e. Wonderful Words out of Holy Scripture.” Against what he regarded as the idolatrous worship of the letter in Luther’s theology he directed “The Book sealed with Seven Seals.” In unreconciled contradictions collected in this tract out of Scripture he thinks to be able to prove that God Himself wished to warn us against the deifying of the letter. The letter is the devil’s seat, the sword of antichrist; he has the letter on his side, the spirit against him. With the letter the old Pharisees slew Christ, and their modern representatives are doing the same to-day. The letter killeth, the spirit alone giveth life. He also attached very little importance to the sacrament and external ordinances. He makes no distinction, or at most only one of degree, between God and nature. God, God’s Word, God’s Son, the Holy Spirit, and nature are with him only various aspects or manifestations of the same power, which is all in all; and his theory of evil inclines strongly to dualism. On the other side, he deserves the heartiest recognition as a German prose writer in respect of the purity, copiousness, and refinement of his style, and as the author of the first text books of history and geography in the German language. After a changeful and eventful life in several cities of South Germany, having been expelled successively from Nuremberg, Strassburg, and Ulm, he died at Basel in A.D. 1542.―A career in every point resembling his was that of Theobald Thamer, of Alsace. After having sat at the feet of Luther in Wittenberg as an enthusiastic disciple, he took up an attitude of opposition to the Reformation by giving absolute determining authority to the subjective principle of conscience, and by the rejection of the Lutheran doctrine of justification. He went over ultimately to the Roman Catholic church in A.D. 1557, to seek there the peace of soul that he had lost, and died as professor of theology at Freiburg, in A.D. 1569.―A far more powerful thinker than either of these two was the Italian Dominican monk, Giordano Bruno of Nola. His violent and abusive invectives against monkery, transubstantiation, and the immaculate conception obliged him, in A.D. 1580, to flee to Geneva. From thence he betook himself to Paris, where he delivered lectures on the ars magna of Lullus (§ 103, 7); afterwards spent several years in London engaged in literary work, from A.D. 1586 to A.D. 1588 taught at Wittenberg, and on leaving that place delivered an impassioned eulogy on Luther. After a further continued life of adventure during some years in Germany, he returned to Italy, and was burnt in Rome in A.D. 1600 as a heretic. A complete edition of his numerous writings in the Italian language does not exist. These are partly allegorico-satirical, partly metaphysical, on the idea of the Divine unity and universality, in which the poetical and philosophical are blended together. He adopted the doctrine of God set forth by Nicholas of Cusa (§ 113, 6), representing the deity as at once the maximum and the minimum, and carried out this idea to its logical conclusion in pantheism. Bruno deserves special recognition as a consistent protester against the geocentric theories of ecclesiastical scholastic science, and for this merits a place among the first apologists of the Copernican system.418

§ 146.4. The Pantheistic Libertine Sects of the Spirituals in France, reminding us in theory and practice of the mediæval Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit (§ 116, 5), had their origin in the Walloon provinces of the Netherlands. As early as A.D. 1529 a certain Coppin preached their gospel in his native city of Lille or Ryssel. Quintin and Pocquet, both from the province of Hennegau, transplanted it to France in A.D. 1530. At the court of the liberal-minded and talented Queen Margaret of Navarre (§ 120, 8), they found at first a hearty welcome, and from this centre carried on secretly a successful propaganda, until Calvin’s influence over the queen, as well as his energetic polemic, “Against the Fantastic and Mad Sect of the Libertines, who call themselves Spirituals, A.D. 1545,” put a stop to their further progress. The contemporary Libertines of Geneva (§ 138, 3, 4), who rose up against the rigoristic church discipline of Calvin, are not to be confounded with these Netherland-French Libertines, although their apostle Pocquet also lived and laboured for a long time in Geneva. The impudent immorality of the Genevan Libertines was quite different from the moral levity of the Spirituels, which had always a spiritualistic-pantheistic significance, their characteristics consisting rather in a broad denial of and contempt for Christian doctrines and the facts of gospel history.

§ 146.5. Under the name of Familists, Familia charitatis, Henry Nicolai or Nicholas of Münster, who had previously been closely related to David Joris (§ 148, 1), founded a new mystical sect in England during the reign of Elizabeth. They were distinguished from the Anabaptists by treating with indifference the question of infant baptism. Nicholas appeared as the apostle of love in and through which the mystical deification of man is accomplished. Although uneducated, he composed several works, and in one of these designated himself as “endowed with God in the spirit of His love.” His followers have been charged with immoral practices, and the doctrine has been ascribed to them that Christ is nothing more than a Divine condition communicating itself to all the saints.419

