PROTESTANT AND PAPAL IMMORALITY.

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lancthon, Bucer and four others, signed and sealed a document, attempting to dissuade the Landgrave, but failing of that, closed by saying: 'If, however, your highness is utterly determined upon marrying a second wife, we are of opinion that it ought to be done secretly.' Antony Corvinus, the fourth signer of this reply to Philip, gives an account of the examination of John of Leyden, at which he was present, in which John gave his seven articles of faith. He intrenched himself behind Luther's position, saying that they followed the example of the patriarchs,' declared marriage a 'political institution,' and then put in the same plea as Philip. In Philip's letter to the Wittenberg divines he said: 'Ever since my marriage I have lived constantly in a state of adultery and fornication, and as I will not forego this course of life, I am interdicted from taking the holy communion; for St. Paul expressly says, "The adulterer shall not see the kingdom of heaven." John of Leyden adopted this plea, saying, in. his seventh article: It is better to have a plurality of wives than a multitude of prostitutes. God be our judge.' Henry, the Duke of Brunswick, berated Luther for his approval of Philip's bigamy; when Luther replied, with his usual mildness, in his famous article,' Against the Buffoon :' "The duke has daily swallowed devils, and he is chained in hell with the chains of divine judgment.' He then exhorts the pastors to denounce the duke from the pulpit as one who has been damned by divine judgment.' But when he revised his pamphlet, he said to Melancthon that he had been altogether too moderate.26

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And what better examples had the Catholics set the Münster men in the line of purity? From the ninth century down, as Bowden says, in his 'Life of Hildebrand: 'The infamies prevalent among the clergy are to be alluded to, not detailed.' The open licentiousness of the popes was appalling. The popes of the fifteenth century were profligate and debased beyond belief. Innocent VIII. publicly boasted of the number of his illegitimate children. Alexander was a monster of iniquity, who gave dispensations for crimes that cannot be written. Baronius says that the vilest harlots domineered in the papal see, at their pleasure changed sees, appointed bishops, and actually thrust into St. Peter's chair their own gallants, false popes. Take simply the case of John XII. Bowden wrote: The Lateran palace was disgraced by becoming a receptacle for courtezans; and decent females were terrified from pilgrimages to the threshold of the Apostles, by the reports which were spread abroad of the lawless impurity and violence of the representative and successor' of two others equally vile. 27 But these were no worse than Sixtus IV., who erected a house of ill-fame in Rome, the inmates of which, according to Dr. Jortin, paid his holiness a weekly tax, which amounted sometimes to 20,000 ducats a year. The purest spirits in the hierarchy blush to tell the hard narrative of monastic life in the sixteenth century, although it made pretension to spotless virtue. Archbishop Morton, 1490, accused the Abbot of St. Albans with emptying the nunneries of Pray and Sapnell of modest women and filling them with vile females. The clergy kept concubines openly from the

pope down. Ten priests addressed a letter to the Bishop of Constance, asking permission to marry, confessing that their wicked mistresses had been their 'scandal 'and ruin.' He absolved them and others on the payment of five gulden; and Hottinger writes that the revenue from this source was 7,000 gulden. This was a full match for the obscenities of Münster. Such transactions in sacred life led these madmen to throw away all license in civil life.

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A word as to the nude indecencies of Münster must finish this chapter. People appeared naked at the baptistery and in public places. Where had they learned these revolting practices? For centuries the fanaticism of Rome had immersed all persons in a state of nudity. As far back as A. D. 347, the Ritual of Jerusalem required the candidates for baptism to put off the garments wherewith they are clothed.' Brenner, the great Catholic authority, says: "For sixteen hundred years the candidate for immersion was completely undressed.' The Synod of Cologne, in 1280, carried this fanaticism to such an extent, that they decreed that an infant must have water poured upon its head in the name of the Trinity to save it from perdition, if dying, when but half-born. How like Lambecius, who blamed the Danes and 'Swedes for delaying baptism through bashfulness and shame. . . . Since, formerly men and women laying aside their bashfulness, their whole bodies being entirely nude, were baptized in the presence of all; and that not by sprinkling, indeed, but by immersion or sinking them.' 28 These are the men who now shudder at Münster! These are the men who formerly put hundreds of thousands upon the rack, of every rank, age and sex, to be tortured.29

