========================================================================
  THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS (1860)
  by Ford
========================================================================

Ford's 1860 historical argument for the ancient origins of Baptist principles
and churches, tracing Baptist identity through the centuries prior to the
Protestant Reformation.

  Chapters: 17

------------------------------------------------------------------------
  TABLE OF CONTENTS
------------------------------------------------------------------------

    1. 00-Title & Contents
    2. 01-Introduction
    3. 02-The 18th Century
    4. 03-The 17th Century
    5. 04-The 16th Century
    6. 05-The 15th Century
    7. 06-The 14th Century
    8. 07-The 13th Century
    9. 08-The 12th Century
   10. 09-The 10th Century
   11. 10-The 8th Century
   12. 11-The 7th Century
   13. 12-The 6th Century
   14. 13-The 5th Century
   15. 14-The 3rd Century
   16. 15-The 2nd Century
   17. 16-The 1st Century

========================================================================
  CHAPTER 1: 00-TITLE & CONTENTS
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction Century Eighteen: Baptists in Virginia Century Seventeen: Baptists
in England Century Sixteen: The Reformation Century Fifteen: Wales Century
Fourteen: Wickliffe and the Lollards Century Thirteen: Pete de Brue Century
Twelve: Henry of Lausanne Century Ten: Baptists in Italy Paulicians Century
Eight: Retrospect Century Seven: Montenses Century Six: Donatists Century Five:
Numidians Century Three: Novations Century Two: Tertullianists Century One: The
Primitive Churches


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 2: 01-INTRODUCTION
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford

INTRODUCTION "...the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the
truth." (1 Timothy 3:15) The following will prove a very acceptable historical
contribution to the masses of the people. It will be to history a sort of
elementary work, yet replete with historic facts, and the biographies of the
leading witnesses of Jesus in the darkest ages of the world. In this little
work, the general reader will find, traced by a graphic pen, the bold outline of
the history of the people now called Baptists. Like an experienced woodsman, the
author has blazed the rough and bloody track of our people back into the
wilderness, even into the "remotest depth of antiquity," but in these dark
depths he loses not, like Mosheim, their "trail," but pursues it until it leads
out into the unclouded light of the first century, where he finds the footsteps
of the apostles and the Son of God himself, mingling with those of the first
Christians, leading still back toward the banks of the Jordan, upon which the
colors of the new kingdom were first unfurled, and a people to receive the
coming Son were first prepared by his herald, John.

Some may object to the mode selected by the author in pursuing his inquiry, and,
because it is novel, regard it as unnatural and unphilosophical.

Such an objection is not well founded. The author designed this for the outline
of an original investigation of his subject, and he has therefore selected the
more real and genuine method of procedure.

Says Rawlinson: "In every historical inquiry it is possible to pursue our
researches in two ways; we may either trace the stream of time upward and pursue
history to its earliest source, or we may reverse the process, and, beginning at
the fountain-head, follow down the course of events in chronological order to
our own day. The former is the more philosophical, because the more real and
genuine method of procedure; it is the course which, in the original
investigation of the subject, must, in point of fact, have been pursued; the
present is our standing point, and we necessarily view the past from it, and
only know so much of the past as we connect more or less distinctly with it."
(Bampton Course, 1859, Lecture ii, p. 49.) This work is timely, and we think
will be gladly received by the masses, since it furnishes them, in a condensed
form, with authentic historical facts, with which to meet the questions and
charges every day cast into their faces by the descendants of those who murdered
our ancestors: "Where did the Baptists come from?" "Baptists originated with
Roger Williams, and their baptisms with his informal baptism." "Baptists at best
are but the descendants of the fanatical Anabaptists of Munster, and have no
history before their day," and other like charges. Multitudes of our people have
never been furnished with the facts of history with which to disprove these
charges. They have ever opened at the third of Matthew, and triumphantly pointed
to a body of Baptists in Judea, gathered by "John the Baptist," and to the
Church on the Mount of Olives, to which Christ gave the commission to the Church
at Jerusalem, and to all the Churches planted by the apostles, all manifestly
Baptist Churches; but the thick darkness of eighteen centuries, to the
multitude, rolls between the apostolic period and the present. It should be a
matter of devout thanksgiving to Almighty God, and be hailed as the harbinger
star of near millennial day, that every year is pouring increasing light into
that darkness, discovering to the inquiring gaze of the world who have been the
true followers of Christ, and who "the witnesses of Jesus," contending earnestly
for and maintaining with martyr courage the faith once delivered to the saints,
and the ordinances as they were at first committed to the Church. The light that
is pouring upon the obscurity that has so long rested upon the wanderings of the
Bride of Christ, in the wilderness into which she has been driven by her bloody
persecutors, may be the earnest of the fulfillment of the prophet’s vision when
he saw a woman, the symbol of the Church, coming up out of the wilderness,
leaning upon the arm of her Beloved, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and
terrible, to her enemies, as an army with banners.

O, that the Lord would fulfill that vision in our day! We wait, we long for it
as one who watcheth for the morning. Then shall be sung, in full vision, the
song an oppressed and suffering Church has long sung in faith only:

Triumphant Zion, lift thy head From dust and darkness and the dead! Though
jumbled long, awake at length, And gird thee with thy Savior’s strength. Put all
thy beauteous garments on, And let thy excellence be known: Deck’d in the robes
of righteousness, The world thy glories shall confess. No more shall daring foes
invade, And fill thy hallow’d walls with dread; No more shall hell’s insulting
host Their victory and thy sorrow boast. God from on high has heard thy prayer,
His hand thy ruin shall repair, Nor will thy watchful Savior cease To guard thee
in eternal peace. Southern Psalmist. Nashville 1860J.R.G. WHERE DID THE BAPTISTS
COME FROM?

Milestones by the Track of Time This is an age of inquiry and tireless research.
To the questionings of an imperative curiosity the very rocks have rendered an
account of themselves, and the leaves that fell before the flood, have been made
to tell their story. Not a time-worn mark, or hieroglyphic, but has been cleared
from the dust of centuries and deciphered. Not a crumbling monument, or a buried
city, or perished people of the dead, past, but has been reproduced on the
canvas of living history. Naught escapes the sleepless eye, the persevering
industry of modern research. Now, there is a class of people in our midst,
numbered by hundreds of thousands - found, indeed, wherever soul-freedom is, and
the gospel is, a people marked and peculiar, whose principles and influences
have told, and must still tell on the character and destiny of society. This
people are called BAPTISTS. Their distinguishing peculiarities are, an
uncompromising avowal and advocacy of soul-liberty, enlightened, and guided, and
governed only by the Eternal King. That earthly priests, and kings, and
governments, ranged hierarchies and mitered fathers, are but as those "that peep
and that mutter." "To the law and to the testimony," is their watchword; "if any
man speak not according to these things, it is because there is no light in
him," that no mortal has the right to decide the church relations of any human
being. In a word, that Christianity demands voluntary obedience; and to
forestall, control, or fetter this, is antichristian. This is the prominent
peculiarity of the people of whom we speak. And the profession of this voluntary
surrender to the Lord of life is avowed by a burial by baptism into his sacred
name.

Now, this people, so well known and so rapidly increasing among us, as a
distinct class, originated somewhere. Some spot witnessed their beginning; some
period in the march of time noted the birthday of these Baptists. Can the place
of their nativity be found? Can the record of their origin be traced? Is the
energy of human research, with all its triumphs, to pause breathless here, and
acknowledge itself baffled and defeated? NO, no! The question can and must be
answered, or history is a dead, a dumb thing. Let its voice but be heard as it
tones distinctly through the mists of ages, and it will be forever decided -
WHERE DID THE BAPTISTS COME FROM? But in vain shall we seek among the
authoritative records of the past, for one kind word concerning them. Crushed
beneath a powerful and persecuting hierarchy; few, feeble, and what the world
calls unlearned, yet lifting up their voice in defiant tones above the storms of
execration and violence; protesting, in the name of truth and freedom, against
the universal domination of the State Church, and a proud, tyrannical clergy;
sounding out through the grates of filthy prisons the joyous notes of redeeming
mercy, and melting the hearts of those that mockery attracted to the spot;
scattered defenceless, without State patronage, or the prestige of noble names,
or great leaders; with no earthly head, or strong central government to give
direction to their aims; with the Word of God their only guide; yet rising in
the strength of God above the crested waves, battling with the storm, steadily,
steadfastly, onward, upward, until now, in the words of the eloquent Chalmer:

"Let it never be forgotten of the Baptists, that they form the denomination of
Fuller, and Cary, and Ryland, and Hall, and Foster; that they originated one of
all missionary enterprises; that they have enriched the Christian literature of
our country with an authorship of the most exalted piety, as well as of the
first talent, and the first eloquence; that they have waged a noble war with the
hydra of Antinomianism; that, perhaps, there is not a more intellectual
community of ministers, or who have to their number put forth a greater amount
of mental power and mental activity in the defense and illustration of our
common faith; and what is still better than all the triumphs of genius and
understanding, who by their zeal and fidelity, and pastoral labour among the
congregations which they have reared, have done more to swell the lists of
genuine discipleship in all the walks of private society, and thus both to
uphold and extend the living Christianity of our nation." (Dr. Chalmers’s
Lectures on Romans.) Such are the people whose origin we would trace, and whose
origin surely can be found.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 3: 02-THE 18TH CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford

CHAPTER I Century Eighteen Baptists in Virginia In 1775, the Baptists first
appeared in this mighty West. It was at a period the most momentous in the
world’s history. The storms of Revolution were sweeping over the colonies,
spreading calamity and gloom. Nowhere did the contest rage more fearfully than
in Virginia, and nowhere did the opposing parties put forth mightier efforts. It
was the battle of truth, of principle, of national life, fought not for America
alone, but for the world. The dark hour was succeeded by the sunrise of freedom.
In the midst of this conflict, and ere the storm had subsided, the West rose
into being, like the fabled spirit of beauty, from the waves of the agitated
sea. The principles which triumphed in the revolution were the elements of her
existence, and the men who had suffered most from oppression, and had lifted up
their voices for freedom from the jails of Virginia, were the first settlers in
the valley of the Mississippi.

Lewis Craig had been followed by his sympathizing church to the gates of
Fredericksburg jail. He was followed by that same church through the Cumberland
gap, to plant that gospel barrier amid the tangled wilderness of the "dark and
woody ground." The principles which actuated him and them, and which have ever
characterized the Baptists, had been working silently, but effectually, for a
century previous in Virginia. Of the names of those prosecuted for those
principles little need be said. Let one scene suffice. It was the trial of Lewis
and Joseph Craig and Aaron Bledsoe. They had been indicted for preaching the
gospel of the Son of God in the colony of Virginia. The clerk was reading the
indictment in a slow and formal manner; when he pronounced the crime with
emphasis - "For preaching the Gospel of the Son of God in the colony of
Virginia," a plainly-dressed man who had just rode up to the court-house
entered, and took his seat within the bar. He was known to the court and
lawyers, but a stranger to the mass of spectators, who had gathered on the
occasion. This was PATRICK HENRY, who, on hearing of this prosecution, had rode
some fifty or sixty miles from his residence in Hanover county, to volunteer his
services in their defense. He listened to the further reading of the indictment
with marked attention, the first sentence of which that had caught his ear was,
"For preaching the Gospel of the Son of God." When it was finished, and the
prosecuting attorney had submitted a few remarks, Henry arose, reached out his
had and received the paper, and addressed the Court:

"May it please your worships: I think I heard read by the prosecutor as I
entered this house the paper I now hold in my hand. If I have rightly
understood, the king’s attorney of this colony has framed an indictment for the
purpose of arraigning, and punishing by imprisonment, three inoffensive persons
before the bar of this Court, for a crime of great magnitude-as disturbers of
the peace. May it please the Court, what did I hear read? Did I hear it
distinctly, or was it a mistake of my own? Did I hear an expression as if a
crime, that these men, whom your worships are about to try for a misdemeanor,
are charged with-what?"-and continuing in a low, solemn, heavy tone, "For
preaching the Gospel of the Son of God!"

Pausing, amid the most profound silence and breathless astonishment, he slowly
waved the paper three times around his head, when, lifting his hands and eyes to
heaven, with peculiar and impressive energy he exclaimed, "GREAT GOD!" The
exclamation, the action, the burst of feeling from the audience, were all
overpowering. Mr. Henry resumed:

"May it please your worships: There are periods in the history of man, when
corruption and depravity have so long debased the human character, that man
sinks under the weight of the oppressor’s hand, and becomes his servile, his
abject slave; he licks the hand that smites him; he bows in passive obedience to
the mandates of the despot, and in this state of servility he receives his
fetters of perpetual bondage. But, may it please your worships, such a day has
passed away! From that period, when our fathers left the land of their nativity
for settlement in these American wilds, for LIBERTY, for civil and religious
liberty, for liberty of conscience, to worship their Creator according to their
conceptions of Heaven’s revealed will; from the moment they placed foot on the
American continent, and in the deeply imbedded forests sought an asylum from
persecution and tyranny, from that moment despotism was crushed; her fetters of
darkness were broken, and Heaven decreed that man should be free-free to worship
God according to the Bible. Were it not for this, in vain have been the efforts
and sacrifices of the colonists; in vain were all their sufferings and bloodshed
to subjugate this new world, if we, their offspring, must still be oppressed and
persecuted. But, may it please your worships, permit me to inquire once more,
for what are these men about to tried? This paper says, ’For preaching the
Gospel of the Son of God.’ Great God! For preaching the Gospel of the Savior to
Adam’s fallen race." And in tones of thunder, he exclaimed: "WHAT LAW HAVE THEY
VIOLATED?" while the third time, in a slow, dignified manner, he lifted his eyes
to heaven, and waved the indictment around his head. The Court and audience were
now wrought up to the most intense pitch of excitement. The face of the
prosecuting attorney was pallid and ghastly, and he appeared unconscious that
his whole frame was agitated with alarm; while the judge, in a tremulous voice,
put an end to the scene, now becoming excessively painful, by the authoritative
declaration, "Sheriff, discharge those men."

They battled on for truth and soul freedom; and their fortitude, their courage,
and final triumph have been recorded by their foes. They were republicans from
principle. Says the Episcopalian, Hawkes: (Hawkes’s Protestant Episcopal Church
in Virginia, p.121.)

"No dissenters in Virginia experienced, for a time, harsher treatment than did
the Baptists. They were beaten and imprisoned, and cruelty taxed its ingenuity
to devise new modes of punishment and annoyance; but the men, who were not
permitted to speak in public, found willing auditors in the sympathizing crowds
who gathered around the prisons to hear them preach from the grated windows.
"Persecution had taught the Baptists not to love the establishment, and they now
saw before them a reasonable prospect of overturning it altogether. In their
Association, they had calmly discussed the matter and resolved on their course;
in this course they were constant to the end; and the war they waged against the
church was a war of extermination. They seem to have known no relentings, and
their hostility never ceased for seven-and twenty years. They revenged
themselves for their sufferings by the almost total ruin of the church; and now
commenced the assault, for, inspired by the ardor of patriotism, which accorded
with their interests, they addressed the Convention, and informed that body that
their religious tenets presented no obstacle to their taking up arms and
fighting for the country; and they tendered the services of their pastors in
promoting the enlistment of the youth of their persuasion. A complimentary
answer was returned, and the ministers of all denominations, in accordance with
the address, placed on equal footing. This, it is believed, was the first step
toward religious liberty in Virginia." A century anterior to this, a statute was
enacted in the colonial Legislature of Virginia, which runs thus:

"Whereas, Sundry and divers persons, out of adverseness to the establishment
orthodox religion, or out of new-fangled conceits of their own heretical
inventions, refuse to have their children baptized. Be i enacted, that whosoever
shall thus refuse when he might carry his child to a lawful minister within the
country, shall be fined two hundred pounds of tobacco, half to the informer, and
half to the parish." (Herring’s Statutes). The persons against whom the
legislative thunder was hurled in the name of God and King Charles II., were
Baptists. Here, then, in the interior of Virginia, at the time when Rhode Island
was organizing, and with no intercourse with that distant little colony, we find
Christian immersionists, Baptists. Where did they come from?

One year previous, in the colony of Massachusetts, a "poor man by the name of
Painter," as we are informed by Mr. Hubbard, "was suddenly turned Anabaptist;
and, having a child born, would not suffer his wife to carry it to be baptized."
He was complained of for this to the Court, and enjoined by them to suffer his
child to be baptized. But poor Painter had the misfortune to dissent, both from
the church and the court. He told them that infant baptism was an antichristian
ordinance, for which "he was tied up and whipped."

Gov. Winthrop tells us that Painter was whipped "for reproaching the Lord’s
ordinance."(Backus, vol. i, p. 147). The persecutions at this time were so
numerous in this pious Pedobaptist colony, that a letter was addressed to the
"Governor, Assistants, and People of Massachusetts, exhorting them to lenient
measures toward the Dissenting brethren." About this time, we are told by Gov.
Winthrop, that "the Anabaptists increased and spread in Massachusetts; and this
fearful increase which could not be checked by argument or insult, led to the
following act for their suppression:"

"Forasmuch as experience hath plentifully and often proved that the Anabaptists
have been the infectors of persons in the main matters of religion, and the
troublers of churches in all places where they have been; and that they who have
held the baptizing of infants unlawful, have usually held other errors
therewith; and whereas, divers of this kind have, since our coming into New
England, appeared among ourselves, and if they should be connived at by us are
likely to be increased among us, it is ordered and agreed, that if any person or
persons, within this jurisdiction, shall either openly condemn or oppose the
baptizing of infants, or go about secretly to seduce others from the approbation
or use thereof, or purposely depart from the congregation at the ministration of
the ordinance - every such person of persons shall be subject to banishment."
(Winthrop, p. 211). Of the malice of these "tender mercies" of Pedobaptist
orthodox churches, a passing glance is sufficient. The connection of infant
baptism and oppression is so intimate, that in no spot on earth has the former
prevailed that the latter has not followed. But pursuing our inquiry; the
statute shows one fact: that from the first settlement, (or, as the act reads,)
"since our coming into New England have appeared among ourselves divers
Anabaptists." Five years anterior to the enactment of the above law, in 1638,
Hanserd Knollys, a name enshrined in the temple of soul-liberty, gathered
together a Baptist church; and John Smith, John Spur and four others, were
arrested in 1639 for attempting to organize a church at Weymouth, fourteen miles
south of Boston. Before Roger Williams was baptized, or his Church organized,
there were Baptist Churches and Baptist ministers throughout New England. The
principles of this down- trodden people Roger Williams adopted, and in
advocating them, defending them, and suffering for them, he has stamped immortal
honour on his name. The glory of that name we would not, even could we, tarnish.
Not a green leaf would we pluck from the imperishable laurels that wreathe his
brow. Every lover of freedom, every one imbued with the spirit of Jesus Christ,
as he follows the turbid stream of history and searches for that vital principle
which first enlarged the soul of humanity on this continent, will have his
footsteps arrested, and will pause with delight as he watches the developments
of principle on the colony of Massachusetts. In February, 1631, an humble
pilgrim, noble in his appearance, yet retiring in his manners, a little more
than thirty years of age, a fugitive from English persecution, Roger Williams,
like a "light on eternity’s ocean," rose amid the darkness of spiritual
depotism, then brooding over Europe and the world. "It became his glory," says
Bancroft, "to found a State on the principle of full liberty of conscience, and
to stamp himself upon its rising institutions in characters so deep that the
impress has remained to the present day, and can never be erased." There he
stood, like freedom itself, towering above the storms of persecution and
suffering, triumphant, sublime. But historic facts prove beyond doubt that Roger
Williams was not the founder of the Providence Church, and further, that the
church he established, and which crumbled to pieces four months after it was
gathered, was not the first church in America. It is recorded in the minutes of
the Philadelphia Association, when the first Church in Newport was one hundred
years old in 1738, Mr. John Callender, their minister, delivered and published a
sermon on the occasion.

Williams, indeed, touched the Baptist standard, but ere he raised it, his hand
trembled, and it fell. It was seized by a steadier hand; at Newport it was
raised, and far and near they came to it; it was carried into the heart of
Massachusetts, and a work was commenced which till the last setting of the sun,
shall never cease; and this, before we have any evidence that a church in
Providence had begun to be.

