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The Baptists said: On all such questions the Bible is autocratic; apply it honestly, under the divine right of private judgment, without trammel, and we will follow it; but we refuse to take the interpretations of it which the magistrates give us, for God has not made them our interpreters in such matters. This compelled Zwingli to fall back squarely on the Romish ground, and in turn to compel them to follow the Council. Then came the first break between him and them, on infant baptism. At that moment he was so nearly with them on that subject, that he was willing to delay the baptism of infants ‘until they arrived at years of discretion.’ He said in 1525: ‘The error that it would be better to baptize children when they had come to years of understanding, seized me too a few years ago;’ giving as his reason that ‘There is no clear utterance in the New Testament that commands the baptism of children.’ Keller attests that, ‘Luther at the outset designated Zwingli and his followers as the party associates of these who held views in reference to infant baptism, that were different from his own.’ [Preussische Jahrbucher, 1882] ‘We can easily see,’ says Hase, ‘why the Baptists were not satisfied with the excuses of the Swiss reformers;’ and as easily we can see why Zwingli complained: ‘The Papists call us heretics, and the Anabaptists call us half-papists.’ Sometimes he encouraged the practice, sometimes not, always denying the regenerating efficacy of baptism; but finally he concluded to continue infant baptism on the ground that if it ceased the people would clamor for circumcision, as they must have a bond of visible union. OEcolampadius had said: ‘We have never dared to teach infant baptism as a command, but rather as an instinct of charity.’ [To Zwingli, 1527, St. w Ka., 1883, p. 173] Like him, Zwingli feared a division in the Reformed ranks and resorted to these expedients to prevent this, until Pedobaptist pressure forced him to turn over the question to the civil power. As Dr. Dorner says: ‘He saw that the setting aside of infant baptism was the same as setting aside the national Church, exchanging a hitherto national reformation of the Church for one more or less Donatist. For, if infant baptism were given up, because faith was not yet, there only remained as the right tune for it the moment when living faith and regeneration were certain. And then baptism would become the sign of fellowship of the regenerate, the saints, who bind themselves together as atoms out of the world.’ [Hist. of Prot. Theology, S. 294]

The Baptists of Zurich began to assail infant baptism in 1523, one of their pastors calling it a useless thing. ‘One might as well baptize a cow or a calf,’ he said. Then Grebel writes: ‘Those who understand the teaching of the Scriptures in reference to baptism refuse to allow their children to be baptized.’ Reublin rejected the practice and held a public discussion with the pastors of Zurich, the only result of which was, that the Council arrested two men of his congregation and three from the village of Zollikon near by for refusing to bring their children for baptism, fining them each one silver mark and thrusting them into prison. [Egli Zurich Baptists, p. 18] When the Council demanded why they refused, they answered that Christ required them to believe before they could be baptized; and they stood there firmly. [Studien und K., 1882, pp. 216,217,225,245,283] Zwingli had published a tract on the subject which fanned the excitement, and the Council had appointed a public discussion. Grebel asked that the debate be in writing, with the Bible as the only source of appeal, and Zwingli agreed to this, but the Council refused. Yet when they met in the Council Hall, January 11, 1525, and his disputants held him to this Bible restraint, he ungenerously charged them with dictating that be should preach nothing but what suited them; and he became so excited as to draw forth the counter-charge of violently stopping their mouths by interruption, screaming and long address. [Egli, p. 21] Zwingli presented the current Pedobaptist arguments of his time, and the brave Council, as in duty bound, sagely declared him the victor. With equal gravity they decreed the next day that all should have their children baptized within a week or be banished, and that a christening font at Zollikon, which had been demolished, should be repaired. These forceful arguments were repeated almost daily, and on January 21 the Council came to New Testament example, after the Jewish order, and straitly charged the Baptists to keep silent on this subject; which was about as hard a thing as they could ever do. Of course this made Zwingli’s triumph good, and the Baptist preachers were ordered out of the country within a week, as a punishment for allowing him to become victorious and for the sin of rendering themselves harmless.