§ 147. Anabaptism.420

The fanatical ultra-reforming tendencies which characterize the later so called Anabaptism, first made their appearance within the area of the Saxon reformation. They now broke forth in wild revolutionary tumults, and were fundamentally the same as the earlier Wittenberg exhibitions (§ 124). In this instance, too, passionate opposition was shown to the continuance of infant baptism, without, however, proceeding so far as decidedly to insist upon rebaptism, and making that a common bond and badge to distinguish and hold together separate communities of their own, inspired by that fundamental tendency. This was done first in A.D. 1525 among the representatives of ultra-reform movements, who soon secured a position for themselves on Swiss soil. And thus, while in central Germany this movement was being utterly crushed in the Peasant War, Switzerland became the nursery and hotbed of Anabaptism. Its leaders when driven out spread through southern and south-eastern Germany as far as the Tyrol and Moravia, and founded communities in all the larger and in many of the smaller towns. And although in A.D. 1531 the Anabaptists, with the exception of some very small and insignificant remnants, were rooted out of Switzerland, yet in A.D. 1540 they were able to send out a new colony to settle in Venice, in order to carry on the work of proselytising in Italy.―Chiefly through the instrumentality of the south German apostles, Anabaptist communities and conventicles were sown broadcast over the whole of the north-west as far as the Baltic and the North Sea. And even as early as the beginning of A.D. 1530 there issued from the Netherlands an independent movement of a peculiarly violent, fanatical, and revolutionary character, which spread far and wide. In A.D. 1534, John of Leyden set up his Anabaptist kingdom in Münster with endless glitter and display, and sent out messengers over all the world to gather the “people of God” together into the “new Zion.” The unfortunate termination of his short reign, however, had a sobering influence upon the excited enthusiasts, so that they resolved to abandon those revolutionary and socialistic tendencies, to which their brethren in south and east Germany had never given way, or, if at all, only in isolated cases where they had been carried away by chiliastic expectations. Yet were they in the north as well as in the south, afterwards as well as before, mercilessly persecuted on all hands, almost as severely by the Protestant as by the Catholic governments, and often imprisoned in crowds, banished, scourged, drowned, hanged, beheaded, burnt. Under all these tribulations they developed a truly wonderful persistency of belief, and exhibited a heroic martyr spirit. To collect their scattered remnants, and to save them from destruction by a calm and sensible reformation, was the work to which from A.D. 1536 Menno Simons unweariedly applied himself.

§ 147.1. The Anabaptist Movement in General.―The name of Anabaptists has always been repudiated by those so designated as a calumnious nickname and term of reproach. And, in fact, it is clearly inadequate, inasmuch as it does not characterize either the regulating principle or the essential core and nature of the aim of the party, which had been already fully developed before rebaptism had been set up as a term of membership. Within their own constituted congregations no second baptism found place, but only one baptism of adults on the ground of a personal profession of faith. Nevertheless, the rejected designation had, at the time at which it had originated, this justification, that then all the members of this community actually were rebaptizers or had been rebaptized; and the introduction of a second baptism, as it was the result and consequence of their fundamental principle, became also the occasion, means, and basis for their incorporation into an independent denomination.―The representatives of the Anabaptist movement showed their ultra-reforming character by this, that while at one with Luther and Zwingli in seeking the overthrow of all views and practices of the Roman Catholic church regarded by them as unevangelical, they characterized the position of the reformers as a halting half way, and so denounced them as still deeply rooted in the antichristian errors of the papacy. And because the reformers firmly repudiated them, and vigorously opposed and refused to countenance those radical demands and fanatical chiliastic expectations of theirs that went so much further, they turned upon them and their reformed institutions often with a fury and bitterness even more intense than they manifested to their Romish opponents. Most offensive to them was the attitude of the reformers toward the civil authorities. They were especially indignant at the reformers for not rejecting with scorn the help of magistrates in carrying out the Reformation movement, for recognising, not only the right, but the duty of civil rulers to co-operate in the reconstruction of the church, to exercise control over the ecclesiastical and religious life of the community as well as of each individual, to see to the maintenance of church order, and to visit the refractory with civil penalties. Then their innermost principle was the endeavour to make a complete and thorough distinction between the kingdom of nature and the kingdom of grace, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world, of the converted and the unconverted, so as to restore a visible kingdom of saints by gathering together all true believers from all sections of the utterly corrupted church into a new holy communion of the regenerate. Thus they would prepare the way for the promised millennium, when the saints shall rule the world. The State, with its penalties and punishments, belongs essentially to the domain of evil, and is to be endured only so long as there are unbelievers and unconverted people, who alone are under its jurisdiction. The community of true Christians, on the other hand, is in no need of any secular magistracy, for this law, which the civil power administers, concerns only the unrighteous and evildoers. But in matters of religion and the inner man, the civil authority can have no manner of right to interfere; as, on the other hand, believers ought not to accept any sort of magisterial office or civic rank. Freedom in matters of conscience, religion, worship, and doctrine is a fundamental axiom, which forms the primary privilege of every religious denomination, and the only admissible punishment in connection with religious questions is exclusion from the particular community. The only unconditionally valid legislative code for Christians is the Bible. To the law of the State, however, he is not to submit at all in spiritual things, and even in temporal things only in so far as Holy Scripture and his own conscience, enlightened by the Spirit of God, do not enter a protest; but where the injunction of a magistrate oversteps the limit, he must offer strenuous resistance, and contend even to blood and death.―With respect to the mode of life and activity within the ranks of the community, the peculiarly high claims which they put forth to be regarded as a congregation of chosen saints demanded that they should insist upon the actual personal conversion and regeneration of each individual member, the exclusion of everything sinful and worldly by means of a rigidly strict discipline, and where necessary by expulsion from church fellowship, as well as the avoiding of all needless intercourse with the unconverted and unbelieving, and the exercise of true and perfect brotherly love toward one another, which also, so far as present circumstances might admit, should evidence itself in the voluntary sharing of goods. As a condition of the admission of any individual into the community proof had to be given of repentance and faith, and as an authenticating seal on the one side of the entrance being granted, and on the other side of the obligation being undertaken, baptism was administered, which now, as infant baptism was denounced as an invention of the devil, was understood simply of adult baptism, for the most part administered in the usual way by sprinkling. The ecclesiastical constitution of the regularly formed congregations was modelled after what they regarded as the apostolic type. Their congregational worship was extremely simple, quite free of any ornament or ceremony. Their doctrinal system, owing to the prominence given to the practical and the ethical, was but poorly developed, and was therefore never set forth in a confession of faith obligatory on all the communities. Upon the whole, they inclined more to the Zwinglian than to the Lutheran type of doctrine, especially in their views of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The grand Reformation dogma of justification by faith alone was rejected, as also the idea that even the regenerate may not in this world attain unto perfect sinlessness. Here and there, too, antitrinitarian views found entrance, but the majority firmly adhered to the œcumenical faith of the church, or at least soon returned to it. Chiliastic theories and expectations were widely spread, but the attempts to realize them in the present by means of revolutionary movements were soon recognised and denounced as mischievous, and so, too, the fanatical, pseudo-prophetic craze by which many of the leaders of the movement were carried away came by-and-by to be discredited.