Among the evils that have resulted from the wrong date of the Providence Church,
has been the prominence given to Roger Williams. It is greatly to be regretted,
that it ever entered into the mind of any one to make him, in America, the
founder of our denomination. In no sense was he so. Well would it be for
Baptists, and for Williams himself, could his short and fitful attempt to become
a Baptist be obliterated from the minds of men. A man only four months a
Baptist, and then renouncing his baptism forever, to be lauded and magnified as
the founder of the Baptist denomination in the New World! As a leader in civil
and religious liberty, I do him homage; as a Baptist, I owe him nothing.

There is another name, long, too long concealed, by Williams being placed before
him, who will in after times be regarded with unmingled affection and respect,
as the true founder of the Baptist cause in this country. That orb of purest
luster will yet shine forth, and Baptists, whether they regarded his spotless
character, his talents, his learning, the services he rendered, the urbanity and
the modesty that distinguished him, will mention John Clarke as the real founder
of our denomination in America. And when Baptist history is better understood
than it is at present, every one, pointing to that venerable church which, on
one of earth’s loveliest spots he established, will say, "This is the mother of
us all!" But in Virginia were Baptists ere Rhode Island had its charter. In
Massachusetts were Baptist congregations before Williams was baptized. In the
language of the legislative act already cited, "since our coming to New
England," before Roger Williams saw it, "divers of this kind", Baptists,
pleading for soul-liberty and Christian immersion, trod these shores of the New
World, stained or hallowed by their blood. "SOME OF THE FIRST PLANTERS IN NEW
ENGLAND WERE BAPTISTS." This is the language of Dr. Mather, their bitter foe,
who lived in that persecuting age; and his language, corroborated as it is by
colonial laws and documents still extant, is conclusive.

Here, then, closes our first milestone up the blood-stained path which Baptists
have been forced to travel. Here we look on the bleak, wild forests of New
England and Virginia, as this mighty nation was lifting its mountain summits
into the morning mists of historic light. And here, before Williams lived, or
Clarke or Holmes suffered and bled, we have found these Baptists.

We subjoin the epitaph of this noble man of God, whose memory should be held in
vivid and grateful recollection by every lover of truth and freedom. To the
Memory of DOCTOR JOHN CLARKE,

One of the original purchasers and proprietors of this island, and one of the
founders of the First Baptist Church in Newport, its first pastor and munificent
benefactor: He was a native of Bedfordshire, England, and a practitioner of
physic in London. He, with his associates, came to this island from Mass., in
March, 1638, O.S., and on the 24th of the same month obtained a deed thereof
from the Indians. He shortly after gathered the Church aforesaid, and became its
pastor. In 1651, he, with Roger Williams, was sent to England, by the people of
Rhode Island Colony, to negotiate the business of the Colony with the British
ministry: Mr. Clarke was instrumental in obtaining the Charter of 1663 from
Charles II., which secured to the people of the State free and full enjoyment of
judgment and conscience in matters of religion. He remained in England to watch
over the interests of the Colony until 1664, and then returned to Newport and
resumed the pastoral care of his Church. Mr. Clarke and Mr. Williams, two
fathers of the Colony, strenuously and fearlessly maintained that none but Jesus
Christ had authority over the affairs of conscience. He died April 20, 1676, in
the 66th year of his age, and is here interred. To our inquiry - Where did they
come from?


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 4: 03-THE 17TH CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford

CHAPTER II Century Seventeen Baptists in England Cromwell and the Stuarts "We
are cheered by the rays from former generations, and live in the sunny
reflection of all their light."

Monuments rise all along the stream of time, whose summits, like the fabled
statue, kindled beneath the light, give out cheering music, and over the deep
sorrows of humanity throw a halo of hope and joy. We can thus look up the dark
current in its ever onward, desolating sweep, bearing on its flood the wreck of
nations and systems; can behold the rocky towers where our fathers have stood,
and the deep indented footprints crimsoned with their blood; and can hear above
the deep silence the sublime echo of their voices. We are their children. They
link us to the past. Their histories, like the tombstones of our parents, speak
lovingly to us from their graves.

Such a monument, a link in our common brotherhood, was Hanserd Knollys, a
Baptist preacher, who was imprisoned in New England by virtue of a warrant from
the Court of Commission, a Protestant inquisition, which followed him with its
persecutions till the day of his death. Around him were numerous Baptists. Such
men as Clarke and Holmes battled and suffered by his side. They had fled in
search of freedom to this New World, but their tracks were followed, and their
first church-meeting, near boston, broken up, and they were hauled to prison by
the agents of the law. Eighteen years after the landing of the Mayflower, when
every man in the colony was English born, and before Roger Williams was
baptized, a Church of Baptists was formed in America. Where did they come from?

Let us trace the connecting link across the Atlantic, from New England to Old
England. Hanserd Knollys was born in Lincoln, England, 1598. He graduated with
honour at Cambridge University. Having joined the Baptists, he became the object
of Episcopal hate. He passed over to New England, where persecutions still
followed him. When the news reached him of the revolution which brought Charles
I. to the block, in 1648, he returned to England. Says Crosby:

"A few years after his return from America, we find Mr. Knollys discharging his
public ministry to a congregation of his own gathering, in Great St. Helen’s,
London, where the people flocked in crowds to hear him, and he had generally a
thousand auditors. This roused the jealousy of the Presbyterians, and the
landlord was prevailed on to refuse them the use of the place any longer.

"The life of this good man was one continued scene of vexation and trouble. Soon
after the Restoration, in 1660, Mr. Knollys, with many other innocent persons,
was dragged from his own dwelling-house, and committed to Newgate, where he was
kept in close custody for eighteen weeks, until delivered by an Act of grace
upon the king’s coronation. At that time, four hundred persons were confined in
the same prison for refusing to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy. A
royal proclamation, occasioned by the rebellion of a person of the name of
Venner, was issued at this time, prohibiting Anabaptists and other sectaries
from worshipping God in public, except at their parish church. This cruel edict
was the signal for persecution, and the forerunner of those sanguinary laws
which disgraced the reigns of the Stuarts; and to these things we must attribute
the frequent removals of Mr. Knollys, mentioned in a former part of this memoir.
During his absence in Holland and Germany, his property was confiscated to the
Crown; and, when the law did not favour the monarch’s pretensions, a party of
soldiers were dispatched to take forcible possession of Mr. Knollys’s premises,
which had cost him upward of ? 700." The old man died in poverty at the age of
ninety-three after spending at different times nine years of imprisonment,
besides fines and banishments. In a brief review of his life, as immortality was
about to break in upon him, he wrote:

"I confess that many of the Lord’s ministers have excelled me, with whom he has
not taken so much pains as he hath with me. I am an unprofitable servant; but,
’by the grace of God, I am what I am.’" The brief visit of Hanserd Knollys to
America, and his return to England, together with sacrifices and suffering -
amid which he stood like a tower, unawed and unbowed beneath the thunder-storm,
give to his character peculiar interest. But, beyond this, the age in which he
lived will ever be memorable to Baptists. It was the age of Tombs, of Collier,
of Kiffin, and of Bunyan, a day of trial and triumph. Let us listen to the
historian, Macaulay, speaking of these men:

"Bunyan had been bred a tinker, and had served as a private soldier in the
parliamentary army. Early in his life he had been fearfully tortured by remorse
for his youthful sins, the worst of which seem, however, to have been such as
the world thinks venial. from the depths of despair, the penitent passed to a
state of serene felicity. An irresistible impulse now urged him to impart to
others the blessings of which he was himself possessed. He joined the Baptists,
and became a preacher and writer. His education had been that of mechanic. He
knew no language but the English, as it was spoken by the common people. Yet his
rude oratory roused and melted hearers, who listened without interest to the
laboured discourses of great logicians and Hebraists. His works were widely
circulated among the humbler classes. One of them, the Pilgrim’s Progress, in
his own lifetime, was translated into several languages.

"It may be doubted whether any English Dissenter had suffered more severely
under the penal laws than John Bunyan. Of the twenty-seven years which had
elapsed since the Restoration, he had passed twelve in confinement. He still
persisted in preaching; but, that he might preach, he was under the necessity of
disguising himself like a carter. He was often introduced into meetings through
back doors, with a smock frock on his back, and a whip in his hand. If he had
thought only of his own ease and safety, he would have hailed the indulgence
with delight. He was now, at length, free to pray and exhort in open day. His
congregation rapidly increased; thousands hung upon his words; and at Bedford,
where he ordinarily resided, money was plentifully contributed to build a
meeting-house for him. His influence among the common people was such that the
government would willingly have bestowed on him some municipal office; but his
vigorous understanding and his stout English heart were proof against all
delusion and all temptation. He felt assured that the proffered toleration was
merely a bait intended to lure the Puritan party to destruction; nor would he,
by accepting a place for which he was not legally qualified, recognize the
validity of the dispensing power. One of the last acts of his virtuous life was
to decline an interview to which he was invited by an agent of the government."
(The Continuation of Bunyan’s Life, appended to his "Grace Abounding.")

"Great as was the authority of Bunyan with the Baptists, that of William Kiffin
was still greater. Kiffin was the first man among them in wealth and station. He
was in the habit of exercising his spiritual gifts at their meetings; but he did
not live by preaching. He traded largely; his credit on the Exchange of London
stood high; and he had accumulated an ample fortune. Perhaps no man could, at
that juncture, have rendered more valuable services to the court. But between
him and the court was interposed the remembrance of one terrible event. He was
the grandfather of the two Hewlings, those gallant youths who, of all the
victims of the bloody Assizes, had been the most generally lamented. For the sad
fate of one of them, James was in a peculiar manner responsible. Jeffreys had
respited the younger brother. The poor lad’s sister had been ushered by
Churchill into the royal presence, and had begged for mercy; but the king’s
heart had been obdurate. The misery of the whole family had been great; but
Kiffin was most to be pitied. He was seventy years old when he was left
desolate, the survivor of those who should have survived him. The heartless and
venal sycophants of Whitehall, judging by themselves, thought that the old man
would be easily propitiated by an alderman’s gown, an by some compensation in
money for the property which his grandson had forfeited." (Macaulay’s History,
vol. 2 p. 175). Of Thomas Collier, a passing word is all that can be given. He
preached at Guernsey, where he had many converts; but his cruel persecutors
would not allow him to enjoy peace. They banished him and many of his followers
from the place, and cast him into prison at Portsmouth; but how long he remained
in confinement we are not informed. On account of his incessant labours and
extensive usefulness, he is represented by his adversaries as having done much
hurt in Lymington, Hampton, Waltham, and all along the west country. "This
Collier," ways Edwards, one of his Pedobaptist contemporaries, "is a great
sectary in the west of England, a mechanical fellow, and a great emissary, and a
dipper, who goes about Surrey, Hampshire, and those countries, preaching and
dipping." (Sketches of Early Baptists). But time would fail to speak of
Bamfield, of Denne, and of Tombs, the antagonist of Baxter, of Jessey, also, and
of Goswold, whose congregation in London, even at that day, was three thousand,
and whose pulpit powers no man in England surpassed. This was in 1660. There
were then, even in the midst of all this persecution, two hundred and seventeen
(217) Baptist churches in England; and a fearless avowal of their convictions,
long afterward known as the Philadelphia Confession of Faith, was published and
circulated, among whose signers were Kiffin, and Tombs, and Knollys.

It was a dark, and yet a glorious day, for the Baptist denomination; for the
blackest clouds send forth the brightest lightnings. Charles I. was dethroned in
1648, and royalty, nobility, episcopacy, and the whole tribe of dead formalities
were swept like rotting leaves from the realm. But the Stuarts had returned, and
with sin a treason in their train, marched with garments rolled in blood and
crime over the rights of a prostrate people. Episcopacy, ever the deadly foe of
Christianity and soul- freedom, was again enthroned and clad in scarlet. It
plied at once its engines of oppression and cruelty. But there were those whom
the power of the Bishops could neither bend nor crush. Above their thunder rose,
with fearless front, the forms of Bunyan, of Kiffin, of thousands more, whose
names are found only in heaven’s martyr-roll; Baptists, whose fidelity to their
principles was, like those principles themselves - DEATHLESS. From 1649 to 1659
was a kind of twilight hour of hope; and most valiantly did the Baptists press
upon the attention of the world their principles of soul-freedom. These
principles, previously sheltered in obscurity, became the property of the
people. The parliamentary army, whose splendid victories won freedom for
England, and struck terror to the tyrants of Europe, was composed, to a great
extent, of Baptists. An army, not of hireling fighters, but of true men,
battling for freedom. Says Carlyle:

"In dark, inextricable difficulties, Cromwell’s officers used to assemble and
pray alternatively for hours, for days, till some definite resolution arose
among them. Consider that - in tears, in fervent prayers, and cries to the great
God to have pity on them, to make His light shine before them. A little band of
Christian brothers, who had drawn the sword against a black, devouring world,
they cried to God in their straits, in their extreme need, not to forsake the
cause that was His. The light that now rose upon them, how could a human soul by
any means get better light? To them it was as the shining of heaven’s own
splendour into the vast howling darkness."

Never before had the world seen such an army, whose "officers preached," and
whose privates were constantly "busy in searching the Scriptures."

Major General Harrison, one of the most distinguished leaders, was a Baptist. To
the cause of freedom his life had been given; and his death on the scaffold, on
the return of Charles II., was that of a pious Christian hero. Ludlow, Tilburn,
and Overton, the friend of Milton, and Col. Mason, the governor of the Isle of
Jersey, were Baptists. And such was their increase and influence, that Baxter,
the Presbyterian, complained that many of the soldiers became Baptists as a
means of promotion. He laments, that "those who at first were but a few in the
city and army, had, within three years, grown into a multitude." To them he
traces the invasion of Scotland, the downfall of monarchy, and the establishment
of a Republic. (Baxter’s Works, xx. p. 255). In Cromwell’s own family their
influence was felt; and the genius of Milton shunned not to avow these
sentiments. No wonder that Bunyan, who once served in the army against the king;
not wonder that Baptists, generally, were the victims of hate and cruelty, from
kings, bishops, and presbyters. They were, as their antagonist, Hawks, has said,
"Republicans from principle." In the destruction of the throne of Charles, they
were the principal actors. During that brief hour of freedom, they multiplied by
thousands. But we must pass a little farther up the stream. To our inquiry -
Where did the Baptist come from? The confession or declaration of principles, to
which reference has been made, was published during the reign of Charles I., in
1643. Thirty-two years previous, when the burning rage of Episcopal persecution
was at its height, a similar avowal of their faith, a bold confession of their
immortal principles, was published to the world. (Rippon’s Register, No. 8). A
reference to these Confessions of Faith often curls the lip of ignorance into a
heartless sneer. But let the eye glance a moment on the situation of those who
signed a sent forth these confessions; let their sorrows, their foes, the
dangers menacing them, be seen, - and the man who does not honour the real
heroism displayed in the fearless, outspoken avowal of their principles, is one
destitute of the noble instincts of humanity. A sublime scene was that, when, in
the old hall in Philadelphia, with the roar of the British lion in their ears,
feeble, and unorganized, and an ignominious death the certain consequence of
defeat, man after man moved calmly forward and placed his name to that immortal
document, the Declaration of Independence. Is there any comparison? Let us see.
THE BAPTISTS OF ENGLAND WERE POOR

Into their situation we can have an insight by an extract from a tract, put
forth by one of them in 1613. A tract which, if we will reflect a moment, we
will acknowledge to be a deep tone of sorrow, wrung from crushed, yet trusting,
fearless hearts. The extract is from a little work published by Leonard Busher,
citizen of London, entitled "A Plea for Liberty of Conscience, presented to King
James." Busher, toward the close of his treatise, says:

"Another reason why so many good people are now deceived, is, because w that
have most truth are persecuted, and therefore most poor; whereby we are unable
to write and print, as we would, against the adversaries of truth. It is hard to
get our daily bread with our weak bodies and feeble hands. How, then, should we
have means to defray other charges, and to write and print? I have, through the
help of God, out of his Word, made a scourage of small cords, whereby antichrist
and his ministers might be driven out of the temple of God. Also a declaration
of certain false translations in the New Testament. But I want wherewith to
print and publish them. Therefore must they rest till the Lord seeth good to
supply it."

Ah, poor Busher! And yet dare he and the Baptist of his day, three years after
King James’ version was sent forth, attempt to show up the false translations of
our present version. Then, alas, they were too poor to print the corrections
which truth required. But they did not and do not despair. When Busher thus
lifted his voice, the ashes of Edward Wightman were still being borne about by
the winds; for, he was burned at the stake at Litchfield for being Baptist just
three years before. He was charged with affirming "that the baptizing of infants
is an abominable custom; that the Lord’s Supper and baptism are not to be
celebrated as they now are in the Church of England; and that Christianity is
not wholly professed and preached in the Church of England, but only in part."
For these, Episcopacy doomed him to death. It was the year 1612, April 11, that
Wightman was sent to the stake; one year after James’ version was given to the
world. And that almost canonized head of the Episcopal church thus, in the name
of Christ, authorized poor Wightman’s death.

"Whereas, the reverend father in Christ, Richard by Divine providence, of
Coventry and Litchfield, bishop, hath signified unto us, that he, judicially
proceeding, according to the exigence of the ecclesiastical canons, and of the
laws and customs of this our kingdom of England, against one Edward Wightman, of
the parish of Burton-upon-Trent, in the diocese of Coventry and Litchfield, and
upon the wicked heresies of Ebion, Cerinthus, Valentinian, Arius, Macedonius,
Simon Magus, Manus, Manichees, Photinus, and of the ANABAPTISTS.

"We command thee, that thou cause the said Edward Wightman, being in thy
custody, to be committed to the fire in some public and open place, below the
city aforesaid, for the cause aforesaid, before the people; and the same Edward
Wightman, in the same fire, cause really to be burned, in the detestation of the
said crime; and for manifest example of other Christians, that they may not fall
into the same crime. And this no ways omit, under the peril that shall follow
thereon. ("Witnesses, etc., James, Rex.") And the Episcopal historian, Dr.
Fuller, a contemporary with these events, says: "God may seem well pleased with
these seasonable severities."

It was in the midst of such circumstances as these: poor, calumniated, fined,
banished, burned at the stake, that Baptists had the courage to make public
confession of the truths they held, and for which they were ready to die.
Fearlessly, without equivocation or compromise in the face of danger and death,
they penned, they signed, they published, and circulated what they professed and
confessed. Let heartless, faithless scoffers scoff at it and such as them. Their
privilege to scoff was won by the blood of these men. But we must take a few
more hurried steps along the upward pathway. "In 1589, Dr. Some, an Episcopal
writer of that day, "there were several Anabaptist conventicles in London and
other places." This was in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, as the fires of
Smithfield, which lit up the bloody reign of her sister Mary were dying out; and
yet their slumbering flames were fed with the bodies of inoffensive Baptists,
whose dooms were sealed by "the most Protestant virgin Queen." A congregation of
Baptists was discovered on Easter day without Aldergate, London, in 1570, seven
and twenty of whom were taken and imprisoned, where they wasted and died in
filthy dungeons. And during the same year John Wielmaker and Henry Torwoort were
burned at Smithfield. (Hume, Crosby, Cobbett).

Passing by the years of Mary’s reign, which were marked by the indiscriminate
murders of Protestants, we may pause over the illustrious years of the young and
pious Edward VI., in which the foundation of Episcopacy was laid; when kingcraft
and priestcraft united to force upon Protestants a creed and a ritual still
venerated and followed in America by the offshoots of that Antichristian
hierarchy, Protestant Episcopacy and Methodist Episcopacy.

Cranmer, the father of English Episcopacy, ruled young Edward and England.
"There were, at this time," says Fox, in his Book of Martyrs, "numerous
Anabaptists in England, who, with other errors, objected to infant baptism and
to the manner of it, by sprinkling, instead of dipping. Among them was one
George Van Parre. He had led a very exemplary life, and suffered with great
composure of mind." He was burned to death. A Protestant inquisition was
established in 1549, with Cranmer at its head, and hundreds of Baptists were the
victims of its cruelty. Among these, an illustrious and heroic example will ever
awaken the sympathies of mankind.

