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A HISTORY OF THE BAPTISTS

By Thomas Armitage

1890

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[Table of Contents for "A History of the Baptists" by Thomas Armitage]

POST-APOSTOLIC TIMES

THE BOHEMIAN BRETHREN AND THE LOLLARDS

In the thirteenth century and onward, a few seers read the signs of the coming Reformation. Men’s souls felt the need of it, and hope lived on. They saw that the cause of Christ was not dead, its vitality was but suspended, and everywhere prophetic aspiration looked for the end of shameless pretension and scandalous morals in the Church. Three classes are known as the Reformers before the Reformation: the Theologic school, chilled by farcical superstition; the Mystical, who groaned in spirit after God; and the Biblical, whose faith in the word of God never faltered. This last school longed to cast the Bible into the mass of torpid profligacy, as the prophet threw salt into the pot of death. John Tauler, A.D. 1290-1361, was the most noble and noted of the Mystics. He was the son of a wealthy farmer of Strasburg. For eight years he sought some one to lead him nearer to God, and at last found his tutor in a beggar at the gate of the cathedral. He allied himself with those known as ‘Friends of God,’ at Strasburg and Cologne, and deserves to be ranked with Fenelon for learning, piety and eloquence. Of his sermons Luther said to Spalatin: ‘If you enjoy solid theology, just like the ancient, get Tauler’s sermons; for I have found no theology, whether in Latin or in any other tongue, that is more sound and consonant with the Gospel.’ He did little, however, to reform his times; he enjoyed inner fellowship with God and trampled upon his own selfishness, but had no power to work on the dead level of a reformer.

With the great revival of letters the learned began to appeal from the decrees of the Church to the text of the Fathers, from them to the Latin Vulgate, and then from that translation to the Greek parchments. But the Italian thinkers rested in the revived literature; chiefly in philosophy, the charms of verse and the golden measurement of prose. Some of them were kings amongst men; but the restored classic form, diction, elegance, imagination, were the scepter which they waved, and its motions made no stir of dry bones in the open valley of vice. Rome gloried in the beauties of Hellas rather than in the beauties of holiness, in the song and the drama rather than in the realities of saving truth. At times shame aroused her humanist mood and she had fierce fits of morality, when she thundered against her own wickedness, being careful always not to strike herself with lightning. She was like the acolyte, who all his life had been too close to the altar to feel any reverence for its mysteries. Old Greek thought was welcome, but not the Galilean. But when her learning went on pilgrimage into the Transalpine kingdoms and touched the less volatile and more robust races, it was felt at the foundations of humanity. German and Italian mind met at Constance and Basle; the souls of Dante, Medici and Piccolomini (Pius II) clashed with the controversialists at Prague, Vienna, Cologne and Heidelberg; and while this seething mass was all alive, Guttenburg threw the first printed Bible into the vast ferment, and it has never been quiet since. From that day, 1455, the Reformation began to set in firmly. That very year Reuchlin, the father of Hebrew learning in Germany, was born, and twenty-two years later, Erasmus. These were called the ‘Two eyes of Germany.’ The first was the great forerunner of Luther, and fought against indulgences for a generation before that monk was born. He dared to compare the Vulgate with the Hebrew and to point out its errors. When rebuked for doing so he said: ‘I revere St. Jerome as an angel; I respect De Lyra as a master; but I adore Truth as a God.’ In that saying he uttered the great thought of the Reformation.

