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In the Petrobrusians we find a sect of Baptists for which no apology is needed. Peter of Bruis seized the entire Biblical presentation of baptism, and forced its teaching home upon the conscience and the life, by rejecting the immersion of babes and insisting on the immersion of all believers in Christ, without any admixture of Catharistic nonsense. He was a converted priest, it is believed a pupil of Abelard, brought to the Saviour’s feet by reading the Bible. There he saw the difference between the Christianity of his day and of that of the Apostles; and he resolved to devote his life to the restoration of Gospel Christianity, and began his work as early as A.D. 1104. He threw tradition to the winds with the double sense of Scripture, and took its literal interpretation. With this went the doctrine of transubstantiation, holding the Supper as a merely historical and monumental act. He held the Church to be made up of regenerated people only, counted the bishops and priests as he know them, mere frauds; and cast aside all the ceremonial mummeries of the Romish hierarchy. He would not adore images, offer prayer to or for the dead, nor do penance. He laughed at the stupidity which holds that a child is regenerated when baptized, that he can be a member of Christ’s flock when he knows nothing of Christ as a Shepherd, and demanded that all who came to his churches should be immersed in water on their own act of faith. He had no controversy on the subject of immersion with the Romish priests, for they practiced nothing else as the custom of their Church in his day, nor for a century afterward; therefore no separate Baptist body was needed for that reason. His great offense was that he reimmersed those whom they had immersed as babes when they became disciples of Christ and were regenerated by the Spirit of God.

The chief testimony that we have of him is from Peter the Venerable, the Abbot of Clugny, and a brief passage from Abelard. This Peter, his deadly opponent, gives a full account of his doctrines and tried to crush him; but, singularly enough, never breathed a syllable against his practice of immersing, for that was Peter’s own practice, only its subjects were babes. The venerable monk, ‘Maxima Biblioth.’ (xxii, 1035), defines the views of the Petrobrusians precisely as would an able Baptist of today, and attempts to answer them with the exact stock arguments of 1886. He says: ‘The first article of the heretics denies that children below the age of reason can be saved by the baptism of Christ; and affirms that another’s faith can do those no good who cannot yet exercise faith of their own, since, according to them, it is not another’s but one’s own faith which, together with baptism, saves, because the Lord said, "Whosoever believeth and is baptized shall be saved."’ He makes them say in another place, ‘It is an idle and vain thing to plunge candidates in water at any age, when ye can, indeed, after a human manner, wash the flesh from impurities, but can by no means purify the soul from sins. But we await an age capable of faith, and after a man is prepared to acknowledge God as his and believe in him, we do not, as you slander us, rebaptize, but baptize him; for no one is to be called baptized who is not washed with the baptism wherewith sins are washed away.’

The Abbot stood side by side with Bernard in his Biblical scholarship and mental force. They were the leading defenders of the Catholic faith in France, and threw themselves into the gap with all their might to defend her against these simple Gospel Baptists. Instead of bowing to our Lord’s words as an obedient disciple, Peter indulged in this absurd reasoning: ‘Has the whole world been so blinded and hitherto involved in such darkness, that to open their eyes and break up the long night it should, after so many fathers, martyrs, popes and heads of all the Churches, have to wait so long for you, and choose Peter of Bruis and Henry, his disciple, as exceedingly recent apostles, to correct the long error? If this be true, it is manifest how great an absurdity follows. For then all Gaul, Spain, Germany, Italy, yea, all Europe, since for three hundred years, yea for near five hundred years, has had no one baptized save in infancy, has had no Christian. But if it has had no Christian, then it has had no Church. If no Church, then no Christ; if no Christ, then assuredly they have all perished.’ It seems never to have entered his head that Christ was before and above all the fathers, popes and heads of the Churches; and that, therefore, they must all obey him and take the consequences of their own disobedience, be they what they might, rather than nullify his law.