§ 147.2. Keller, in his Reformation und die ält. Reformparteien of 1885, has undertaken to give a historical basis to a view of the origin and character of the Anabaptist movement diverging in several important respects from the one that has hitherto been generally accepted. He sees in the tendency of the Swiss Anabaptist to go beyond the position taken up by Luther and Zwingli not merely, as several earlier investigators had already done, a revival of certain mediæval endeavours at reform, but an actual, uninterrupted continuation of these, involving, not only a relationship, whether conscious or unconscious, but also a close historico-genetic and personal connection with “those old evangelical brotherhoods, which through many centuries, under many names,” in spite of persecutions that raged against them, still survived in secret remnants down into the 16th century. Of these brotherhoods, during the 12th century, the Waldensians formed the heart and core. Their precursors were the Petrubrusians [Petrobrusians], the Apostolic Brothers, the Arnoldists, the Humiliati, etc.; their successors and spiritual kinsmen were the heretical Beghards and Lollards, the Spirituals together with Marsilius of Padua and King Louis of Bavaria, the German mystics, the Friends of God and Winkelers, the Dutch Brethren of the Common Life, and, in specially close association with the German Waldensians, the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren; of like character, too, were John Staupitz, the Zucker family of Nuremberg, Albert Dürer, and a great number of other notables belonging to the first decades of the 16th century. And these all, as belonging to one and the same spiritual family, and forming an unbroken chain, link joined to link, when church and State raged against them with fire and sword, found always nurseries and places of refuge in those “noble corporations of builders and masons,” whose tried organization was made by them the basis of the church constitution, and has thus been handed down to modern times. Luther, who, moved by Staupitz and the study of Tauler and the “Deutsche Theologie,” was at first inclined to throw himself into the spiritual current, from A.D. 1521 more and more withdrew himself from it, and even Zwingli detached himself from it on account of some proceedings which he did not approve. The origin of the so called Anabaptism is thus, not merely traced back to these two great reformers, but rather is conditioned by the firm maintenance of a primitive evangelical tendency, from which those two turned aside. In the one case we have “new evangelicals,” founding a new communion; in the other, “old evangelicals,” conserving and continuing the old communion. And not Zürich, where the Anabaptist movement began to get a footing in A.D. 1524, but Basel, was its true birthplace. There in A.D. 1515 the liberal-minded printers Frobenius, Curio, and Cratander, who first printed the reformatory writings of the Middle Ages, repeatedly gathered the secret representatives and friends of those old brotherhoods from their hidings in the mountains of Switzerland and Savoy, as well as from the south of France and Germany, in their “chapter sessions,” held there in order to consult about the founding of new brotherhoods; and from thence the opposition to infant baptism was first transplanted to Zürich.―But these “chapter sessions” served quite another purpose than the fostering of Waldensian and Anabaptist societies, and were rather devoted to advancing the interests of liberalistic humanism and scholarship. And the embracing together of all the above-named sects as representing one and the same spiritual current, though supported by a great many combinations, guesses, suppositions, and deductions, which from their very boldness and the confidence with which they are stated are often startling, seems to be utterly untenable, and to proceed not so much from an unbiassed study of original sources as from a prejudiced judgment manipulating the facts with great art and skill. In conclusion, then, Keller proceeds to deal with the later actors in the Anabaptist movement, and finds them not only in the Mennonites and Puritans, but also in the freemason lodges, the Rosicrucians, and Pietists. Even the spiritual tendencies of Lessing, Kant, to a certain extent also of Schiller, also of Schleiermacher, through his connection with the Brethren of Herrnhut, seem to him determined and dominated by this same fundamental principle! The baselessness of Keller’s arguments has been thoroughly exposed by Kolde and Carl Müller, yet he continues unweariedly to repeat and set them forth.

