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Luther’s, imply the sympathy of the civil authorities. Charles V. had valiantly opposed the development of heresy in the Netherlands, and nowhere else had there been such numbers of martyrs, for some thirty thousand are supposed to have been put to death during his reign. Under Philip II. it soon became almost impossible to distinguish clearly between the religious issues and the resistance to the manifold tyranny of Philip and his representatives. William of Orange, who had passed through several phases of religious conviction, stood first and foremost for toleration. Indeed, Holland became the home of modern religious liberty, the haven of innumerable free spirits, and the centre of activity of printers and publishers, who asked for no other imprimatur than the prospect of intelligent readers.

It is impossible to offer any exhaustive classification of those who, while they rejected the teachings of the old Church, refused at the same time to conform to the particular types of Protestantism which had found favour in the eyes of the princes and been imposed by them on their subjects. This large class of “dissenters” found themselves The Anabaptists. as little at home under a Protestant as under a Catholic regime, and have until recently been treated with scant sympathy by historians of the Church. Long before the Protestant revolt, simple, obscure people, under the influence of leaders whose names have been forgotten, lost confidence in the official clergy and their sacraments and formed secret organizations of which vague accounts are found in the reports of the 13th-century inquisitors, Rainerus Sacchoni, Bernard Gui, and the rest. Their anti-sacerdotalism appears to have been their chief offence, for the inquisitors admit that they were puritanically careful in word and conduct, and shunned all levity. Similar groups are mentioned in the town chronicles of the early 16th century, and there is reason to assume that informal evangelical movements were no new things when Luther first began to preach. His appeal to the Scriptures against the traditions of the Church encouraged a more active propaganda on the part of Balthasar Hubmaier, Carlstadt, Münzer, Johann Denk (d. 1527) and others, some of whom were well-trained scholars capable of maintaining with vigour and effect their ideas of an apostolic life as the high road to salvation. Miinzer dreamed of an approaching millennium on earth to be heralded by violence and suffering, but Hubmaier and Denk were peaceful evangelists who believed that man’s will was free and that each had within him an inner light which would, if he but followed it, guide him to God. To them persecution was an outrage upon Jesus’s teachings. Luther and his sympathizers were blind to the reasonableness of the fundamental teachings of these “brethren.” The idea of adult baptism, which had after 1525 become generally accepted among them, roused a bitterness which it is rather hard to understand nowadays. But it is easy to see that informal preaching to the people at large, especially after the Peasant Revolt, with which Miinzer had been identified, should have led to a general condemnation, under the name “Anabaptist” or “Catabaptist,” of the heterogeneous dissenters who agreed in rejecting the State religion and associated a condemnation of infant baptism with schemes for social betterment. The terrible events in Münster, which was controlled for a short time (1533–34) by a group of Anabaptists under the leadership of John of Leiden, the introduction of polygamy (which appears to have been a peculiar accident rather than a general principle), the speedy capture of the town by an alliance of Catholic and Protestant princes, and the ruthless retribution inflicted by the victors, have been cherished by ecclesiastical writers as a choice and convincing instance of the natural fruits of a rejection of infant baptism. Much truer than the common estimate of the character of the Anabaptists is that given in Sebastian Franck’s Chronicle: “They taught nothing but love, faith and the crucifixion of the flesh, manifesting patience and humility under many sufferings, breaking bread with one another in sign of unity and love, helping one another with true helpfulness, lending, borrowing, giving, learning to have all things in common, calling each other ‘brother.’ ” Menno Simons (b. circ. 1500) succeeded in bringing the scattered Anabaptist communities into a species of association; he discouraged the earlier apocalyptic hopes, inculcated non-resistance, denounced the evils of State control over religious matters, and emphasized personal conversion, and adult baptism as its appropriate seal. The English Independents and the modern Baptists, as well as the Mennonites, may be regarded as the historical continuation of lines of development going back to the Waldensians and the Bohemian Brethren, and passing down through the German, Dutch and Swiss Anabaptists.

The modern scholar as he reviews the period of the Protestant Revolt looks naturally, but generally in vain, for those rationalistic tendencies which become so clear in the latter part of the 17th century. Luther found no intellectual difficulties in his acceptance and interpretation of the Scriptures as God’s word, and in maintaining Socinians
or Anti-Trinitarians. against the Anabaptists the legitimacy of every old custom that was not obviously contrary to the Scriptures. Indeed, he gloried in the inherent and divine unreasonableness of Christianity, and brutally denounced reason as a cunning fool, “a pretty harlot.” The number of questions which Calvin failed to ask or eluded by absolutely irrational expedients frees him from any taint of modern rationalism. But in Servetus, whose execution he approved, we find an isolated, feeble revolt against assumptions which both Catholics and Protestants of all shades accepted without question. It is pretty clear that the common accounts of the Renaissance and of the revival of learning grossly exaggerate the influence of the writers of Greece and Rome, for they produced no obvious rationalistic movement, as would have been the case had Plato and Cicero, Lucretius and Lucian, been taken really seriously. Neo-Platonism, which is in some respects nearer the Christian patristic than the Hellenic spirit, was as far as the radical religious thinkers of the Italian Renaissance receded. The only religious movement that can be regarded as even rather vaguely the outcome of humanism is the Socinian. Faustus Sozzini, a native of Sienna (1539–1603), much influenced by his uncle Lelio Sozzini, after a wandering, questioning life, found his way to Poland, where he succeeded in uniting the various Anabaptist sects into a species of church, the doctrines of which are set forth in the Confession of Rakow (near Minsk), published in Polish in 1605 and speedily in German and Latin. The Latin edition declares that although this new statement of the elements of the Christian faith differs from the articles of other Christian creeds it is not to be mistaken for a challenge. It does not aim at binding the opinions of men or at condemning to the tortures of hell-fire those who refuse to accept it. Absit a nobis ea mens, immo amentia. “We have, it is true, ventured to prepare a catechism, but we force it on no one; we express our opinions, but we coerce no one. It is free to every one to form his own conclusions in religious matters; and so we do no more than set forth the meaning of divine things as they appear to our minds Without, however, attacking or insulting those who differ from us. This is the golden freedom of preaching which the holy words of the New Testament so strictly enjoin upon us. . . . Who art thou, miserable man, who would smother and extinguish in others the fire of God’s Spirit which it has pleased him to kindle in them?” The Socinian creed sprang from intellectual rather than religious motives. Sufficient reasons could be assigned for accepting the New Testament as God’s word and Christ as the Christian’s guide. He was not God, but a divine prophet born of a virgin and raised on the third day as the first-fruits of them that slept. From the standpoint of the history of enlightenment, as Harnack has observed, “Socinianism with its systematic criticism (tentative and imperfect as it may now seem) and its rejection of all the assumptions based upon mere ecclesiastical tradition, can scarcely be rated too highly. That modern Unitarianism is all to be traced back to Sozzini and the Rakow Confession need not be assumed. The anti-Trinitarian path was one which opened invitingly before a considerable class of critical minds, seeming as it did to lead out into