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THE BOHEMIAN BIBLE

Bohemia has well been called the ‘Cradle of the Reformation.’ It is difficult to ascertain exactly when the Scriptures were first rendered into its native tongue, or by whom they were translated from the Latin vulgate. But portions so translated were in circulation before Huss, and about the time that he began to preach these several parts were collected for the first time; after his martyrdom copies were greatly multiplied. The greater part of a Bohemian Bible was extant at the close of the fourteen century, as it is well-known that Queen Anne of England possessed a Bohemian Bible. AEneas Sylvius remarked that ‘ It was a shame to the Italian priests that many of them had never read the New Testament, while scarcely a woman could be found among the Bohemians (or Taborites) who could not answer any questions respecting either the Old or New Testaments.’ From A.D. 1410 to 1488, four different recensions of the entire Scriptures can be traced, and many more of the New Testament, some being translated anew. It is an interesting fact, that Guttenberg, the inventor of cut metal types, used them in printing the earliest edition of the Latin Bible (the Mazarine), A.D. 1450-1455 ; and that the Bohemian Bible, published by the Brethren in 1488, was one of the first instances on record, where the newly-invented art of printing was applied to the use of the Bible in a living language. This was fifty years before England enjoyed Wickliff’s Bible inprint, and four years before the discovery of America by Columbus. The love of freedom and education went hand in hand in Bohemia, and were common to her whole people. Before A.D. 1519, six printing-presses were running, three of which were owned by the Brethren, whose authors issued sixty productions between A.D. 1500-1510, witnesses to their mental activity. They also produced those hymns which have made them immortal. While under fierce persecution, their families were compensated for the loss of sermons, by tracts, books of devotion and inspiring hymns.

This godly literature went on increasing and preparing the world for the Reformation. When Bohemian nationality was lost in the Thirty Years’ War (1620), three fourths of her population were Protestant, and the cultivated people of the nation choosing to renounce their country rather than their religion, sought their homes where they could, to the number of seventy thousand men, including artists, clergy, nobility and scholars. Every Bohemian book was burnt on suspicion or brand of heresy, and some individuals boasted that they had burnt sixty thousand copies of this sacred literature. Such precious relics as escaped the flames were shut up in various places, guarded by bolts, chains, iron doors and gates, and labeled ‘Hell.’

In all that related to love for the Bible and religious liberty, SAVONAROLA, the confessor of Florence, was in sympathy with the Brethren of Bohemia. He was a Dominican monk, A.D. 1452-1498, earnest, devout, and so versed in the Scriptures that he could almost repeat them from memory. He was a Christian patriot, who vindicated the rights of the Florentine Republic, and a political leader in that cause. He demanded the removal of the pope and the recognition of Christ as King. In person he was small, awkward in his gestures, violent in his manner, and profuse of imagery; hence the vehemence of his preaching against the Medicean court and the pope, whom he regarded as an atheist. Pope Alexander VI, of abominable memory, tried to silence him by the offer to make him a cardinal. This offer he spurned, with the remark that he wished no red hat but one dyed in his own blood, ‘the hat given to the saints.’ Long practice at public speaking and much study so removed or overcame his natural defects that he became a consummate orator, who swayed the people almost to fanaticism, so that they held regular burnings of elegant but licentious books and works of art. He was excommunicated and finally burnt, with two of his disciples.