The Petrobrusians were a thoroughly antisacerdotal sect, whose hatred of tyranny threw off the Roman yoke of the twelfth century; a democratic body, in distinction from the aristocratic organizations both of the Catholics and the Albigenses. It appears from the assembly of the latter body, at Lombers, that they had a pope who had come from far-off Bulgaria, and who carefully defined the bounds of their various Catharist bishoprics. In that assembly also they had warm contests; and the names of those are given who were exalted to episcopal functions by the forms of the Consolamentum. We have seen that their numbers were very great as a people, but the members of the Electi were comparatively few. Reiner, who had spent seventeen years amongst them, tells us that ‘the Credentes were innumerable,’ but that the Electi of both sexes did not exceed four thousand. This form of aristocracy well suited the feudal cast of society in that day, and may explain, in part, why the rationalistic nobles and the hierarchical priesthood so readily became Cathari. But the Petrobrusians were of the common people, who sought the Saviour by simple directness and not through any saving intervention. They demanded the words of Christ in the New Testament for every thing, and not the traditions of an inner and favored few. With a quaint tinge of chagrin, something after the fox-and-grapes order, Peter the venerable abbot hints that his brother, Peter of Bruis, refused to immerse infants because he was too lazy to perform the rite; as if it were easier to dip overgrown peasants in the Rhone than tiny babes in the fonts. He thought, also, that his beloved Baptist brother burned the crosses because it was easier to do that than to worship them; and that he rejected masses because be was hardly paid enough for saying them.

The Petrobrusians were thoroughly and deeply anti-Catholic in all that conflicted with the Gospel. While they were Puritanical they were not ascetic. They abolished all fasts and penances for sin because Christ only can forgive sin, and this he does on a sinner’s trust in his merits. They held marriage as a high and honorable relation, not only for Christians generally, but for the priests. They denied that the person of Christ could be made a sacrifice on the altar, that the chair of the pope is the chair of Peter, and that one bishop had power to consecrate another. They made void the priesthood of Rome, condemned its sacraments as superstitious, and demanded that baptism be administered only to believers. With them a Church did not mean an architectural structure, but a regenerated congregation, nor had consecrated places any charm for them; for God could hear them as well in the marketplace as in the temple, and loved them as much in a barn as before an altar. Their success filled the Romish communion with alarm. Peter of Bruis was little superior in learning to Peter of the Gospel; but, like his great predecessor, he was sincere, earnest and eloquent, and the Lord wrought mightily by his hand. Multitudes flocked in all directions to hear him as a man specially sent of God to bring glad tidings of great joy. Soon his word turned the dioceses of Aries, Embrun, Die and Gap upside down. In their enthusiasm the people burned their images and crucifixes, some Catholic places of worship were overturned, and many monks and priests were handled very severe. On a certain Good Friday the crowd brought all their wooden crosses and made a bonfire of them, at which they roasted and ate meat. Their venerable adversary thus describes their work: ‘The people are re-baptized, the churches profaned, the altars overthrown, the crosses burned, flesh is eaten, even on the .day of our Lord’s passion, priests are whipped, monks are imprisoned, and by terror and torture they are compelled to marry wives.’

If this were true, the whipping and imprisonment of these helpless Romanists is very un-Baptistic; and as to the question of compulsory marriages, the abbot probably drew slightly on his imagination, as none but the priests themselves had the legal power to celebrate marriage; to say nothing of taking their wives under the pressure of Baptist ringleaders whom they banished, and who were obliged to fly to Narbonne and Toulouse for their lives. In these places Peter bravely preached for twenty years, and with great success. Besides, his doctrine spread not only through Provence and Dauphine, but much farther to the east. At last, however, in 1126, while he was preaching at St. Gilles, he was suddenly arrested by a violent mob and burned at the stake, his eloquent tongue being silenced in the midst of his triumphs.

