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That ignorance is inexcusable which attributes the rise of Baptists to ‘The period of the Münster kingdom;’ much rather can it be proved that in the lands mentioned Baptist Churches existed for many decades, and even centuries. No greater injustice can be done to any people than has been done to the German Baptists, in the attempt to saddle them with the evils of the Peasants’ War and the villainies of Münster. Not one of their old and acknowledged leaders was found in the uproar either at Muhlhausen or Münster, and but few of their people were mixed up with these proceedings. As to numbers, they were an insignificant sect in Germany proper at that time, and as a body on principle, they stood aloof from filling the magistracy, from oaths and the sword. In Switzerland, where the Peasants’ War raged as violently as in Germany, they positively refused to unite their fortunes with the peasants, and their course there throws light upon their conduct in Germany. Grebel and Simon Stumpf, to their honor, sympathized with the down-trodden people, but their principles would not allow them to draw the sword. Grebel branded the oppressors as ‘The tyrants of our forefathers,’ but he denied that he had ever thought of subverting government. When the Swiss peasantry revolted in the Gruningen district, they attacked the cloisters of Bubikon and Ruti with their Zwinglian pastors in their ranks. Their Baptist neighbors, meanwhile, gave them their moral support, but left the sword sheathed for conscience’ sake. They relied upon the spirit and morals of the Gospel to enlighten the souls of the people, believing that this would work out their social liberties too. Hubmeyer aided the peasants at Waldshut much in the same way. Zimmerman, the historian of the Peasants’ War, says: ‘In Waldshut and the Evangelical Brotherhood there were heads capable of grasping the bold and great thought of uniting the forces of the peasants, split up as they were among countless leaders, in one purpose and aim: namely, the restoration of the old liberty of the empire, and the overthrow of existing un-Christian oppression. To this end brotherhoods were formed and armed throughout the entire German empire, and communication by means of correspondence and messengers was regularly sustained.’ This ‘Brotherhood’ was entered by 138 cities, and by counts, knights and bishops innumerable, but by few Baptists. A branch was organized at Waldshut, which city Muller entered with 1,200 peasants; but when the persecuted Baptists there were charged with heresy and sedition, they uniformly denied the second charge, although they delighted in the doctrinal heresy charged upon them. Jacob Gross, a disciple of Hubmeyer, fled from Waldshut rather than bear arms. When Bruppacher was examined on the rack at Zurich, he said that he had never heard his brethren ‘Teach that there should be no magistracy; or that in case they should be successful they would overthrow the State.’ And they uniformly denied that they had any thing to do with sedition, while doctrine and not sedition was the burden of their oral discussions and literature.

Happily, in modern times, the calumny that the Baptists were responsible for the horrors of Münster has lost its edge and the truth has found its way to the surface. Brandt attributes them to some ‘enthusiastical Anabaptists,’ but is careful to add: ‘Not to the well-meaning Baptists.’ Schaff pronounces it ‘The greatest injustice to make the Anabaptists, as such, responsible for the extravagances that led to the tragedy of Münster.’ Uhlhorn says that ‘Sedition, or a call to sedition, is not chargeable against the Anabaptists of Southern Germany at this time; I have found no trace of any fellowship with the seditious peasants.’ But their contemporaries, who knew them well, bear the same testimony. Capito, their stern opponent at Strasburg, says that he must ‘openly confess’ that most of them manifest ‘godly fear and pure zeal. Before God I testify that I cannot say that their contempt for life springs from blindness rather than from a divine impulse.’ Wetzel, the Catholic, declared that ‘Whoever speaks of God and a Christian life, or earnestly strives after personal improvement, passes as an arch Anabaptist.’ And Frank, who wrote in 1531, says of them: ‘They teach love, faith and the cross. They are long-suffering and heroic in affliction. . . . The world feared they would cause an uproar, but they have proved innocent everywhere. If I were emperor, pope, or Turk, I would not fear revolt less from any people than this. . . . All the Baptists oppose those who would fight for the Gospel with the sword. Some object to war or any use of the sword, but the most favor self-defense and justifiable war.’