THE LOLLARDS

The Lollards form an important link in this chain of events. The followers of Wickliff were early known by this name; but some trace their origin to Walter Lollard, who was burnt at Cologne about A.D. 1322. The term was applied at Antwerp to a society formed there in 1300 for ministering to the sick--it is supposed from the Dutch lullen--to sing in a low tone, as at funerals, where they soothed by slowly sung dirges. But it soon became a term of reproach, by an ingenious twist, as if it were derived from lolium (darnel), tares amongst wheat. Wickliff was regarded as the father of the Lollards, but whether his followers assumed that name, or it was pinned to them, in stigma, is uncertain. During his lifetime Wickliff sent out great numbers of itinerant preachers, who preached in market-places, moors, commons, and wherever they could find hearers. They increased so rapidly that Pope Martin raved against them in the most vulgar manner, and Archbishop Courtenay spent five months in purging Oxford University of their presence. The underlying spirit of Lollardism sought the right of unfettered thought, the free interpretation of the Bible as the rule of faith, and the apostolic simplicity of the ordinances. During the reign of Richard II, the followers of Wickliff sent Twelve Articles to Parliament seeking certain social and politico-religious reforms, for they shared in the political dissatisfaction which swept over the continent in the fourteenth century. It had taken an exciting form in Italy, France and Germany; in England, it concerned ecclesiastical property and the right of the State to confiscate it; the Lollards taking the negative of that question, not believing in the union between the Church and the State.

PAPAL PRESUMPTION/ PERSECUTIONS

In seeking a thorough reformation of religion, it was necessarily involved in political struggles, for religion was held at the caprice of political tyranny. The pontiffs made pretensions to all temporal as well as spiritual power, and kings were sworn to obey them in all things. Innocent III coolly instructed John of England what to do in his kingdom, and when he disobeyed, deposed him, expelled him from the Church, put his kingdom under interdict, absolved his subjects from their allegiance and forbade them to obey him. Thus crushed, May 15, 1213, John publicly took his crown from his head and gave it to the pope’s legate, who, by his master’s command, returned it in five days. The nation wrung its great Bill of Rights, Magna Charta, from John A.D. 1215, but the pope had the impudence to annul all its provisions. His bull reprobated it as a conspiracy against himself, as dangerous to the cross of Christ and destructive to the regal rights of England. He prohibited and annulled it in the name of the Trinity and of the Apostles Peter and Paul, then laid ‘the fetters of excommunication’ on the barons, placed ‘their possessions under the ecclesiastical interdict,’ and required the bishops to proclaim his sentence with the ringing of bells and the burning of candles. Things went on from bad to worse, until, when Henry IV was crowned, the pope bound him by oath to obey him as sovereign lord in all things. This insufferable impertinence kept England in a continual broil with Rome, and as true Englishmen the Lollards could brook such outrages no longer. Their resistance made them objects of pontifical hate. Walden and others charged Wickliff with being one of the seven heads from the bottomless pit, and the adherents of Rome generally indulged in the same black tirades; amongst them Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, who denounced them as ‘malignants,’ ‘putrid’ and ‘rotten,’ till he frothed at the mouth.

The result was, that from the accession of Henry IV, 1399, their blood flowed in a stream for nearly two centuries with slight respite, chiefly while York and Lancaster fought the bloody battle of the roses. Fuller touchingly remarks: ‘The very storm was their shelter.’ Capital punishment for matters of opinion in religion was introduced into the laws of England, 1401, and William Sawtre was the first Lollard martyr under that savage provision.

Fuller says that Henry was more cruel to the Lollards ‘than his predecessor,’ and Fox states that he was the first English monarch who burnt heretics. But Camden alludes to a case, it is thought the one recorded in the Chronicle of London, of one of the Albigenses who was burnt in 1210; and Collier tells of a deacon who became a Jew, was degraded by a council at Oxford, 1222, and burnt under Henry III. This inhuman torture had long existed on the Continent, and Burnet attributes its late introduction into England to the high temper of the people, who would not submit to such severity. But this consideration is not satisfactory, while the fact stands that Parliament deliberately enacted the law for the burning of heretics, making the nation responsible for their murder, while in other lands the will of the prince was sufficient to burn heretics without statute law. The English sheriffs were forced to take an oath to persecute the Lollards, and the justices must deliver a relapsed heretic to be burned within ten days of his accusation. [II. Henry V, Stat i, C. 7] The fact is, that the pope dictated English law at the shrine, and Archbishop Chicheley says openly, in his Constitution, 1416, that the taking of heretics ‘ought to be our principal care.’ JOHN BADBY, a Lollard and a poor mechanic, was brought before Archbishop Arundel, March 1, 1409, on the charge of heresy touching ‘The Sacrament.’ He said that he believed in the omnipotent God in Trinity, but if every wafer used in the sacrament were Christ’s veritable body, soul and divinity, there would be 20,000 gods in England. Being condemned to death March 16, he was bound with chains, put into an empty barrel and burnt in Smithfield, in the presence of the Prince of Wales, afterward Henry V, who at the stake offered him a yearly stipend from the treasury if he would recant.