Rome practiced the same indecencies in flagellation, borrowed from the heathen feast of Lupercale, in which, according to Virgil and Plutarch, young noblemen walked through the streets naked, cutting themselves with whips and rods, in austerity, while sacrifices were burning to the gods. The same barbarity was practiced by Christian women in France, Mezaray being authority. For two centuries this flagellant madness ran through Bavaria, Austria, the Upper Rhine and Italy, nay, through Saxony itself. These morbid fanatics practiced all stages of undress, formed a brotherhood, swept in thousands through these lands, singing hymns, having revelations from angels and the Virgin, and with a letter from Christ himself, which they exhibited in their pilgrimages. Motley calls the Münster men, Furious fanatics, who deserved the mad-house rather than the scaffold:' and how much better. were Catholics or Protestants, in practicing the same things? It is hardly worth while sending the Münster fiends to perdition alone, nolens volens, for unbearable beastliness. There was this difference between their butchery and the legal murders of Protestant and Catholic, called martyrdoms, namely: that theirs were acts of violence perpetrated in a religious craze or frenzy, while the others were the result of deliberate legislation, put on the statute-book, in that icy sublimity which dresses itself in the guise of human and divine law. But history will mete out to all these parties that tardy justice which will be honestly accepted by all in due time.

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CHAPTER V.

THE REFORMATION-THE GERMAN BAPTISTS.

HE German and Swiss Reformation preceded the English in point of date, all being due to the same causes, while each in a sense stood alone. When Wessel, the mystic, died Zwingli was a boy of five years, Luther of six, Erasmus was a man of twenty-two, Reuchlin of thirty-four and Melancthon was unborn. Luther did not nail his theses to the cathedral door at Wittenberg till 1517, but the Bohemian Reformers sent a delegation to Erasmus at Antwerp as early as 1511, asking him to point out any errors in their Confession of Faith, but he found none. Sebastian Frank, who published his history A. D. 1531, says: "The Picards in Bohemia are divided into two, or as some say, into three parties, the large, sinall, and very small, who hold in all things with the Anabaptists, have all things common, baptize no children, and do not believe in the real presence.' So far from finding the origin of the so-called 'Anabaptist' movement in the lawless extravagance of Münster, 1534-35, it is seen that the Swiss history of the Baptists which has been given, preceded that date, and a similar history marks their movements in Bohemia. Addis and Arnold, in their Catholic Dictionary, say that various sects repudiated infant baptism in the Middle Ages, and they trace not only a genetic but an historical connection between these and the Baptists,-agreeing with the Encyclopedia Britannica,' that 'The continuity of a sect is to be traced in its principles, and not in its adherents.'

MORAVIA. After Hubmeyer fled from Zurich in 1526, he made his way to Nicholsburg in Moravia, where he established the Baptist cause. This became the field of his labor and the churches multiplied rapidly, partly from the banished of all lands and partly from new converts. They were no more welcome to the king and emperor there than elsewhere, but the rulers stood in fear of the Turks at the time; the Hussites were passive, yet welcomed the Baptists to their estates, so that they could preach and celebrate the ordinances, and they had peace. Ulimann had also fled from Switzerland to Moravia, but in 1580, he returned to persuade his Baptist brethren to leave their Alpine home and seek freedom there too. Full of hope, many gathered their little property and started on this long pilgrimage, but were waylaid at Waldsee, and because they would not renounce their principles, Ulimann and the men were beheaded, while the women were drowned. The question concerning the use of the sword soon divided the Moravian Baptists, Hubmeyer believing in its civil use, but a party of non-resistants withdrew to Austerlitz in 1528. That party subdivided in 1531, when Reublin, another Swiss Baptist, took

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THE MORAVIAN BAPTISTS.

a company of one hundred and fifty to Auspitz, on the plea that they had not sufficient freedom at Austerlitz in public speaking, that their brethren intermarried with unbelievers and that they were not treated with equality. This party soon fell into vain janglings,' and Reublin was excluded for withholding from the common funds. Jacob Huter, however, soon restored harmony by means of a common constitution, and his followers were known as the Huterites.