But the death of Peter was not the end of his cause. Labbe calls him ‘the parent of heretics,’ for almost all who were thus branded after his day trod in his steps; and especially all Baptist ‘heretics.’ Even the candid and celebrated Dr. Wall says: ‘I take this Peter Bruis (or Bruce, perhaps, his name was) and Henry to be the first antipedobaptist preachers that ever set up a Church or society of men holding that opinion against infant baptism, and rebaptizing such as had been baptized in infancy.’ When, like Elijah, God took Peter to heaven in a fiery chariot, he had Elisha ready to catch his falling mantle, in the person of HENRY OF LAUSANNE; or, as Cluniacensis much prefers to put it, he was followed by Henry, ‘the heir of Bruis’s wickedness.’ This petulant author imagined that Peter’s principles had died with him, and like a simpleton writes; ‘I should have thought that it had been those craggy Alps, and rocks covered with continual snow, that had bred that savage temper in the inhabitants, and that your land, being unlike to all other lands, had yielded a sort of people unlike to all others.’ But he soon perceived his mistake. No doubt the sublime aspects of the Alps, like all mountainous regions, were well adapted to start free inquiry in the unfettered mind, and to inspire those distinct tones of religion which stimulate it to advanced thought. Their deep foundations excite to logical deduction, and their broad stretch invites the reasoning powers to throw off all that hampers and hoodwinks them by vulgar submission to antiquated authority. Their very lines and curves, set gracefully against the blue sky, invite manhood out of itself to talk with God in strains of wonder, poetry and sublimity; until a loving awe for him steals over the spirit, as his sunshine bathes the brow of the peak, and the soul is drawn under the winning dominance of adoration and love. There a man feels both his littleness and his freedom, the pain of being hemmed in by obstruction, the stinging smart of dictation, and the terrible delight of rising upward if be can take no other direction. Like the eagle which sails above his hut, his soul dares to rise into grand and dreadful sensations where his spirit feels the majesty of its own wing; his eye scrutinizes the relations of the man in the valley to the mountains around him, and to the God above him, and lie resolves to soar into a freedom as wide and high as the liberty of his own nature. Such a mountaineer is not easily tethered to bogs in the Roman Cainpagna, nor to the vale of the sluggish Tiber; but he soars to the sources of the dashing cascades, to read his greatness and that of his fellow-men in the wide-open volume at the footstool of Jehovah’s throne.

Such a bold soul had Christ been preparing in Henry, the next brave Baptist of the Swiss valleys. He had formerly been a monk of Clugny and had joined himself to his master, Peter of Bruis, in the midst of his toils; and thus had caught his spirit and been imbued with his principles. Our venerable abbot kindly tells us that Henry added some errors of his own to those of Peter, a noble tribute to his progressive mind; but he fails to tell us what they were. Most likely he pushed the attributes of a zealous "Reformer a little further against current abuses. Already he had reached the degree of deacon in the Catholic communion, when his fiery eloquence in exposing the wickedness of the clergy cut him off from further hearing amongst them. He then made common cause with Peter, as Melancthon did with Luther and Whitefield with Wesley. The Abbot of Clugny denounces him as an ‘apostate, who had returned to the vomit of the flesh and the world, a black monk was he.’ He was a man of letters; but his peculiar attraction lay in his contempt for the applauded traditions of the Fathers and in his appeal to the neglected Bible. In Neander’s Life of Bernard he says of Henry:

‘He had all the attributes to deeply impress the people, great dignity in personal appearance, a fiery eye, a thundering voice, a lively step, a speech that rushed forth impetuously as it flowed from his heart, and Bible passages were always at hand to support his addresses. Soon was spread abroad the report of his holy life and his learning. Young and old, men and women, hastened to him to confess their sins and said they had never seen a man of such severity and friendliness whose words could move a heart of iron to repentance, whose life should be a model for all monks and priests. He appeared in the garb of a penitent, his long beard hanging upon his breast, his feet bare even in winter, a staff in his hand; a very young John the Baptist, in a living voice. In drawing his picture, an enemy speaks of his face, through the quickness of his eyes, as like a perilous sea; tall of body, quick of gait, gliding in his walk, quick of speech, of a terrible voice, a youth in age, none more splendid. than he in dress.’ [Page 335]