Even where the accused recanted the punishment was barbarous. John Florence, accused of heresy, renounced his views but was sentenced to be whipped for three Sundays before the congregation in the Norwich Cathedral, and for three Sundays more in his own parish church at Shelton, bearing a taper and clothed only in canvas undergarments. The English had become mere serfs to a religious despotism, which brought them to the climax of wickedness that murdered its best subjects for claiming the sacred immunity to worship God as they would. England made certain shades of opinion in the Church ‘high treason to the crown,’ simply constructive treason at the most; for so-called heresy was made disloyalty under the pretense that the ‘King of Glory was contemned under the cover of bread.’ In other words, the denial of the ‘Real Presence in the sacrament of the altar’ was made an overt act against the monarch of the realm. And so, the chief aim of king and Parliament was legally to grill to ashes the most patriotic people of England. The secular method of punishing treason was by hanging or beheading, but Bale says that at the Parliament at Leicester it was enacted (2 Henry V) that the Lollards should be hanged for treason against the king and burnt for heresy against God.

It was in keeping with this double-handed tyranny that LORD COBHAM (Sir John Oldcastle) was put to death. He was a Welshman of great ability and consecration to Christ, who had been imprisoned in the Tower, but had escaped and was recaptured after being hunted for four years with a price upon his head. Bishop Bale says that: ‘Upon the day appointed, he was brought out of the Tower with his arms bound behind him, having a very cheerful countenance. Then was he laid upon a hurdle, as though he had been a most heinous traitor to the crown, and so drawn forth into St. Giles’s field, where they had set up a new pair of gallows. As he was come to the place of execution, and was taken from the hurdle, be fell down devoutly upon his knees, desiring Almighty God to forgive his enemies. Then was he hanged up there by the middle in chains of iron, and so consumed alive in the fire. That is, he was hanged over the fire as a traitor, and then burnt as a heretic, 1418.'

This state of things did not cease down to the time of Henry VIII, when tyranny changed hands only from the pope to the monarch. When the head of Anne Boleyn fell upon the scaffold, no man dared to proclaim her innocent, even on religious grounds, and the king used the power which the law left in his hands to persecute either Catholic or Protestant as he would. Indeed, for three hundred years no great soul arose in England who was able to arrest the despotism of pope and sovereign. Religions freedom or bondage ebbed or flowed through the will of the monarch, and, in that matter, the nation counted for little as against imbecile pope or royal despot.

When a heretic was condemned the church bells tolled, the priest thundered and the sentence of excommunication was pronounced. The priest seized a lighted candle from the altar and cried: ‘Just as this candle is deprived of its light, so let him be deprived of his soul in hell.’ All the people were obliged to say ‘So be it;’ then came fine, imprisonment and death. Under Henry VIII it was proposed to consolidate all the penal laws against religion, when he said: ‘Leave that to me.’ He and his bishops then framed the ‘ Six Article Act,’ which decreed that if a man denied that the bread and wine in the Supper were the very Christ, he should suffer death by burning and forfeit all his possessions to the king, as in high treason. [31, Henry V, iii, C. 14, Sec. 8,9] No mercy was shown under any circumstances.