Joan Boucher, of Kent, was a female of illustrious character and family
distinction. Her education was far beyond that of the most eminent of her
country-women of her age. The commission was granted to the bishops to search
out and apprehend the heretical Baptists. Joan was selected as an illustrious
victim. She was tried before these Protestant bishops and condemned. The
venerable archbishop who framed many of the prayers still read in the Episcopal
and Methodist Churches brought the warrant to the youthful Edward to sign. He
doubted, even declined. The bishop plied him with arguments and arts. The king
still thought it was an instance of the same spirit of cruelty for which the
Reformers condemned the Papists. But Papist and Protestant Episcopacies, through
their ramifications, are one in origin, form, and tyranny. Edward was silenced,
not convinced. With tears in his eyes, he signed the death warrant. A year,
within three days, transpired between her condemnation and death. Every effort
was made to pervert her from the truth. At length, on the 2nd of May, 1550, she
was bound to a stake in Smithfield, and died in fearless triumph. Her
persecutors tried to sully her memory by attributing opinions to her which she
never held. She was a Baptist; a member of the Baptist Church then existing at
Canterbury, and which exists to this hour. Her memory is deathless, and the
crime of her murder stains with blackness, and stamps FALSEHOOD on the front of
Episcopacy.

We here approach those stirring times when society burst forth into new life;
when the magic charm which wrapped Europe in the sleep of ages was broken, and
the light of truth dawned like a new morning of creation on the world. Amid the
struggle and the conflict of heart and mind, of truth with fiction, of the
oppressed with tyrants, Baptists were everywhere mingling in the battle,
foremost, fearless, numerous, in England, Spain, Germany, France, lifting up
their voices, yielding up their lives; pleading for soul-freedom, and embalming
it with their blood. The Reformation, a memorable milestone in the path of time,
records ten thousand Baptist martyrdoms. Did they originate in the great
Protestant Reformation?


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 5: 04-THE 16TH CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford

CHAPTER III Century Sixteen - The Reformation A pure Christianity is the
glorious embodiment of soul freedom.

Adapted to the spiritual wants and immoral aspirations of the individual man;
meeting him in his darkness with the clearness of its discoveries; meeting him
in weakness with its transforming power; meeting him in wretchedness with
consolation and refuge; coming in direct contact with the heart, and flashing in
upon it a full sense of its sinfulness and responsibility, and breathing into
the deep recesses of his being the breath of life and hope, it raises him to
communion with the Eternal, as responsible and as free to worship God, so far as
human agencies or interferences are concerned, as though no other being but
himself dwelt upon the earth. Christianity, uncorrupted, presses upon man his
personal, his individual relations to eternity, telling him to "work out his own
salvation," and thus makes it a matter entirely between himself and his God.

Hence its announcement was not to kings or magistrates; to a convocation of
rules or a hierarchy of priests. It chose no organized power as its oracle. It
sanctioned no assumptions of human authority in spiritual concerns. Replete with
blessings boundless and eternal, with all that could elevate and adorn a fallen
humanity; shedding the light of truth on man’s ruin and redemption; unfolding
the future and perfection of his being, and flinging an everbrightening radiance
over the grandeur of his destiny, Christianity was and is her own revealer; her
own oracle; attending herself the heaven-lit fires that burn upon her altar.

Passing by, without a word or a look of recognition, the exalted ranks of
principalities and powers, thrones and dominions, she unvailed her beauty and
whispered her message of mercy to the obscure, the despised, the pious poor. She
visited the haunts of the people, and not the conclaves of priests or the
palaces of kings. From the hill-tops, by the shepherds, her songs were first
heard. Amid poverty in the manger she took up her abode. She uttered her voice
in the streets, and in the fields, in the fisherman’s hut on the sea-shore, and
in the chief places of concourse in the city. Leveling or ignoring all
artificial distinctions, Christianity places each man on an equal platform
before his Maker, equally dependent, equally responsible, and therefore equally
free. This is the great conservative principle of human society, the freedom of
the soul, a principle whose elements Christianity concentrates and proclaims.

Where, then, shall we expect to behold Christianity, robed in her pure forms,
lifting her laureled brow and gathering up her trophies?

"Go walk where she hath been, and see The shining footprints of her deity, And
feel those godlike breathing in the air Which mutely tell HER SPIRIT hath been
there."

Truth flourishes where freedom is. On a fair field, single- handed against the
serried hosts of error, her victory is sure.

Well, where did the truth flourish most? Let a foe to Baptists answer:

"In the times of general liberty this opinion (of Baptists) grew mightily."
(Wall, ii, p. 317.) Yes, in the times of general liberty it grew mightily; and
even beneath the withering blast and fiery thunderbolts of despotism, though
often riven, it could never be uprooted.

Such a time of general liberty was that glorious epoch known as the Protestant
Reformation. Night had long wrapped in darkness and tyranny a sleeping world.
Suddenly, as at the trump of God, men everywhere awoke and struggled to roll off
the weight that was crushing them. Simultaneously in Germany, France,
Switzerland, England, Spain, throughout Europe, mighty men rose up pleading for
truth and freedom. But the history of the Reformation is known. Its results are
all around us. Protestant Episcopacy, and that branch of it called Methodism,
Presbyterianism through all its subdivisions, and Lutheranism, all Reformed or
Protestant Churches, are the results of that mighty awakening and revolution.
The Church of Rome they reformed. In it these Reformers were baptized, and its
materials were used in the new formation. And truly great men were these
Reformers, these founders of the present Protestant Churches. From the monk of
Wittemberg, from the valleys of the Alps, from the plains of France, the notes
of soul-freedom rung forth. These notes were heard amid the mountain glens, in
the forest depths, by thousands sheltered in remote obscurity, who came forth at
the cheering call and owned themselves - BAPTISTS. Is this so? Let their
opponents decide. Mosheim says this:

"The true origin of that sect which acquired the denomination of Anabaptists, by
their administering anew the rite of baptism to those who came over to their
communion, and derived that of Mennonites, from that famous man to whom they owe
much of their present felicity, is hidden in the depths of antiquity, and is of
consequence difficult to be ascertained. This uncertainty will not appear
surprising when it is considered that this sect started up suddenly in several
countries at the same point of time, under leaders of different talents and
different intentions, and at the very period when the first contests of the
Reformers with the Roman pontiffs drew the attention of the world, and employed
all the pens of the learned in such a manner as to render all other objects and
incidents almost matters of indifference."

(The Anabaptists) "not only considered themselves descendants of the Waldenses,
who were so grievously oppressed and persecuted by the despotic heads of the
Romish Church, but pretend, moreover, to be the purest offspring of the
respectable sufferers, being equally opposed to all principles of rebellion on
the one hand, and all suggestions of fanaticism on the other."

"It may be observed," continues Mosheim, "that they are not entirely in an error
when they boast of their descent from the Waldenses, Petrobrussians, and other
ancient sects, who are usually considered as witnesses of the truth in times of
general darkness and superstition. Before the rise of Luther and Calvin, there
lay concealed in almost all the countries of Europe, particularly in Bohemia,
Monrovia, Switzerland, and Germany, many persons who adhered tenaciously to the
doctrine, etc., which is the true source of all the peculiarities that are to be
found in the religious doctrine and discipline of the Anabaptists." (Mosheim’s
History of the Anabaptists, p. 490-1).

These words of the learned Pedobaptist historian we have given in full, for all
ought to know them. The Baptists "started up suddenly in several countries at
the same point of time, at the very period the Reformers drew attention of the
world." They came not from these Reformers, for they started up at the same
point of time, and according to Mosheim, "they were not satisfied with the
reformation proposed by Luther. They looked upon it as much beneath the
sublimity of their views, and, consequently, undertook a more perfect
reformation; or, to express more properly their visionary enterprise, they
proposed to found a true church, entirely spiritual, and truly divine."
(Mosheim’s History of the Anabaptists, p. 492).

They did not commence with Menno Simon, for when first he attended the
Anabaptist assemblies, says Mosheim, he was a Popish priest; "and not till 1536
did he throw off the mask and publicly embrace their communion." They came not
from Rome. They had not received baptism from her priests, and attempted no
reformation of her dead, corrupting form. Where did these Baptists come from?
The unchallenged words of Mosheim, already quoted, answer the question,
"concealed in almost all the countries of Europe before the rise of Luther and
Calvin." Let us illustrate his statement by a rapid glance at the places of
their concealment.

ENGLAND In the year 1539, the thirteenth of the reign of Henry VIII, the
following enactment was promulgated:

"That those who are in any error, as Sacramentarians, Anabaptists, or any others
that sell books having such opinions in them, once known, both the books and
such persons shall be detected and disclosed immediately to the king’s majesty,
or one of his privy council, to the intent to have it punished without favor,
even with the extremity of the law." (Fox’s Martyrs, vol., ii, p. 440). This was
soon after the bands which attached Henry to Rome were severed. It was the first
dawn of the Protestant Reformation in England. Henry had divorced Catharine, and
married Anne Boleyn. The effects of his quarrel with Rome emboldened the
Baptists to leave their hiding- places, "and," says, Fox, speaking of the
influence of Anne Boleyn over Henry, "we read of no persecution nor any
abjuration to have been in the Church of England, save only that the Registers
of London make mention of certain Anabaptists, of whom ten were put to death in
sundry places of the realm, A.D. 1535; other ten repented and were saved."
(Martyrology, p. 956, Ed. 2).

Here, then, were Baptists coming out from their concealment at the very first
dim dawn of the Reformation, when Henry first broke with the Pope, because he
would not grant him a divorce from Queen Catharine. The following year a
convocation sat, and, after some matters relating to the king’s divorce had been
debated, the lower house presented to the upper house a list of religious
heresies which prevailed in the realm, specifying those of the Anabaptists.
Among its items are:

"1. Infants must needs be christened, because they are born in original sin,
which sin must needs be remitted, and which only can be done in the sacrament of
baptism.

"2. That children or men once baptized, can or ought never to be baptized again.

"3. That they ought to repute and take all the Anabaptists, and every man’s
opinion agreeing with said Anabaptists, for detestable heresies and utterly to
be condemned." (Dr. Wall, vol. ii, p. 309). The truth, like an over-burning
altar fire, thus lived unquenchable in concealment, "or," as says the
persecuting Dr. Featly, who wrote against the Anabaptists in 1645, "if it broke
out at any time, by the care of the ecclesiastical and civil magistrates, it was
soon put out. But of late this sect has rebaptized hundreds of men and women
together, in the twilight, in rivulets and some arms of the river Thames."
(Ibid, Infant Bap., vol. ii, p. 316).

"They were found," says Bishop Burnett, "in almost every town and village in
England." "They were emboldened," says Durham, as quoted by Dr. Wall, "and their
great increase is accounted for by the partial toleration in religion." The fact
stated by Mosheim is thus verified: Baptists lay concealed in almost all the
countries of Europe before the rise of Luther and Calvin. They lay concealed in
thousands in England, and came forth at the first note of partial freedom.

Where, then, did the Baptists come from?


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 6: 05-THE 15TH CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford

CHAPTER IV Century Fifteen - Wales The vale of Carleon is situated between
England and the mountainous parts of Wales, just at the foot of the mountains.
It was for centuries the Piedmont of the Welsh. The Welsh Alps, Mount Merthyn
and Tydfyl, the recesses and caverns, were the hiding-places of Christ’s lambs.
In this vale, as in other portions of Wales, the ordinances of Christ had been
administered since the time of the Apostles. So soon as the Reformation occurred
in England, and spread into Wales, communication was at once opened between the
obscure followers of Christ in the mountain fortresses, and the awakened clergy
of the establishment. Of the latter, three distinguished men adopted the
sentiments held by those Welsh heretics, who claimed descent from the Apostles.
Their names were Perry, Wroth and Ebury. These henceforth were called the
Baptist Reformers, because they were of the Reformation, and had joined with the
Baptists. We will now let the History of the Welsh Baptists present the facts in
the case:

"It is no wonder that Perry, Wroth, and Ebury, commonly called the first Baptist
Reformers in Wales, should have so many followers at once, when we consider that
the field of their labors was the vale of Carleon and its vicinity. As they were
learned men belonging to that religion established by law, and particularly as
they left that establishment and joined the poor Baptists, their names are
handed down to posterity, not only by their friends, but also by their foes,
because more notice was taken of them than of those scattered Baptists on the
mountains of the principality (Wales). If this denomination had existed in the
country since the year 63, and so severely persecuted, it must be, by this time,
an old thing. But the men who left the Popish establishment were the chief
objects of their rage, particularly as they headed the sect everywhere spoken
against, and recognized Baptist Churches. The vale Olchon, also, is situated
between mountains almost inaccessible. How many hundred years it had been
inhabited by Baptists before William Ebury, it is impossible to tell. It is a
fact that can not be controverted, that there were Baptists here at the
commencement of the Reformation; and no man upon earth can tell when the church
was formed, and who began to baptize in this little Piedmont. Whence came these
Baptists? It is universally thought to be the oldest church, but how old none
can tell. We know that, at the separation, they had a minister named HOWELL
VAUGHAN, quite a different sort of Baptist from Ebury, Wroth, Vavasor, Powell,
and others, who had come out from the Established Church. And this is not to be
wondered at; for they had dissented from the Church of England, and had,
probably, brought some of her corruptions with them. But the mountain Baptists
were not (Protestants or) dissenters from the establishment. We know the
Reformers were for mixed communion, but the Olcan received no such practice."
(Thomas’s History Welsh Baptists. Also Hist. W. B., by J. Dais, p. 17).

These are most conclusive evidences that William Tyndale, who translated the
Bible into the English language, and the four books of Moses into the Welsh
language, in 1536, was a Welsh Baptist of that plain, strict, apostolic order.
He lived most of his time in Gloucester, England; but Llewellyn Tyndale and
Hezekiah Tyndale were members of the Baptist Church in Abergavenny, South Wales.
(Dais’s History Welsh Baptists, p.21). The text of Mosheim is thus fully
illustrated by facts. Baptists lay concealed in almost all the countries of
Europe before the rise of Calvin and Luther.

BOHEMIA A deep forest, extending three hundred miles in length, and two hundred
in breadth, was, in the days of Roman triumph, settled by a tribe of Celts
called Boii, who fled to its shelter to avoid the Roman yoke. Hence the word
"Bohemia," under which are now included the countries of Silesia and Moravia. A
short time before the birth of Christ, Caesar described this Hercynian Forest
thus:

"It is nine day’s journey over. It begins on the confines of the Helvetii,
Nemetes, and Rauraci, (that is, Switzerland, Basil, and Spires,) and extends
along the Danube to the borders of the Daci and Anartes, (that is,
Transylvania,) there turning from the river to the left, it runs through an
infinite number of countries.No one could ever yet come to the end of it or know
its utmost extent, though some have gone sixty days’ journey into it." This was
the Hercynian Forest, of which the Black Forest was then a part. Amid its
depths, Paul tells us he preached the gospel of Christ, and it tribes were
visited by Titus. (Rom. XV:19, 28; 2 Tim. iv:16). In this wilderness, before the
rise of Luther, Mosheim tells us, were Baptists. Thousands of them claim to have
been sheltered there in the wilderness from the wrath of the dragon. Is it true?
In 1519, six years before Luther appeared before the Diet of Worms, a letter was
addressed to Erasmus from Bohemia, thus describing this people:

"These men have no other opinion of the Pope, cardinals, bishops, and other
clergy than of manifest Antichrists. They call the Pope sometimes the beast, and
sometimes the whore, mentioned in the Revelation. Their own bishops and priests,
they themselves do choose for themselves, ignorant and unlearned laymen, that
have wife and children. They mutually salute one another by the name of brother
and sister. They own no other authority than the Scriptures of the Old and New
Testament. They slight all the doctors, both ancient and modern, and give no
regard to their doctrine. Their priests, when they celebrate the offices of
mass, (or communion,) do it without any priestly garments; nor do they use any
prayer, or collects on this occasion, but only the Lord’s Prayer, by which they
consecrate bread that has been leavened. They believe, or own little or nothing
of the sacraments of the church. Such as come over to their sect, must every one
be baptized anew in mere water. They make no blessing of salt, nor of water; nor
make any use of consecrated oil. They believe nothing of divinity in the
sacrament of the eucharist; only that the consecrated bread and wine do, by some
occult signs, represent the death of Christ; and, accordingly, that all that do
knee down to it, or worship, are guilty of idolatry; that that sacrament was
instituted by Christ to no other purpose but to renew the memory of his passion,
and not to be carried about or held up by the priests to be gazed on. For Christ
himself, who is to be adored and worshipped with the honor of Latreia, sits at
the right of God, as the Christian Church confesses in the Creed. Prayers to
saints, and for the dead, they count a vain and ridiculous thing; as likewise
auricular confession and penance enjoined by the priest for sins. Eves and
fast-days are, they say, a mockery and disguise of hypocrites."

Every word in this description points out Baptists. Two of these brethren waited
on Erasmus at Antwerp, to congratulate him on his bold statements of truth. He
declined their congratulations, and reproached them as Anabaptists. (Adversarii
nobis hunc titulum-ie., Anabaptistarum, Apud Lydium. Robinson’s Researches, p.
506). Luther and the German Reformers, whom they joyfully welcomed into the
light, turned from them with antipathy and cheerlessly they returned to their
concealment in the depths of their native forests to tell their brethren "They
are adverse to us because of our name - i.e. Anabaptists." (Erasmus’s Answer is
in Camerarus de Eccl. Fratrum, p. 125). They acknowledged the charge; they owned
themselves Baptists. But their concealment, their principles, and their numbers
were known. Entreaty, sophistry, and threats were used in vain to influence,
pervert, or intimidate them. They appealed to God’s word, and were unwavering.
Their destruction was planned and brutally executed. An edict for their
banishment was obtained from the Emperor, and Protestants and Catholics rejoiced
in its enforcement. About forty thousand Baptists were proscribed. His majesty,
in the edict, expresses his astonishment at the number of Anabaptists, and his
horror at their principal error, which was, that they would submit to no human
authority on matters of religion. The edict was published just three weeks
before the harvest and vintage came on, that these poor people might not be able
to carry away the produce of their toil. Their lands were to be forfeited to the
emperor, and they banished to beggary. And three weeks after the proclamation of
the edict, death would be inflicted on any of them found in the borders of the
country. (Carafa, p. 133, quoted by Robinson in Researches). And thus is the
scene described:

"It was autumn, the prospect and the pride of husbandmen. Heaven had smiled on
their honest labors. Their fields stood thick with corn; and the sun and the dew
were improving every moment to give them their last polish. The yellow ears
waved an homage to their owners; and the wind, whistling through the stems and
the russet herbage, softly said, Put in the sickle, the harvest is come. Their
luxuriant vine leaves, too, hung aloft by the tendrils, mantling over the
clustering grapes, like watchful parents over their tender offspring; but all
were fenced by an imperial edict, and it was instant death to approach. Without
leaving one murmur upon record, in solemn, silent submission to the power that
governs the universe and causes all things to work together for good to his
creatures, they packed up and departed. In several hundred carriages they
conveyed their sick, the innocent infants sucking at the breasts of their
mothers who had newly lain-in, and their decrepit parents, whose work was done,
and who silvery locks told every beholder that they wanted only the favor of a
grave. At the borders they filed off, some to Hungary, others to Transylvania,
some to Wallachia, others to Poland and Sach-hel-greater, far greater for their
virtue, than Ferdinand for all his titles and for all his glory."

Ah, me! what a sad pilgrimage was that! Sad! No; it was sublime. And when the
triumphal march of bannered legions, flushed with victory and crowned with
glory, shall have been forgotten, the memory of these men, their pilgrimage,
their tears, their sublime, trusting silence will be held in everlasting
remembrance. Bohemian Baptists, forty thousand of them, who sent messengers to
cheer the German Reformers at the first dawn of the Reformation; who lay
concealed in the dark forests of Dalmatia, "before the rise of Calvin and
Luther." Where did they come from?

