The Rise and Fall of Religious Liberty in America
By C. M. S.
The Brave Stand of the Anabaptists
THE exaltation of the pope above Christ; the papal determination to extinguish the gospel and traffic in the “souls of men” (Rev. 18:13); the cruel persecutions of the Roman Catholic Church against those who would be free in Christ,—these ripened the world for the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century. The gospel of soul-freedom proclaimed by Luther and others, together with their later denial of, and opposition to, the principles of that freedom, ripened the world for a vigorous campaign in the interests of a free conscience. The first step out of bondage was justification by faith; the second was its logical result,—religious liberty. Two citations here must suffice to show the conditions in Reformation times. Rev. S. A. Swaine, in his work, “The Religious Revolution in the Sixteenth Century,” page 108, says: “In the same year [1519], six men and a woman were burnt alive at Coventry [England], for the crime of teaching their children the Lord’s prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Ten Commandments, in the common tongue. In 1521, the year in which Henry received the title of Defender of the Faith, the most horrible cruelties were practised on some simple folk in the diocese of Lincoln for their adhesion to evangelical doctrines.” Tyndale had translated the New Testament into the speech of the common people. Concerning its reception Swaine says: “The most energetic measures were being taken against that formidable book—formidable to the papacy and the devil—the New Testament. The clergy everywhere inveighed against it, as containing an ‘infectious poison.’ The bishop of London, on the 24th of October, 1526, enjoined on his archdeacons the seizure of all English translations of the Scriptures, ‘with or without glosses;’ and the archbishop of Canterbury went so far as to issue a mandate against all the books which contained ‘any particle of the New Testament.’ So ‘exceeding mad’ were they against the Gospel.”—“Religious Revolution,” page 113. Out of that condition, similar in all the European countries, grew the Reformation. In 1529, because of the attempt of the German emperor, at the pope’s instigation, to crush out what liberty of conscience had been achieved, there was drawn up and presented to the authorities that celebrated protest from which comes down to us the name “Protestant.” The protestants refused to consent to the repeal of the liberties already secured— because it concerns the glory of God and the salvation of our souls, and that in such matters we ought to have regard, above all, to the commandment of God, who is King of kings and Lord of lords, each of us rendering him account for himself, without caring the least in the world about majority or minority. . . . Moreover, the new edict declaring the ministers shall preach the gospel, explaining it according to the writings accepted by the holy Christian Church; we think that, for this regulation to have any value, we should first agree on what is meant by the true and holy Church. Now, seeing there is great diversity of opinion in this respect; that there is no sure doctrine but such as is conformable to the Word of God; that the Lord forbids the teaching of any other doctrine; that each text of the Holy Scriptures ought to be explained by other and clearer texts; that this holy book is, in all things, necessary for the Christian, easy of understanding, and calculated to scatter the darkness; we are resolved, with the grace of God, to maintain the pure and exclusive teaching of his Holy5Word, such as it is contained in the Biblical books of the Old and New Testaments, without adding anything thereto that may be contrary to it. This Word is the only truth; it is the sure rule of all doctrine and of all life, and can never fail or deceive us.