THE VIEWS OF THE LOLLARDS ON INFANT BAPTISM are not so easily stated, as their teachings on the Real Presence and their resistance to Church power. Possibly Dr. Williams states the case as carefully as any one. He says: ‘There were also among the Lollards, or early English followers of Wickliff, some who followed out the results of Wickliff’s principles, in the study of the vernacular Scriptures to the conclusion that baptism went with faith, and that infants, not capable of exercising the one, should not receive the other.’ He also cites the fact which Rastell has preserved in his Entrees: ‘A Latin writ, sending over to the bishop for judgment according to the canon law, three several groups of Lollards, who all reject infant baptism.’ [Lecs. Bap. Hist., p. 126] Walden denounced Wickliff ‘for denying infant baptism, that heresy of the Lollards, of whom he was so great a ring leader;’ but probably unjustly. Fox also complains that one error of the Lollards was that they denied that children are lost who die before baptism. Wickliff practiced infant baptism, but denied that babes were lost if they died unbaptized. Hence, when some of his followers came to separate their salvation from their baptism, they naturally held it in light esteem, after the order of John Frith. who said: ‘Baptism bringeth not grace, but doth testify unto the congregation that he which is baptized had such grace given him before.’ The testimony is too nearly unanimous to be contradicted, that many, if not most, of the Lollards did not practice infant baptism, while some did, amongst them Wickliff himself. Knyghton informs us that in a few years after Wickliff’s death more than half the people of England became Lollards, and sowed a free harvest for the Baptists, but their sufferings were intolerable.

The most monstrous barbarity attended the martyrdom of William Tylesworth and James Bainham. Tylesworth was burnt at Amersham, 1506, when his only daughter was compelled to take a brand and set fire to the pile which consumed her honored father. Proclamation was made at his burning that whoever brought a fagot or stake to consume him should have forty days’ pardon. Crowds of ignorant people brought them, and caused their children to bring them. After his martyrdom that daughter, with twenty-four others bearing fagots on their necks, were taken to Aylesbury and other towns as a show, after which their cheeks were branded with red hot irons.

James Bainham, a barrister of the Middle Temple and the son of a knight, was imprisoned by Sir Thomas More, who tied him to a tree and whipped him with his own hands. He was sent to the Tower, loaded with irons, and condemned to death by Bishop Stokesley on charges of heresy. Amongst other things, he said of baptism: ‘We belong to God by adoption, not by water only, but by water and faith.’ His sufferings overcame his flesh and he recanted. He was then sentenced to walk before a cross to St. Paul’s barefoot, to stand before the preacher during the sermon with a fagot on his shoulder and a lighted taper in his hand. After paying a fine of twenty pounds he was released; but on publicly renouncing his recantation with deep sorrow, he was burnt in Smithfield, April 30, 1532, and joined the noble army of martyrs gathered from the ranks of the Lollards.

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A HISTORY OF THE BAPTISTS

By Thomas Armitage

1890

[Note from the publisher. This valuable out-of-print book was scanned from an original printing and carefully formatted for electronic publication by Way of Life Literature. We extend a special thanks to our friend Brian Snider for his labor of love in diligently scanning the material so that it might be available to God's people in these days. For a catalog of other books, both current and old, in print and electronic format, contact us at P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, [e-mail] (e-mail), http://wayoflife.org/~dcloud (web site).]