§ 147.3. The Swiss Anabaptists.―Even in German Switzerland, although the reformers of that country had proceeded much further than the Saxon reformers in the direction of removing every vestige of Roman Catholicism in constitution, doctrine, worship, and discipline, ultra-reforming tendencies soon made their appearance among those who thought that such changes were not radical and thorough enough. Here, too, the refusal to recognise infant baptism was made specially prominent. Indeed even Zwingli himself at first pronounced against its necessity and serviceableness. According to him, baptism was not, as with Luther, a means of grace, but analogous to the circumcision of the Old Testament―a sign of obligation, by means of which the subject of baptism accepted the Christian faith and life as binding upon him. Thus he was inclined for a time to depreciate infant baptism, without however declaring it absolutely unallowable. But when subsequently it became apparent that the radical opposition to it on the part of its former friends, and their insisting upon the obligation to observe only adult baptism, proceeded from an ultra-reforming tendency, which threatened with ruin much that was necessary to ecclesiastical and civil order, and tended to make the extremest consequences of these views the very foundation of their system, he expressed himself all the more decidedly in favour of having infant baptism obligatorily retained.―The most zealous leaders of the Anabaptist movement in Switzerland were Conrad Grebel, a cultured humanist, son of a distinguished Zürich senator, already designated by Zwingli as “the coryphæus of the Baptists;” Felix Manz, also a humanist, and famous as an earnest promoter of Hebrew studies, but drowned in A.D. 1527 by order of the Zürich council; George Jacobs, a monk of Chur in the Grison country, commonly called Blaurock, on account of his dress; Louis Hätzer of Thurgau, etc. Besides these native Swiss, the following also wrought with equal enthusiasm for the promotion of the Anabaptist cause: William Röubli, a priest banished from Rottenburg on the Neckar on account of his evangelical zeal; Simon Stumpf, who had migrated from Franconia, and Michael Sattler from Breisgau; but above all the famous Balthazar Hubmeier, a scholar of John Eck, distinguished as a popular preacher and an indefatigable apologist and skilful polemical writer on the side of the Anabaptists. He was, in A.D. 1512, professor of theology at Ingolstadt, in A.D. 1516 pastor of the cathedral church of Regensburg; from whence, in A.D. 1522, already powerfully influenced in favour of evangelical truth by Luther’s writings, he removed to Waldshut, and there entered on the work of the Reformation, but afterwards decided against the continuance of infant baptism and in favour of Anabaptism. The Austrian government, under whose protectorate Waldshut was, demanded that he should be delivered up, which the governor steadfastly refused to do. But when, in Dec., 1525, Waldshut was obliged to surrender at discretion, he fled to Zürich, was there taken prisoner, and was driven, through fear of being delivered up to Austria, to make a public recantation. He then left Zürich and passed over into Moravia.―The original home of the Anabaptist movement in Switzerland was Zürich and its neighbourhood. At Wyticon and Zollicon, Röubli publicly preached in A.D. 1524 against infant baptism, and persuaded several parents to refuse to have their young children baptized. When, in Jan., 1525, the Zürich council voted for the expulsion of all ultra-reform agitators, these assembled together on the evening preceding their departure for mutual edification and establishment by prayer and Scripture reading. Then Blaurock rose, and besought Grebel “for God’s sake to baptize him with the true Christian baptism into the true faith,” and, when this was done, imparted it himself to all others present. The same sort of thing happened soon after at Waldshut, where Hubmeier on Easter Eve received baptism by the hand of Röubli, and then on Easter Day conferred it upon 110 and afterwards upon more than 300 individuals. In this way a thorough break was made, not only with the old Catholics, but also with the young reformed Church, and the foundation of an independent Anabaptist community laid, which now with rapid strides spread over the whole of reformed Switzerland. Thus originated, e.g., the twelve Anabaptist congregations that existed in Zürich and neighbourhood as early as A.D. 1527, the twenty-five in the Zürich highlands, and also the sixteen which in A.D. 1531 were to be found in the Zürich lowlands. An attempt was next made to diffuse information among the sectaries and convert them from their errors by means of discussions and controversial tracts, Zwingli lending his aid by word and pen; and then resort was had to fines and imprisonment. In June, 1525, St. Gall, following the example of Zürich, issued sentence of banishment against the Baptists. But as the expulsion of the leaders in no degree contributed to the crushing of the communities, which rather gathered strength in secret, and as the exiles were now for the first time fully able to spread over all lands the seeds of their Anabaptist doctrines, it was finally concluded that capital punishment was a necessity. The Zürich council, in March, 1527, issued an edict, according to which all rebaptizers and rebaptized were without exception to be drowned, and this example was followed by the other magistrates. In consequence of the general persecution that followed the Anabaptist agitation in Switzerland might be regarded as stamped out in A.D. 1531, although here and there little groups meeting in remote and hidden corners, under constant threat of prison and death, dragged out a miserable existence for some twenty years more.421

§ 147.4. The South German Anabaptists.―The Anabaptists expelled from Switzerland in A.D. 1525 spread first of all over the neighbouring south German provinces. Blaurock, publicly whipped in Zürich, returned to the Grison country, and, when again driven out of that refuge, to the Tyrol, where the Anabaptist views found uncommonly great favour. Röubli and Sattler retired to Alsace, where Strassburg especially became one of the chief nurseries of Anabaptism, and from thence they carried on a successful mission work in Swabia. Louis Hätzer and John Denck (§ 148, 1) gathered a large following in Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Strassburg; also in Passau, Regensburg, and Munich; then pressing eastward along the Inn and the Danube, their adherents founded Anabaptist communities in Salzburg, Styria, Linz, Stein, and even in Vienna. They found the greatest success of all among the industrial classes, and travelling artisans proved their most zealous apostles. Although, beyond carrying on an unwearied propaganda on behalf of their own religious confession, they almost invariably refused to identify themselves with any other sort of social and political agitation, they were on all hands most cruelly persecuted; no city, no country town, no village was beyond the reach of inquisitorial scrutiny. Their radical extirpation was, by the decision of the diet at Spires in A.D. 1529, represented as a duty to the empire resting upon all; for the sixth section of its decrees enjoined that “each and all of the rebaptizers and rebaptized, both men and women, come to years of discretion, should be brought to the stake and block or suchlike death without any trial before the spiritual judge.” Most blood was indeed shed in lands under Catholic governments. In the Tyrol and in Görz, for example, it is said that, even in A.D. 1531, the number executed was over 1,000, among whom was Blaurock, who was burnt in A.D. 1529. Sebastian Franck, in A.D. 1530, estimated the number of the slain at somewhere about 2,000, and the heat of the persecution only began with that year. Duke William of Bavaria went furthest, with the atrocious order, “Whoever recants, let him be beheaded; whoever refuses to recant, let him be burnt alive.” But also Protestant governments, princes, and magistrates took part more or less zealously in the work of extermination recommended in the interests of the empire. Only the Landgrave Philip of Hesse and the magistrates of Strassburg kept at least their hands clean from blood, although they also by imprisoning and banishing did their best to prevent the spread of this heresy in their domains.