All left but Castelberger, who was ill and allowed to remain for a month, but they charged that he must not hold any meetings, and so put Zwingli to the needless trouble of vanquishing him over again. The Baptist babes, however, were not brought to baptism, and on February 1 the Council ordered the disobedient arrested and each child baptized as soon as it was born. Mantz and Blaurock, with twenty-four parents of Zollikon, were brought to trial within a week. After sentence to pay the cost of their imprisonment and a fine of 1,000 gulden, all were released except two. Mantz claimed the right to baptize all who came to him, but was threatened with the Tower if he repeated the crime, and Blaurock was to swear allegiance to the authorities in tins matter. The fair conclusion is that they both flouted the magistrates; for soon after, at a great Baptist meeting at Zollikon, Blaurock spent the whole day in preaching and baptizing. When this sad news reached Zurich the Council fined those who had been baptized, and threatened with banishment all who should be thereafter. Some few recanted, but most of them refused to submit. Zwingli was not dictator in Zurich, but he cannot be relieved of responsibility in this matter. The Council, consisting of two hundred, had entire ecclesiastical power over the city and canton. He appealed to it again and again for religious decisions, and approved its doings; in fact he was its guide. Yet it organized itself into a Protestant Inquisition, robbed Christ’s disciples of their freedom, tortured them, confiscated their property and put them to death, and he approved its acts. He believed that the officers of State were responsible for the religion of the people and helped them to make Swiss Protestantism as intolerant as Romanism. Hess puts this point clearly: ‘Zwingli said public order demanded the severity he exercised, but his decrees were in the face of the proclamation which the Reformers had made of religious liberty.’ His theory was exactly that of the Catholics, and he invoked the edge of the sword as effectually as the pope. His dream was power, and under the pretext of removing what he called a canker of heresy, he wielded physical violence." In his sixty-seven theses against Rome he said: ‘No compulsion should be employed in the case of such as do not acknowledge their error, unless by their seditious conduct they disturb the peace of others.’ But these Zurich Baptists were never in sedition. They simply worshiped Christ in their own houses or in the forests and gorges, and the nearest they came to sedition was to insist that the magistrates had no right from God to persecute them for doing so.

All sorts of lame and flimsy pleas have been created to cover these barbarities, but their blood stains ‘will not out.’ These Protestant Inquisitors well knew that when their own religious opinions subjected them to civil tribunals, they resented such interference. Their enthusiasm had only been fired and their convictions deepened by whippings, rackings and burnings. Yet they tried the same severity upon the Baptists which the Catholics had tried on them. And that, too, under the plea that while it was wicked for Catholics to torture them, it was but an act of saving love for Protestants to drown Baptists in murderous waters. Zealous republicans themselves, they comfortably forgot that their Baptist fellow-countrymen had a touch of William Tell and liberty about them; and so they proved their own love of freedom by treating their fellow-patriots as harshly as possible. The common hypocritical apology, that a charitable veil must be drawn over such murderous proceedings because of the darkness of the age in which they lived, is little better than a crime. They had the most thorough knowledge of the art of gentleness toward themselves, dark as was the age, and the gentleness of these whom they legally murdered stood in incarnate rebuke before them ; hence it was but one step to the Golden Rule of Jesus, had they not been better pleased to use the iron rod. Common justice pushes this mendacious pretense aside, and finds a true verdict against them as narrow, fanatical and wicked. True, the brutal laws of Frederick II were still in force, but they professed to be loving disciples of God’s Lamb and not Thugs under the emperor; and no law of his could compel them to slaughter their fellow-disciples for Jesus’ sake. We may hoodwink ourselves as we please, and gloss over their acts as we may, but this Reformed Inquisition has painted its own portrait black and it cannot be bleached white. Its Draconian holiness throws all honest forbearance into spasms. It is worthy of the Pharisaic and Sadducean Sanhedrin, but is a disgrace to the light and sweetness of the Son of Man, whom they slew.