The truth is out of joint somewhere when men charge them with enmity to civil government, with being revolutionary and the veriest butchers, because their faith forbade them to draw the sword. Bayle tells us that Turenne remonstrated with Van Benning for tolerating them, when he replied: ‘They are good people, and the most commodious to a State in the world, because they do not aspire to places of dignity. We fear no rebellion from a sect that makes it an article of their faith never to bear arms. They edify the people by the simplicity of their manners, and apply themselves to arts and business, without dissipating their substance in luxury and debauchery.’ Nay, Bayle himself says that their great enemy De Bres ‘Says nothing to insinuate that the Anabaptist martyrs suffered death for taking up arms against the State, or for stirring up the subjects to rebel, but represents them as a harmless sort of people. . . . ’Tis certain that many of them who suffered death for their opinions had no thought of making any insurrection.’ [Dict. Art. Anabaptists] A few madmen of Münster, with Rothmann at their head, aroused their new converts to their views, and so brought disgrace upon their name; but if any of the acknowledged leaders had to do with the vile conspiracy, who and where were they?

Melancthon says that he made particular inquiry whether Storch was with Münzer in his uprising, but he found nothing to justify his suspicions. And Hase adds: ‘No one can prove that Storch was guilty of direct political aims. He went about seeking out the elect, who forsook home and their native land for the sake of the truth.’ [Neue Propheten, p. 101] Cornelius sums up the whole matter, covering the time from 1525 onward, when he says: ‘Anabaptism and the Peasants’ War had no conscious connection. The two movements were generally distinct.’

So much has been said of these disgraceful transactions at Münster, and said so rashly, to the injury of Baptists, that one is tempted to add cumulative evidence on the subject, even to prolixity. The mean-spirited charges were flung in their faces by men who persecuted them at that time, and they repudiated them with deep feeling, as cruelly adding insult to injury. This side of the case must be noticed. Keller quotes an old chronicle to show that Greble and Mantz were called ‘false prophets’ by the fanatical libertines in Abbacell, whom they rejected and combated, keeping clear of them in entangling alliance because they were libertines. [Vol. ii, 35] The Schleitheim Articles as well as many private writings throw a strong light upon this subject. Not only does the sixth article, on ‘The Sword,’ relieve them from this odium, but they wash their hands of the revolutionary transactions at Zwickau and Muhlhausen, the first in 1521, the last in 1524, under Münzer. They say to the Baptist congregations:

‘Scandal has been brought in amongst us by certain false brethren, so that some have turned from the faith, imagining to use for themselves the freedom of the Spirit and of Christ. But such have erred from the truth and have given themselves (to their condemnation) to the wantonness and freedom of the flesh; and have thought faith and love may do and suffer all things, and nothing would injure or condemn them because they believed.’ They warn that ‘faith’ does ‘not thus prove itself, does not bring forth and do such things, as these false brethren and sisters do and teach. . . . Beware of such, for they serve not our Father, but their father the devil. But ye are not so, for they who are in Christ have crucified the flesh, with all its lusts and longings.’ After they have given the seven articles, they say: ‘These are the points which some brethren have understood wrongly and not in accordance with the true meaning, and thereby have confused many weak consciences, so that the name of God has been grossly blasphemed. For which cause it was necessary that we should be united in the Lord, which, God be praised, has taken place. . . . Mark all those who walk not according to the simplicity of divine truth, which is contained in this letter, as it was apprehended by us in the assembly, in order that each one among us be governed by the rule of discipline, and henceforth the entrance among us of false brethren and sisters be guarded against. Separate the evil from you.’