§ 147.5. The Moravian Anabaptists.―Balthazar Hubmeier, banished, in A.D. 1526, from Zürich, had found in Nikolsburg in Moravia a place of refuge. Under the powerful and far-reaching protection of the lords of Liechtenstein, which he obtained for his gospel, Moravia became “a delightsome land,” and Nikolsburg a “New Jerusalem” to the sorely oppressed Anabaptists, who had been hunted like wild beasts and made homeless wanderers. And there they remained, notwithstanding severe hostile attacks, from which they repeatedly suffered, especially between the years 1536 and 1554. This was followed by “the good time,” from A.D. 1554 to 1565, and from A.D. 1565 to 1592 by “the golden age” of the community, now consisting of 15,000 brethren. With A.D. 1592 began again “the times of tribulation,” until their church, as well as Protestantism generally throughout the country, received its deathblow. According to their numerous “chronicles” and “memoirs,” describing to their posterity the fortunes of the community, dating from A.D. 1524, the number of Anabaptists put to death up to A.D. 1581 in Switzerland, South Germany, and throughout the Austrian States was 2,419. Hubmeier had already, by the end of A.D. 1527, after Moravia had come under Austrian rule, been made prisoner in Vienna, along with his wife; and there, in the spring of A.D. 1528, he went to the stake with the heroic spirit of a martyr. Three days later his wife, showing the same bold contempt for death, was drowned in the Danube. In A.D. 1531 James Huter, from the Tyrol, stood at the head of the Moravian Anabaptists. Owing to the persecution which from A.D. 1529 raged there against his companions in the faith, he migrated thence with 150 brethren. He succeeded in composing the many splits and quarrels which had broken out in consequence of these migrations among the various sorts of Anabaptists from Silesia, Bavaria, Swabia, and the Palatinate, and managed to organize them in one united body with the earlier settlers. His reputation and influence were consequently so great that the community took the name from him of the “Huterian Brethren.” During the persecution which was directed against them in A.D. 1535 he fled to the Tyrol, but was there taken prisoner and burnt in March, 1536.―The Moravian Anabaptists, who had been with perfect propriety designated “the quiet of the land,” were characterized by exemplary piety, strict discipline, moral earnestness, industrial diligence, conscientious obedience to the laws, unexampled patience and gentleness amid all sufferings, but, above all, by the astonishing courage of their martyrs and fortitude under torture. In regard to doctrine, with the exception of a few “false brethren” affected with Socinian views, they unanimously and from the first acknowledged their adherence to the œcumenical symbols. Their mode of worship was of an extremely simple character. As sacraments, i.e. as “symbols of a holy thing,” they recognised

true Christian baptism, i.e. that of grown up people who professed repentance and faith;

the Lord’s Supper as a festival, in memory of the sufferings and death of Christ, as well as a thanksgiving for the grace of God thereby enjoyed, and as expression of the church’s faith in it;

Marriage as a symbol of the espousals of Christ and His church (Eph. v. 23-32); and in some fashion

the laying on of the hands of the elders in the ordination of the clergy.

Mass, confirmation, extreme unction, confession, and indulgence, worship of images, saints, and relics, as well as infant baptism, were utterly rejected by them. They were equally decided in denying all merit in fasting and observing the feast days, in repudiating the doctrine of purgatory, and many of the ceremonies of the Romish church. They also rejected the Lutheran and Zwinglian doctrine of justification, which they regarded as a remnant of antichristian Romanism. But as the true and only communion of saints they regarded themselves as alone constituting the true church. At the head of their community stood

a bishop; and

next him the ministers of the Lord, divided into apostles with the missionary calling for the spread of the church, preachers, and pastors over particular congregations, and helpers to give assistance to these;

ministers of benevolence, i.e. dispensers to the poor and administrators of the possessions of the church; and

the elders, as representatives of the church in conducting its government.

A particularly important factor for maintaining the union of the scattered communities was the synodal constitution introduced by Hubmeier. The superintendents of the smaller circuits met together for consultation weekly, and the deputies from the larger circuits met together once a month; while the general synods, embracing also the brethren beyond the bounds of Moravia, were convened for purposes of administration once a year, when that was possible.―Continuation, § 162, 2.