In truth, Zwingli had his hands full. His opponents had as clear heads and stout hearts as himself, their education was as broad, and they stood serenely fortified by the word of God. When Hubmeyer raised the issue of infant baptism with him, 1523, he wavered, as we have seen; and afterward when his Baptist friend reminded him of this in his published work on baptism, and pressed-him for scriptural authority, he replied: ‘The New Testament does not command the baptism of infants, neither does it forbid it; therefore we must look to the Old Testament for an analogy which will clear up the matter.’ Dr. Rule, no lenient apologist of Baptists, says: ‘The Council of Zurich had been called on by Zwingli to decide what the citizens should receive as true doctrine, and at once gave evidence of their incompetence by expelling a devoted Christian, who, being an unprotected outcast, was made the first martyr of the Reformation in these can-tons.’ As far as appears, he approved all the cruelties of that tyrannical body without a word of remonstrance, although he brought every trivial subject to their notice--throwing the blame upon the Baptists themselves after the usual shift, ‘they deserved what they got.’ Playing fast and loose with the New Testament himself, and baptizing children in obedience to the ‘silence’ of the New Testament, still he demanded of the Baptists a positive injunction of Christ for baptizing on a confession of him those who had been christened as babes. So he could stand coolly by and see the Baptists drowned, but surely not because the New Testament was silent on the subject of drowning Baptists. If its silence gave consent to the baptism of infants, certainly it did not render the legal murder of Baptists holy. Well might he admit that ‘nothing cost him so much sweat as his controversy with the Baptists.’

Who were these Swiss Baptists, whom the "Reformed Inquisition handled so savagely? One of them was CONRAD GREBEL, who early in the Reformation was Zwingli’s most admired and admiring friend. Born about 1500, his father was a noted member of the Zurich Council. He educated Conrad in the universities of Vienna and Paris. Like Augustine, his son was proud, moved in high society and led a godless life when young. In 1521, Basel invited him to high literary work, and on returning to Ins native city Zwingli became his pastor, discovered his great intellectual power and became closely identified with him. In a letter to Myconius, August 26, 1522, he says of Grebel: ‘He is a most candid and learned youth.’ But the next year they began to draw apart on the true character of a Gospel Church and broke completely. He told Zwingli: ‘The Scriptures teach that all children, who have not arrived at the knowledge of good and evil, are saved by the sufferings of Christ.’ He held infant baptism to be a sin, by attributing to itself what only belonged to the cross of Christ. Again he said: That by faith in the blood of Christ, only can sin be washed away, ‘So that the water does not confirm and increase the faith, as the Wittenberg theologians say, nor does it save. . . . Let us form a community of true believers, for it is to them alone that the promise belongs, and let us establish a Church without sin;’ clearly meaning not an immaculate body, but a congregation of regenerate men, rejecting the practice which made all in the State members of the Church by infant baptism. This Zwingli did not want, but wanted a State-Church, and objected, that it was not possible ‘to make a heaven upon earth, for Christ taught us to let the tares grow with the wheat till the harvest, when the angels would separate them.’ Grebel cared less about keeping the angels busy than he did for obedience to Christ, but failed to bring Zwingli to his views. He had no political controversy with his countrymen, excepting on the question of religious liberty, but devoted himself to missionary work in the villages on Lake Zurich. The peasants there were in revolt and the Pedobaptist pastors rose with them, but he kept aloof, preaching only the Gospel. The great Baptist Church at Hinwyl was established by him, with many others.

