The Baptist in history

THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY

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THE

BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

FIVE LECTURES

BY

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REV. H- Cr JVIOSHER, A. JVL,

PASTOR FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH,

Albert Lea, Minn.

1900.

Simonson & Whitcomb, Printers,
Albert Lea, Minn.

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TWO COPIES MECElVE

Library of Congr««% J

Office of tka «£)T J\V

APR 8 - 1900 * •
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60064

COPYRIGHT, 1900,

BY

R. C. MOSHER.

SECOND COPY,

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CONTENTS.

LECTURE I.— The Distinctive Principle of page.

Baptists, 8

Importance of Foundation Principles, . . 9

Necessity of Obedience, . . . . . 18

Needless Divisions Wrong. .... 14

How Baptists are Regarded, .... 16

Baptist Growth and Solidity, ... IT

The Distinctive Principle. .... 19

The New Testament as Authority. . . 20

Reason of Baptist Unity, ..... 21

Proofs of Baptist Position, .... 21

Historical Genesis of Other Churches, . . 27

Illustrations in Germany, Africa and Cuba, . 29

Conclusion, . ...... 31

LECTURE II— The History of Baptists, 36

Different from Other Church History, . . 36

An Apostolic Succession, . . . . 37

Misnamed Church History. .... 39

Ancient Origin of Baptists, .... 41

Their Aims Compared with Others, ... 42

Misrepresentations of Baptist History. . . 44

The Munster Kingdom, ..... 45

The Peasants' War./ 47

The Historical Line. — Apostolic Churches, . 49

CONTENTS.

Baptist ic Movements.

St. Patrick and His Work,

Patrick Not a Baptist,

Welsh Claims, .

The Petrobrusians,

The Waldenses,

The Anabaptists,

Anabaptists Not Immersionists,

Anabaptists the Real Reformers,

English Baptists,

American " ...

Present Baptist Strength,

51

52
55
57
58
59
61
63
65
65
67
68

LECTURE III.— The Sufferings of Baptists, 72

Novatian and Donatist Sufferings, ... 73

Persecutions Not for Immersion, . . 74

Immersion the Universal Practice, ... 75

Immersion in the Westminster Assembly, . 78

John Wesley an Immersionist, .... 79

Infant Baptism the Cause of Persecution, . 81

Infant Baptism Itself Persecution, ... 85

Baptists Never Persecuting, .... 86

Number of Christians Murdered, ... 88

Awful Sufferings of Baptists, ... 89

Decree of the Inquisition, ... 94

Numbers Put to Death, .... 96

Reasons for Persecutions. .... 98

Complicity of the Reformers, . . . 100

Infamous Character of Procedure, . . 101

Sufferings in England, ..... 102

" America, 104

CONTENTS. O

Sufferings in Massachusetts, .... 105

" Virginia, Etc., .... 107

Wtiy they Endured Such Things, . 109

LECTUEE IV.— Baptist Influence on Civil

Government, 115

Influence of Church on Government, . . 116

Leadership of Baptists in Religions Liberty, . 119

Testimonies of Writers, 120

Baptist Confessions of Faith, .... 122

Treatises on Religious Liberty, . . . 124

The First Baptist Government, ... 126

The First Baptist College, .... 127

Liberty versus Toleration, .... 129

Claims of Others as to Leadership, . . 130

Influence in Holland, ..... 136

" England, ..... 137

of Rhode Island, .... 138

Baptist Efforts in New England, . . . 140

Severe New England Laws, .... 141

Baptist Efforts in Virginia, .... 143

Baptists in the Revolution, .... 146

Adoption of the Constitution. — John Leland, 147

The First Amendment, ... . . . 148

Influence through Thomas Jefferson, . . 149

Testimony of Mrs. Madison, .... 150

Leadership in present Struggle, . . . 152

LECTURE V.— Baptist Influence on The

Spiritual Life of Other Religious Bodies, 157

Contrast of Past and Present, .... 157

Causes of Change, ..... 161

4 CONTENTS.

Anabaptists and the Reformation. . . . 16)>

Failure of the Reformation, .... 165

Progress Towards Spiritual Church Membership, 168

Growing Supremacy of the Bible, . . . 171

Peter's Primacy 172

Defense of Infant Baptism, .... 173

Bible Versions and Translations. . . . 171

Increasing Number of Immersions. . . . 176

Decline of Infant Baptism, . . . 177

Admissions of Pedobaptists, .... 177

Increase of Adult Baptisms, .... 181

Decrease of Infant Baptisms, .... 183

Presbyterian Figures. ..... 181

Congregational " ...... 186

Methodist ;< . . 188

Episcopal i; 189

Reformed Church Figures, .... 189

Summary of Figures, . . . . . 190

Conclusion, ....... 191

Table of Membership and Baptisms. . Appendix.

INTRODUCTORY,

The origin of these lectures was as follows: It was
years ago, while reading Baptist history, that there
came to me, like a revelation, a vivid sense of the grand
achievements of our spiritual ancestors and the vital
necessity to Christendom at large of the preservation
and enforcement of the principles which they held and
which we hold. It seemed to me also that there ought
to be more of a systematic teaching of these principles
and a setting forth of our history so as to show what
reason we have for self respect in view of the past and
for steadfast loyalty in view of the future. Such
study of our history as has been possible since that
time has only confirmed my former convictions. In
other churches there is no hesitancy in teaching de-
nominational loyalty, but among us it is mostly left to
the self evidence of the truths we teach, and it is no
exaggeration to say that scarcely one in a hundred of
our church members realizes either the importance of
our principles, our present power, or our past attain-
ments. I resolved at the time referred to that, if I
should ever be pastor of another church, that church
should have a course of addresses along these lines.
Twice was this course of lectures attempted, but a
period of physical prostration prevented their com-

6 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

pletion. The third attempt was successful to the extent
which may be shown in the following pages. My effort
has been not to present a full view of Baptist history,
but only to gather up and present facts in such a way
that all Baptists "to whom these presents may come"
may feel that they may stand a little straighter because
of a better self respect as Baptists, and must be a little
more loyal to those principles which thus far have been
the preservation of Christianity from corruption and
failure, and which shall hereafter lead to a purer
church, a mightier spiritual force, and a speedier com-
ing of the kingdom of our Lord Christ.