§ 147.6. The Venetian Anabaptists.―Down to the year 1540 the evangelical reform movement in Italy (§ 139, 22-24) had an essentially Lutheran orthodox character. But after that an Anabaptist current set in, coming probably from Switzerland, and communicated through Italian refugees residing there, which subsequently took the direction of a unitarian rationalistic movement. Its main centre was in the domain of Venice, and its most zealous promoter an Italian, an exile from home on account of his faith, Tiziano, who, with no fixed place of abode, resided sometimes on this side, sometimes on the other side of the Alps. Fuller knowledge of him we owe to the confessions of one of his scholars, Manelfi, recently discovered in the Venetian archives, which he wrote out voluntarily and penitently before the Inquisition, first at Bologna and then at Rome, in Oct. and Nov., 1551. Don Pietro Manelfi, priest at San Vito, was led, in A.D. 1540 or 1541, by the preaching of a Capuchin, Jerome Spinazola, to the conclusion that the Romish church is contrary to Holy Scripture, and is a human, yea, a devilish invention. This same priest also introduced him to Bernardino Ochino (§ 139, 24), who furnished him with several writings of Luther and Melanchthon, and taught him that the pope is antichrist and the mass satanic idolatry. Called by the “Lutherans” of Padua, he now for two years travelled through all northern Italy and Istria as Lutheran “minister of the word.” Then in Florence he made the acquaintance of Tiziano, and after long resistance yielded at last to be baptized by him. During a conversation which, in A.D. 1549, Tiziano had with him and several other friends at Vincenza, the question was raised, over Deuteronomy xviii. 18, whether Christ is God or man. It was agreed in order to decide the matter to summon an Anabaptist council, to meet at Vienna in Sept., 1550. There were somewhere about sixty deputies who responded, of whom between twenty and thirty were from Switzerland, mostly Italian refugees, who at the fortieth session of their secret conclave, “after prayer, fasting, and reading of Scripture,” laid down the following doctrinal propositions as binding upon all their congregations: “Christ is not God, but man, yet a man full of Divine power, son of Joseph and Mary, who after him bore also other sons and daughters: There are neither angels nor devil in the proper sense; but when in Holy Scripture angels appear, they are men sent by God for special purposes, and where the devil is spoken of the fleshly mind of man is meant: There is no other hell than the grave, in which the elect sleep in the Lord till they shall be awaked at the last day; while the souls of the ungodly, as well as their bodies, like those of the beasts, perish in death: To the human seed God has given the capacity of begetting the spirit as well as the body: The elect will be justified only by God’s mercy and love, without the merits, the blood, and the death of Christ: Christ’s death serves merely as a witness to the righteousness, i.e. ‘the mercy and love’ of God.” On their specifically Anabaptist doctrine, because not the subject of controversy, there was no deliverance. The denial of the supernatural birth of Christ, however, led to a limitation of the fundamental doctrine of the absolute authority of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament by the exclusion of the first chapters of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which it was now affirmed had been forged by Jerome at the command of Pope Damasus. The decrees of the council were adopted by all the communities, with the exception of that of Citadella, which in consequence was cast out of the union. Manelfi, elected bishop, travelled in this capacity during a whole year among the churches assigned to him, always accompanied by a brother. Then he became penitent, and cast himself upon the grace of the papal Inquisition. His confessions, especially as bearing on the names and whereabouts of his former companions, Lutherans as well as Anabaptists, were sent from Rome to the Venetian tribunal of the Inquisition, which now began its work of persecution and vengeance with such zeal and success, that after some decades every trace of Lutheranism and Anabaptism was rooted out. Many escaped imprisonment by opportune flight; many also failed in courage, and retracted; but the steadfast confessors were burnt or drowned in great numbers. Meanwhile this fiery tribulation had proved in most of the communities a purifying fire. The radical heretic tendency that had prevailed since the council gave place by degrees to the more moderate views of earlier days. This change was greatly furthered by the close intimacy existing between the Italian Anabaptists and the Moravian Brethren from about the middle of A.D. 1550. The credit of having effected this alliance, and securing its benefits to their fellow countrymen, belongs especially to two noble-minded men, Francesco della Saga, formerly a student of Rovigo, and Giulio Gherardi, formerly subdeacon at Rome. But the latter, in A.D. 1561, the former a year later, fell into the hands of the Venetian Inquisition. After all attempts at conversion proved in vain, both were thrown by night into the Venice canal, Gherardi in A.D. 1562, and Saga in A.D. 1565.

§ 147.7. The older Apostles of Anabaptism in the North-West of Germany.―In the north-west no less than in the south and east, from the lower Rhine as far as Friesland and Holstein, in Jülich, Cleves, Berg, in Hesse, Westphalia, and Lower Saxony, as well as in Holland and Brabant, where the Reformation had begun to gain some footing, Anabaptism also secured an entrance and some success. Among their older apostles labouring in these regions the most distinguished were Hoffmann and Ring.

Melchior Hoffmann, a currier from Swabia, had even in his early home taken part in the religious movements of the age, and in A.D. 1524, in the prosecution of his handicraft, went to Livonia, and became the herald of these views in Wolmar, Dorpat, and Reval. When his followers in Dorpat broke down the images and attacked the monasteries, he was obliged to flee, and carried on his operations for some time in Stockholm (§ 139, 1). Expelled by-and-by from that city, he next made his appearance in Wittenberg. Luther took offence at his prophetic-apocalyptic fanaticism, and pointed him to his handicraft as his legitimate calling. He now went to Holstein, where King Frederick of Denmark afforded him a fixed residence at Kiel, with permission to preach throughout the whole land. By contesting the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, and representing the sacrament as of merely symbolical import, and the partaking as purely spiritual, he caused offence even here, and was, after a public disputation with Bugenhagen at Flensburg in A.D. 1529, driven out of the country. He sought refuge in Strassburg, where Bucer received him with open arms. There for the first time, under the influence of the Swiss Anabaptists, was full and clear expression given to those objections to infant baptism which long before had been cherished in his heart. He had himself baptized, and became from this time forth the most zealous apostle of Anabaptism throughout all North Germany. In this capacity he wrought unweariedly and successfully, issuing forth from Emden in East Friesland, where he had settled in A.D. 1529, and by his travels, preaching, and writings spread his doctrines far and wide. Besides his heterodox doctrine of the sacraments and his apocalyptic-fanaticism, which led him to proclaim that the second coming of Christ would take place within seven years, and ultimately to announce that he himself was the prophet Elias foretold in Malachi iv. 5, 6 as its forerunner, he brought forward his theory about the incarnation of Christ, according to which the eternal Word did not assume from Mary flesh and blood but Himself became flesh and passed through Mary, simply “as the sun shines through glass,” because otherwise not Christ’s but Mary’s flesh would have suffered for us. In other respects he utterly rejected the wild, fantastic notions of the Anabaptists which were some years later developed in Münster. In his own life he was thoughtful, pure, and strictly moral, in disposition mild, benevolent, and charitable. In A.D. 1533 we find him again at Strassburg, where his fanatical-prophetical preaching soon produced such dangerous results that the magistrates felt obliged to shut him up under bolts and bars, where he could be out of the way of doing mischief. He was still in prison in A.D. 1543, and from that time onward nothing more is known of him. But a sect of Melchiorites, by no means few in number, held their ground for a long time in Alsace and Lower Germany.

