A 6 CHAPTER I. THE SWISS BAPTISTS. WORD here may be necessary as to the proper name of this interesting people; were they Baptists or Anabaptists? They are commonly characterized as 'Anabaptists' by friends and foes; yet this name was especially offensive to them, as it charged them with rebaptizing those whom they regarded as unbaptized and because it was intended as a stigma. By custom their most friendly historians call them Anabaptists,' yet many of their candid opponents speak of them as Baptists.' The Petrobrusians complained that Peter of Clugny 'slandered' them by calling them 'Anabaptists,' so did their Swiss and German brethren after them. The London Confession, 1646, protests that the English Baptists were 'commonly though unjustly called Anabaptists.' Knollys resented this name, calling it scandalous;' and Haggar, 1653, rebukes Baxter for its use. You do very wickedly to call them Anabaptists, thereby to cast odium upon us, pray you, are you so wicked and malicious as to call them Anabaptists?' Blackwood, 1645, complains of being 'nicknamed Anabaptists. We deny your title; Anabaptism signifies baptism again; our consciences are fully satisfied with one baptism, provided it be such as we judge to be the baptism of Christ; and if our consciences ... why, I 328 . THE NAME BAPTIST. judge that sprinkling we had in our infancy to be none of Christ's baptism, I ask you whether can we, in good conscience, rest satisfied therewith? We are, if we must needs be new named, Antipedobaptists, or Catapedobaptists, but no Anabaptists." Baptists now refuse to be called 'Anabaptists,' and for the same reasons. Respect for ourselves and our ancestry demands that the offensive title be thrown aside, and it is not used in this work excepting in quotations. Neither we nor our fathers can properly be named Anabaptists, and to use the term is simply to accept a misleading 'nickname' pinned upon us in contempt. Modern Baptists need the admonition of Keller, who says: Whenever, at the present time, the name "Anabaptist" is mentioned, the majority think only of the fanatical sect which, under the leadership of John of Leyden, established the kingdom of the New Jerusalem at Münster. There were "Baptists" long before the Münster rebellion, and in all the centuries that have followed, in spite of the severest persecutions, there have been parties which, as Baptists or "Mennonites," have secured a permanent position in many lands. The extent of the Baptist movement in the first period of its growth, is at present very considerably undervalued in cultivated circles." He calls the Münster doings a 'caricature' of Baptist ideas, and adds: With the majority at the present time, those views are the ruling ones which three hundred years ago were vanquished after a severe conflict. . . . A more correct understanding of the movements, which, at the beginning of the Reformation were thus in collision, would be of the greatest value for an understanding of much of the development of to-day; and, any way, it is unjust that the nation (Germany) should fail to recognize some of its most gifted men simply because they are known as Anabaptists. In the last decades, out of the ruins and rubbish left behind in the desolation wrought by the religious war, already many an old work of art of that day has again been brought to light." Let us at least respect our ancestry enough to join the latest and best continental writers in calling them Baptists. 2 Baptist Switzerland did not lie in the forest cantons, in the narrow valleys sheltered by pinnacles which rend the clouds and are crowned with eternal snow. It ran farther north through the belt of free cities on the Upper Rhineland, on both sides of the river and the frontier. On the Swiss side it included Berne, Basel, Zurich, St. Gall and Schaffhausen; and on the German side Strasburg, Ulm, Augsburg, with other great centers of wealth and high culture. This republic of letters contained the best schools and universities in the Republican Confederation. Democratic ideas took root amongst patriots who had won their independence over the body of Charles the Bold at the gate of Nantz. They first prized the political principles on which their republics bravely stood, but found religious bondage incompatible with free States. When neither bishop nor king linked them to Church life politically, they concluded logically enough that religion was no longer a governmental science. In medieval and aristocratic Saxony and other monarchies the Church and State formed one body, and religious life was honey-combed by a legal KELLER'S RESEARCHES. 