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

THE ERA OF THE REFORMATION

THE SWISS BAPTISTS

A word here may be necessary as to the proper name of this interesting people; were they Baptists or Anabaptists? They are commonly characterized as ‘Anabaptists’ by friends and foes; yet this name was especially offensive to them, as it charged them with rebaptizing those whom they regarded as unbaptized and because it was intended as a stigma. By custom their most friendly historians call them ‘Anabaptists,’ yet many of their candid opponents speak of them as ‘Baptists.’ The Petrobrusians complained that Peter of Clugny ‘slandered’ them by calling them ‘Anabaptists,’ so did their Swiss and German brethren after them. The London Confession, 1646, protests that the English Baptists were ‘commonly though unjustly called Anabaptists.’ Knollys resented this name, calling it ‘scandalous;’ and Haggar, 1653, rebukes Baxter for its use. ‘You do very wickedly to call them Anabaptists, thereby to cast odium upon us, . . . why, I pray you, are you so wicked and malicious as to call them Anabaptists?’ Blackwood, 1645, complains of being ‘nicknamed Anabaptists. We deny your title; Anabaptism signifies baptism again; our consciences are fully satisfied with one baptism, provided it be such as we judge to be the baptism of Christ; and if our consciences judge that sprinkling we had in our infancy to be none of Christ’s baptism, I ask you whether can we, in good conscience, rest satisfied therewith? We are, if we must needs be new named, Antipedobaptists, or Catapedobaptists, but no Anabaptists.’ Baptists now refuse to be called ‘Anabaptists,’ and for the same reasons. Respect for ourselves and our ancestry demands that the offensive title be thrown aside, and it is not used in this work excepting in quotations. Neither we nor our fathers can properly be named Anabaptists, and to use the term is simply to accept a misleading ‘nickname’ pinned upon us in contempt.

Modern Baptists need the admonition of Keller, who says: ‘Whenever, at the present time, the name "Anabaptist" is mentioned, the majority think only of the fanatical sect which, under the leadership of John of Leyden, established the kingdom of the New Jerusalem at Munster. . . . There were "Baptists" long before the Munster rebellion, and in all the centuries that have followed, in spite of the severest persecutions, there have been parties which, as Baptists or "Mennonites," have secured a permanent position in many lands. The extent of the Baptist movement in the first period of its growth, is at present very considerably undervalued in cultivated circles.’ He calls the Munster doings a ‘caricature’ of Baptist ideas, and adds: ‘With the majority at the present time, those views are the ruling ones which three hundred years ago were vanquished after a severe conflict. . . . A more correct understanding of the movements, which, at the beginning of the "Reformation were thus in collision, would be of the greatest value for an understanding of much of the development of today ; and, any way, it is unjust that the nation (Germany) should fail to recognize some of its most gifted men simply because they are known as Anabaptists. In the last decades, out of the ruins and rubbish left behind in the desolation wrought by the religious war, already many an old work of art of that day has again been brought to light.’ [Preussische Jahrbucher, Sep. 1882]

Let us at least respect our ancestry enough to join the latest and best continental writers in calling them Baptists.

Baptist Switzerland did not lie in the forest cantons, in the narrow valleys sheltered by pinnacles which rend the clouds and are crowned with eternal snow. It ran farther north through the belt of free cities on the Upper Rhineland, on both sides of the river and the frontier. On the Swiss side it included Berne, Basel, Zurich, St. Gall and Schaffhausen; and on the German side Strasburg, Ulin, Augsburg, with other great centers of wealth and high culture. This republic of letters contained the best schools and universities in the Republican Confederation. Democratic ideas took root amongst patriots who had won their independence over the body of Charles the Bold at the gate of Nantz. They first prized the political principles on which their republics bravely stood, but found religious bondage incompatible with free States. When neither bishop nor king linked them to Church life politically, they concluded logically enough that religion was no longer a governmental science. In mediaeval and aristocratic Saxony and other monarchies the Church and State formed one body, and religious life was honey-combed by a legal membership in the Church of newborn babes. Many asked, therefore, why republicanism could not properly let the commonwealth of Israel alone? Hence, when republics claimed the right to bind the consciences of their citizens and counted all criminals who resisted their mandates, a dark shadow fell athwart the republican escutcheon, for that class. As Baptists, they discovered that the conscience of each man being free Godward, nations who had conquered the right to take care of themselves could never be cramped back into an enforced religious uniformity.