In 1116 this lithe, young Baptist apostle of the Alps drew near to the thriving city of Mans, and sent two of his disciples within the gates to obtain permission of Hildebert the bishop to preach in his diocese. This prelate was a disciple of Berengarius, and so looked with favor on Henry’s efforts to purify the Church. He was about to depart for Rome, but instructed his archdeacon to treat Henry kindly and allow him to preach. The fame of his piety had reached the city before him, and the people believed that he possessed a prophetic gift. He entered Mans, and while the bishop was visiting Rome the people received him with delight; the priests of the lower order sat at his feet, almost bathing them with tears, while most of the higher clergy protested against him and stood aloof. A platform or pulpit was specially erected for him, from which he might address the people. He made marriage a chief matter in his sermons, he would free it from unnatural restrictions, would celebrate it in early life and make it indissoluble. He would not accept the repentance of an unchaste woman until she had burned her hair and her garments in public. He condemned extravagant attire and marriage for money. ‘Indeed,’ says his enemy, ‘he was marvelously eloquent,’ a remark which couches his matter as well as his manner. While the priests wept over his exposure of their corruptions, the people were enraged at the priests. They refused to sell any thing to them, threatened their servants with violence, and their safety was secured only by the shield of public authority. The clergy came to dispute with Henry, but the people handled them roughly and they fled for safety. Chagrined at their defeat, they united in a letter forbidding him to preach, but the people protected him and he went on boldly.

When the bishop returned the people treated his religious acts with contempt and said: ‘We do not want your benedictions. You may bless the dirt. We have a father and a priest who surpasses you in dignity, holy living and understanding. Your clergy avoid him as if he were a blasphemer, because with the spirit of a prophet he is uncovering their vices, and out of the Holy Scriptures is condemning their errors and excesses.’ The bishop had an interview with Henry, but dared not tolerate the stanch reformer any longer. Henry, therefore, retired to Poitiers and other southern provinces of France, where he continued to labor with great success, in some cases whole congregations leaving the Catholics and joining his standard. The people gave him a ready hearing, for the Catharists and Peter had prepared his way. He had met Peter in the Diocese of Narbonne and received from him the direction of the rising sect. Ten years after the martyrdom of Peter he labored in the regions of Gascony, in the southwest of France, and made a deep impression. In 1134, however, he was arrested by the Bishop of Aries and brought before the Council of Pisa, held by Innocent II, and condemned to confinement in the monastery of Clairvaux, of which Bernard, the chief opposer of the Petrobrusians, was abbot. He soon escaped, however, and was found preaching in Toulouse and the mountain regions round about under the protection of Ildephons, a powerful noble who had become his disciple.

His ministry was so influential that Bernard, in his tour of visitation, found ‘churches without congregations, the people without priests, the priests without due honor, the mass and other sacraments neglected, and the fast days unobserved.’ He complains that ‘the way of the children of Christians is closed, the grace of baptism is refused them, and they are hindered from coming to heaven; although the Saviour, with fatherly love, calls them, saying, "Suffer little children to come unto me."’ The venerable abbot looked upon their baptism as salvation, and to him their exclusion from the immersion which he administered was exclusion from Paradise. The loving Lamb of God had redeemed them; but because Bernard could not hear his voice calling them through the baptistery of a corrupt Church, he was tormented with the thought that surely they must perish. To be sure, that Church was powerless to admit them into heaven by its blessing, or to shut them out by its curse. So he, with his brethren, put them to the sword, with their parents; and all the time, while the blood of innocents was following its keen edge, Jesus was rising from his throne to receive their parting spirits to his bosom as fast as they were slain. Bernard was fretting his soul with the thought that they were ‘forbidden to come’ because they were not brought through his appointed way, so he made their shrill wail echo up and down the Alpine valleys, while they passed through the darker vale of death to him who redeemed his little ones with his own precious blood.