JOHN WYCLIFFE

The first great master who had grasped it was the princely Yorkshireman and pure-hearted pastor of Lutterworth. He was the father of the greatest idea of three centuries, namely: The gift of the Bible to England in English, as the inheritance of all, from the king and queen down to the plow-boy and milk-maid. He read the charter of God to man traced on the parchment, and while his own heart burned he quietly vowed that it was the native right of every Englishman to warm his bosom by its reading. Men call this lowly, daring farmer’s son the ‘Morning Star of the Reformation.’ More gracefully may Wickliff wear the trope of Augustine, when he compares some saints to the sun. He charmed by the luster of his rising, he strengthened by the reign of his light, he filled the heavens with the glow of his decline, and after five hundred years the moon and the stars of the Reformation make to him their obeisance. The inflow of French had corrupted the old vernacular, so that the Anglo-Saxon version had become obsolete. Besides, it had become a crime for those who could read the Scriptures in their mother tongue to do so. The clergy themselves were grossly illiterate, many curates knew not the Ten Commandments, nor could they understand one verse of the Psalter. The pope sent his bull to Beaumont for his consecration as Bishop of Durham; and Andrews, in his History of Britain, tells us that he tried again and again to spell out its words in public, but was so puzzled that at last he cried out: ‘By St. Louis! it could be no gentleman who wrote this stuff.’ Edward III entered his protest against this state of things, and Wickliff resolved to end it forever. At that time a manuscript copy of one page of Scripture was of immense cost and printing was not discovered. The annual allowance of a university scholar was but fifty shillings, the wages of a laboring man three half-pence a day, and two arches of London bridge only cost 25 pounds, in 1240; yet in 1274 the Abbot of Croxton paid for a fairly written Bible in nine volumes the sum of 33 pounds 6s. 8d.

In Wickliff’s day the contest between the Church and the civil power was just growing severe, and he devoted his whole life to a struggle with the papacy. Newman well describes the conflict: ‘The State said to the Church, "I am the only power that can reform you; you hold of me; your dignities and offices are in my gift." The Church said to the State, "She who wields the power of smiting kings cannot be a king’s creature; and if you attempt to reform her you will he planting the root of corruption by the same hand which cuts off its branches."’ Bull after bull was thundered against Wickliff for one thing or another, five of them in one month; but he quietly persevered, preparing his Bible for the common people. He took the greatest pains to make it plain, casting aside all foreign terms and scholastic words, using the uncouth language of the people, so that the most lowly and unlettered could understand what they read or heard. Knighton, Canon of Leicester, his violent foe, saw his drift and said: ‘Christ intrusted his Gospel to the clergy and doctors of the Church, to minister it to the laity and weaker sort. But this Master Wickliff, by translating it, has made it vulgar, and laid it more open to the laity, and even women who can read, than it used to be to the most learned of the clergy and those of the best understanding; and thus the gospel jewel, the evangelical pearl, is thrown about and trod underfoot of swine.’

Wickliff finished his work in 1380 and died at Lutterworth, his body sleeping there amongst his flock, in the chancel of the parish church. As his Bible aroused the English conscience, the pope felt a chill; he heard unearthly sounds rattle through the empty caverns of his soul, and he mistook Wickliff’s bones for his Bible. The moldering skeleton of the sleeping translator polluted the consecrated ground where it slept. The Council of Constance condemned his Bible and his bones to be burnt together. The pope shivered all over, chilled to the marrow, and he needed a fire to thaw him withal. So after the godly preacher had slept quietly for over thirty years, Chicheley, Archbishop of Canterbury, went down in state to Lutterworth to give new life to the venerable rector and to set him preaching again. A great body of solemn clergy went with him to enforce the grim sentence, and somehow managed to keep straight faces while they went through the pious farce of dragging the ghastly Yorkshire frame from the tomb. The little sanctuary stood on a hill, and when they had sated their ghostly ire at the charnel-house they drew the skeleton to the tiny river Swift, consumed it with dry fagots and threw the ashes into the generous stream. Every atom of his dust rested on a softer, purer bosom that day than Chicheley had ever known. Such a treasure had never floated on the laughing brook before, so it divided his holy ashes with the Severn and the sea. Little Lutterworth was too small either for his Bible or his bones, and now they are welcomed by the wide world.

Froude finds a resemblance between some of Wickliff’s views and those of the Baptists, and others have claimed him as a Baptist. But it were more accurate to say that many who carried his principles to their legitimate results became Baptists. His foundation principles were:

‘That all truth is contained in the Scriptures, and that Christ’s law sufficeth by itself to rule Christ’s Church; that we must receive nothing but what is in the Scripture; that whatever is added to it or taken from it is blasphemous; that no rite or ceremony ought to be received into the Church but that which is plainly confirmed by God’s word; that wise men leave that as impertinent which is not plainly expressed; that we admit no conclusion that is not proved by Scripture testimony; and that whoever holds the contrary opinions is not a Christian, but flatly the devil’s champion.’