GERMANY Luther, in his strugglings into light, had boldly written at the
commencement of his career as a Reformer, these words:

"The term ’baptism’ is Greek, and may be rendered ’dipping,’ as when we dip
anything all over, so that it is covered all over; and although the custom is
now abolished among many, (for they do not dip children, but only pour on a
little water,) yet they ought to be wholly immersed, and immediately taken out;
the etymology of the word seems to require this. The Germans call baptism tauff
from tieff, depth, signifying that to baptize is to plunge into the depth. And,
indeed, if we consider the design of baptism, we shall see that this is
requisite." (Luther, De Pedobaptism, p. 71).

He had also said:

"If you receive the sacraments without faith, you bring yourselves into great
difficulty, for we oppose against your practice the saying of Christ, ’He that
believeth and is baptized shall be saved.’" (Luther’s Works, tome vii).

What wonder that from their concealment came forth the banished, enfeebled,
downtrodden Baptists, to hail him as a brother. And so they did. "The drooping
spirits of these people," says Mosheim, "who had been dispersed through many
countries, and persecuted everywhere, were revived when they were informed of
Luther’s course. Then they spoke with openness and freedom." But some years
afterward he became their foe, and notwithstanding what he had said about
dipping, persecuted them as redippers or Anabaptists. Among these German
Baptists was one MUNZER, on whose noble efforts to break the fetters of
political slavery so much insult and falsehood have been heaped. But Munzer was
a Popish priest. He followed Luther in his reforming projects. "Thomas Munzer,"
says D’Aubign?, "was not without talent. Certain mystical writings, which he had
read in his youth, had given a false direction to his thoughts. He made his
first appearance at Zwickau; quitted Wittemberg on Luther’s return thither; and,
not willing to hold a secondary place in general esteem, became pastor of the
small town of Alstadt." (D’Aubign?, vol. iii p. 148). He was then a reforming
parish priest, and not till years after was he known or named as an Anabaptist.
So that before Munzer left Rome and joined the political party engaged in the
Munster Rebellion, Luther and Erasmus, as well as the Pope, had denounced and
persecuted the thousands of Baptists scattered through Europe. But of Poland we
might speak; of Switzerland also, and the persecution there, of almost every
country in Europe. Is the statement of the Pedobaptist historian sustained? Let
it be repeated: "Before the rise of Luther and Calvin there lay concealed in
almost all the countries of Europe many persons who adhered tenaciously to the
doctrines of the Anabaptists." Thousands upon thousands in the mountain
fastnesses, amid the sheltered valleys of the Alps, in the deep forests of
Illyricum, and the obscure glens of England, were Baptists. The torch of truth,
which lit their places of concealment, revealing the blackness of the deep
rayless night which surrounded them, flashed unnoticed into the cell of the
hermit and the monk, and, under God’s guiding eye, directed priests and scholars
to his holy word. That torch, which these Baptists had borne steadily aloft and
handed down along their blood-tracked path, at length lit up the world in the
blaze of splendor which burst forth at the Reformation! that became an epoch, a
milestone, in the march of Christ’s witnesses. Beyond it, before it, we have
found these witnesses, these Baptists. The inquiry again recurs, WHERE DO THESE
BAPTISTS COME FROM?


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 7: 06-THE 14TH CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford CHAPTER V - Century Fourteen Wickliffe
and the Lollards A bright star rose on the darkness of the fourteenth century,
and threw its light over Britain and the continent of Europe.

It was the darkest hour of that long night of Papal oppression. Over that
darkness and dead silence, from the Avon to the Tiber, a sound went fort from
Lutterworth; a light from the center of Britain. A memorable spot is that little
village Richard III buckled on his armor for the battle of Bosworth field. Near
it Wolsey fell, and with him the power of Popery in England. There, too, stands
the memorable little ground of Naseby, where Cromwell and liberty triumphed over
the defeated despot Charles.

Lutterworth! Associations cluster round it more potent in their influence than
the clash of armies or the fall of kings. The lone voice that went forth from
it. the light that gleamed from it in the fourteenth century are heard and felt
still, must echo and beam through all time, and all eternity. It was the voice
and light of truth, truth which once generated is immortal. Chains can not bind
it; time can not weaken it. Eternal is its nature; eternity is its guardian.
(Bancroft) John De Wickliffe, rector of Lutterworth, was the chosen instrument
to announce that truth, and bear aloft that flame-torch through the world’s
valley of the shadow of death. On the banks of the Tee, in Yorkshire, John
Wickliffe was born, in 1324. With Bradwordine, and Occam, and Dunn, and Scotus,
the luminaries of the age, He passed his early manhood in Oxford University. He
entered the clerical order, and beheld before him the highest honors in the
"Church." But, like Luther God’s Word had found entrance into his soul, and. in
obedience to its teaching he tore away from his heart the webs and wrappages of
error which incased and deadened it. On, step by step, he struggled into light,
until on the Bible and the Bible alone, he took his lime and defiant position.
Among the principles he advocated were, that the church consisted only of
believers, the saved; that baptism was a "sign of grace received before," and
consequently should be administered to those only who professed to have received
"grace." "It was in 1371." says Walsingham, "that Dunn and Wickliffe read the
accursed opinions of the Berengerians, one of which undoubtedly was the denial
of infant baptism." (Neal’s History of the Puritans). Thomas Walden, who was
familiar with his writings, called him "one of the seven heads that rose out of
the pit, for he denied the baptism of infants, that Heresie of the Lollards of
which he was so great a leader." And further, Wickliffe, in the eleventh chapter
of his Trialogues, as quoted by Danvers, states that "believers are the only
subjects of baptisms." In his adherence to the Bible as is only rule of faith
and practice; in his denial of grace or pardon communicated in baptism; in his
rejection of infant and avowal of Christian baptism; and in his clear definition
of a church as an assembly of baptized believers, WICKLIFFE WAS A BAPTIST. Among
Baptist heroes and martyrs must his name be enrolled. As one of them was reviled
while living, and, forty years after his peaceful death, his ashes were violated
by the foes of truth. But Wickliffe did not stand alone. Thousands were around
him, and followed him. Branded, burned, and driven from the haunts of men, these
Wickliffites, these Baptists, were found scattered throughout England. "They
were as numerous," says Sir William Newbury, in his History of England, "as the
sands of the sea."

Here, then, we have found these people in the midst of the fourteenth century.
Where did these Baptists come from? Did they originate with Wickliffe? Did the
"morning star" of the Reformation usher in the advent of the Baptists, Whose
existence previously was not? Let us see. Milner, in his History of
Christianity, says:

"The term ’Lollard’ was affixed to those who professed a greater degree of
attention to acts of piety and devotion than the rest of mankind. Of these,
Walter Reynard, a Dutchman, was apprehended and burned at Cologne. This is he
whom I have already called Reynard Lollard, in the account of the waldenses, and
from whom the Wickliffites are supposed to have acquired the name of Lollards."
That these Lollards were Baptists is evident. The denial of infant baptism we
have already seen was the "great heresie of the Lollards." In the Dutch
Martyrology is an account of one L. Clifford, who was arraigned as a Lollard,
and confessed and recanted, acknowledging that they renounced infant baptism.
And Fox, in his Martyrology, has extracted from the register of the Bishop of
Hereford, on of the charges of which the Lollards were found guilty, "that faith
ought to precede baptism." Of these Lollard Baptists was William Sawtre, the
first name in that illustrious roll of martyrs who died for soul-freedom in
Britain; and soon after, at the hour of midnight, one hundred of those down-
trodden Christians assembled to worship god among the bushes of St. Giles, near
London, hoping , at that hour and unfrequented place, to be free from detection
and molestation, were tracked and murdered by the king and a troop of his
courtiers.

Among the Lollards was one illustrious man of title, wealth, and courage. It was
Sir John Oldcastle, Earl of Cobham. He was apprehended and brought to trial
before the Bishops. He met them and their charge with fearless intrepidity.
Nobly he avowed and advocated the doctrines which have distinguished Baptists in
every age. Honor and preferment were before him if he would but recant;
disgrace, ignominy, and death the reward of his steadfastness. He chose to be
numbered with the scorned, down-trodden, vulgar Baptist; And confront shame and
suffering, rather than abandon or betray the immortal principles that inspired
them.

Faith, inwrought, heartfelt faith, shining, without a shadow into the depths of
a man’s being, revealing the eternal verity of the thing believed, faith resting
on a rock which the rush of a wrecked universe can not move, this is the soul of
true heroism. There never was a hero without it. Dragged, amid insults, to
Tyburn to be hung up by the waist and burned to death, his possessions
confiscated, his family impoverished, his name cast out as evil, Sir John
Oldcastle never wavered. this was the victory whereby he overcame the world,
even his faith. In death he warned the people to follow nothing but the
scriptures; prayed for his enemies, and exclaimed, "I die in triumph!" And so he
received the crown which celestial conquerors wear. Pity or regret found no
place in the hearts of his sanctimonious murderers. "He was an Anabaptist." said
Parsons the English Churchman, "and deserved to die as a traitor." (Dr. Thomas
Fuller, Church History, vol. ii, p. 448).

"Not satisfied with his death," [ says Fox,] "the clergy induced the Parliament
to make fresh statutes against the Lollards. It was enacted, among other things,
that whosoever read the Scriptures in English, should forfeit lands, chattels,
goods, and life, and be condemned as heretics, should be hanged for treason
against the king, and then burned for heresy against god." (Fox, Acts and
Monuments). "No sooner was this act passed than a violent persecution was raise
against the Lollards." (Ib., Book of Martyrs, p. 224). In an old history of the
Welsh Baptists are recorded the labors and sufferings of an intelligent, active
Baptist layman, who, from Wales, passed into England in company with a preacher.
His name was Walter Brute.

"While the Lord was employing the immortal Wickliffe to prepare his way in
England, he remembered Wales in his tender mercy, and visited her with the
dayspring on high. The pioneer in the cause of the Reformation in Wales was
Walter Brute, who was a native of the principality, and who had been at Oxford,
where he became acquainted with Wickliffe, with whom he formed an intimacy, and
fully entered into his views respecting the reformation of the church. It is an
old adage, that like begets like, which was verified in the case Brute. Having
reflected on the pitiable condition of his countrymen, who were bewildered in
the haze of ignorance, his heart was moved with compassion. He left the
university, endowed with the principles, fortified with the intrepidity, and
fired with the zeal of his colleague; and fully determined to resist the
delusions and abominations of the secular church, even unto blood, he entered
his native land, where he soon distinguished himself." Fox says, that Walter
Brute was "eminent in learning, gifts, knowledge, zeal, and grace."

"He fearlessly sounded the trump of God throughout the land, until, in a few
years, the huge temple of Antichrist began to crumble, and its gilded worshipers
to tremble for their safety, As his weapons were those of truth and
righteousness, and his cause the cause of God, his victory was certain, and he
soon became instrumental in rescuing the prey from the mighty, and in delivering
many lawful captives. His disinterestedness becoming generally known, and his
labors of love appreciated, he found a number of steady friends among high and
low. It may be supposed, that in traversing the country to preach the truth, and
to seek the lost sheep of the house of Adam, that the established churches were
closed against him; for we learn that he was preaching from house to house, and
in the chief places of concourse and elsewhere, and conducting the worship of
God with the greatest simplicity. He maintained that baptism was not necessary
to salvation; and that it was to be administered to adults subsequently to
conversion. And he frequently took occasion to protest against the doctrines and
discipline of the Established Church. His zeal for the truth and his exposures
of the Papacy, soon elicited the hostility of the clergy, and fixed upon him all
the envy of the sons of the Church, in the prosecution of the heresiarch, Walter
Brute, whose words the land was not able to bear. The insolence, oppression, and
exsquires of the clergy had become quite intolerable to the lords and squires,
whose hereditary high-mindedness would not suffer the sons of Levi to surpass
them in authority or splendor. Many of the great congratulated Brute in putting
a check to the clergy from no other principles than those of personal interest
and envy; and gladly availed themselves of the opportunity to chastise their
powerful rivals. Besides, the Reformation had so extensively prevailed among all
ranks, that some of the great and nobles were pious reformers, and others were
impelled to yield to the force of public opinion,

Arrested and brought before the Bishop of Herefordshire, he confounded his
adversaries by his fearlessness and acquaintance with the Scriptures. In the
account of his trial, recorded by fox, is his written answer to the Bishop:

"In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I, Walter Brute, sinner,
Layman, husbandman, and Christian, having my offspring of Britons, have been
accused to the Bishhop of Herefordshire that I did err in matters of Christian
faith, by whom I am required that I should give a written answer.

"If any man of any state or sect whatever, will show me that I err in my
writings or sayings, by the authority of the sacred Scriptures, or a probable
reason grounded thereon, I will gladly receive his information. But as for the
bare words of any teacher, (Christ only excepted,) I will not simply believe,
unless he shall be able to establish them by the truth of experience, and the
example of God’s Word." Such was the fearless denial of Episcopal and church
teachings which Baptists dared to utter centuries before Luther was born, and
which is their leading characteristic still. Walter Brute was condemned as an
Anabaptist. But from the ten thousand sufferers of the poor Lollards we must
pass. there still stands at this hour the gloomy monument of their miseries on
the banks of the Thames, the Lollards Tower at Lambert Palace, London. Fitted up
as the palace of their torture by the Bishop of Canterbury, in 1414, it stands
there a witness to the triumph of truth. It speaks with an awful, yet prophetic
eloquence, of the future of the Baptists. But still the question occurs, these
Baptists, Lollards, Wickliffites, Whence came they? Was Wickliffe, then, their
father and founder?

It must be remembered that Wickliffe was denominated by his persecutors, "The
leader of the Lollards." It is evident that thousands of these Lollards hailed
him as a great light, whom God had raised up and sent forth amid the darkness.
that he adopted their principles, and became one of them, there is little doubt.
but why were they called Lollards? Now Mosheim, with whom there is a general
agreement among historians, states tat "Walter, a Dutchman of remarkable
eloquence, and famous for his writings, who came from Mentz to Cologne, was
burned there in 1322." (History, p. 356) Fuller and Perrin state that he came to
England in the reign of Edward III. "from the Waldenses, among whom he was a
great barb or pastor." That this man’s name was Walter Reynard is most evident,
and, "Lollard," a term of reproach, was given to him and his brethren because
they were accustomed to sing psalms and hymns. Abelly says the word is derived
from loben, "to praise," and herr, "Lord." But, however this may be, the fact is
unchallenged, that Walter the Lollard, a shining light in the midnight of Papal
darkness, after passing from country to country, lifting his eloquent voice and
scattering over the wintery seed- fields the germs of truth, passed trough
England to build up the scattered flock of Christ there, and then breathed out
his great soul amid the fires of martyrdom, before John Wickliffe was born. That
this Walter Lollard was a Baptist in unquestionable. He came from the Waldensian
Baptists to England, and found Baptists there, who were welcomed this eloquent
teacher among them, may be traced to a still higher date. At the time when the
Norman nobles of William the Conqueror were crushing out the spirit, the
language, and nationality of Englishmen; when a foreign priesthood and a foreign
tongue were forced by cruel edicts upon the prostrate Saxons, there were those
who still dared to avow their deathless attachment to the simple truths and
ordinances of primitive Christianity. During the reigns of William and his son
Rufus, they were subjected to insults and persecutions, and were denounced by
the imported Popish Bishop, Lanfrank, of Canterbury. (Fuller, Ecclesiastical
History, vol. I). Gascony and Guienne, the domains of the Dude of Normandy,
were, at the conquest, attached to England. The intercourse between the latter
and the Pyrenean mountains, became general and intimate. "In Gascony the
heretics, says the old monkish historian, Sir William Newbury, "were as numerous
as the sands of the sea." A company of these Baptists were found in England in
the tenth century, and is thus described by Henry in his history of Great
Britain, which in substance, corresponds with Napier, Collier, and Lyttleton: A
company of about thirty men and women attracted the attention of the government
by the singularity of their religious practices and opinions. They were
apprehended and brought before the Council of the Clergy at Oxford. Being
interrogated about their religion, their teacher, named Gerard, a man of
learning, announced in their name, that they were Christians, and believed the
doctrines of the apostles. Upon a more particular inquiry, it was found that
they denied several of the received doctrines of the church, and, refusing to
abandon their damnable heresies. they were condemned as incorrigible heretics,
and delivered to the secular arm to be punished. The king, ( Henry II,) at the
instigation of the clergy, commanded them to be branded with red-hot iron on
their foreheads, whipped through the streets of Oxford, and having their clothes
cut short at their girdles, to be turned into the open fields, all persons being
forbidden to afford them shelter or relief under the severest penalties. This
cruel sentence was executed with the utmost rigor, and it being the depth of
winter, all these unhappy persons wee pressed with cold and hunger." A further
account of these people and their treacherous treatment, is found in the Dutch
Martyrology, or " Martyr’s Mirror," (This rare book is in the Jesuit’s College
of St. Louis) which places the date in 1161, and gives abundant evidence that
they were Baptists. Their leader was branded on the forehead and chin, and, as
they were driven, bleeding and naked, out into the wintery fields to die, he
raided his voice in triumph, singing, "Blessed are ye when ye are hated, Beaten,
despised." etc. But they did not all perish. There were among the crushed Saxons
a hatred to their foreign oppressors, dings, and priests, and a common sympathy
for those who suffered from Norman cruelty. The seed was scattered, and a half
century afterward, Walter Lollard preached among these same Baptist, Waldenses
of England. The Lollards, The Wickliffites, the suffering, struggling pioneers
of the Reformation, we have found them away up amid the darkness of the middle
ages, found them weak, yet fearless; few, yet mighty; poor, yet powerful,
sublime in their sufferings, and triumphant in their prostration. Baptists they
were, whether represented by Wickliffe. or Lollard, or Gerard. Neither the power
of man, nor the gates of hell could prevail against them. But from the Lollards,
and from England with it blessed and elevated by the truths they cherished, let
us pass still upward, marking this or them as a milestone in the path of time.

’In the year 1391, the king, wishing to show favor to the Church, issued a
letter to the nobility of the Principality, in which he imperiously enjoined
them to assist Dr. John Trevnant, Bishop of Hereford, in apprehending and
punishing Walter Brute and his adherents."Evans Martyn’s Letter.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 8: 07-THE 13TH CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford CHAPTER VI - Century Thirteen

Pete de Brue

"History is composed of innumerable biographies." At least it should be. We love
to tread the path beaten out by human footsteps, and lit up by imperishable
deeds. Men and their acts are the waymarks which make the road familiar; the
travelers and their footprints give all its interest to the moss-grown pathway.
From the Baptists of England, who were scourged and driven forth into the
wintery fields to die, we ascend a step higher. Let us travel back the path they
came. We shall let Dr. Wall, in his very opposition to Baptists, tell:

"William of Newburg, who lived then in England, describes some of these men by
the name of Publicani, and by their being Gascoigners; and says, about thirty of
them came out of Germany into England, under Henry II, about 1170, and being
examined of their faith, they denied and detested holy baptism, the eucharist,
and marriage. Foxe, out of Historia Gisburnensis, mentions the same men; and
that the chief of them were Gerhardus and Dulcinus Navarensis. He gives no
account of any opinion they had against baptism. But Holinshead says, they
derogated from the sacraments such grace as the church, by her authority, had
then ascribed to them." (Wall, his Infant Baptism, vol.ii, p. 264. As quotations
from a multitude of authors confuse, I shall confine myself principally to Wall,
Oxford edition, 1835, or new American edition,1860.)