At the time when the land swarmed with Henry’s followers, Pope Eugenius III determined to suppress him and his work, and for this purpose employed Bernard, Cardinal Alberic and others. Bernard held a phenomenal influence over the masses on account of his pure life and reputed miracles; and crowds flocked to hear him preach as if he were an angel of God. He proposed at once to prove the divinity of his mission by miracles. ‘Let this be a proof,’ said he, ‘that our doctrine is true and that of the heretics false, if your sick are healed by eating the bread which I have blessed.’ But he could not always hold the people. At Vivi-defolium they left the church, and when he followed and addressed them in the street they interrupted him with Scripture passages until his voice was drowned. On his return he wrote a letter, in which he congratulated himself on gaining something by his labors, but urged the people to finish the work of extermination which he had begun. ‘Follow and seize them, and determine not to rest until the sects have been driven out of your territory, for it is not safe to sleep in the vicinity of serpents.’

Under such instructions the bishops succeeded in recapturing Henry, when the Pope’s legate cited him and his disciples to answer at his tribunal. His followers fled, and in 1148 Henry was brought before the Council of Rheims, at which Pope Eugenius III presided. He was condemned as a heretic to perpetual confinement and hard fare in a neighboring monastery, where he soon died. But the work which Peter and he had done was so great that when they were dead it survived them. We have seen that Tanchelyn had planted the same seed in Cologne which they had planted in France; and we are reaping the harvest today.

One of the great movements of the century brings before us the immortal Italian, ARNOLD. He was born at Brescia, in the North of Italy, about A.D. 1105, and was an educated monk, a disciple of Abelard; having listened to his lectures, with a crowd of other young men, in his school of the ‘Paraclete’ and been indelibly impressed thereby. God had endowed him with rare gifts. He possessed great fervor, purity and serenity, with a remarkable flow of eloquence; these he united to most graceful and attractive manners and charming conversational powers. As a preacher, he filled Lombardy with resistance to the pride and pretensions of the priesthood. He was the purest, most severe and bold personification of republican democracy, both laical and ecclesiastical, of the century. At that time Feudalism bad wrought such desolation that there was a reaction in Italian aspirations to resist empire and the papacy. These were the two grand Italian ideals of his day, and he determined upon the resurrection of the Roman commonwealth and the destruction of the temporal power of the pope. Under the stirring appeals of his deep convictions and impassioned eloquence the popular cry was raised: ‘The people and liberty,’ and he became as much its incarnation as Mazzini and Garibaldi in modern times. As the apostle of religious liberty, he contended .for a full dissolution of the union between Church and State, and fired the cities to seek perfect freedom from both pope and empire by establishing a republic. As a patriot, he looked upon these civil enemies only with contempt, and summoned Italy to shake them off. As a Christian, he was an antisacramentarian, desiring to bring the Church back to the New Testament standard; or, as Gibbon expresses it, he boldly threw himself upon the declaration of Christ, ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ He would not use the sword, but maintained his cause by moral sentiment; and yet formed the daring plan of planting the standard of civil and religions liberty in the city of Rome itself, for the purpose of restoring the old rights of the Senate and the people. His pure morals and child-like sense of justice started the whole land.