The great Baptist movement on the Continent originated with no particular man nor in any one place. It seems to have sprung up in many places at about the same time, and its general growth was wonderful, between 1520 and 1570--half a century. Keller says: ‘A contemporary, who was not a Baptist, has this testimony concerning the beginning of the movement: "The Anabaptist movement was so rapid, that the presence of Baptist views was speedily discoverable in all parts of the land."’ He mentions Switzerland, Moravia, the South and North German States and Holland, with many principalities, and writes: ‘The more I examine the documents of that time, at my command (as archivist of Munster), the more I am astonished at the extent of the diffusion of Anabaptist views, an extent of which no other investigator has had any knowledge.’ He speaks of their churches in Cologne, Aachen, Wesel and Essen, in East Friesland, the duchies of Bentheim, Linden, Oldenburg, Lippe and the city of Minden. [Pref. to Hist. Anabaptists] He cites Frederic of Saxony, the Duke of Limeburg and the Reformer Ehegius, to show that from 1530 to 1568, Saxony and the Lutheran cities were filled with Baptists, also the Westphalian cities, Soest, Lippstadt, Leingo, Unna, Blomberg. Osnabruck and others. He says: ‘The number of Baptists was especially great both in Thuringia and in Hesse, as well as in the "Evangelical cities," Bremen, Hamburg; Lubeck, Brnnswick, Hanover, etc.;’ and that ‘the coast cities of the North Sea and East Sea, from Flanders to Danzig, were filled with Anabaptist views.’ Then he finds them everywhere, from the duchy of Cleve on the Lower Rhine, up that river to the Alps. The sixteenth century opened with a general awakening throughout Europe to the need of religious reform, and this was specially marked in Switzerland, before Luther. In ideal, the Swiss reformers longed to get back to the Apostolic pattern, to a spiritual Church free from the control of human policy, and their aims took a Baptist bearing. It is sheer ignorance to represent the Swiss Baptists as merely urging reform in a defective baptism. This is a monstrous bugbear to frighten superstitious folk, who count the refusal of a spurious baptism to what they call ‘covenanted babes,’ as an affront to Christ, and all one with ‘soul-killing.’ They held infant baptism in discredit, not only as a human institution, but as a flagrant impiety palming itself off as an institution of God, and asking the State to enforce it on pain of death, while the Church claimed to administer it by the authority of the Trinity! This double claim rendered it an abominable thing which stepped in between them and their children, robbing both of their natural rights. Looking upon it in this light, it became an alarming perversion of the whole genius of a spiritual religion, and a piece of wild fanaticism which forestalled all right of choice in either parent or child, in order to smuggle the babe into the State-Church. To force its baptism under the magisterial domination of pains and penalties was to bind the infant to a clerical despotism, which, if repeated in England or the United States today, would shiver their governments to atoms. The scenic caricatures of these Swiss Baptists have been a simple mendacity answering the end of an historical trick to nullify real facts and render honest men hateful. ‘

When ZWINGLI took lead in the Swiss Reformation, he demanded obedience to the word of God in all Christian matters, and resolved to reject what it did not enjoin. When debating with Dr. Faber, before six hundred Catholic dignitaries at Zurich, 1523, he laid down this foundation principle. Faber demanded who should judge between them on the matters in dispute, and Zwingli pointed to the Hebrew, Greek and Latin Scriptures, which lay before him. Instead, the doctor proposed that the issue should be decided by the universities of Paris, Cologne and Freiburg. Zwingli replied that the men in that room could tell better what the Scriptures taught than all the universities. ‘Show me,’ he demanded, ‘the place in the Scripture where it is written that we are to invoke the saints.’ When Faber defended that doctrine by the Councils, Zwingli showed that as these erred, nothing was binding but the Bible, and said that he would go to the universities if they accepted the Bible as the only judge. Dr. Blanche said: ‘You understand the Scriptures in one way, and another in another. There must be judges in order to decide who has given the right interpretation.’ But Zwingli refused to give any man a place above the Scriptures. Many of his hearers had strong Baptist tendencies and took in this radical doctrine. Educated by so skillful a general, they turned his own weapons upon him when they took issue with him on other subjects; and he was powerless, being obliged to appeal to the sword drawn from the Catholic armory. He was the most advanced of all the reformers biblically, but the moment that he fell into controversy with his own Baptist disciples, he broke with his fundamental principle and made the magistrates of Zurich the decisive judges in the dispute.