In his translation he uses the words ‘wash,’ ‘christen’ and ‘baptize’ in regard to the initiatory ordinance. His rendering of Matt. 3:5,6, is, ‘Thanne ierusalem wente out to hym and al indee, and al the cuntre aboute iordan: and thei werun waischen of hym in iordan and knowlechiden her synnes.’ Again, in verse 11: ‘ I waisch you in watyr.’ Also Mark 1:5: ‘and thei weren baptisid of hym in the flum Iordan.’ [English Hexapla] He always retains the preposition ‘in’ and never ‘with,’ ‘in water,’ ‘in Jordan,’ even when he speaks of Christ’s figurative baptism, his overwhelming in grief he gives the same rendering, Mark 10:39: ‘Ye schulen be waischun with the baptym, in whiche I am baptiside.’ The natural force of the word in is made doubly emphatic by the use of the word ‘wash,’ wash in; allowing that he intended to convey the sense of dip; according to Greenfield, ‘It is evident, that to wash the body or person, without specifying any particular part of the body, must necessarily denote to bathe, which clearly implies immersion, washing being the mere consequence of immersion. This sense of the translator agrees exactly with his common practice and that of his times.

THE BOHEMIAN BRETHREN

Wickliff’s translation was to kindle the truth afresh through all Germany, and to light the way of John Huss and Jerome of Prague through the flames of Constance. The Bohemians came of the Slavonic race, and were originally known as Czechs. They conquered Bohemia in the sixth century, and becoming Christians under the labors of Methodius, a Greek priest, long remained members of the Greek Church. They were brought under papal supremacy in 968, when their ritual was abolished, the Latin imposed upon them, and the cup taken from the laity. Their king was elective, and while bent on preserving their constitutional freedom against the pretensions of Austria, they were restive under the religious restrictions of the pope. HUSS was of this Czech blood, and intensely national in spirit, therefore antipapal, as all Bohemian Catholics were. Insular England, also, had the ear of Bohemia through Anne, the English queen, wife of Richard II, and sister to their own king. She was the personal friend of Wickliff, who was one of her husband’s chaplains. Huss made his writings his constant study, and when he not only defended them but demanded their free use amongst the Bohemians, two hundred volumes of them were publicly burnt at Prague. Some Waldensians in 1385 had brought Wickliff’s works to Prague, and the Queen of Bohemia had helped Huss to circulate them. Various scandals helped to awake Bohemia; notably amongst them the discovery in an old church at Wilsnak, of three communion wafers impregnated with what seemed to be blood. The priests proclaimed that this was the blood of Christ, and pilgrims came flocking from all the adjacent countries, even as far as Norway, to be healed, before the whole transaction was exposed as a fraud. When Huss and Jerome were burned all Bohemia was aroused, and in 1415, four hundred and fifty-two nobles not only subscribed to their doctrines, but bound themselves to protect the preaching of God’s word on their estates. For a long time these Reformers maintained the Bible as the supreme authority in all matters of doctrine and life, but when they came to its interpretation they were hampered by the popish idea of uniformity; for they could not tolerate each other’s rights, and so split into two parties. One body rejected all that was not expressly commanded in Scripture, the other accepted all ecclesiastical practices which the Scriptures did not expressly forbid; which is in essence the position of the Baptists and Pedobaptists down to this day. The radicals were called Taborites, from the name of the fortified mount which they held; the conservatives were known as Calixtines, from calix (cup) which became their symbol, and the kingdom, was thrown into civil war.

The TABORITES followed ZISKA, a most intrepid leader. He was far in advance of Huss in his doctrines, not only pushing aside the traditions of the Church and leaving every man to interpret the Bible for himself, but, in 1420 his party published fourteen articles, amongst which are these: That the faithful are not to receive the views of the learned, unless they are found in the Bible; that no decree of the Fathers, or ancient rite, or tradition of men is to be retained, but those which are found in the New Testament; that infants ought not to be baptized with exorcisms, and that the use of sponsors should be discontinued. [Blunt’s Dic. of Sects, Art. Hussites] Some members of this body joined the ‘Brethren of the Law of Christ,’ or the ‘Bohemian Brethren.’