FELIX MANTZ was a noble Swiss Baptist leader, a native of Zurich. His father was a canon of the cathedral and gave him a liberal education. He was a thorough Hebrew scholar, was the firm friend of Zwingli, and had been with him from the first. He began to question the scriptural character of a State-Church and infant baptism in 1522. In a scholarly manner he endeavored to draw Zwingli to this Gospel ground, but he broke at once with Mantz, who began to preach in the fields, forests and his mother’s house, translating his text from the Hebrew, and expounding his translations. For this ‘and the rebaptism of adults’ he was arrested at Chur and driven from the city, but returned under the threat of the authorities to take his life. As he was from Zurich, he was shortly after sent there for punishment, and lay in prison for a long time. There he went through all sorts of disputations and sufferings, for he lived on bread and water. His release was offered if he would stop baptizing, and finally he escaped with twenty others, hoping, as one expressed it, ‘That they could safely reach the Bed Jews across the ocean,’--the American Indians, then recently discovered, expecting more humanity from them than from the holy Swiss evangelicals. Mantz argued with Zwingli on baptism and asked him to write a book on the subject, which he did with great severity, but Mantz was not allowed to publish an answer.

At last the Reformed Inquisition accused him of obstinately refusing ‘to recede from his error and caprice,’ for they said that he would ‘ Seek out those who wished to accept Christ and follow his word, and unite with them by baptism, but let the rest alone in their own unbelief,’ and many other things in the same line. They then chose Jan. 5, 1527, as the black day for his judicial murder. His sentence gave him over to the executioner, who put him into a boat, bound his hands over his knees, put a block between his arms and legs, threw him into the water to drown, and then his property fell to the government. He denied before them that he opposed civil government, spoke of the love of Christ very sweetly and left one of the most pathetic letters, exhorting his brethren to a Christ-like spirit. He was led on the day of his slaughter from the Wellenburg, the heretics’ tower, through the fish-market and shambles to a boat, preaching to the people as he went. A Reformed pastor at his side sought to silence him, but his faithful brother and his old mother brushed away their tears and exhorted him to suffer firmly for Jesus’ sake. The executioner put the black cap on his head, bound him to a hurdle and threw him into Lake Zurich, as he cried, with Jesus, ‘Into thy hands I commend my spirit!’

The effect of his execution was electric, and Baptists sprang up all over the land. Capito wrote from Strasburg to Zwingli, Jan. 27, saying: ‘It is reported here that your Felix Mantz has suffered punishment and died gloriously, on which account the cause of truth and piety, which you sustain, is greatly depressed.’ He wrote again within a week to learn whether he died for ‘violated public faith,’ or on account of ‘obstinacy’ in religion, ‘and with what firmness he came to the end of life.’ The crime of the Council haunted its members, after the manner of the Baptist and Herod, and they wrote in self-defense to Augsburg that they slew him ‘as a warning to others.’ Bullinger accounts for Mantz’s fortitude thus: ‘Malefactors are often stiff-necked when they are executed.’ This poor ‘malefactor’ demonstrated his stiff-neckedness just before his death, in these words: ‘The Gospel teaches divine love, leads us away from hatred and envy to love. According to the nature of his heavenly Father, Christ showed his love to all men. Love to God through Christ alone can stand. Like our heavenly Father, we should be merciful to all. Christ forces not one to his glory, but chooses the willing and prepared by faith and baptism.’ And this was one of those frightful Baptist fanatics, whose very name sends a chill through some Christian veins.

GEORGE JACOB BLAUROCK was another Swiss Baptist worthy. He was a monk who abandoned the monastery of Church for the Gospel, a very simple-hearted man, who became an intrepid and eloquent disciple of Christ. When he reached Zurich he went at once to Zwingli to be instructed in the way of salvation, with but little satisfaction. He then sought the Baptists, and in great agony of soul obtained remission of sins from God while amongst them. At once he saw that his infant baptism was not of Christ, and begged to be baptized on a confession of his own faith in his Saviour. Falling on his knees, Grebel poured water on his head. Zwingli charged him with schism in becoming a Baptist. He replied that he had the same right to separate from Zwingli that Zwingli had to leave the pope. Then he held debates with the reformer, once in the cathedral, and Bullinger’s account of them shows that he was a full match for Zwingli. As he must be answered, the old farce was repeated of chains, imprisonment, and finally death by drowning. On the day of Mantz’s murder, the hands of Blaurock were bound, his body stripped to the waist; and he was led through the streets, where, by order of the Reformed Inquisition, he was beaten till his flesh quivered and his blood flowed in his tracks. On reaching the gates of the city an oath was demanded of him, that if he was permitted to go free he would not return. This he refused for a time and was sent back to prison, but afterward he took it and left the city forever. Then Zwingli was mean enough to reproach the Baptists for not excluding him from their fellowship for having taken an oath which, he said, was contrary to their principles. He was pursued from place to place until, according to Cornelius, he was burnt at the stake at Claussen, in the Tyrol, A.D. 1529, but not before he had moved the greater part of Northern Switzerland by his hallowed eloquence.