The Baptists increased to sixty congregations in twenty years, each numbering several hundreds; besides, many settled in Hungary and Transylvania to avoid persecution. By vote of the people, each congregation chose its pastor aud deacons.3 Their pastors were good Bible students, and their people were fond of sacred song, some of their hymns numbering forty-five verses each; for they put an exhortation, a Bible story or the history of a martyr into rhyme. They formed themselves into a community under the direction of one head, and divided into households; each with 'ministers of the word' and 'ministers of need,' and the whole fraternity labored. They taught their children in a common school, and when old enongh put them to a trade. Marriage was restricted to their own sect, and their joint earnings went into a common treasury, out of which all were supported. De Schweinitz, a little later than the middle of the century, says of them:

In Moravia there were many Anabaptists. . . . This sect, which numbered seventy communities in Moravia, was divided into three factions; the communists, who kept up a community of goods, the Gabrielites, and the Sabbatarians. It is said of the Anabaptists, that they were the best farmers, raised the best cattle, had the best vineyards, brewed the best beer, owned the best flour mills, and engaged on a large scale in almost every kind of trade known in their day.' He further says that in spite of frequent persecutions they prospered. Their industrial pursuits, for which they became celebrated, won the good-will of powerful families among the nobility; and when Maximilian expressed his surprise that they had not been extirpated in his father's time and casting his tolerance to the winds, proposed to drive them out of the country, the Upper House of the Diet protested against such a measure as destructive to the interests of the kingdom. Hence they were allowed to remain, but loaded with taxes.' Keller says: In Moravia, where the Baptists for a long time found influential protectors, persecution begun in 1528. At Easter, in Brünn, Thomas Waldhausen, with two associates, was burned, and at Znaym and Olmutz several of the leaders were put to death. Also at Bruck, in Steinmark, nine men were beheaded and three women were drowned.' 5

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Erhard tells of a curious Catholic, who visited them and evidently 'cast a wishful eye' upon their full cheer. He complained:

"They will not have any poor among them, the sisters dress like the nobility in silk and satin, though they are only waiters' and porters' wives. They have no lack of grain, but gather every year enough for seven. They have plenty of ducats and gold crowns, so that they paid one bill of twenty-two hundred gulden. Their tables are loaded with hare, fish, fowl, nor do they lack good Holland cheese. They ride in beautiful wagons and on fine horses. Their stalls are filled with fat cattle, swine and sheep. They monopolize all the trades, and it looks as though they would soon buy out the lords.'

THEIR PURITY AND SIMPLICITY.

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Good for the Anabaptists,' for once they evinced grand common sense, and none the less for keeping that hungry monk out, even if his eyes did water. Still, they were kind, and when famine passed over the land they had enough and much to spare for their neighbors. Then their abundance made Moravia a sort of 'Promised Land' for their pinched brethren who came flocking to them from other countries, for bread and liberty. When these gaunt wretches arrived they said: 'Brother, it is ours by God's gift. In your poverty we will give you and your little ones food and clothes, shelter and schools.' And they had many such calls, as in one year sixteen hundred Baptist emigrants left Switzerland and Bavaria for Moravia. Their manner of life was very frugal, they used few words, were vehement in disputation, and willing to die, but not to yield.' They called themselves 'Apostolical;' and elected their general superintendent, who instructed them in the rules of faith and life, and prayed with them every morning before they went to work. quarter of an hour before eating they covered their faces with their hands in meditation. Their dress was plain and dark, and they conversed much on the future. Erhard, an eye-witness, wrote in Latin rhyme: 'Would that Diogenes might see your baptism and make sport of your washings. You will sometime be called Trito-Baptists, when you are immersed in the Stygian lake.' This evidently alludes to their method of baptizing believers, for they denounced infant baptism severely. When Zeiler visited them long afterwards, 1618, he reported them as still living after the same simple order, and says that they numbered seventy thousand. His account of their communion is very interesting.

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In summer, they would gather at some central point to "break bread," as they called the communion. Long tables were arranged with seats for the company. The day preceding, preparatory sermons were preached, with another early on the day of the celebration. After reading the words of the institution and a prayer, a slice of a large loaf of bread was handed to the presiding preacher, in this case one of the nobility, he broke off a piece and passed the rest to his neighbor, and so on from table to table. Slice after slice was broken until every one had taken a morsel. In like manner the wine was poured out of large vessels into smaller ones and passed around.'

When we bear in mind the constantly recurring outbursts of persecution, their steady increase seems remarkable. They were deprived of Hubmeyer, their great leader, in 1528, seven years before the Münster uproar. The Austrians imprisoned him at Vienna, where Faber and Beck tried earnestly to lead him back into the fold of Rome, but he would not yield a hair's-breadth and was burnt, March 10th. Three days after, his wife was thrown from a bridge into the Danube with a heavy stone around her neck, and drowned. He was a great character and a prolific author of large literary ability. His motto, Truth is immortal,' gives the key-note to his high, bold and logical spirit. His full mind overflowed with original thought, delighting in that keen insight which eagerly hails the truth of God without gloss as supreme. His translations of the Gospels, Epistles to the Romans and Corinth