One of the Baptist martyrs, Dryzinger, in 1538, only three years after the craze, was examined as to whether he and his brethren approved of these vile proceedings. He answered that ‘They would not be Christians if they did.’ Hans, of Overdam, another martyr, complained of these false accusations of violence. He said: ‘We are daily belied by these who say that we would defend our faith with the sword, as they of Münster did. The Almighty God defend us from such abominations.’ Young Dosie, a beautiful character, who was a prisoner to the Governor of Friesland, and endured cruel slaughter for his love to Christ, was asked by the governor’s wife if he and his brethren were not of that disgraceful people who took up the sword against the magistrates. With the sweet innocence of a child he replied: ‘No, madam, these persons greatly erred. We consider it a devilish doctrine to resist the magistrates by the outward sword and violence. We would much rather suffer persecution and death at their hands and whatever is appointed us to suffer.’ All this is no more than Erasmus said of them in 1529: ‘The Anabaptists have seized no churches, have not conspired against the authorities, nor deprived any man of his estate or goods.’ They had no sturdier foe than Bullinger, yet he renders this verdict: ‘Say what we will of the Baptists, I see nothing in them but earnestness, and I hear nothing of them except that they will not take an oath, will not do any wrong and aim to treat every man justly. In this, it seems to me, there is nothing out of the way.’

But Cornelius tells us plainly: ‘All these excesses were condemned and opposed wherever a large assembly of the brethren afforded an opportunity to give expression to the religious consciousness of the Baptist membership.’ This was the case at Augsburg, where a formal convention of their leaders discountenanced all political measures. No one outside of their number has better described their advanced position as a people in all respects than Fusslin, in his preface to vol. ii of Beitrage:

‘The Reformers rejected the superstitious abuses attached to the sacraments; the Anabaptists restored the sacraments themselves to memorials for believers. The Reformers preached against unnecessary bloodshed; the Anabaptists denounced war of every kind. The Reformers protested against Catholic tyranny; the Anabaptists denied to any civil power authority in matters of religion. The Reformers decried public vices; the Anabaptists excluded the immoral from their fellowship. The Reformers sought to limit usury and covetousness; the Anabaptists made them impossible by the practice of communism. The Reformers educated their preachers; the Anabaptists looked for the inner anointing. The Reformers condemned the priests for simony; the Anabaptists made every preacher depend on the labor of his own hands and the free gifts of the people.’

The Baptists of our day are the first and the freest to wash their hands of all the black deeds at Minister, not only because they are black, but also because their true brethren of the sixteenth century renounced them as honestly and earnestly. Several of the Münster men professed some things in common with the Baptists, but more that the Baptists detested. Fusslin, with characteristic impartiality, says: ‘There was a great difference between Anabaptists and Anabaptists. There were these amongst them who held strange doctrines, but this cannot be said of the whole sect. If we should attribute to every sect whatever senseless doctrines two or three fanciful fellows have taught, there is no one in the world to whom we could not ascribe the most abominable errors.’ He clearly alludes here to the Münster teachers. But, as clearly, he did not look upon them as the fathers of the Baptists in Germany. Without doubt a handful of Baptists in that city ran into polygamy, the only instance in all the centuries where a congregation of them has embraced that abomination. But even there the shocking practice was condemned and resisted at every step. Goebel tells us (i, p. 189) that two hundred moral and moderate Baptists in Münster heroically withstood the iniquity, and it was not established until forty-eight of this number had been put to a bloody slaughter for their resistance. So that in the struggle nearly fifty true Baptists fell martyrs to purity in that German Sodom; and at last, the ministers and most of the people yielded to the clamor for polygamy under this reign of terror.

While this handful of madmen had not been educated in visions, violence and indecency by the Baptist leaders of Switzerland and Germany, others had impregnated them with these doctrines from their cradle. For centuries these teachings and practices had filled the air. The doctrine of wild visions, both of God and the devil, was taught in the monastic institutions, and wonders of this sort were blazoned abroad by bishops, cardinals and popes everywhere. The Catholic communion believed then and still believes in new revelations from God. Saints innumerable are mentioned who heard voices from heaven, had visits from the Virgin, the Father, the Son and the angels--as Ignatius, Aquinas, Teresa, Felix and Anthony. Francis was not only inspired to read men’s minds and consciences as well as their faces, but he received the rules of his new order of monks directly from God. Like John of Leyden he appointed twelve apostles, and one of them hanged himself to boot. He also ‘prophesied’ that he should become ‘a great prince’ and be adored over the whole earth. Bridget, Catharine and Rosa, with endless nuns, were prophetesses. Teresa took the crucified Christ by the hand, was espoused to him and went up to heaven in the shape of a white dove. The Münster men never had such dreams, raptures, apparitions, phantasms and ecstasies as the canonized saints of Rome. Neither did Luther help the lunatics to sounder doctrine when he saw the devil in the form of a ‘dog,’ ‘a whisp of straw,’ a ‘wild boar’ and ‘a star;’ nor when he threw the inkstand at his head. As to violence:

Catholics and Protestants taught them that tradition, reason and Scripture made it the pious duty of saints to torture and burn men as heretics out of pure love for their holiness and salvation. Protestants told them that it was sacred duty to slaughter those as schismatics, sectaries, malignants who corrupted the Church and would not live in peace with the Reformed. Who educated these fanatics in Christian love and gentleness? The law of their times was to repel force with force. When the Münster men came into power they applied the reasoning of their tutors in atrocity, saying: ‘Our bounden duty is now to rid the earth of Christ’s enemies and ours, as they would rid it of us.’ And who will say that all these murderers did not stand on the same plane of outrage and barbarity in this respect? As to immoralities:

Every pure mind shrinks from the abhorrent indecencies of Münster. And who had set them this example? They practiced polygamy; but ten long years before this, 1524, Luther had written: ‘The husband must be certified in his own conscience and by the word of God that polygamy is permitted to him. As for me, I avow that I cannot set myself in opposition to men marrying several wives, or assert that such a course is repugnant to the Holy Scripture.’ About the same time he preached his famous sermon on ‘Marriage,’ which chastity may well pass in silence, beyond this one expression: ‘Provided one has faith, adultery is no sin.’ It was not the madmen of Münster but Martin Luther who said: ‘Whatever is allowed in the law of Moses as to marriage is not forbidden by the Gospel.’ His course in the shameful affair of Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, shows that although he ‘did not wish to see this practice (polygamy) introduced among Christians,’ yet he held to his old views. Hence, in 1539, four years after the Münster abomination, Philip told him, with what Michelet calls ‘a daring frankness,’ that he must marry another wife or continue his adulteries, saying: ‘I have read with great attention the Old and New Testaments, and I can discover no other resource save that of taking another wife; for I neither can nor will change my course of life; I call God to witness my words.’ Yet with that unblushing brow before him, Luther, with Melancthon, Bucer and four others, signed and sealed a document, attempting to dissuade the Landgrave, but failing of that, closed by saying: ‘If, however, your highness is utterly determined upon marrying a second wife, we are of opinion that it ought to be done secretly.’ Antony Corvinus the fourth signer of this reply to Philip, gives an account of the examination of John of Leyden, at which he was present, in which John gave his seven articles of faith. He intrenched himself behind Luther’s position, saying that they followed ‘the example of the patriarchs,’ declared marriage a political institution, and then put in the same plea as Philip. In Philip’s letter to the Wittenberg divines he said: ‘Ever since my marriage I have lived constantly in a state of adultery and fornication, and as I will not forego this course of life, I am interdicted from taking the holy communion; for St. Paul expressly says, "The adulterer shall not see the kingdom of heaven."’ John of Leyden adopted this plea, saying, in his seventh article: ‘It is better to have a plurality of wives than a multitude of prostitutes. God be our judge.’ Henry, the Duke of Brunswick, berated Luther for his approval of Philip’s bigamy; when Luther replied, with his usual mildness, in his famous article, ‘Against the Buffoon:’ ‘The duke has daily swallowed devils, and he is chained in hell with the chains of divine judgment.’ He then exhorts the pastors to denounce the duke from the pulpit as one who ‘has been damned by divine judgment.’ But when he revised his pamphlet, he said to Melancthon that he had been altogether too moderate.