Before speaking of these, a word may not be unacceptable concerning that marked character, Ziska. He was a Bohemian nobleman, and in 1410 lost an eye in the war between the Prussians and Lithuanians. Afterward, he became chamberlain to King Wenceslaus. He was a most daring chief, whether of loyal or insurgent forces. Sigismund laid claim to the Bohemian crown, but Ziska withstood him with desperation. At Kuttenberg, a Catholic city, where his Catholic enemy burned, hanged and beheaded sixteen hundred prisoners of war as heretics, he retaliated terribly upon the monks and priests; and no wonder. He lost his remaining eye by an arrow-shot in a great battle which defeated Sigismund, A.D. 1420. But this made no difference with him as a chieftain. When entirely blind, his hot blood made him the same indomitable victor. He would take his stand on an elevation in the center of the battle-field, with his best officers all around him. Then he borrowed their eyes, as he turned his empty sockets this way and that. His staff reported to him the progress of the fight, and he gave his imperious commands accordingly. Almost without fail, panic seized the Germans, who were utterly routed again and again. At last, the emperor finding that he could do nothing against him, offered him the government of Bohemia, the command of his own armies, and a yearly tribute, if he would acknowledge him as the King of Bohemia. He spurned the tender, and at that point died of the plague. He had been the perfect terror both of the pope and the emperor when he had but one eye, and when he lost the second their torment increased. This dauntless, blind, old Semi-Baptist, must have been of the sturdy type after which the iron-boned Roundhead and the steel-nerved Covenanter and the adamantine Puritan took cast. For, it is said that before he died, he pledged his followers to tan his skin for a drum-head, that the very sound of his hardened hide might strike terror into these brazen foes of God and man. This may he legend, but it is as seriously said that they granted his request; if so, to the honor of his religious posterity, he that hath ears to hear, can catch the sound of that ‘drum ecclesiastic’ all round the globe in this nineteenth century.

The Bohemian Brethren became numerous, counting about one fourth of the people. Even a century before Huss, King Ottocar II found so many heretics in his realm that he applied to the pope to extirpate them. Peregrinus, A.D. 1310, attempted to convert or destroy them. But John of Drasic released the prisoners from patriotic motives and abolished the inquisitor’s court. The Waldensians abounded over the border in Austria, and kept up their union with those of Lombardy. They so developed in Bohemia that they supplied numbers of preachers for Northern Germany, for in the Acts of the Inquisition in Brandenburg and Pomerania, 1391, four hundred Waldensians are mentioned by name. In 1393-94 it brought one thousand Waldensians under its power in Thuringia, Brandenburg, Bolieinia and Moravia. Endless numbers evaded the inquisitors, but in 1397 one hundred of them were burnt in Steyer, Austria; and in the opening of the fifteenth century they had great influence in Bohemia. Peter Chelcicky, named from the village of Chelcic in Southern Bohemia, was the forerunner of the ‘Brethren.’ He was an original and independent thinker, criticised John Huss freely, and would take sides with neither of the Hussite factions. He first appears in public life in the Bethlehem Chapel, Prague, 1420, in a dispute with Jacobellus, on the wrong of appealing to arms in questions of religion, nor did he believe in war at all, not even in self-defense. He insisted on the new birth, and thought it better to baptize believers only, who could show their faith by their works, but did not absolutely forbid infant baptism ; still, he would confine it to the children of believing parents. He says that Christ ‘Speaks of faith first, then of baptism. And as we find this doctrine in the Gospel we should keep it now. But the priests err in baptizing the great multitude, and no one is found, neither old nor young, who knows God and believes his Scriptures. Nevertheless, all without discrimination are baptized. But we should hold firmly that baptism belongs to those who know God and believe in his Scriptures.’ He complains that the masters at Prague had made baptism as common. ‘As a huckster who sits in the market-place and sells plums.’ Palacky ranks him next to Huss, as the greatest thinker of Bohemia in the fifteenth century, and says that he was familiar with Waldensian views as early as 1419. Goll believes that he was one of their body when he came to Prague from his home on the Austrian border; as, in his neighborhood great open-air meetings were held, with lay preachers and baptizers. A council held at Bourges, A.D. 1432 complains thus: ‘In Dauphine there is a certain district included between the mountains which adheres to the errors of the Bohemians, and has imposed and sent tribute to them.’ The Waldensian prisoners before the Inquisition at Freiburg, 1430, acknowledged that some of their apostles came from Bohemia; and AEneas Silvius, afterward Pius II, wrote, July, 1451, that all sects had migrated to Tabor, the chief being Waldensians. When they organized in the northeast corner of Bohemia, they so feared to take any but Gospel steps that they sent delegates to search for the true Church in any part of the earth, but met their ideal nowhere; then they sent to Vienna, to confer with Stephen for a formal union with the Waldensians, but it failed. The followers of Peter became a separate society, known as the ‘BRETHREN OF CHELCIC,’ but persecution and division nearly extinguished them in about fifty years, when they revived under Lucas, a new leader, who was sent, with another delegate, to visit Italy. On their way to Rome they passed through Florence, and witnessed the burning of Savonarola, May 23, 1498. These brethren found a welcome amongst the hidden Waldensians at Rome and more openly in Piedmont, but it was especially warm at the latter place, where they had much conference on points of faith and practice. The two parties could not agree in all things, but some of them united in a famous protest against the Romish Church, in which they say: ‘Antichrist has, by cunning, taken away from the Lord Jesus the grace and truth of true hope by Christ’s merits, and ascribes this truth to saints, clergy, sacraments, words, yes, to hell-fire. Participation in the merit of Christ is gained by faith, poured in by the Holy Spirit. The deception consists in this: Antichrist awakens the faith that, if one is only baptized and receives the sacrament, he has received the sacrament and the truth. Antichrist attributes the reformation effected by the Holy Spirit to dead, external faith, and baptizes infants in that faith, and in the same gives its orders and other sacraments.’ What Erasmus said of some of the Hussites, appears to have been true of the Brethren: ‘They admit none until they are dipped in water.’ So, Cainerarius tells us that many who united with the Brethren renounced the baptism of infants which they had received in the State Church, and were baptized before they came into the new fellowship.