Gascony was in the south of France, not far from the Pyrenees, those mountain
walls which divide France from Spain. Here the same historian, Newburg, says:
"These heretics were as numerous as the sands of the sea." They were called
sometimes Albigenses, and sometimes Waldenses; this later word meaning simply,
dwellers in valleys. Of these French Baptists, who passed from Gascony to
England, Wall says:

"But the more exact accounts, and particularly Mr. Limborch’s history of the
inquisition, do distinguish the Waldenses from the Albigenses, both as to their
tenets and their places of abode. And it is, I thin, only among the latter that
any Antipedobaptists were found. As FRANCE WAS THE FIRST COUNTRY in Christendom
were dipping of children was left off, so there FIRST ANTIPEDOBAPTISM BEGAN."
(Wall, his Infant Baptism, vol. ii, p. 239). Or more truly, according to this
admission of a champion of infant baptism in France, whose emperor gave power to
the beast, the superstition of infant sprinkling was first introduced, and
"dipping left off." and, consequently, there the followers of Christ first
displayed their uncompromising opposition to the corrupting rites. Yes, where
sprinkling was first introduced, Antipedobaptists are first found. When was
that? Not in apostolic days. Wall admits it was in beautiful, degraded France.
When was it? Date it when you may, and then, and there, you must date the
determined opposition to it in the land that gave it birth. These Albigeses,
then so numerous in Gascony, were Baptists. But Wall shall speak again:

" First, one Evervinus, of the diocese of Cologne, a little before the year
1140, writes to St. Bernard a letter, (which is lately brought to light by F.
Mabillon, Analect, tom.iii,) giving him an account of two sorts of heretics
lately discovered in that country. One sort were, by his description, perfect
Manichees. Of the other sort he says:

" ’they condemn the sacraments, except baptism only; and this only in those who
are come to age, who, they say, are baptized by Christ himself, whoever be the
minister of the sacraments. They don believe infant baptism. alleging that place
of the Gospel: He that believeth and is baptized, etc. All marriage they call
fornication, except that which is between two virgins,’ etc.

"Then at the year 1146, Peter, abbot of Clugny, writing against one Peter Bruis,
and one Henry, his disciple, and their associates. charges them with six errors,
the first of which was their denial of infant baptism. The other five were:

" ’2. That churches ought not be built; and if built, ought to be pulled down.’

"If we were to credit all the reports that come now from France, the Cevennois
would seem to of this opinion, by their destroying so many churches; but I hope
that those reports are not true.: (These are Wall’s own words).

"He also says, that they were reported to renounce all the Old Testament, and
all the New, except the four Gospels.’ but this he was not sure of; and would
not impute it to them, for fear he might slander them. So it appears that he did
not certainly know what they held. Yet, to make his proofs unquestionable, he
first proved the truth of the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles, by their
agreement with the Gospels; and then the Old Testament by the New. And then out
of the whole proceeds to refute their tenets, bestowing a chapter on each. the
first of them was, as I said against infant baptism, and is thus expressed:

"The first proposition of the new heretics. They say:

" ’Christ sending his disciples to preach, says in the Gospel: Go ye out into
all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is
baptized, shall be saved; but e that believeth not shall be damned From these
words of our Savior, it is plain that none can be saved unless he believe and be
baptized; that is, have both Christian faith and baptism.

""’It is therefore and idle and vain thing for you to wash persons with water,
at such a time when you may indeed cleanse their kin from dirt in a human
manner, but not purge their souls from sins. But we do stay till the proper time
of faith; and when a person is capable to know his God, and believe in Him; then
we do (not as your charge us, rebaptize him, but) baptize him.’

"This is, as to the practice, perfectly agreeable with the modern
Antipedobaptists; but, as Cassander observes, it is upon quite contrary grounds.
For the Antipedobaptists now do generally hold, that all that die infants,
baptized or not, of Christian or of heathen parents, are saved; and so it is
needless to baptize them; whereas, these held that, baptized or not, they could
not be saved; and so it was to no purpose to baptize them. And this writer does
accordingly spend most of the chapter, which is in answer to this tenet of
theirs, proving that infants, as well as grown men, are capable of the kingdom.

" ’ Abate,’ says he, ’of that overmuch severity which you have taken upon you,
and do not exclude infants from the kingdom of heaven, of whom Christ says, Of
such is the kingdom of heaven.’

"It is to be noted," continues Wall, "that this author speaks of this opinion as
then lately set on foot; and says, it might have seemed to need or deserve
confutation, ’ were it not that it had now continued twenty years. that the
first seeds of it wee sown by Peter de Bruis,’ (who was living when the book was
written, but put to death before it was published, of which mention is mad in
the preface). It was first vented in the mountainous country of Dauphine, and
had there some followers; from whence, being in good measure expelled, it had
got footing in Gascony, and the parts about Toulouse, being propagated by Henry,
who was a Disciple and successor of the said Peter.

"This writer aggravates this charge of novelty by urging that if baptism, given
in infancy, be null and void, as they pretend, " ’Then all the world has been
blind hitherto, and by baptizing infants for above a thousand years, has given
but a mock baptism, and made but fantastical Christians, etc. and, whereas, all
France, Spain, Germany, Italy, and all Europe, has had never a person now for
tree hundred or almost five hundred years baptized otherwise than in infancy, it
has ad never a Christian in it.’"

It must be remembered that the foregoing citations were mad by Wall writing
against the Baptists, and are quoted from Papist persecutors, who wrote for the
purpose of arousing the vengeance of the church against these water heretics. No
wonder that the rejection of infant baptism was slanderously construed into a
denial of infant salvation, when the Papist joined the two together as
inseparable. but that these heretics believed in a converted church membership,
in believers’ baptism only, and in local church independency, is most evident
from the character of the reproaches and calumnies of their foes, which is and
must be recognized by all who regard his word. It has been the question of the
ages; it is pre- eminently the question of this age.

If any proof were needed, it is abundant. These men were Baptists. The Jesuit
Gretzer after describing this ancient sect, says: "This is a picture of the
heretics of our own day, especially the Anabaptist." "to say honestly what I
think," writes the celebrated Limborch, of all the modern sects, the Dutch
Baptists most resembles the Albigenses and Waldenses." "The Baptists are not
entirely in error." says Mosheim, "when they boast their descent from the
Waldenses, petrobrussians , and other Ancient sects, who are usually considered
witnesses for truth in the time of general darkness and superstition."

No, we are not entirely in error, even according to our ancient and present
foes. "Witnesses for the truth in the times of general darkness," our elder
brethren have ever been. Noble brotherhood! Poor, simple down-trodden were ye;
but boldly, amid gloom and blood, ye stood forth, witnesses for the truth.
Baptists they have an ancestry around whom associations cluster, eclipsing the
triumphs of all earth’s chivalry. Baptists, O! that the earnest, death-defying
devotion of their forefathers still were theirs. The Baptists who came from the
regions of the Pyrenees to England, were called Wickliffites and Lollards. We
have traced them to Gascony, where they were called by the names already given
from Wall, Henricians, Petrobrussians, and Arnoldists. Of these men we shall now
speak.

WHAT IS BAPTISM? Has this word no meaning to it? Why, then, is not that meaning
discovered and its requirement followed? What a blessing to the world were this
question settled, and put forever at rest.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 9: 08-THE 12TH CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford CHAPTER VII - Century Twelve Henry of
Lausanne Peter de Bruis (Bruys) Arnold of Brescia HENRY OF LAUSANNE In the
beautiful city of Lausanne, surrounded by the towering Alps, the sheltering
homes of God’s hidden ones, an Italian hermit learned the simple truths of the
gospel. The idleness of the hermit was at once exchanged for the armor and the
toil of an embassador of Christ. To the dwellers in those valleys he broke the
bread of life; and over those mountain peaks he passed, bringing glad tidings to
beautiful, yet darkened France. >From Mans, from Poictiers, from Bordeaux, he
was successively banished, after what victories or defeats we know not. Of
martial valor, of deeds of chivalry performed on those same spots, we have many
a glowing record. What would we not give to know the words and acts of this
simple gospel preacher, as he passed through those proud old cities, with their
grim castles and splendid cathedrals, and glorious recollections of heraldry and
conquest looming up in the Gothic twilight of that age. But like the apostolic
record, which notes the entrance of Paul into Philippi, where the beauties of
Grecian art, column, and statue, and temple, robed in the autumnal charms of a
vicious loveliness, surrounded him on every side, one fact only has importance
sufficient for enduring record: "There they preached the Gospel." So of Henry.
More than this we know not.

"He passed through these cities, exercising his ministerial function with the
utmost applause of the people, and disclaiming with vehemence and fervor against
the superstitions they had introduced into the Christian Church." (Mosheim, p.
289).

"We have no satisfactory account," adds Mosheim, "of the doctrines of this man;
we merely know that he censured the baptism of infants, and the corrupt manners
of the clergy." But we have a satisfactory account of his doctrines, given even
by Mosheim himself, and more especially by Wall. Henry was a Baptist, believing
in the spirituality of Christ’s kingdom, the supreme authority of Christ as
king, and the immersion of true believers. In the old and melancholy city of
Toulouse, where four thousand heretics were burned during a century, the hero
hermit, Henry, lifted his voice, "cried aloud, and spared not." Toulouse, from
whose cathedral summits are seen the mingling streams of the ?ervennes and the
Tarn, sweeping on through the beautiful vale of the Garonne; and in the obscure
distance of the Pyrenees, rearing their silvered heads to heaven, as though
inviting to their mountain fastnesses the shorn lambs of Christ’s fold;
Toulouse, in the darkness and stillness of its death-sleep, was suddenly
convulsed by the embodied power and wisdom of God, the gospel. The clergy woke
to the danger of their craft. His opposition to their human dogmas, their
splendid buildings, their vestments, instrumental music, the whole train of
priestly wrappages, brought down their vengeance on the daring innovator. The
great Saint Bernard, we have seen, thundered out his maledictions, and poor
Henry, driven from Toulouse, fled to the mountains, was pursued, and brought
before a council at Rheins. This was in 1158.... He held that the church was a
spiritual body composed of regenerated persons. He also held that no person
should be baptized until he knew he was saved. He rejected infant baptism. He
denied that children, before they reach the years of understanding, can be saved
by receiving baptism. So great was this man’s influence that whole congregations
left the Romish churches and joined with him.

Because of his plain and powerful preaching he was compelled to flee for his
life, but was finally arrested and committed to prison at Rheins where he
finished his life.

PETER DE BRUIS (BRUYS)

"Peter de Bruis made the most laudable attempts to reform the abuses and to
remove the superstitions that disfigured the beautiful simplicity of the gospel;
but, after having engaged in his cause a great number of followers, during a
laborious ministry of twenty years, he was burned at St. Giles’s, in the year
1130, by an enraged populace, instigated by the clergy, whose traffic was in
danger from the enterprising spirit of this reformer. The whole system of
doctrine, which this unhappy martyr, whose zeal was not without a considerable
mixture of fanaticism, taught to the Petrobrussians (a name by which his
followers were called) is not known." ... He held to the same principles as
Baptists of today. He rejected infant baptism, and baptismal regeneration. He
condemned the doctrines of the popes, that the real body and blood of Christ
were exhibited in the Eucharist, but taught that they were merely represented or
symbolized by the embles used. He taught that the oblations, prayers, and good
works of the living, could be in no respect advantageous to the dead. After a
laborious ministry of twenty years, he was burned in 1130, by an enraged
populace set on by the clergy, whose traffic was in danger from the enterprising
spirit of this great and powerful preacher.

ARNOLD OF BRESCIA

Arnold, early in life, traveled from his native Italy into France, (Chapter v,
p. 289) and became a pupil of the celebrated Abelard. In France he imbibed the
spirit of soul-freedom, and received into his heart the light of the gospel. He
returned to his native city in the habit of a monk; and began to preach that
gospel in the streets of Brescia. The people were melted and roused beneath his
fiery appeals. The clergy were alarmed, and in the Council of Lateran condemned
him to perpetual silence. This was in 1139. Arnold fled to the wilderness, and
in the valley of the Alps found shelter among kindred spirits. He was soon found
proclaiming the truth in the Canton of Zurich, where Zwingle afterward appeared.
Conspiracies were formed against him. The whole power of Rome was directed to
his overthrow and ruin.

We can not contemplate the lion courage of Luther at Worms without emotions of
enthusiastic admiration. The admiration is just. And yet the intrepidity of
Arnold, fully equal to it, if not superior, is seldom mentioned. A lone man, in
a still darker age, unsupported by the presence and sympathy of princes, as
Luther was, he breasted and defied the whole thunderstorm of Rome. Driven from
his shelter, he passed the Alps, and planted himself in the midst of his foes,
entered Rome itself, and with the sublime example of his master before him, as
"A gate of steel Fronting the sun receives and renders back His figure and his
heat"

He flashed the light of truth in burning eloquence over the seven hills.
(Gibbon, vol. iii, p. 366) Freedom triumphed for the hour. Rome woke from the
slumber and slavery of ages. "But the fervor of the people is less permanent
than the resentment of the priest." The powers of the clergy were again
concentrated and directed against the preacher. The heresy of Arnold was
considered two-fold. "He dared," says Gibbon, "to quote the language of Christ,
’My kingdom is not of this world’, that the church was a distinct and spiritual
assembly of baptized believers; and, as a consequence, the heinous crime was
laid to his charge of rejecting infant baptism." (Pr?ter h?c de sacramento
ulterus et Baptismo parvulorum). He was a Baptist. For holding just what
Baptists now hold, and for no other charge, "he was arrested, condemned,
crucified, and then burned, and his ashes thrown into the Tiber."

Well has Dr. Brewster said, It is impossible not to admire the genius and
persevering intrepidity of Arnold. To distinguish truth from error in an age of
darkness, and to detect the causes of spiritual corruption in the thickest
atmosphere of ignorance and superstition, evinced a mind of more than ordinary
strength. To struggle against superstition intrenched in power, to plant the
standard of revolution on the very heart of her empire, and keep possession of
her capital a number of years, could scarcely be expected from an individual who
had no power but that of his eloquence, and no assistance but that which he
derived from the justice of his cause. Yet such were the individual exertions of
Arnold, which posterity will appreciate as one of the noblest legacies which
former ages have bequeathed. Religious freedom: it was not announced first by
Roger William, nor Milton, nor the Baptist in Germany. "The trumpet of liberty,"
says Gibbon, "was first sounded by Arnold of Brescia." That trumpet has been
sounded by every true Baptist in every age. In its defense have they ever
suffered; yet in its defense they have ever rallied. In its defense, the
bleeding body of Arnold was immolated on a burning pile. But his memory lives,
and even in Rome will his name yet become a watchword of victory. The time will
yet be, when over the spot where the flame consumed him, will some monument
record his greatness and his virtue, when the power which has trampled on human
rights, and has rioted in human blood, with all its corrupting inventions, shall
have sunk, like the apocalyptic millstone, in the deep, and no traces remain of
the ruin it has wrought.

We pass from these heroes of "the faith once delivered to the saints." The
Arnoldists, the Henricians, and Petrobrussians we have found, and, by their
enemies, showed them to be Baptists. Did the Baptists originate with these men
whose names were transfixed to them? We shall pause in our journey, for we have
found they were Baptists; and their presence marks another milestone in the path
of time.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 10: 09-THE 10TH CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford CHAPTER VIII - Century Ten Baptists in
Italy

Paulicians

Waymarks in the wilderness, flame-pillars in the night-desert, were these three
heroes of truth, Henry, Peter de Bruis, and Arnold of Brescia. "Nor are the
Baptists," says Mosheim, "entirely in error when they boast of their descent
form the Waldenses, Petrobrussians, and other ancient sects."

These "ancient sects," it has been seen, received from their foes appellations
derived from champions who were renowned, or who perished in the propagation of
their cause Truth is aggressive ever. Christianity aims at the entire subversion
and ruin of everything opposed to it in spirit or practice. Such was the mission
of the apostles. Feeble and few as they were, they undertook the invasion of the
mighty territories of evil. They admitted of no compromise; they asked and gave
no quarter. They sought no relaxation, knew no pause, and were deaf to the word
"retreat;" but ever in the field, they "fought manfully the battles of the
Lord." The same indomitable energy and fearless courage characterized the
Baptist standard-bearers of the dark ages, and those who gathered around them
were called by their names. Thus the "heretics" along the valleys of Piedmont
and the Alps, were called "Arnoldists." That Arnold was a Baptist, as well as
Peter de Bruis, has been shown by the statements of Pedobaptists.Those,
therefore, known as their followers, and who were numbered by thousands, were,
also, most unquestionably, Baptists. Where did they come from? We have now to
peer through the darkest gloom that ever settled on the world’s history. Through
that mystic obscurity images appear, arrayed in the wrappages of ecclesiastic
pomp; and romantic personages, that seem like the creations of fancy. Can we,
amid that mist and darkness, find the footsteps of God’s hidden ones? We are on
the track, and shall faithfully follow it.

We have already seen, that in the south of France were thousands of Baptists in
the tenth and eleventh centuries.

"It was in the country of the Albegeois," [says the classic Gibbon,] "in the
southern provinces of France, that the Paulicians were most deeply implanted. In
the practice, or at least in the theory, of the sacraments, the Paulicians were
inclined to abolish all visible objects of worship; and the words of the gospel
were, in their judgment, the baptism and communion of the faithful," (Gibbon,
Decline and Fall, vol. v, p. 388). [believers].

Now let us learn from Mosheim the belief of those Paulicians:

"They maintained, in general, according to their own confession, that the whole
of religion consisted in the study of practical piety, and in a course of action
conformable to the Divine laws; and they treated all external modes of worship
with the utmost contempt. Their particular tenets may be reduced to the
following heads:

1. They rejected baptism, and, in a more especial manner, the baptism of
infants, as a ceremony that was, in no respect, essential to salvation.

2. They rejected, for the same reason, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.

3. They denied that the churches were endowed with a greater degree of sanctity
than private houses, or that they were more adapted to the worship of God than
any other place.

4. They affirmed that the altars were to be considered in no other light than as
heaps of stones, and were, therefore, unworthy of any marks of veneration or
regard.

5. They disapproved the use of incense and consecrated oil in services of a
religious nature.

6. They looked upon the use of bells in the churches as an intolerable
superstition.

7. They denied that the establishment of bishops, presbyters, deacons, and other
ecclesiastical dignities, was of Divine institution, and went so far as to
maintain that the appointment of stated ministers in the church was entirely
unnecessary.

8. They affirmed that the institution of funeral rites was an effect of
sacerdotal avarice, and that it was a matter of indifference whether the dead
were buried in the churches or in the fields.

9. They looked upon the voluntary punishment called penance, so generally
practiced in this century, as unprofitable and absurd.

10. They denied that the sins of departed spirits could be, in any measure,
atoned for by the celebration of masses, the distribution of alms to the poor,
or a vicarious penance; and they, consequently, treated the doctrine of
purgatory as a ridiculous fable.

11. They considered [Catholic ceremonial] marriage as a pernicious institution,
and absurdly condemned, without distinction, all connubial bonds.

12. They looked upon a certain sort of veneration and worship as due to the
apostles and martyrs, from which, however, they excluded such as were only
confessors, in which class they comprehended the saints, who had not suffered
death for the cause of Christ, and whose bodies, in their esteem, had nothing
more sacred than any other human carcass.

13. They declared the use of instrumental music in the churches, and other
religious assemblies, superstitious and unlawful.

14. They denied that the cross on which Christ suffered was, in any respect,
more sacred than any other kind of wood, and, in consequence, refused to pay to
it the smallest degree of religious worship.

15. They not only refused all acts of adoration to the images of Christ, and of
the saints, but were also for having them removed out of the churches.

16. They were shocked at the subordination and distinctions that were
established among the clergy, and at the different degrees of authority
conferred upon the different members of that sacred body. When we consider the
corrupt state of religion in this country, and particularly the superstitious
notions that were generally adopted in relation to outward ceremonies, the
efficacy of penance, and the sanctity of churches, relics, and images, it will
not appear surprising that many persons of good sense and solid piety, running
from one extreme to another, fell into the opinions of these mystics, in which
among several absurdities, there were many things plausible and specious, and
some highly rational."

(Mosheim, pp. 258, 259).

Let it be remembered that this is the statement of their bitter enemy, and even
he modified it by this explanation:

"The eleventh article is scarcely credible, at least as it is here expressed. It
is more reasonable that these mystics did not absolutely condemn marriage."
(Mosheim, pp. 258, 259).

Doubtless the truth is, they denied, as all Protestants do, that marriage was a
sacrament, and stripping it of all the ghostly ceremonies of Popery, esteemed
it, as we do, a civil contract between the parties, in the fear of God, and
according to His Word. Their denial of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper can be
accounted for in the same way. They refused to worship the host, or admit that
the words pronounced by the priest change the bread into the soul, body, and
divinity of Christ. This, to the clergy of Rome, was, of course, a blasphemous
denial of the sacrament. They were Baptists. They were the predecessors of the
Petrobrussians and Arnoldists. They were numbered by scores of thousands. Gibbon
says:

"They conversed freely with strangers and natives, and their opinions were
silently propagated in Rome and the kingdoms beyond the Alps. It was soon
discovered that many thousand Catholics, of every rank and either sex, had
embraced the Manichean heresy."