And what better examples had the Catholics set the Münster men in the line of purity? From the ninth century down, as Bowden says, in his ‘Life of Hildebrand:’ ‘The infamies prevalent among the clergy are to be alluded to, not detailed.’ The open licentiousness of the popes was appalling. The popes of the fifteenth century were profligate and debased beyond belief. Innocent VIII publicly boasted of the number of his illegitimate children. Alexander was a monster of iniquity, who gave dispensations for crimes that cannot be written. Baronius says that the vilest harlots domineered in the papal see, at their pleasure changed sees, appointed bishops, and actually thrust into St. Peter’s chair their own gallants, false popes. Take simply the case of John XII Bowden wrote: ‘The Lateran palace was disgraced by becoming a receptacle for courtezans; and decent females were terrified from pilgrimages to the threshold of the Apostles, by the reports which were spread abroad of the lawless impurity and violence of the representative and successor of two others equally vile. But these were no worse than Sixtus IV, who erected a house of ill-fame in Rome, the inmates of which, according to Dr. Jortin, ‘paid his holiness a weekly tax, which amounted sometimes to 20,000 ducats a year.’ The purest spirits in the hierarchy blush to tell the hard narrative of monastic life in the sixteenth century, although it made pretension to spotless virtue. Archhishop Morton, 1490, accused the Abbot of St. Albans with emptying the nunneries of Pray and Sapnell of modest women and filling them with vile females. The clergy kept concubines openly from the pope down. Ten priests addressed a letter to the Bishop of Constance, asking permission to marry, confessing that their wicked mistresses had been their ‘scandal and ruin.’ He absolved them and others on the payment of five gulden; and Hottinger writes that the revenue from this source was 7,000 gulden. This was a full match for the obscenities of Münster. Such transactions in sacred life led these madmen to throw away all license in civil life.

A word as to the nude indecencies of Münster must finish this chapter. People appeared naked at the baptistery and in public places. Where had they learned these revolting practices? For centuries the fanaticism of Rome had immersed all persons in a state of nudity. As far back as A.D. 347, the Ritual of Jerusalem required the candidates for baptism ‘to put off the garments wherewith they are clothed.’ Brenner, the great Catholic authority, says: ‘For sixteen hundred years the candidate for immersion was completely undressed.’ The Synod of Cologne, in 1280, carried this fanaticism to such an extent, that they decreed that an infant must have water poured upon its head in the name of the Trinity to save it from perdition, if dying, when but half-born. How like Lambecius, who blamed the Danes and Swedes for delaying baptism through ‘bashfulness and shame. . . . Since, formerly men and women laying aside their bashfulness, their whole bodies being entirely nude, were baptized in the presence of all; and that not by sprinkling, indeed, but by immersion or sinking them.’ These are the men [Catholics] who now shudder at Münster! These are the men who formerly put hundreds of thousands upon the rack, of every rank, ago and sex, to be tortured.

Rome practiced the same indecencies in flagellation, borrowed from the heathen feast of Lupercale, in which, according to Virgil and Plutarch, young noblemen walked through the streets naked, cutting themselves with whips and rods, in austerity, while sacrifices were burning to the gods. The same barbarity was practiced by Christian women in France, Mezaray being authority. For two centuries this flagellant madness ran through Bavaria, Austria, the Upper Rhine and Italy, nay, through Saxony itself. These morbid fanatics practiced all stages of undress, formed a brotherhood, swept in thousands through these lands, singing hymns, having revelations from angels and the Virgin, and with a letter from Christ himself, which they exhibited in their pilgrimages. Motley calls the Münster men, ‘Furious fanatics, who deserved the mad-house rather than the scaffold:’ and how much better were Catholics or Protestants, in practicing the same things? It is hardly worth while sending the Münster fiends to perdition alone, nolens volens, for unbearable beastliness. There was this difference between their butchery and the legal murders of Protestant and Catholic, called martyrdoms, namely: that theirs were acts of violence perpetrated in a religious craze or frenzy, while the others were the result of deliberate legislation, put on the statute-book, in that icy sublimity which dresses itself in the guise of human and divine law. But history will mete out to all these parties that tardy justice which will be honestly accepted by all in due time.

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