According to other accounts Melchior Ring, a currier of Swabia, is represented as having wrought during the same period and throughout the same places in Sweden, Livonia, Holstein, and East Friesland, entertaining similar christological, prophetico-apocalyptic, and Anabaptist views. The identity of the Christian name, fatherland, handicraft, doctrinal tenets, date, and spheres of labour is so striking, that one is almost tempted to identify him with Melchior Hoffmann, especially as John of Leyden in his later examination is said to have affirmed that Melchior Hoffmann had actually borne the name of Ring. We feel compelled, however, to maintain the distinctness of their personalities, since, according to Hochbuth’s researches in the history of the Anabaptists in the Hessian state, Ring had been actively engaged in Hesse at a time during which it can be proved that Hoffmann was at work elsewhere.

§ 147.8. So far in respect of place and time as the influence of Hoffmann reached,―and it seems down to the time of his imprisonment to have been widely predominant throughout the whole of the north-western district,―the life and movement of the Anabaptists there kept clear of any social revolutionary tendencies, and in their aberrations from the ways of the reformers were restricted to the purely religious domain. In the beginning of the year 1530, however, a movement broke forth again in Holland, in which there was a resurrection of the spirit of Thomas Münzer, and the demand for a thoroughly radical and revolutionary reconstruction of social and political relations was brought into prominence. The most important representative of this tendency was a baker, Jan Matthys of Haarlem, who, claiming to be a prophet, proclaimed the introduction of the millennium of glory as the proper and principal task of the Baptists. For the fulfilment of this task he insisted upon the overthrow of the present order in church and State, resistance to their enemies with weapons in hand, even the destruction of all “the ungodly” from the face of the earth, in order that “the saints,” as promised in Scripture, should rule over the world, and lead to completion the kingdom of God. The doctrine of the new prophets may even already have taken root in the minds of the Baptists, roused and excited by continued persecution, without their having clearly perceived what it would ultimately lead to if successfully carried out. But when in Münster these fanatical theories were shown forth as actual realized facts, when John of Leyden set up his pretentious kingdom in that “New Jerusalem,” and sent out into all the world his numerous apostles with the demand for adhesion, in many cases they found a too willing audience. The miserable collapse of the Münster kingdom was the first thing that again called people back to their senses, and rendered their remnants susceptible to the purification of Anabaptism to which Menno Simons devoted his whole life.

§ 147.9. The Münster Catastrophe, A.D. 1534, 1535.―The preacher Rothmann of Münster had for some time maintained the Zwinglian theory of the Lord’s Supper, and then he took a further step in the repudiation of infant baptism. A public disputation in A.D. 1533 yielded no result, and he refused to obey an order to retire into exile. He now sought, and that successfully, to increase his following, by the adoption of new elements of the Anabaptist creed. On the festival of the Three Holy Kings in A.D. 1534, John of Leyden or John Bockelssohn made his entrance into the city. An illegitimate son of a girl in the Münster province, brought up by relatives in Leyden, whither he returned after several years spent in travelling about as a journeyman tailor, he was in the autumn of A.D. 1533 converted by the prophet Matthys, and soon became his most zealous apostle. In Münster the young man, now in his twenty-fifth year, handsome in appearance and endowed with rich intellectual abilities, was favourably received in the house of a rich and respectable cloth merchant, Bernard Knipperdolling, who had been long interested in the religious movement, and married his daughter. In the meantime Jan Matthys also was called from Amsterdam to Münster. Both now wrought in common among the inhabitants of the city. Their sermons, delivered with glowing eloquence, produced a great impression, especially among the women, and their following grew to such an extent that they believed they might act in defiance of the council. In consequence of a riot the magistrates were weak and yielding enough to enter into an agreement with them by which they obtained legal recognition. Then from all sides Anabaptist fanatics crowded into Münster. After some weeks they secured a majority in the council, and Knipperdolling was made burgomaster. The prophet Matthys declared it to be God’s will that all unbelievers should be expelled. This was done on 27th February, 1534. Seven deacons divided among the believers the property of those who had been banished. In May the bishop began the siege of the city. This much at least resulted from that proceeding, that the epidemic was confined to Münster. After all images, organs, and books, with the exception of the Bible, had been destroyed, they introduced the principle of community of goods. Matthys, who regarded himself as called to slay the besieging foes, in a sortie fell by their swords. Bockelssohn took his place. The council in consequence of his revelations was dissolved, and a theocratical government of twelve elders, who were ready to receive their inspiration from the new prophet, was set up. In order that he might marry Matthys’ beautiful widow, he introduced polygamy. He took seventeen wives; Rothmann satisfied himself with four. In vain did the remnants of moral consciousness existing still among the inhabitants protest. The discontented, who gathered round the smith Mollenhök, were overcome and all of them were put to death. Bockelssohn, proclaimed by one of his fellow prophets, John Dusendschur, king of the whole earth, set up a splendid court, and perpetrated the most revolting iniquities. He regarded himself as called to bring in the millennium, sent out twenty-eight apostles to spread his kingdom, and appointed twelve dukes to govern the world under him. The besiegers had meanwhile, in August, 1534, made an utterly unsuccessful attempt to storm the city. Had they not toward the end of the year received assistance from Treves, Cleves, Mainz, and Cologne, they would have been obliged to raise the siege. Even then they could only think of securing the surrender of the city by famine. It had already been reduced to sore straits. But on St. John’s night, 1535, a deserter led the soldiers to the wall. After a most determined struggle the Anabaptists were utterly overthrown. Rothmann rushed into the hottest of the battle, and there met his death. King John and his premier Knipperdolling and his chancellor Krechting were taken prisoners, and on 22nd January, 1536, were pinched to death with redhot pincers and then hung in iron chains from St. Lambert’s tower. Catholicism was finally restored to absolute and exclusive supremacy.