329 membership in the Church of newborn babes. Many asked, therefore, why republicanism could not properly let the commonwealth of Israel alone? Hence, when republics claimed the right to bind the consciences of their citizens and counted all criminals who resisted their mandates, a dark shadow fell athwart the republican escutcheon, for that class. As Baptists, they discovered that the conscience of each man being free Godward, nations who had conquered the right to take care of themselves could never be cramped back into an enforced religious uniformity. The great Baptist movement on the Continent originated with no particular man nor in any one place. It seems to have sprung up in many places at about the same time, and its general growth was wonderful, between 1520 and 1570-half a century. Keller says: A contemporary, who was not a Baptist, has this testimony concerning the beginning of the movement: "The Anabaptist movement was so rapid, that the presence of Baptist views was speedily discoverable in all parts of the land." He mentions Switzerland, Moravia, the South and North German States and Holland, with many principalities, and writes: "The more I examine the documents of that time, at my command (as archivist of Münster), the more I am astonished at the extent of the diffusion of Anabaptist views, an extent of which no other investigator has had any knowledge.' He speaks of their churches in Cologne, Aachen, Wesel and Essen, in East Friesland, the duchies of Bentheim, Linden, Oldenburg, Lippe and the city of Minden. He cites Frederic of Saxony, the Duke of Lüneburg and the Reformer Rhegius, to show that from 1530 to 1568, Saxony and the Lutheran cities were filled with Baptists, also the Westphalian cities, Soest, Lippstadt, Leigo, Unna, Blomberg, Osnabrück and others. He says: "The number of Baptists was especially great both in Thuringia and in Hesse, as well as in the "Evangelical cities," Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck, Brunswick, Hanover, etc.;' and that the coast cities of the North Sea and East Sea, from Flanders to Danzig, were filled with Anabaptist views.' Then he finds them every-where, from the duchy of Cleve on the Lower Rhine, up that river to the Alps. The sixteenth century opened with a general awakening throughout Europe to the need of religious reform, and this was specially marked in Switzerland, before Luther. In ideal, the Swiss reformers longed to get back to the Apostolic pattern, to a spiritual Church free from the control of human policy, and their aims took a Baptist bearing. It is sheer ignorance to represent the Swiss Baptists as merely urging reform in a defective baptism. This is a monstrous bugbear to frighten superstitious folk, who count the refusal of a spurious baptism to what they call 'covenanted babes,' as an affront to Christ, and all one with 'soul-killing.' They held infant baptism in discredit, not only as a human institution, but as a flagrant impiety palming itself off as an institution of God, and asking the State to enforce it on pain of death, while the Church claimed to administer it by the authority of the Trinity! This double claim rendered it an abominable thing which stepped in between them and their children, robbing both of their natural rights. Looking upon it in this light, it became an alarming perversion of the whole genius of a spiritual religion, and a piece of wild fanaticism which forestalled all right of choice in either parent or child, in order to smuggle the babe into the State-Church. To force its baptism under the magisterial domination of pains and penalties was to bind the infant to a clerical despotism, which, if repeated in England or the United States to-day, would shiver their governments to atoms. The scenic caricatures of these Swiss Baptists have been a simple mendacity answering the end of an historical trick to nullify real facts and render honest men hateful. When Zwingli took lead in the Swiss Reformation, he demanded obedience to the word of God in all Christian matters, and resolved to reject what it did not enjoin. When debating with Dr. Faber, before six hundred Catholic dignitaries at Zurich, 1523, he laid down this foundation principle. Faber demanded who should judge between them on the matters in dispute, and Zwingli pointed to the Hebrew, Greek and Latin Scriptures, which lay before him. Instead, the doctor proposed that the issue should be decided by the universities of Paris, Cologne and Freiburg. Zwingli replied that the men in that room could tell better what the Scriptures 'Show me,' he demanded, 'the place in the taught than all the universities. When Faber Scripture where it is written that we are to invoke the saints.' defended that doctrine by the Councils, Zwingli showed that as these erred, nothing was binding but the Bible, and said that he would go to the universities if they accepted the Bible as the only