That meant “the Bible and the Bible only” as the Christian’s guide, and it also meant freedom of conscience. Upon this matter Luther himself said: “No man can command, or ought to command, the soul except God, who alone can show it the way to heaven. It is futile and impossible to command, or by force to compel, any man’s belief.” There were thousands of honest-hearted souls to whom that doctrine was as the bread of life and the water of life. Hungry and thirsty, their souls cried out for it; and having feasted upon it, they could never go back to the husks of papal dogmas, doctrines, traditions, and with them the slavery of the soul. They practised those precepts; and when, from the study of the Word, they learned new truths, long hidden under the rubbish of tradition, they began to practise their new-found freedom in believing and teaching their new-found truths. Where these truths were beyond, or were not understood by, the leaders of the Reformation, or where persons of a fanatical disposition mixed truth with error and taught that, the Reformers themselves began to feel that it was necessary to put a restriction upon religious liberty, and they did it. We showed last week how dangerous it became for men and women to believe and teach contrary to the doctrines of the Reformers; how the same instruments used by the papal power to suppress the gospel were used by the Reformers to suppress teachings not in harmony with their creeds, till men and women were tortured and burned and drowned for no other crime than exercising liberty of belief and practise in things purely religious. The statue of Zwingli, erected at Zurich in 1885, holding the Bible in one hand and a sword in the other, is a concrete characterization of later Reformation times. Out of those times and conditions grew the Anabaptist movement. Misrepresented by many fanatics who were called Anabaptists, misunderstood and maligned by others, their very name a contemptuous title invented by their enemies (re-baptizers), they grew in spite of sword and fire and water, all of which were made instruments of death to them because of their faith. They had drunk in the doctrines of soul-freedom from the sermons and writings of Luther, from the famous protest to the Diet of Spires, but chiefly from the Word of God itself. This sect, “everywhere spoken against” by Catholic and Protestant alike, and everywhere persecuted by both with similar cruelty became the heralds of religious liberty not only for the Old World, but for the New as well. Concerning them we read:— Among the few and scattered European voices for religious liberty, heard in the two hundred fifty years from the day of Luther, the place of honor is undoubtedly to be accorded to the Anabaptists. Their doctrine is one of the most remarkable things which appeared in that wonderful age. It comes to speech with a clearness and fulness which suggests a revelation, just as to Luther dawned justification by faith, soul enlightening and uplifting. And no less notable, this doctrine came at the very opening of the Reformation, in the year 1524, just after the famous Diet of Worms, and while Luther was secluded in the Wartburg—“Rise of Religious Liberty in America,” page 63.
It will be of interest to know what they believed and taught. They insisted that freedom of conscience and of worship were essential to spiritual growth; that religion should be entirely exempt from the regulation or interference of the civil power, so that “a man’s religion should not work his civil disability.” They held that the church “should be composed exclusively of the regenerate, membership therein to be conditioned” upon “the work of grace in the heart.” “In this last point,” says Cobb, “they anticipated, by more than two centuries, that distinction by Edwards which shattered the union of church and State in America.” In the plea for religious liberty written by Prof. Hubmeyer, rector of the University of Ingolstadt (himself an Anabaptist), we find these declarations:— If men can not be convinced by appeals to reason or to the Word of God, they should be let alone. One can not be made to see his errors either by fire or sword.
He proclaimed these principles openly, lost the friendship of Luther and Zwingli for doing so, and in the year 1528 suffered martyrdom, being tortured with red-hot pincers, beheaded, and his body burned. Just one year previous to his martyrdom the Swiss Anabaptists issued a Confession of Faith, which is said to have been the first ever published “in which Christian men claimed absolute religious freedom for themselves, and granted absolute religious freedom to others.” Following are some of the principles held in common by the Anabaptist body:— That secular authority has no concern with religious belief; that the Christian resists no evil, and therefore needs no law courts, nor should ever make use of the tribunals; that Christians do not kill or punish with imprisonment or the sword, but only with exclusion from the body of believers; that no man should be compelled by force to believe, nor should any be slain on account of his faith; that infant baptism is of the pope and the devil; that adult baptism is the only true Christian baptism. On those principles they stood unflinchingly, and for doing so were tortured or drowned or burned or beheaded. The whole world was arrayed against them and the principles they espoused. A hundred years of persistent persecution succeeded in crushing out the Anabaptist movement in Germany and Switzerland. As the Waldenses fled from Catholic persecution, so fled the Anabaptists from Lutheranism and Calvinism. “They scattered all over continental Europe, and increased in numbers marvelously.” Before Germany and Switzerland had extinguished the torch of this new Reformation, its adherents had kindled fresh fires in the western part of Europe and in England. In the Netherlands they became known as the Mennonites, and under Charles V more than fifty thousand persons, mostly Anabaptists or Mennonites, paid with their lives for maintaining an unshackled conscience. But they were not exterminated. Prince William of Orange finally championed their rights, declaring to the magistrates of Middleburg: “You have no right to trouble yourselves with any man’s conscience, so long as nothing is done to cause private harm or public scandal. We, therefore, expressly ordain that you desist from molesting these Baptists.” Of the influence of the Anabaptist movement upon religious liberty in America, we shall learn in our next article.