BALTHAZAR HUBMEYER was the noblest of the Swiss Baptists. He was born at Friedburg, Bavaria, A.D. 1480, and studied philosophy and theology under Eck, the great antagonist of Luther, graduating 1503. In 1512 he became preacher and professor of theology at Ingolstadt, but was cathedral preacher at Ratisbon in 1519. He embraced Luther’s views in 1522, and leaving his preferments in the Catholic Church he settled at Waldshut, being in full communication with Zwingli. His power and eloquence moved that city; be assisted Zwingli in the great debate at Zurich with the Catholics, 1523, after which they became the closest and warmest friends. His powerful ministry almost destroyed Romanism in Waldshut, and Austria compelled him to seek refuge elsewhere. This he found in Schaffhausen, but soon discovered that the Reformation in Zurich had not gone back to the Apostolic model. He had laid his best thoughts before Zwingli and OEcolampadius, who at first saw their consistency, then rejected them. However, he followed his convictions, left the State-Church and was baptized by Reublin, at Waldshut in 1525, with more than a hundred of his former congregation. He felt his way to Baptist principles very gradually and on thorough conviction. At first when children were brought to him as a Reformed pastor for baptism, he preached on the little ones being brought to Christ and blessed by him without the use of water (Matt. 19); but if their parents still demanded christening, he gratified them without yielding his own views. After forming a Baptist church, he baptized more than three hundred of his former hearers, and the population became largely Baptist. He preached in the open air to great multitudes at St. Gall also, and made a deep impression on the popular mind in the second disputation at Zurich. Being obliged to leave Waldshut the second time, he now found refuge amongst the Baptists of Zurich.

There he was soon arrested and cast into prison, where he lay four months, appealing to his old friend, to the emperor, to the Confederation and the Council, but in vain. His health was broken, his wife was in prison, and he lay in a dungeon with more than twenty others: ‘Where no light of sun or moon penetrated, where bread and water were the only nourishment, and these could not be taken for days together, on account of the sickening odors of the place; where the living were shut up with the dead, with no hope of escape but in death or recantation.’ The Zurich Inquisition used all methods to compel him to recant, for he had written several powerful books which were stirring the public mind ; amongst them one ‘Concerning Heretics and those that burn them.’ He showed that all butchery under the pretense of zeal for Christ was a fraud, and an open denial of him who came to save men and not to burn them. Another work of his on Baptism so aroused the Reformers of Berne, Basel and Strasburg, that Zwingli was forced to reply. Haller said: ‘Many have been misled by Hubmeyer’s book, but do not be alarmed too much, the Council has banished every Anabaptist.’ Zwingli’s reply was so bitter and vindictive, that Hosek says: ‘He gave reins to his passions;’ and Stern writes of Hubmeyer’s production, that he ‘Showed moderation, respect for his opponents, and force, not in coarse or violent language, but in thought.’ Many of his positions were fresh and very forceful. In answer to the evasive and shallow pretensions of Zwingli, that the silence of the New Testament permitted infant baptism, he said that the spirit of our Lord’s command to baptize the believing forbade its use to babes, thus: ‘The command is to baptize those who believe. To baptize those who do not believe, therefore, is forbidden. For example, Christ commanded his Apostles to preach the Gospel; in so doing, the doctrines of men were forbidden.’ Was he correct?