From about 1130 he preached with such power that by 1139 the Lateran Council sentenced him to banishment; and to escape death he fled to the Swiss Canton of Zurich. Amongst the mountains of Switzerland he found shelter with many Lombards who had fled from the hatred of their own countrymen. In Zurich he boldly maintained ‘that every city should constitute an independent state, in whose government no bishop ought to have the right to interfere, that the Church should not own any secular dominion, and that the priests should be satisfied to enjoy the tithes of nature, remaining excluded from every temporal authority.’ He was not allowed, however, to remain quietly in his asylum, but was driven from place to place with a price upon his head. At last, goaded principally by Bernard and the pope, he determined to attack Rome boldly and openly; and did so with great effect. In the public streets he proclaimed to the multitude that the sword and scepter are intrusted to the civil magistrate; that abbots, bishops and the popes must renounce their State or their salvation; and that all their temporal honors are unlawful. The Romans rose in a body to assert their inalienable rights as citizens and Christians, to confine the pope to spiritual matters, to put his ecclesiastics under the civil power, and to establish a laical government with the Senate at its head. Rome was thrown into insurrection; all Europe felt his power, and the eyes of Christendom were turned to the Eternal City. After a desperate contest against three several popes, which cost Lucian his life, a new constitution was framed and the sanction of Adrian IV was demanded to its provisions. The pope fled for his life, his temporal power was abolished and a new government was established in 1143, which maintained the struggle with varying fortunes for about ten years. The violence of the people, however, prevented final success. They rose in insurrection, demolished the houses and seized the property of the papal party, while Arnold was conservative and touched nothing. Nevertheless, his holy apostolate planted the seeds of that republicanism which controls the Italy, Switzerland and France of today.

Bernard seems to have hated him with a singular intensity, and called him a conspirator against Jesus Christ. Pope Eugenius III put Rome under interdict (1154), an act which deprived it of all its religious privileges; the Emperor Barbarossa marched against it with a large army, and after a contest of about eleven years this daring reformer was obliged to surrender. In 1155 he was hanged, his body burned to ashes and his dust thrown into the Tiber, lest the people should collect and venerate it as a precious relic. Thus perished this great patriot and martyr to the holy doctrine of soul-liberty. But Italy will ever hold his name in hallowed remembrance. Down to A.D. 1861 a simple slab commemorated his noble deeds, then a modest statue took its place. But in 1864-65 the Communal and Provincial Councils of Brescia each voted a sum of 30,000 lire (Ital.) for a splendid monument to his honor. The city of Zurich made a large contribution, and from other sources, the sum soon amounted to 150,000 lire (Ital.), about $30,000. The ablest artists of Northern Italy competed for the prize model, which was awarded to M. Tabaccbi. The base is done after the design of the great architect, Tagliaferri, who has succeeded admirably in reproducing the old Lombard style of architecture of Arnold’s time. It is of various colored marbles hewn from the rocks of Brescia. The statue and the four base-reliefs were cast in the artistic foundery of Nelli of Rome. The statue itself is of bronze and is four meters (13 feet 4 inches) high. Arnold is represented in a preaching attitude; his gigantic figure being that of a monk in a long robe with most graceful folds. His long, nervous arms extend from the wide sleeves, his wonderful face is serene, but inspired for address; and the simplicity of the whole conception is worthy of the greatness of the man. The first alto-relievo represents him expounding his doctrines to the Brescians, holding in his hand the Book of Truth; in the second he is on trial, defending himself before his judges against the accusations of his foes; in the third he stands preaching in the Forum, surrounded by shields, broken columns and capitals, among which is also the Arch of Titus; the fourth presents him on the scaffold with his hands tied behind his back, the judge at his side about to read his sentence, and a funeral pile ready for lighting behind him. The scene is terrible, but he stands in calm majesty, his eyes steadily fixed before him. This beautiful work of art was dedicated to him as the forerunner of Italian liberty in the nineteenth century, and was officially unveiled at Brescia August 14, 1882. Most eloquent orations were delivered, while redeemed Italy looked on, by the patriot Rosa and Zanardelli, ‘Minister of Grace and Justice’ for that year.

Although the great distinctive feature in which Arnold most sympathized with Baptists relates to his unbending opposition to any union whatever of Church and State, he appears to have symbolized with them in some other respects. Dr. Wall says that the Lateran Council of 1139 condemned him for rejecting infant baptism, and he thinks that he was ‘a follower of Bruis’ in this respect. If so, then the Council which condemned the Petrobrusians condemned him. Bernard accuses him and his followers of deriding infant baptism. Evervine not only complains of the same thing, but says that they administered baptism only to believers. Gibbon also states that Arnold’s ‘ideas of baptism and the Eucharist were loosely censured; but a political heresy was the source of his fame and his misfortunes.’

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