We will pass the Alps, and follow up the track those Baptists traveled. In the
classic land of Italy, beneath the dread shadow of the Vatican, have lived, in
every age, men, upon whose foreheads was never stamped the symbol of the beast,
and on whose spirits beamed the light of truth, brighter and purer than their
own lovely skies. The historian Gibbon says:

"In the busy age of the crusades, some sparks of curiosity and reason were
kindled in the Western world. The heresy of Bulgaria, the Paulician sect, was
successively transplanted into the soul of Italy and France. The Gnostic visions
were united with the simplicity of the gospel, and the enemies of the clergy
reconciled their passions with there conscience, the desire of freedom with the
profession of piety."

These were the same people whose belief has been given from Mosheim, the people
to whom Arnold of Brescia belonged, and who were called Manicheans, Paulicians,
Catheri, Paterines, and Anabaptists. In Italy they were known as Paterines. They
said that a Christian Church ought to consist of persons who had professed
faith, and that it had no power to frame general canons or creeds. And Gregory,
writing against them, says:

"The baptism which the Catholics approve, the Paterines condemn, the baptism of
children, which is condemned by the Paterines."

They were Baptists. They had fifteen associations in Italy. And in vindication
of their principles, their virtues, and their antiquity, let Gibbon now speak:

"The Paulicians sincerely condemned the memory and opinions of the Manichean
sect, and complained of the injustice which impressed that invidious name on the
simple followers of Paul and Christ. The objects which had been transformed by
the magic of superstition, appeared to the eyes of the Paulicians in the genuine
and naked colors. Of the ecclesiastical chain, many links were broken by these
reformers; and against the gradual innovations of discipline and doctrine they
were strongly guarded by habit and aversion, as by the silence of Paul and the
Evangelists. They attached themselves, with peculiar devotion, to the writings
and character of Paul, in whom they gloried. In the Gospels and Epistles of
Paul, Constantine investigated the creed of the primitive Christians; and
whatever might be the success, a Protestant reader will applaud the spirit of
the inquiry. In practice, or, at least, in the theory, of the sacraments, the
Paulicians were inclined to abolish all visible objects of worship; and the
words of the gospel were, in their judgments, the baptism and communion of the
faithful. A creed thus simple and spiritual, was not adapted to the genius of
the times; and the rational Christian was offended at the violation offered to
his religion by the Paulicians." (Gibbon’s Ro. Hist., ch. 54).

Mosheim says:

"It is evident they rejected the baptism of infants. They were not charged with
any error concerning baptism."

Dr. Allix says:

"They , with the Manicheans, were Anabaptists, or rejectors of infant baptism,
and were, consequently, often reproached with that term."

Milner says:

"They were simply Scriptural in the use of the sacraments; they were orthodox in
the doctrine of the Trinity; they knew of no other Mediator than the Lord Jesus
Christ." That these Paulicians or Paterines were Baptists, is by the united
testimony of profane and ecclesiastical history, placed beyond a doubt. Well,
where did they come from? Gibbon continues:

"About the middle of the eighth century, Constantine, surnamed Copronymus by the
worshipers of images, had made an expedition into Armenia, and found, in the
cities of Melitene and Theodosiopolis, a great number of Paulicians of his
kindred heretics. As a favor of punishment, he transplanted them form the banks
of the Euphrates to Constantinople and Thrace; and, by this emigration, their
doctrine was introduced and diffused in Europe. If the sectarians of the
metropolis were soon mingled with the promiscuous mass, those of the country
struck a deep root in a foreign soil. The Paulicians of Thrace resisted the
storms of persecution, maintained a secret correspondence with their Armenian
brethren, and gave aid and comfort to their preachers, who solicited, not
without success, the infant faith of the Bulgarians."

They were transplanted from the banks of the Euphrates to Constantinople. Under
the Byzantine standard they were transported to "Rome, Milan, and the kingdoms
beyond the Alps." Amid the provinces of southern France they were found in the
twelfth century, under the leadership of Henry and Peter de Bruis. From the
south of France they passed to England and other parts of Europe, "where they
lingered," says Gibbon, "till the Reformation." And thus is the text of Mosheim
illustrated:

"Before the rise of Luther and Calvin there lay concealed in almost all the
countries of Europe men who adhered tenaciously to the principles of the modern
Baptists." And thus through the gloom of the dark ages have we tracked the path
along which passed the witnesses of Christ, and have found those who, with
abiding attachments, adhered to our principles, and were members of our churches
as far back as the eighth century, and in the lands of apostolic labor and
suffering. The Paulicians, calumniated, banished as criminals, stand forth a
prominent milestone in the march of time, and that blood-stained trace we shall
still follow in our further inquiry: Where did the Baptists come from?


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 11: 10-THE 8TH CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford CHAPTER IX Century Eight

Retrospect

Let us number up the way-marks we have passed. From the persecutions in Virginia
just preceding the Revolution, we ascended the stream of colonial history, and
found Baptists in the Old Dominion at the time that Holmes, and Clark, and
Knollys, were planting the standard of truth and freedom in the wilds of New
England. From Virginia and Rhode Island we entered the jail of Bunyan,and beheld
Keach on the pillory. With the rise of Luther, and Calvin, and Cranmer, we found
Baptists starting forth from their concealment, pouring down like torrents from
the mountain fastnesses in every part of Europe. Long before Luther lived, or
the Reformation was born, we found them in the vales of the Alps, in the
mountains of Wales, and in the forests of England. Henry, Peter de Bruis, and
Arnold of Brescia, were among the torch-bearers in the darkness of the middle
ages. In the lovely land of Italy, under the very shadow of the Vatican, the
Paterine Baptists were condemned by the persecuting Pope, and described by the
classic historian. From Italy to Constantinople, and from Constantinople to
Armenia and Syria, we have traced the Paulician Baptists. From these we again
take our line of departure in our search for the head-spring. But ere we
proceed, let us ascend some historic hight and glance over the surrounding
prospect. We are up among the Paulicians in the mountains of Armenia, in the
middle of the seventh century. Amid those sublime hights where the family of
Noah looked down on a world covered with the slowly receding waters of the
deluge, let us take a passing survey of a world now mantled in spiritual night.
What a sad, yet not hopeless sight, the world in the seventh century presented.
In the distant West, where the tall Alps rise above the glassing lake; where the
children of freedom find safety within those mountain walls, the green foliage
of the "tree of life" is blooming, the flowers in "the garden of the Lord" send
forth their sweet perfume, and the dew of blessing descends on the few and
banished children of Christ who are dwelling there together in unity. Still
farther west, and among the Pyrenees, the descendants of the banished Novatians,
branded as Anabaptists, live in quit peace, devoted to their sovereign Lord. And
yonder, in those western isles, where white cliffs gleam in the setting
sunlight, a scene of striking interest may be witnessed. Let us look at it. From
Asia Minor, through Paul, or some of his co-laborers, the gospel was carried to
Britain. When civil dissension had weakened the power of Rome, and the wild
Picts and Scots were continually making inroads upon the helpless inhabitants,
when Rome could not defend them, the protection of the hardy Anglo-Saxons was
sought; they drove back the Scottish invaders, but became in their turn the
owners and rulers of the island. A Saxon kingdom of Pagans was established, and
the old British Christians were driven toward Wales. Pope Gregory sent a monk
named Austin to convert these Saxon Pagans, who came with his tribe of muttering
and persecuting monks to carry out the commands of his ghostly lord. He won over
the Saxons. He made disciples of them by wholesale baptisms. His next step was
to attempt the conversion of those apostolic churches over to Christendom, that
is, Popery and infant baptism. The old British Churches differed in regard to
baptism, as well as in many other things, with those Romanist missionaries. An
old British, or rather Welsh pastor, named Deynock, whose opinion in
ecclesiastical affairs had the most weight with his countrymen, when urged by
Austin to submit in all things to the ordinances of the Roman Church, returned
the following remarkable answer:

"We are all ready to listen to the church of God, to the Pope of Rome, and every
pious Christian; that so we may show to each, according to his station, proper
love, and uphold him by word and deed. We know not that any other obedience can
be required of us toward him whom you call the Pope, or the father of fathers.
But this obedience we are ready to render to him and to every Christian."
(Neander, vol. iii, p. 17). A council or convention was afterward held between
Austin and the Welsh preachers, at which the latter declared that they could do
nothing without a full representation from their churches. Finally the Britons
refused to enter into any terms of agreement with Austin. "Well, then," said the
haughty priest, "as you will not have us as friends, you shall as foes, and
experience the vengeance of the Saxons." (Neander’s Eccl. Hist. Ang. Fuller’s
History English Churches, vol. i). His threat was carried out. The college at
Bangor was destroyed; the preachers were massacred, and over two thousand of
these primitive Christians in Hereford were sacrificed to the demon of apostasy.
(Dupin, Eccl. His., vol., p. 90. Fox’s Martyrs, vol. i, p. 135). The question
arises, were these ancient British Christians Baptists? That they did not
originate from Rome is most evident; that they never had adopted her profane
rites, her wholesale baptisms, her councils and decretals, is unquestionable.
Were they Baptists? They had not Episcopal head or archbishop among them who
could speak and act authoritatively from the rest, as is most evident from the
fact that Deynock, the old Pastor who had so much influence among them, could
not represent and act for the churches. That they were not Episcopalians is
evident to any one who will read the account of the convention under the oak; in
which, though a large number of their principal men were assembled to meet and
confer with Austin, they would not and could not speak for their churches; they
possessing no such authority. They evidently belonged to independent churches,
which regarded the humblest Christian as being quite as good authority as the
Pope or his church council. Such is the plain language of Deynock, as given
above. So far they were Baptists.

Further, we are told by Neander, (and with him agree all the more ancient church
histories,) that they differed with Austin in regard to the mode of baptism; for
it appears that while he immersed as a usual thing, he sprinkled, according to
Roman indulgence, the infant and the dying. The primitive British Churches,
therefore, must have been rigid immersionists; else how could they have differed
with Austin about the mode? But, in addition to this, the old English Chronicle
says:

"and thus hed wuneden here an hundred and five yere that neure com here
cristendom i cud i thissen londe no belle i-rungen no masse isunge no chirche
ther nes i-haleyed no child ther nes ifuleyed." The modern English of which is:

"And thus they dwelt here An hundred and five years So that never christening
Came here to be known in the land, Nor bell rung, nor church hallowed, Nor child
was there baptized."

Such is the historic chronicle of England, the only form in which the history of
that dark period has come down to us. And the evidence is conclusive that there
was no infant baptism in England till it was brought there from Rome by Austin
and his monks. Here there were independent churches against whose theology no
complaint could be brought which rejected the authority and formalities of Rome;
believed in a spiritual birth; rigidly enforced immersion, and knew nothing
about infant baptism. They were Baptists in church government, in theology, in
practice; uncompromising Baptists, who were ready to perish rather than yield a
principle. Where did they come from? Not from Popery; not from the Gnostics, or
Oriental sects; nor from the apostate Greek hierarchy. It is acknowledged that
the BANGOR CHRISTIANS WERE PLANTED BY THE APOSTOLIC EVANGELISTS, whose
principles an practices they maintained, and it has been demonstrated that these
primitive Bangor disciples were Baptists. Driven back by Austin and the Saxons,
they continued under the protection of Heaven and the Welsh mountains, preaching
Christ and administering his ordinances, down through all the changes, and
darkness, and persecution of the middle ages, until, like the descendants of the
Paulicians, charging the moral atmosphere with those elements which burst forth
in the sixteenth century in the great Reformation. But from the point we have
reached in the regions of Armenia in the seventh century, we must inquire for
the origin of those Paulicians. After Neander had dwelt with painful minuteness
on the corruptions of the old Greek Church, he says:

"We have yet to speak of the reaction of the Christian consciousness within the
church against this ecclesiastical system, which had been forming by the combing
Christian with foreign elements; a reaction on the part of rising and spreading
sects that stood forth in opposition to the dominant church, presenting a series
of remarkable phenomena of the religious spirit, extending through the medieval
centuries, and accompanying the progressive development of the church
theoretical system.

"In spite of fire and sword, the remains of those sects which arose in the early
period of the Christian Church, had been still pressed in those districts. These
sects having from the first stood out against the union of Christianity with
Judaism, now entered into the contest against those doctrines and institutions
in particular which had grown out of the mixture of Jewish with Christian
elements." (Neander, vol. iii, p. 214).

These Paulicians were then, according to Neander, and every other impartial
historian, one of those sects which arose in the early period of the Christian
Church; one of those sects which broke off from the majority on the first
introduction of Jewish ceremonies, circumcision, or its substitute, infant
baptism, episcopacy, priesthood, instrumental music, imitations of the Pagan
temples, and, finally, baptismal regeneration, image worship, APOSTASY.

Manichaeus was a slanderous name, indicating that they mixed with their
Christianity some notions of the Persian Pagans. It was a baseless calumny. "We
find nothing at all, however," says Neander, "in the doctrines of the
Paulicians, which would lead us to presume that they were an offshoot from
Manichaeism." The ancient origin and the Baptist principles of these Paulicians
are thus demonstrated. Covering the hills and vales of Armenia, receiving fresh
accessions from the persecutions of the Greek Church, and exerting an influence
which reacted on Europe and the world; connected by the bonds of harmonious
brotherhood with the banished Donatists, the spiritual Novatians, and the
Cathari, or Paterine Baptists of Europe, these Paulicians, on the lofty
table-lands and mountain slopes of Armenia, rose like a monument above the waste
of all that was spiritual and all that was true, A MILESTONE IN THE MARCH OF
TIME.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 12: 11-THE 7TH CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford CHAPTER X Century Seven

Montenses

We have seen that the Paulicians were Baptists; that they arose in an early
period of the Christian Church; and that their opposition to the dominant party,
whose aim was to blend Jewish elements and rites with the doctrines and
ordinances of the gospel; and we find that Sylvanius learned the truth which he
afterward propagated with such earnestness and success, from a Syrian who was
returning from captivity among the Saracens. This was in the year six hundred
and fifty-seven.

We have, therefore, clearly traced these Baptists to Syria and Armenia. We have
paused on those heights and looked out on the sleeping earth, with here and
there a company of pilgrims anxiously inquiring, What of the night? We have seen
Baptists at every step of our journey. and now we ask, Where did these Baptists
of Syria and Armenia come from?

Now, it is a fact, that about the very time that Sylvanius received the copy of
the Scriptures from the returning Syrian, Pope Gregory the First issued Papal
mandates condemning and urging the persecution of certain heretics, whom he
called "Montenses and other Anabaptists." He describes them as the advocates of
a spiritual church, composed of regenerated persons only, and as rebaptizers of
those whom they received from others societies. (Gregorii, I Papea, Lib, iii:
"De herese Donatistarum pullutanta. Multos insuper quibus regenerationis qua
prabuerat rebaptizonte."). They are spoken of as a multitude, and as the
descendants of the Donatists. At the same period another class of dissenters
were found in Armenia, and also in Phrygia, who, like those called Donatists,
were denounced as heretics and Anabaptists, because they contended for a pure
church. They were known as Novatians. Not that either of these classes of
Dissenters, among whom there was a complete agreement, were the followers of the
men whose names had been given to them as a term of reproach, not even that they
held the same principles or adopted the practices advocated by Novatian or
Donatus; but the sweeping censures and anathemas of the Greek and Roman
Catholics confounded all Dissenters under one head, designating them by whatever
epithet was the most odious at the time. The Montenses, or Mountaineers, were
made up of those two classes of Dissenters, Novatians and Donatists. Among them
also mingled what were called by the Greeks Melchedecians. "They had neither
beginning nor end," said a Greek father; "neither head nor tail." (Epiphanii
Heris, 70. Neque principium, neque finis; neque caput, neque radix). The
Eucharites (prayers) and Messalians, names given to the very same people by
different writers, were found in the mountains of Armenia during the seventh
century, whither they had sought refuge from their merciless persecutors.

Socrates Scholasticus, in his church history, written in the early part of this
century, says:

"The Phrygians are a nation far more temperate and modest than others; for at
this day they use no running a tilt; no such warlike exercises; neither do they
use to pastime themselves with spectacles and stage- plays. Wherefore these kind
of men, in mine own opinion, draw nearest to the drift and disposition of
Novatian’s letters. It is well know that the Phrygian way of life is more
modest, more chaste and contented, than any other heretical sect whatever. I
conjecture that they aimed at the same modest (humble) way of life which
inhabited the West parts, (Europe,) and leaned toward Novatians’s opinion, who
varied from the Church of Rome by reason of a severe way of living." ( Socrates
Scholasticus, Eccl. His., lib, iv, chap. 23. I quote from an old translation in
my possession, printed in London, 1584).

Here, then, is a key to the character of the Asiatic Montenses, furnished by a
contemporary historian. It shows that these were not exactly Novatians, but
resembled them; and that, in piety and discipline, they carried out the
principal advocated in the Novatian’s letters. What were those principles? We
answer, such as now characterize the Baptist Churches. Of this we shall have
occasion to speak again. But let it be noted here, as an incontrovertible
historic fact, that in regard to the doctrines of grace, of Christ’s deity,
vicarious atonement, and intercession; of spiritual regeneration, and the
resurrection of the body, and eternal rewards and punishments, the orthodoxy of
the Novatians was never questioned. The independency and purity of the churches,
and the rebaptism of all who came from the other organizations, was their
"heresy." And it was from a people resembling them, and carrying out their
principles and practices, scattered through Syria, Phrygia, and Armenia, that
the Paulicians descended. According to the Catholic historian, they were chaste,
modest, with a severe or rigorous discipline, suffering the loss of all things
for the truths they cherished. They were Baptists. The Minuteness, made up of
Novatians and Donatists, and called Eucharites, Messalians, Melchedecians,
Anabaptists, were the true churches of Jesus Christ, which have witnessed in
every age against corruption, innovation, Jewish rites, and clerical rule.

We will ascend a step farther in the world’s history, we will turn over another
page in the records of the struggles of Christ’s soldiery, and, marking the
mountains of Phrygia and Armenia as points in our path where we have found
Baptists, we will investigate where these scattered Montenses came from.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 13: 12-THE 6TH CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford CHAPTER XI Century Six

Donatists

It is difficult to ascertain the true sentiments and character of a people whose
writings were destroyed by those who feared them, and whose words can only be
caught as they are echoed, with bitterness and misrepresentation, by their
implacable foes.

It is, therefore, no wonder if the motives, the faith, and the practices of the
Donatists have been misstated and caricatured by nearly all who have written
their history.

We have already seen that the Baptists of every age and clime have received
names borrowed from men who, holding high positions in the dominant church,
suddenly lifted their voices against its corruptions, and were, consequently,
driven from its communion. It was so with Claude of Lorraine, Arnold of Brescia,
and Wickliffe of England. It is easy to understand how those spiritual churches,
which had never symbolized with the great apostasy; how those "hidden ones."
who, in obscurity, battled and suffered for the truth, would hail, with
enthusiastic gratitude, the appearance of a prominent and bold reformer who, in
the midst of a corrupt church, would come forth, as a messenger from God, to
plead for the truth. At once those scattered and obscure disciples of Christ
would rally around the newly-arisen standard, on which were emblazoned those
principles which they cherished with deathless love. They would soon, in the
public mind and on the page of partisan or superficial history, be identified
and lost in the new movement, and would receive the name which had been given to
the new party. It was thus in the case of the Donatists, as we shall fully see.
In the early part of the fifth century there appeared all over that part of
Africa lying along the shores of the Mediterranean, a class of determined men,
who "maintained that the church should cast out from its body those who were
known, by open and manifest sins, to be called unworthy members." The
corruption’s of the so-called church were detailed by an eye-witness ( Salvian,
who belonged to the church party) in colors the most odious. Iniquity and vice
reveled unblushingly under the protection of church sanctity. Forms, borrowed
from Judaism and Paganism, were substituted for the spiritual power and
voluntary obedience of the gospel. All were received as members who could repeat
the Creed and the form of renunciation; and infant baptism already found
advocates. Against all this, these Numidians, afterward called Donatists,
entered their solemn and powerful protest. Neander says:

"They adduced the fifth chapter of Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians to
prove that none but those who gave evidence of conversion should be received
into or retained in the church. When the church did not act in accordance with
these rules, ’they affirmed’ but tolerated such unworthy members in her
communion. She lost the predicates of purity and holiness, which are the
predicates of a true church." (Neander, vol. ii, p. 206).