judge. Dr. Blanche said: "You understand the Scriptures in one way, and another in another. There must be judges in order to decide who has given the right interpretation.' But Zwingli refused to give any man a place above the Scriptures. Many of his hearers had strong Baptist tendenEducated by so skillful a general, they cies and took in this radical doctrine. turned his own weapons upon him when they took issue with him on other subjects; and he was powerless, being obliged to appeal to the sword drawn from the Catholic armory. He was the most advanced of all the reformers biblically, but the moment that he fell into controversy with his own Baptist disciples, he broke with his fundamental principle and made the magistrates of Zurich the decisive judges in the dispute. The Baptists said: On all such questions the Bible is autocratic; apply it honestly, under the divine right of private judgment, without trammel, and we will follow it; but we refuse to take the interpretations of it which the magistrates give us, for God has not made them our interpreters in such matters. This compelled Zwingli to fall back squarely on the Romish ground, and in turn to compel them to follow the Council. Then came the first break between him and them, on infant baptism. At that moment he was so nearly with them on that subject, that he was willing to delay the baptism of infants' until they arrived at years of discretion.' He said in 1525: The error that it would be better to baptize children when they had come THE ZURICH BAPTISTS. 6 331 to years of understanding, seized me too a few years ago;' giving as his reason that "There is no clear utterance in the New Testament that commands the baptism of children.' Keller attests that, 'Luther at the outset designated Zwingli and his followers as the party associates of those who held views in reference to infant baptism, that were different from his own.' We can easily see,' says Hase, why the Baptists were not satisfied with the excuses of the Swiss reformers;'5 and as easily we can see why Zwingli complained: The Papists call us heretics, and the Anabaptists call us half-papists.' Sometimes he encouraged the practice, sometimes not, always denying the regenerating efficacy of baptism; but finally he concluded to continue infant baptism on the ground that if it ceased the people would clamor for circumcision, as they must have a bond of visible union. Ecolampadius had said: 'We have never dared to teach infant baptism as a command, but rather as an instinct of charity.' Like him, Zwingli feared a division in the Reformed ranks and resorted to these expedients to prevent this, until Pedobaptist pressure forced him to turn over the question to the civil power. As Dr. Dorner says: He saw that the setting aside of infant baptism was the same as setting aside the national Church, exchanging a hitherto national reformation of the Church for one more or less Donatist. For, if infant baptism were given up, because faith was not yet, there only remained as the right time for it the moment when living faith and regeneration were certain. And then baptism would become the sign of fellowship of the regenerate, the saints, who bind themselves together as atoms out of the world.'" 6 8 The Baptists of Zurich began to assail infant baptism in 1523, one of their pastors calling it a useless thing. One might as well baptize a cow or a calf,' he said. Then Grebel writes: Those who understand the teaching of the Scriptures in reference to baptism refuse to allow their children to be baptized.' Reublin rejected the practice and held a public discussion with the pastors of Zurich, the only result of which was, that the Council arrested two men of his congregation and three from the village of Zollikon near by for refusing to bring their children for baptism, fining them each one silver mark and thrusting them into prison. When the Council demanded why they refused, they answered that Christ required them to believe before they could be baptized; and they stood there firmly. Zwingli had published a tract on the subject which fanned the excitement, and the Council had appointed a public discussion. Grebel asked that the debate be in writing, with the Bible as the only source of appeal, and Zwingli agreed to this, but the Council refused. Yet when they met in the Council Hall, January 17, 1525, and his disputants held him to this Bible restraint, he ungenerously charged them with dictating that he should preach nothing but what suited them; and he became so excited as to draw forth the counter-charge of violently stopping their mouths by interruption, screaming and long address.10 Zwingli presented the current. Pedobaptist arguments of his time, and the brave Council, as in duty bound, sagely |