Zwingli, Jud, Myconius and others visited him in prison, and by one means or another wrung from him a recantation. Faber says that he was laid on the rack, and Cunitz, that he was compelled to recant, April 6, 1526. His own words imply the same. His appeal to the Council of Schaffhausen says:

‘I pray you, for God’s sake, and in view of the last judgment, do not press and force me or any other Christian teacher, but hear me, summon my calumniators to appear against me, have no respect for persons, great or small, but judge righteously, for judgment is the Lord’s and the judges are his servants. But should this, my earnest and heart-felt request, not be heeded, though even the Turks would not refuse it, and I should be compelled by prison, torture, sword, fire or water, or permitted by the withdrawal of God’s grace, to say or confess any thing different from the opinion by the enlightenment of God I now cherish; then I do hereby protest that nobody may be offended at my deed, whatever God may bring to pass, and testify before God, my heavenly Father, and before all men, that I will suffer and die as a Christian. May God lend me a brave, unflinching, princely spirit, that I may abide on his Holy Word, and in a real Christian faith commend my spirit into his hands.’

He also tells us that he offered to discuss these and other issues with Zwingli in public, and if convicted of error they might put him to death; but if Zwingli were shown to be wrong, all that he asked of him was to preach the truth. This Evangelical Inquisition, however, thought the rack their most conclusive answer to his holy convictions, and in a moment of weakness the great confessor fell into the relapse which met the noble Berengarius before him, and the learned Cranmer after him. And in the wail of a wounded and humiliated soul he exclaims: ‘They compelled, or sought to compel, me, a sick man, just risen from a bed of death; hunted, exiled, and having lost all that I had, to teach another faith.’ A great triumph, truly, for Christian men of their standing and pretensions!

The people were summoned to the great cathedral, which was crowded, to hear his recantation and the death-knell of the Baptists. Zwingli preached a great sermon on ‘Christian steadfastness,’ save the mark, and loud and long he declaimed against these heretics; then Hubmeyer was to mount the pulpit and renounce his firm faith, to the delectable edification of the Holy Inquisition of Zurich. Egli says that Zwingli warned the magistrates not to trust Hubmeyer to speak in the cathedral. He had a lively memory of what many weeks of labor had failed to do in shaking his faith, till the rack summed up the whole Gospel case. As the inquisitors could not forego the show, all eyes now turned eagerly to the broken frame of the meek Baptist as he climbed the pulpit. He began to read his recantation in a broken, weak and quivering voice, until his heart choked his utterance and he broke down. He swayed to and fro before his audience like a bruised reed shaken by the wind; when suddenly the unseen hand of God was put forth to bind him up, and raising himself to his full height, he filled the sanctuary with the shout, that ‘Infant baptism is not of God, and men must be baptized by faith in Christ!’ The crowd surged like waves and burst into tumult. Some were seized with horror and some shouted applause, till the roof of the Minster rang. Zwingli screamed above the rest, the inquisitors were in a Pedobaptist panic, and the scene closed by dragging Hubmeyer from the pulpit, hustling him through the multitude, and thrusting him back into his dungeon. Once more in his cell, he rewrote his faith in Christ, which writing he closed in these words:

‘O, immortal God, this is my faith. I confess it with heart and mouth, and have testified it publicly before the Church in baptism. I faithfully pray thee graciously keep me in it until my end, and should I be forced from it out of mortal fear and timidity, by tyranny, torture, sword, fire or water, I now appeal to thee. O, my compassionate Father, raise me up again by the grace of thy Holy Spirit, and suffer me not to depart without this faith. This, I pray thee from the bottom of my heart, through Jesus Christ, thy most beloved Son, our Lord and Saviour. Father, in thee do I put my Trust, let me never be ashamed.’

After much more suffering he was permitted to leave the canton quietly, whence he made his way first to Constance and then to Moravia, where we shall meet with him again in his new home.

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