Augustine, bishop of Hippo, taking the position of the Catholic Church, replied:

"That the good and faithful Christians, certain of their won salvation, may
persevere to dwell in unity with the corrupt when it is beyond their power to
punish." The Catholics appealed to those passages and parables which speak of
the separation of the good and bad being reserved to the last day. The Donatists
replied:

"that these passages relate either to the mixing of the good and bad in this
world, or the the hypocrites who crept in unawares; that Christ himself taught
that the field is the world." Their antagonists answered, that "by the world
Christ meant the church." The one plead for a line of demarcation between the
church and the world; and that giving baptism to any woe gave no evidence of a
spiritual change, obliterated all such distinctions. The Catholics, on the other
side, advocated hereditary church membership without moral or spiritual
qualifications, and for a complete blending of the church and the world. The
Catholic party triumphed by imperial interference and merciless persecution. It
resulted in national church establishments, into which all are received to
membership infancy, and from which none are excluded except for heresy. The
other principle, tat none but the converted should be received or retained into
the churches of Christ, was derided, trampled in the dust, branded as infamous,
and its advocates treated as fanatics, apostates, rebels. But it was sheltered
amid the mountains of Armenia. It descended through the night of centuries. It
gleamed along the path of human progression and civilization. It lit the torch
of the Reformers, and blazed upon downtrodden Europe. It finally burst forth in
splendor or these glorious States of ours, where thirty millions of freemen
enjoy its blessings. But there was another great principle which distinguished
the Donatists. Men who plead for a spiritual church, must necessarily oppose
coercion toward the passive or the unwilling, the young or the old, all human
dictation and constraint in matters of conscience. Petilian, one of the Donatist
leaders, says: Did the apostles ever persecute any one? or did Christ ever
deliver any one over to the secular power? Christ commands us to flee
persecutors, (Matt. x:23). thou who callest thyself a disciple of Christ
oughtest not to imitate the deeds of the heathen. Think you thus to serve God by
destroying us with your hands? Ye err, ye err, poor mortals, if ye believe this;
for God has not executioners for is priests. Christ persecutes no one, for e was
for inviting not forcing men to the faith. Our Lord Christ says: ’ NO MAN CAN
COME UNTO ME UNLESS THE FATHER WHO SENT ME DRAW HIM.’ But why do you not permit
every man to follow is own free-will, since God the Lord himself has bestowed
this free-will upon man? He has simply the way of righteousness, that none might
be lost through ignorance. Christ, in dying for men, has given Christians the
example to die, but not to kill. Christ teaches us to suffer wrong, not to
requite it. The apostle tells us of what he had endured, not of what he had done
to others. But what have you to do with the princes of this world, in whom the
Christian cause has only found enemies?" (Augustin Contra Petiliana, in
Lardner’s Gospel Testimony, also Neander). Are not these the principles for
which Baptists have pleas and suffered in every age of the gospel era? Are they
not the principles for which true Baptists (and they only) contend still? "God
made man FREE, after His own image. How am I to be deprived of that, by human
lordship, which God has bestowed on me? What sacrilege, that human arrogance
should take away what God as bestowed, and idly boast of doing this in God’s
behalf! It is a great offense against God when He is defended by men. What must
he think of God who would defend him with outward force. Is it that God is
unable to punish offenses against himself? Hear what the Lord says: ’ My peace I
leave with you; my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth give I unto
you.’ The peace of Christ invites the willing with wholesome mildness. IT NEVER
FORCES MEN AGAINST THEIR WILLS."

Here were the glorious principles inscribed on the broad banners of those called
Donatists. A church made up of the willing, active, converted believers,
professing, obeying, and associating themselves together in church compact of
their own free-will; neither passively while infants, nor by constraint when
adults. Is it any wonder that those who had withdrawn from the majorities and
formed independent churches, long before the Donatists arose, hailed these
defenders of the faith as true yoke-fellows, and that they, consequently,
received their name? Where would the advocates of such principles be classed
now? By what name would they be called? Among whom would they find co-workers
and sympathizers? In the rejection of the baptisms of all other parties, says
Hooker, the great defender of Episcopacy:

"Good men were followed by the Donatists as they are now followed by the
Anabaptists, who rebaptized in infancy." (Lardner’s Eccl. Polity; also Fuller’s
Eccl. Hist., vol. ii, book v).

"The Anabaptists of our day," says the English Church historian, " are the
Donatists new dipped." The fact is thus historically demonstrated, that those
branded as heretics and Anabaptists, scattered through Asia Minor, Armenia,
Phrygia, and portions of Italy and Gaul, after the subversion of Alexandria and
Carthage, and the whole of Numidia, by the Arabs, banished, reproached,
anathematized, pursued by clerical vengeance, and condemned as criminals by
Greek and Roman, the Donatists were watched by the Shepherd of Israel, preserved
by an unseen but almighty hand; and continued, like the bush amid the fires of
persecution, unconsumed, undismayed, the true, independent, spiritual churches
of Jesus Christ, composed of baptized believers. They were Baptists. With a
firmness and fortitude which no disasters could shake and no sufferings appall,
they won their title to that celestial nobility, that linked brotherhood, which,
wit God’s help, has kept the altar-fires burning through the centuries of blood
and gloom, through every trial and through every storm.

"The Donatists," says Mosheim, "enjoyed the sweets of freedom and tranquillity,
as long as the Vandals reigned in Africa; but the scene was greatly changed with
respect to them, when the empire of these barbarians was overturned in 534.
They, however, still remained in a separate body, and were bold enough to
attempt the multiplication of their sect. Gregory the Roman pointiff opposed
these efforts with great spirit and assiduity; and, as appears from his
epistles, tried various methods of depressing this faction." (Mosheim, Eccl.
Hist., cen. vi, ch.5).

Again have we found Baptists in Asia, and Africa and Europe, far up the stream
of time, amid the darkness of the sixth century; and again we will inquire where
these Donatist Baptists came from?


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 14: 13-THE 5TH CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford CHAPTER XII - Century Five

Numidians

Men are known by the cause they espouse, and principles they avow, rather than
the party with which they are classed, or appellations they receive. That
Lafayette was a Republican might in coming years be disputed, or denied, on the
grounds that he was a titled noble, chose to live under a monarchical form of
government, and never expatriated himself from one, so as to become a citizen of
the Republic which claims him as an advocate of its principles, a defender of
its rights, and an associate of its founders. By such special pleading, though
with far less truth and consistency, has it been disputed and denied that the
Numidians were Baptists. But let facts speak their testimony is decisive. A
minority of the church at Carthage, on the shores of the Mediterranean, called a
council to investigate the validity of the election and ordination of its
newly-made pastor or bishop. He had by management secured the majority vote, and
hurried on his ordination by the hands of a self-excluded pastor of a
neighboring church, who was not recognized by the surrounding churches or their
pastors. (I have condensed these facts, which will be found with a unanimity of
detail in Hawei’s Mosheim and Neander). These associate pastors (of Numisia)
were not invited, nor their counsel or approbation sought. The council decided
that the minority was the true church. It then proceeded to ordain Majorius,
elected by it as pastor or bishop. The neighboring Churches of Africa, in
sustaining this church and its pastor against the dominant party and its bishop
Celilanus, gave voice to a great principle, which involved the Christian world
in discussion and interminable contest. The principle was this: "That every
church which tolerated unworthy members in its bosom was itself polluted by the
communion with them. It thus ceased to deserve the predicated of purity and
holiness, and consequently ceased to be a true Christian Church, since a church
could not subsist without these predicates." (Neander, p. 203). This principle
was a protest against hereditary church membership. It proclaimed that none but
those who were born from above, had any right to the ordinances or admission
into the church. Neander, an apologist for infant baptism, says:

"It was still very far from being the case, especially in the Greek Church, that
infant baptism was generally introduced into practice. Among the Christians of
the East, infant baptism, though in theory acknowledged to be necessary, yet
entered so rarely and with so much difficulty into the existence of the church
during the first half of this period." (History, vol. ii, p. 319). [That is, the
first half of the fifth century.]

It is thus most evident from the investigations of the great pedobaptist
historian, whose researches took a wider and more thorough range than those of
any other man, living or dead, that infant baptism was not as yet introduced
when the division took place in the churches in Carthage and Numidia, and when
the majorities expressed and battled for theories which were in direct
antagonism even to their own practice. Even Augustine, who rose to eminence
during the conflicts in Africa, though a child of pious parents, was not
baptized in infancy. The question of infant baptism soon necessarily rose into
prominence. The principles of the Numidian pastors and churches, that none but
regenerate believers could be received into a true Christian Church, and that
those who received any others were not true churches, utterly condemned the
theory of infant membership, and condemned the practice which the majority soon
after introduced.

MAJORIUS, the first pastor of the Carthage Church, died soon after is
ordination, and Donatus was elected to fill his place. Schisms occurred in
almost every church in Africa, and extended into Asia and Europe.

Henceforth, those who declared for the Numidian pastors, and indorsed the
principles they expressed, were denominated Donatists. Their ground was that
Cecilanus had acted the traitor during the persecution of Diocletian, as had
many members of the Carthage Church: that these traitors were nevertheless
sustained by, and continued in the church, and had by management elected
Cecilanus pastor: that Felix, a notorious traitor, was selected to ordain the
new pastor, against the protest of the minority and without the council of
neighboring pastors: that the majority, in thus countenancing unworthy and
unregenerate members, and declaring that spirituality was not essential to
church-membership: in fact lost the predicates of a true church. They had
remained in the dominant church until they had seen in it the signs of apostasy.
Braving and enduring confiscation, imprisonment, banishment, and death; refusing
position, power, the smiles of great Constantine, and the terrors of imperial
indignation, they stood steadfast to those principles which were cherished by
thousands who ad long before broken all connection and communion with dominant
party. A council of foreign interested bishops was appointed by Constantine, the
emperor, to settle the dispute; but compromise was a word unknown to these
Donatists. A spiritual church was with them everything, nothing else was a
church. But these principles would have unchurched those very bishops who were
appointed to adjudicate. Of course the decision was against the Donatists.
Accordingly they were denounced as heretics, and persecuted by the Emperor, now
at the head of the so-called Catholic Church. As a consequence, all who held
these principles, now so manfully sustained by the Donatist, united with them,
and were known by their name; and thus were found in various countries separate
and independent churches, which baptized into their communion none gut those who
gave evidence of a change of heart and life, refused all union and communion
with the religious organizations around them, and rebaptized all who had been
immersed in any other society.

Such were their principles, that Osiander, a historian of great note, and an
apologist for infant baptism and a worldly church, said: "Our modern Anabaptists
were the same as the Donatist of old." And according to Long, an Episcopalian,
who wrote a history of the Donatists, " they did not only rebaptize children,
contrary to the Catholic Church." (History of the Donatists, Orchard, p. 60).

Then, the Donatists of Africa were Baptists. Did the denomination originate with
them?


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 15: 14-THE 3RD CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford CHAPTER XIII - Century Three -
Novations

Donatus was elected pastor of the Church at Carthage in the year 306. It was at
that great crisis in the conflict between Christianity and Paganism, when the
prestige and power of Constantine decided the religion of the Roman empire, and
crushed out all independence and spirituality from those societies which were
absorbed in the universal, or Catholic Church. But years before the rise of the
Donatists, a class of men existed who had separated themselves from the worldly
churches around them, and had long stood on the same ground now occupied by the
Donatists. Similar in their principles, they were soon merged in them, and
received their name; but before that movement they were known by other names,
borrowed from the localities where they withdrew from the dominant parties, or,
from some distinguished pastor among them.

We have found them before spread over Italy, Greece, and Asia. Among other
epithets they were called Novatians. Some of these people were in Carthage up to
the year 254, one Florentius Papianus, who having maintained a good confession
under the pains of torture, stood in high authority as a martyr, asserted that
"he was at a loss to say what he would not part with, sooner than enter into
terms of fellowship with Cyprian, then bishop of the Church at Carthage."

Neander continues:

"Conventicles of this party, where the holy supper was distributed, still
remained open, as Cyprian himself gives us to understand. Commodian, who wrote
his Christian admonitions at a somewhat later period, considered it needful to
combat this separatist tendency." (Neander, vol. I, p. 237). So that there were
those in Africa long before the Donatists, who held the same principles,
separated from the majority, and contended for independent and spiritual
churches. But these were linked in the more general separation, and were
consequently lost in the great movement which occurred in Italy in the early
part of the third century.

NOVATION was a presbyter at Rome. Of his learning and piety there was no
question. It has been said that he made a party to gratify his ambition, and
because he could not brook a rival. The facts are these: He protested against
the lax discipline of the church in the city of Rome. He objected to Cornelius,
its pastor; and, with a minority of that church, withdrew, and formed a new
church, of which he was elected bishop. Neander says:

"According to the accusations of passionate opponents, we must, indeed, suppose
that, in the outset, he was striving from motives of ambition after the
Episcopal dignity, and was thence induced to excite these troubles, and throw
himself at the head of a party. The accusations of his opponents should not be
suffered to embarrass us, for it is the usual custom with the logical polemics
to trace schisms to some outward unhallowed motive.

"The contest at Rome, however, had for its main-spring another individual
altogether, one Novatus, who belonged, originally, to the Separatists of
Africa."

Neander continues:

"He was the man whenever he might be at Carthage or at Rome to become the moving
spring of agitation, although he placed some one else at the head, and caused
everything to move under the name of the latter." (Neander, p. 248).

"The controversy with the Novatian party turned on two general points; one
relating to the principle of repentance; the other what constitutes the idea of
a true church. On the first point Novatian, doubtless, went to extremes. But
Novatus never advocated the absolute rejection of every one that violated his
baptismal vows.

"With regard to the second main point of controversy, the idea of the church,
Novatian maintained that one of the essential marks of a true church being
purity and holiness, every church which neglected the right exercise of church
discipline, tolerated in its bosom, or readmitted to its communion those guilty
of gross sins, ceased, by that very act, to be a true Christian Church. Novatian
laid at the basis of his theory the visible church as a pure and holy one."
(Neander, p. 248).

Such were the principles of the Separatists of Carthage and Rome in the first
great schism, church independence and a spiritual church- membership. At once
the scattered minorities, which had separated from the corrupt majorities,
extended fellowship to the independent Church of Novatian and Novatus. They were
expelled by the majority parties; but in almost every town and city they
flourished in independence, baptizing none but those who gave evidence of
renewed hearts, and rebaptizing all who came among them from other
organizations. That all should be called Novatians is easily accounted for. That
they should be slandered and vilified by the corruptors of Christianity, might
have been expected. But they spread through Europe, through Africa, and Asia. In
the mountains of Armenia they still lingered, till the name Donatists was lost
in Montenses and Paulicians. In the recesses of the Alps the Novatians (called
from the first Puritans) were persecuted as Paterines and Waldenses. Up through
the darkness we have traced their crimsoned footprints. We have found them here,
in the third century, contending for a pure and independent church, baptized on
a profession of faith, and persecuted as Anabaptists. The people called
Novatians were Baptists. They may justly be termed another milestone in our
upward march. It will again be our inquiry: Where did the Baptists come from?


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 16: 15-THE 2ND CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford CHAPTER XIV - Century Two -
Tertullianists

Tertullianus was born in Carthage, in the latter part of the second century. His
writings and his memory were fresh; and the churches which believed and
practiced as he did were numerous at the time of the rise of Novatian and
Novatus. They were scattered throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe. Of the
learning, the ability, and the piety of Tertullian, even the old Catholic
historians speak in the highest praise. his letters to the Emperor of Rome, and
his defenses of Christianity, are monuments of his learning and genius.

Like the Novatians and Donatists, Tertullian beheld the innovations and
corruptions which were fast changing the spiritual character of the churches
into semi-Jewish organizations. He pleaded and protested against the growing
tendency, and, at length, with a minority, withdrew from the Church at Carthage.
This minority church continued there, as similar churches did in other places,
till the rise of Novatus, and, finally, of the Donatists. They were frequently
called Tertullianists, but more generally Montanists. To learn their principles
we must go to the writings of this extraordinary man. Neander says:

"In the last years of the second century Tertullian appears as a zealous
opponent of infant baptism, a proof that the practice had not as yet come to be
regarded as an apostolic institution, for, otherwise, he would hardly have
ventured to express himself so strongly against it. We perceive, from his
arguments against infant baptism, that he introduces Matt..xix: 14. Tertullian
advises that, in consideration of the great importance of the transaction, and
of the preparation necessary to be made for it by the recipients, baptism should
rather be delayed than prematurely applied. ’Let them come,’ says Tertullian,
’while they are growing up; let them come while they are learning, while they
are being taught that to which they are coming; let them become Christians while
they are susceptible.’ " (Neander, vol. i, p. 312). The great Neander,
commenting on these words, remarks:

"Tertullian evidently means that children should be led to Christ by instructing
them in Christianity, but that they should not receive baptism until, after
being sufficiently instructed, they are led by personal conviction, and by their
own free choice, to seek for it with sincerity of heart." (Ut supra). With such
principles, where would Tertullian be classed now? As the corruptions which were
steadily undermining the standing of the churches increased, Tertullian denied
to them the claim of being true Christian Churches. He plead for an equality
among presbyters or elders against the growing arrogance of the metropolitan
pastors. He plead for the purity of the church, and the rejection of all
unregenerate persons. He joined the now numerous sect of the Montanists, and
finally proclaimed with them that the one immersion "can relate only to us who
know and call on the true God and Christ. The heretics have not this God and
Christ. These words, therefore, can not be applied to them, and as they do not
rightly administer the ordinance, their baptism is the same as none."

Such were the principles of the Tertullianists in the second century. Were they
not Baptists?

Tertullian is called a Montanist. Now these Montanists were principally found in
Phrygia. Of these people we give the bitter statements of an enemy who lent all
his talent and power to corrupt and carnalize Christianity. Eusebius says:

"There is a certain village in Mysia, (a region of Phrygia,) called Ardaban,
where first of all one Mantanus, a late convert in the time of Gratus, proconsul
of Asia, inflated with an immoderate desire of chieftainship, primacy, and being
deranged and bereft of his wits, became furious, and published strange
doctrines, and contrary to the customs of ancient tradition. There were few of
the Phrygians seduced, notwithstanding that bold and blind spirit instructed
them to revile every church under heaven. The faithful in Asia excommunicated,
rejected, and banished this heretical opinion out of their churches." (Eusebius,
1. s., chap. xiv). The first thing that strikes the reader of this paragraph is
that the churches, even in the times of Eusebius, were separate and independent,
that they all immersed is unquestioned. The introduction of Jewish and Pagan
ceremonies, at the time of the rise of Montanus, is recorded by every historian;
and Neander, with almost every other reliable antiquarian, acknowledges that a
half century after this period, "infant baptism was not introduced as an
apostolic practice." The conclusion which forces itself on the impartial mind
is, that all the churches, at the time to which Eusebius referred in the
foregoing extract, were nominally made up of baptized believers, which we now
call Baptist Churches. But they were gradually losing their spiritual elements
and gospel principles, and departing from the faith once delivered to the
saints. The abuse afterward heaped on Montanus and Tertullian by this court
bishop Eusebius, who was affected with Arianism, reveals the spirit which
actuated the Judaizing party. Neander says:

"Montanus belonged to the class of men in whom the first glow of conversion
begat and unconquerable opposition to the world. We should remember that he
lived in a country where the expectation that the church should finally enjoy on
the theater of its sufferings, the earth itself, previous to the end of all
things, a millennium of victorious dominion." (Neander, vol. i, p. 518). That
there may have been some extravagances in regard to spiritual operations and
influences, maintained by the Tertullianists, is altogether possible. That
Montanus and his associates have been shamefully misrepresented is certain.