Herzog shows very fully that at the opening of the Reformation, the Waldensian communities were numerous, not only on the Cottian Alps, but in Naples and Provence, ‘besides scattered congregations in Italy, Switzerland, France, and Germany.’ He also says: ‘At various times they appear to have been numerous at Bern, Strasburg and Passau. In the last-mentioned place they attracted attention by refusing to pay tithes, and by rejecting monasticism, infant baptism, exorcism, and the sacrament of confirmation. When the reformatory movement began in Bohemia, they were naturally attracted by it, and their connection with the Bohemian Brethren became a turning-point in their history.’ Goll, in his History of the Bohemian Brethren (i, p. 73), says that their Tract, ‘Reasons for Separation from Rome,’ ‘rejects infant baptism.’ There is scarcely ground for doubt that the Brethren baptized all who came to them from the Romanists, they also rejected infant baptism as such, and in its place substituted this singular process, which they called a ‘Baptismal Agreement.’ When the child was christened, they exacted a solemn promise of the sponsors to bring him up in the faith. But when the child was grown up, and was able to profess his own faith in Christ, he received a second baptism, entering into the real baptismal covenant; of which, Herzog says: ‘Really, as Flaccius protested to Bodenstein, the second act damned the first.’ [Do.] They would not allow the baptism of a dying child, but would pray for him instead. ‘Doubt as to the value of infant baptism is a specific mark of the Brethren.’ [Zeschwitz Katechismen Waldenser, p. 198] Lucas defended the practice of repeating baptism, both in those who came from the Catholics and those amongst themselves who had not received it upon their personal faith, down to 1521; but after his death, under Luther’s influence, the second baptism was dropped and confirmation took its place.

About A.D. 1500 the ‘Brethren’ of all sects in Bohemia were so numerous in city and country, that Pope Alexander VI sent Dominican monks ‘to preach amongst them and hold colloquies, to win them back to his fold. But this failing, King Ladislaus II was persuaded, in 1503, to issue bloody edicts banishing their laymen, who refused to recant, and committing their preachers to the flames. This scattered them as the hoof of a beast separates the roots of a bed of camomiles, but it did not crush them. On the contrary, they used the most active measures for their own vindication and defense, especially through the press, and the growing intelligence of Europe listened to their manly story. This persecution continued long, its tortures, imprisonments, and burnings ending only with the king’s death, March 13, 1516.