§ 147.10. Menno Simons and the Mennonites.―Menno Simons, born at Wittmarsum in Friesland in A.D. 1492, from A.D. 1516 a Catholic priest, had from careful study of Holy Scripture come to entertain serious doubts as to the Romish doctrine. The martyr courage of the Baptists called his attention to the Baptist views of this sect, and soon he came to feel convinced of their correctness. He resigned his priest’s office at Wittmarsum in A.D. 1536, and had himself baptized. Amid indescribable difficulties and with unwearied patience he laboured on, wandering from place to place, devoting all his powers to the reorganization of the sect. He gave it a definite doctrinal formula, “The Fundamental Book of the True Christian Faith,” in A.D. 1539, which in point of doctrine attached itself to the Reformed confessions, and was distinguished from these only by the rejection of infant baptism, and by an unconditional spiritualization of the idea of the church as a pure communion of true saints. It distinctly forbade military and civil service, as well as all taking of oaths, introduced feet washing in addition to baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and by severe church discipline maintained a simple manner of life and strict morality. The quiet, pious demeanour of the Mennonites soon secured for them in Holland, and later also in Germany, toleration and religious freedom. Menno died in A.D. 1559.―Even during Menno’s lifetime his Dutch followers split up into two parties, called “the Fine” and “the Coarse.” The former enforced in all its severity Menno’s strict discipline, and indeed went beyond it by prohibiting all intercourse with the excommunicated, even should these be parents or husbands and wives. The latter wished to allow to the ban only ecclesiastical and not civil disabilities, and to have it exercised only after repeated exhortations had proved ineffectual.―Continuation, § 162, 1.

§ 148. Antitrinitarians and Unitarians.422

The first to contest the doctrine of the Trinity arose from among the German Anabaptists. The Spaniard Michael Servetus wrought out his Unitarianism into connection with a system that was fundamentally pantheistic. The real home of Antitrinitarianism, however, was Italy, a fruit of the half-pagan humanism that flourished there. Banished the country, its representatives sought refuge in Switzerland. Expelled by-and-by from these regions, they betook themselves mostly to Poland, Hungary, and Transylvania, where they found protection from the princes and nobles. A thoroughly developed system of doctrine, elaborated by Lælius and Faustus Socinus, uncle and nephew, was now accepted by them, and by this means they were consolidated into a corporate society.

§ 148.1. Anabaptist Antitrinitarians in Germany.

John Denck from the Upper Palatinate, was, on Œcolampadius’ recommendation, whose lectures he had attended at Basel, made rector of St. Sebald’s school in Nuremberg in A.D. 1523. On account of his maintaining views inconsistent with Lutheran orthodoxy, he came into collision with the reformer of that place, Andrew Osiander, in A.D. 1524, and on the ground of a written confession of faith extorted from him he was deposed from his office and expelled the city. Nor did he find a permanent abode in Augsburg, to which he went in A.D. 1525; for Urbanus Rhegius, who at first received him in a friendly manner, was obliged at last to turn against him on account of his Anabaptist views and the great scandal he caused by maintaining the belief that the devil and all the ungodly would finally repent. He now, in A.D. 1526, went to Strassburg, where Hätzer induced him, as a zealous student of Hebrew, to assist him in his translation of the Old Testament prophets. When here also his influence assumed dangerous proportions, a disputation was arranged for between him and Bucer, in consequence of which he was expelled also from Strassburg. Like treatment awaited him at Bergzahern and also at Landau. He then went to Worms along with Hätzer, who had meanwhile been banished from Strassburg. There they completed their translation of the prophets, but from this retreat also after three months they were again driven out. Denck now once again, through Œcolampadius’ mediation, who unweariedly endeavoured, but in vain, to win him back from his errors, found a fixed abode among the more liberal-minded citizens of Basel; but he died there of the plague in A.D. 1527. Denck was indeed one of the most talented men of his day. His high intellectual endowments and his pure and noble moral life were acknowledged by his most bitterly prejudiced orthodox opponents. Of his numerous tracts and pamphlets only that “On the Law of God, how the Law is Abolished and yet must be Fulfilled,” is still accurately known. It is rich in deep thoughts cleverly put, as is also the confession of faith already mentioned, but in direct antagonism to the Lutheran doctrine on several most vital and cardinal points. He placed the inner word of God above the outward, taught that man had a natural inclination toward good, attached a fundamental importance to the fulfilling of the moral law for the attainment of salvation, gave the person of Christ only the significance of a pattern and exhibition of the Divine love, resolved the doctrine of the Trinity into pantheistic speculative ideas, and by his rejection of infant baptism became the acknowledged head of the whole German Anabaptist movement of his age, so that Bucer could designate him “the pope of the Baptists.”