"While it was the custom to derive the power conceded to the bishops from the
power to bind and loose, conferred on PETER, the Montanist Tertullian, on the
other hand, maintained that these words referred only to Peter personally, and
to those who, like Peter, were filled with the Holy Ghost indirectly. Montanism
set up a church of the Spirit, consisting of the spiritual homines,(spiritual
men,) in opposition to the prevailing outward view of that institution."

Tertullian says:

" ’The church, in the proper and pre-eminent sense, is the Holy Spirit in which
the three are one, and next the whole community of those who are agreed in this
faith.’ The Catholic point of view expresses itself in this, viz.: that the idea
of the church is put first, and by this very position of it is made outward.
Next the agency of the Holy Spirit first, and considers the church as that which
is only derived." (Neander, vol. i, p. 518).

There was the ground on which took place the first grand separation from a
carnalized community. As the fading light left the once irradiated churches
wrapped in the twilight, which soon afterward settled into deep night, the
Montanists parted from them, and proclaimed the true gospel principles,
conversion, faith, spirituality first, baptism and church- membership NEXT. The
dissenting minorities were excluded and traduced. But, unflinching and
uncompromising, they would not acknowledge those societies to be churches, and
therefore reimmersed all who came from them.

These men were Baptists, if immersing none but professedly converted men, and
organizing independent churches on the principles of the gospel, constitute men
Baptists. We found them in Phrygia and Armenia, in Italy and Africa, increasing
steadily till crushed out by imperial cruelty. We traced their footsteps among
the Pyrenees and Alps, where they lay concealed, and suddenly started into life
at the Reformation of Luther.

Thus through the darkness have we tracked them up to the dissent of the
Montanists in Asia, in the year 190, which was within a century of the apostles.
Here, in the rural districts of Asia, which had witnessed the toil and
sufferings of the apostles, and where their teachings were remembered by the
living, who had actually listened to their preaching, and where their writings
were recorded as the inspired voice of Go, here we find Baptists protesting
against the very first departures from the simplicity and spirituality of
apostolic churches. HERE WE FIND WHERE THE BAPTISTS CAME FROM.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 17: 16-THE 1ST CENTURY
========================================================================

THE ORIGIN OF THE BAPTISTS By S. H. Ford CHAPTER XV - Century One - The
Primitive Churches

We now make the bold, yet almost universally admitted assertion, that the
primitive churches were in every distinguishing characteristic Baptist churches.
We affirm that at the time of the departure of the great Tertullian, their
Baptistic features were as yet uneffaced; and that, though lost in the
development of the Man of Sin, they have preserved those lineaments intact in
the churches to this day. Where shall we seek the proof of this? Whom shall we
introduce as witnesses? Shall we let Baptists speak? Will their testimony be
received? No; with all their research, and learning, and candor, we shall
dismiss them as witnesses in the case. Let Pedobaptists speak; let Presbyterians
and Episcopalians testify; and if a jury of rational men can be found, who,
guided by their report, can give a verdict against our affirmation, we shall
acknowledge that there is no confidence to be placed in testimony. DID THEY
BAPTIZE INFANTS?

M. De la Roque:

"The primitive churches did not baptize infants, and the learned Grotius proves
it, in his annotations on the gospel." (In Stennett’s answer to Russen, p. 188).

Salmasius and Suicerus:

"In the two first centuries no one was baptized, except, being instructed in the
faith, and acquainted with the doctrines of Christ, he was able to profess
himself a believer; because of these words; ’He that believeth, and is baptized,
shall be saved.’ " (Epist. ad Tustum Pacium. Thesaur. Eccles. sub voce Evrazis,
tom. ii, p. 1136).

Curcelleus:

"The baptism of infants, in the two first centuries after Christ, was altogether
unknown, but in the third and fourth was allowed by some few. In the fifth and
following ages it was generally received. The custom of baptizing infants did
not begin before the third age after Christ was born in the former ages no trace
of it appears, and it was introduced without the command of Christ." (Epistle to
the Churches of Galatia, chap. iii, verse 27 (2.) Annotat. ad Rom., v. 14).

Venema:

"Tertullian has nowhere mentioned Pedobaptism among the traditions of the
church, nor even among the customs of the church that were publicly received,
and usually observed; nay, he plainly intimates that, in his time, it was yet a
doubtful affair. Nothing can be affirmed with certainty concerning the custom of
the church before Tertullian, seeing there is not anywhere, in more ancient
writers, that I know of, undoubted mention of infant baptism. Justin Martyr, in
his second apology, when describing baptism, mentions only that of adults. I
conclude, therefore, that Pedobaptism can not be certainly proved to have been
practiced before the times of Tertullian; and that there were persons in his age
who desired their infants might be baptized, especially when they were afraid of
their dying without baptism. Tertullian opposed, and by so doing he intimates
that Pedobaptism began to prevail. These are the things that may be affirmed
with apparent certainty concerning the antiquity of infant baptism, after the
times of the apostles; for more are maintained without solid foundation." (Hist.
Eccles., tom. iii, Secul. II, 108, 109).

Episcopius:

"Pedobaptism was not accounted a necessary rite till it was determined so to be
in the Milevitan Council, held in the year 418." (Institut. Theology, 1. iv, c.
xiv).

Bishop Taylor:

"There is no pretense of tradition, that the church in all ages did baptize all
the infants of Christian parents. It is more certain that they did not always do
it than that they did it in the first ages. St. Ambrose, St. Hierome, and St.
Austin, were born of Christian parents, and yet not baptized until the full age
of man or more." (Liberty of Prophesying, v, p. 84).

We might multiply evidence, every word of which is from those who, nevertheless,
practiced infant baptism. But we close with the testimony of the greatest
ecclesiastical historian that ever lived, i.e., Neander:

"Baptism was administered at first only to adults, as men were accustomed to
conceive baptism and faith as strictly connected. We have all reason for not
deriving infant baptism from apostolic institution, and the recognition of it
which followed somewhat later, as an apostolical tradition, serves to confirm
this hypothesis. Irenaeus is the first church teacher in whom we find any
allusion to infant baptism, and in his mode of expressing himself on the
subject, he leads us at the same time to recognize its connection with the
essence of the Christian consciousness; he testifies of the profound Christian
idea, out of which infant baptism arose, and which procured for it at length
universal recognition." (Neander’s History, vol. I, p. 311). Is there any
possibility of denying this testimony? Is it not convincing, overwhelming, that
the churches, previous to Tertullian, practiced but one baptism, and that it was
adult baptism? So far, then, they were Baptists.

IMMERSION

We pause not now to argue the question of immersion. We simply wish to ascertain
a fact. We ask historian, what did the churches of the first and second
centuries do when they performed that ordinance called baptism? Again we call on
the most renowned, the most distinguished Pedobaptists, to answer, men who
practiced and apologized for sprinkling, yet dared not, as scholars, garble or
misrepresent the truth of history.

Neander’s History of the Christian Religion:

"Baptism was originally administered by immersion; and many of the companions of
St. Paul allude to this form of its administration. The immersion is a symbol of
death, of being buried with Christ; the coming forth from the water is a symbol
of a resurrection with Christ; and both, taken together, represent the second
birth, the death of the old man, and a resurrection to a new life. An exception
was made only in the case of sick persons, which was necessary, and they
received baptism by sprinkling."

Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History, first century:

"The sacrament of baptism was administered in this century without the public
assemblies, in places appointed and prepared for the purpose, and was performed
by immersion of the whole body in the baptismal font.

"The sacrament of baptism was administered publicly twice every year, at the
festivals of Easter and Pentecost or Whitsuntide, either by the bishop or the
presbyters, in consequence of his authorization and appointment. The persons
that were to be baptized, after they had repeated the creed, confessed and
renounced their sins, and particularly the devil and his pompous allurements,
were immersed under water, and received into Christ’s kingdom by a solemn
invocation of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, according to the express command of
our blessed Lord. After baptism, they received the sign of the cross, were
anointed, and, by prayers and imposition of hands, were solemnly commended to
the mercy of God, and dedicated to his service; in consequence of which, they
received the milk and honey, which concluded the ceremony. The reasons of this
particular ritual coincide with what we have said in general concerning the
origin and causes of the multiplied ceremonies that crept, from time to time,
into the church."

History of the Church, by George Waddington, M. A.:

"The ceremony of immersion (the oldest form of baptism) was performed in the
name of the three persons of the Trinity; it was believed to be attended by the
remission of original sin, and the entire regeneration of the infant or convert,
by the passage from the land of bondage into the kingdom of salvation."

Cave’s Primitive Christianity:

"The action having proceeded thus far, the party to be baptized was wholly
immerged, or put under water, which was the almost constant and universal custom
of those times, whereby they did more notably and significantly express the
three great ends and effects of baptism. For, as in immersion there are, in a
manner, three several acts, the putting the person into water, his abiding there
for a little time, and his rising up again, so by these were represented
Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection; and, in conformity thereunto, our
dying unto sin, the destruction of its power, and our resurrection to a new
course of life. By the person’s being put into water was lively represented the
putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, and being washed from the filth
and pollution of them; by his abode under it, which was a kind of burial unto
water, his entering into a state of death or mortification, like as Christ
remained for some time under the state or power of death. Therefore, as many as
are baptized into Christ, are said to be ’baptized into his death, and to be
buried with him by baptism into death, that, the old man being crucified with
him, the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth he might not serve sin,
for that he that is dead is freed from sin,’ as the apostle clearly explains the
meaning of this rite. Then, by his immersion, or rising up out of the water, was
signified is entering upon a new course of life, differing from that which he
lived before, that, ’like as Christ was raised up from the dead to the glory of
the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.’ "

Bishop Taylor (Episcopalian):

"The custom of the ancient churches was not sprinkling, but immersion; in
pursuance of the sense of the word (baptize) in the commandment and example of
our blessed Savior. Now this was of so sacred account in their esteem that they
did not think it lawful to receive him into the clergy who had been only
sprinkled in his baptism, as we learn from the Epistle of Cornelius to Fabius of
Antioch."

Richard Baxter (Presbyterian):

"It is commonly confessed by us to the Anabaptists, as our commentators declare,
that in the apostles’ time, the baptized were dipped over head in the water, and
that this signified their profession, both of believing the burial and
resurrection of Christ; and of their own present renouncing the world and flesh,
or dying to sin and living to Christ, or rising again to newness of life, or
being buried and risen again with Christ, as the apostle expoundeth, (Col. iii,
and Rom. vi;) and though we have thought it lawful to disuse the manner of
dipping, and to use less water, yet we presume not to change the use and
signification of it."

Bossuet (Catholic Bishop):

"The baptism of John the Baptist, which served for a preparative to that of
Jesus Christ, was performed by plunging. When Jesus Christ came to john, to
raise baptism to a more marvelous efficacy in receiving it, the Scripture says,
that he went up out of the water of Jordan, (Matt. iii : 16; Mark i : 10). In
fine, we read not in the Scripture that baptism was otherwise administered; and
we are able to make it appear, by the acts of councils, and by the ancient
rituals, that for thirteen hundred years, baptism was thus administered
throughout the whole church, as far as was possible." (In Mr. Stennett against
Russen, p. 145-76).

Dr. Whitby (Episcopalian):

"It being so expressly declared here, (Rom. vi : 4, and Colos. ii : 12,) that we
are buried with Christ in baptism by being buried under water; and the argument
to oblige us to a conformity to his death, by dying to sin, being taken hence;
and this immersion being religiously observed by all Christians for thirteen
centuries, and approved by our church, and the change of it into sprinkling,
even without any allowance from the Author of this institution, or any license
from any council of the church, being that which the Romanist still urgeth to
justify his refusal of the cup to the laity." (Note on Rom. vi:4).

Dr. Wall (Episcopal):

"Their (the primitive Christians) general and ordinary way was to baptize by
immersion, or dipping the person, whether it were an infant, or grown man or
woman, into the water. This is so plain and clear by an infinite number of
passages, that as one can not but pity the weak endeavors of such Pedobaptists
as would maintain the negative of it, so also we ought to disown and show a
dislike of the profane scoffs which some people give to the English
Antipedobaptists, merely for their use of dipping. it was, in all probability,
the way by which our blessed Savior, and for certain was the most usual and
ordinary way by which the ancient Christians did receive their baptism. ’Tis a
great want of prudence, as well as of honesty, to refuse to grant to an
adversary what is certainly true, and may be proved so. It creates a jealousy of
all the rest that one says. As for sprinkling, I say, as Mr. Blake, at its first
coming up in England, ’Let them defend it who use it.’ They (who are inclined to
Presbyterianism) are hardly prevailed on to leave off that scandalous custom of
having their children, though never so well, baptized out of a basin, or
porringer, in a bed-chamber, hardly persuaded to bring them to church, much
further from having them dipped, though never so able to bear it." (History of
Infant Baptism, Part II, chap. ii, p. 462).

"In the case of sickness, weakness, haste, want of quantity of water, or such
like extraordinary occasions, baptism by affusion of water on the face, was by
the ancients, counted sufficient baptism. France seems to have been the first
country in the world where baptism, by affusion, was used ordinarily to persons
in health, and in the public way of administering it. There has been some
synods, in some dioceses of France, that had spoken of affusion, without
mentioning immersion at all, that being the common practice; but for an office
or liturgy of any church, this is, (Referring to Calvin’s "Form of administering
the Sacraments) I believe, the first in the world that prescribes affusion
absolutely; and for sprinkling, properly called, it seems it was, at 1645, just
then beginning, and used by very few. It must have begun in the disorderly times
after 1641." "But then came The Directory, which says: ’Baptism is to be
administered, not in private places, or privately, but in the place of public
worship, and in the face of the congregation,’ and so on. ’And not in the places
where fonts, in the time of Popery, were unfitly and superstitiously placed.’ So
they reformed the font into a basin. This learned assembly could not remember
that fonts to baptize in had been always used by the primitive Christians, long
before the beginning of Popery, and ever since churches were built; but that
sprinkling, for the common use of baptizing, was really introduced (in France
first, and then in the other Popish countries) in times of Popery; and that
accordingly, all those countries in which the usurped power of the Pope is, or
has formerly been, owned, have left off dipping of children in the font; but
that all other countries in the world, which had never regarded his authority,
do still use it; and that basins, except in case of necessity, were never used
by Papists, or any other Christians whatsoever, till by themselves." "What has
been said of this custom of pouring or sprinkling water in the ordinary us of
baptism, is to be understood only in reference to these western parts of Europe,
for it is used ordinarily nowhere else." (History of Infant Baptism, Part II,
chap. ix).

Mr. John Wesley:

"Mary Welsh, aged eleven days, was baptized according to the custom of the first
church, and the rule of the Church of England, by immersion. The child was ill
then, but recovered from that hour. (Extract of Mr. John Wesley’s Journal, from
his embarking for Georgia, page 10). ’Buried with him,’ alluded to the ancient
manner of baptizing by immersion." (Wesley’s Notes on Rom. vi: 4).

NEED WE ADD MORE? Is any other endeavor necessary to substantiate beyond a
question that the churches of the first and second centuries were Baptist
Churches, so far as baptism is concerned in subject and action? The testimony
that might be produced would fill a volume; but the foregoing is sufficient for
the candid. Certain it is as that the heavens are above us, that the primitive
churches immersed all who joined them, and that none were received but
professing believers. One other feature of Baptist Churches must be noticed.
THEIR CHURCH GOVERNMENT Were they Episcopal, Presbyterian, or monarchical? Again
let history speak. Mosheim says:

"The churches in those early times were entirely independent on of another: none
of them being subject to any foreign jurisdiction, but each governed by its own
rules and its own laws. For, though the churches founded by the apostles had
this particular difference shown them, that they were consulted in difficult and
doubtful cases, yet they had no judicial authority, no sort of supremacy over
the others, nor the least right to enact laws for them. Nothing, on the
contrary, is more evident than the perfect equality of these primitive churches.
Having witnessed, in the second century, that the custom of holding councils
commenced in Greece, whence it soon spread through the other
provinces."(Mosheim, first century, chap. 10, sec. xiv). This evidence is
conclusive that neither Episcopacy nor Presbyterianism was known in the first
churches; their government was that now existing among Baptists. but further,
Gibbon, the classic historian of Rome, says:

"Such was the mild and equal constitution by which the Christians were governed
for more than a hundred years after the death of the apostles. Every society
formed within itself a separate and independent republic, and although the most
distant of those little states maintained a mutual, as well as friendly
intercourse of letters and deputations, the Christian world was not yet
connected by any supreme authority or legislative assembly. Toward the end of
the second century the churches of Greece and Asia adopted the useful
institutions of provincial Synods, and they are justly supposed to have borrowed
the model of a representative council from the celebrated examples of their own
country, the Amphictyons, the Achean league, and the assemblies of the Ionian
cities."

We here pause again and review our course. We found, in the early part of the
third century, ere one hundred years had transpired from the death of the
apostles, Tertullian and the Montanists breaking away from the dominant parties
in the churches, on the ground of the innovations, the formalities, and the
corruptions, which had almost quenched their life and light. We found that these
Tertullianists were Baptists, and that from the churches planted by them
descended those persecuted and slandered in every age as Anabaptists. We have
now found, by the light of impartial history, recorded by Pedobaptist scholars,
that previous to Tertullian and the Montanist schism, that is, previous to the
third century, none but adults were baptized. The action of baptism was
immersion, universally; and each church was an independent little republic.

We have now found, by the glimmering and oftshaded lamp of history, relumed by
Pedobaptist scholars, that, previous to Tertullian and the Montenses schism:

I. None but believers were baptized.

II. Baptism was immersion.

III. Each Church was an independent little republic, knowing nothing of
ecclesiastical conferences, synods, general assemblies, or authoritative
councils.

IV. Consequently they were all Baptist Churches then.

For, if the baptism of none but professedly converted believers, and that by
immersion, with independent and democratic church government, constitute Baptist
churches, then the primitive churches were Baptist Churches.

Where, then, did the Baptists come from? When the learned Mosheim, after tracing
the origin of every sect, came to the Anabaptists, or Mennonites, that laborious
investigator paused and said:

"The true origin of this sect is hidden in the depths of antiquity; and it is of
consequence extremely difficult to be ascertained."

Never was truer statement penned. All up the stream of ecclesiastical history
had tracked them, up to its main spring he had gone, and found them there. Amid
the scenes of apostolic labor, in the purest ages of the church, he traced their
existence, but not their origin. Further up into the light of inspired history
he would not pass. Their origin was hidden in those remote depths of antiquity.
It could be found in the Epistles and Acts of the Apostles, and in the testimony
of Jesus. But here he would not seek for their origin, and so he proclaimed that
it was lost. it is not hid in those remote depths. It stands forth in unadorned
simplicity on the shores of the Jordan, amid the scenes of the Pentecost, and
the cities of Greece, while the New Testament flings a flood of historic light
over the whole subject. ere, then, is our ancestry, of whom we are proud, the
origin of our denomination, for which we are grateful. On the shores of the
Jordan, thronged with the wondering citizens of Jerusalem, and the gathering
multitudes of Judea, the harbinger of the Messiah announced the setting up of
the kingdom of Jesus, the institution of the church of Christ. The last of the
prophets, and the first of the heralds of the gospel, like the star of morning,
shining clear and radiant from the bright sky, and then fading away in the
cloudless splendor of the orb of day, in the beginning of the gospel of Jesus
Christ came john, baptizing in the wilderness. That was the beginning.

Amid the multitudes stood Jesus. Behold the Lamb of God! exclaimed the
enraptured herald of the kingdom. And then in those waters, consecrated by a
thousand sacred associations, Jesus was baptized, while from the parting heavens
came the approving voice of the Father, and the anointing symbol of the Holy
Ghost. thus it was, and there it was, that our denomination had its origin. Nor
can learning nor ingenuity fix another spot, nor another period.

Baptists! the flag that floats over you is that of Jesus only; the principles
that govern you have the authority of Jesus only; the ordinances which
distinguish you have the example of Jesus only; and the founder of your churches
is Jesus only. Let deep devotion be yours. Let earnest zeal be yours. Let the
spirit that animated to deeds of valor and endurance our noble and martyred
ancestors be yours. Let us move in harmony, and fight on manfully and wear the
armor constantly, and soon the songs of the angels will announce the advent of
the era when "the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our God
and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever." THE END


========================================================================
Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/ford-the-origin-of-the-baptists-1860v9/
========================================================================