These lectures make no large claim to originality,
except in the plan and manner of presentation, and
there is not much in them which could not be found,
probably, in some other book; but inasmuch as few
have opportunity to examine many books, this summary
may be useful. It should be said also, that although
much has been published of late upon Baptist princi-
ples and history, nothing has yet appeared which pre-
sents the subject in the same way or with the same
purpose as these lectures. They are now published as
they were delivered, except that in a few parts they
have been made more full than was possible in the time
allotted to a public address. The interest shown by
those who have listened to them has encouraged the
hope that they may be more widely useful by their
publication. To our host of Baptist young people
especially they are now presented.

R. C. M.

"Ye call me, Master, and, Lord: and ye say well;
for so I am."

"If ye know these things, Messed are ye if ye do
them."

"I testify unto every man that heareth the words
of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall
add unto them, God shall add unto him the plagues
that are ivritten in this book; and if any man
shall take away from the words of the book of this
prophecy, God shall take away his part from the
tree of life, and out of the holy city, which are
written in this book"

I.

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE OF BAPTISTS

In these addresses we shall attempt an answer to
the following questions: — First, What is a Baptist?
then, Where in the records of the past do we find Bap-
tists? next, What has it cost them to be Baptists? and
finally, What did they do for civil liberty? and what
have they done for the religious life of other bodies?
The full answer to these questions would fill volumes;
nay, the full answer can never be written, for the
greater part of the record of their faith, their heroism,
their endurance, their triumphs, and their weaknesses
and failures, has perished from the earth; but we hope
so much of an answer may be given as will inspire us
to a loftier faith and a stronger fidelity to the truth of
the Gospel, and to greater emulation of the heroism of
the past.

Let it be understood throughout the whole of this
discussion, that while we speak only of Baptists, there
are and have been other and smaller bodies which have
shared in our beliefs and principles, and sometimes
suffered for them, although we cannot stop in our dis-

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE. 9

cussion to give proper credit to each by name. There
are and have been many who, though not known by that
name, should nevertheless be included under the broad
definition of a Baptist. As far, therefore, as these other
bodies have been in accord with us in the maintenance
of these principles, what shall be said applies also to
them.

There are some questions which, apparently, do
not seem to most people to be of much practical
moment in christian life, and yet they are really funda-
mental to it. They are like the substructures of a
mighty bridge, down out of sight and not well under-
stood, and indeed, scarcely thought of by the thousands
who pass over it, and yet upon them the whole struc-
ture rests, and without them it would not stand at all.
You all know that in the erection of any great building
the utmost pains is taken to secure a good foundation.
A few years ago, in the capital city of this state, a great
twelve story printing house was built. The land on
which it stands was originally a swampy place, called
in the West a "slew" (slough), but had been filled
in and so changed that the city dwellers of
my day would never have guessed what was
the original appearance of the ground. But in
digging out for the basement, it was found that
the foundation must be begun in the soft clay mud of
what had been a swamp, and to those who watched the
progress of affairs, it seemed impossible that any con-
siderable building could ever stand on such a basis.
However, the contractor went on with his work. He

10 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

dug out the mud to the depth of several feet, then he
filled in the space with long piles driven down almost
their whole length, putting them close together; then
he made a mixture of concrete and filled the whole
space with it to the top of the piles, so that when it set
and became hard it would be almost like one great,
solid stone. Still further, upon this concrete he placed
great, broad stones, much broader than the thickness of
the walls, upon these another layer of stones not quite
so broad, and upon these still another, and then, and
not until then, did he begin to build the walls of the
structure. Many thousands of dollars spent before he
began to build, but did the owners complain? Not at
all; they knew the value of a good foundation.

Just so in spiritual building, and in building of
churches as well as in building of individual character.
The foundation principles are of the utmost importance,
and to have them right should be the very first object,
though with most individuals it is, in point of fact, the
last. Not one in twenty (and perhaps it would be safe
to say not one in fifty) of the members of churches can
tell what is the real fundamental principle on which
their own church is built, because not one in twenty
makes any careful study of principles or comparison of
methods, and so decides for himself before uniting with
a church. They come in from all sorts of reasons;
because their parents belong to that church; because
they were brought up in that way; because their friends
belong to that church or intend to join it; because that
church has the best house of worship or the most social
advantages; or because they like the minister, or from

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE. 11

some other such reason, but very seldom because they
have read their bibles and examined the principles of
church life and find that in that church the two best
agree.

There are certain underlying principles which give
tone and color and distinctive character to every reli-
gious body, and these different principles will work
themselves out into different styles of activity and ex-
perience with unerring certainty. Each denomination
of christians has its characteristic type which differs
from all the rest, and this type is what it is because the
fundamental principles of church life and organization
are what they are. A Baptist christian is quite differ-
ent from a Methodist christian, and the Methodist is
different from the Presbyterian; a Disciple christian
differs from either of them, and again a real christian
in the Episcopal or Lutheran church differs from them
all. A man who has had forty years experience and
training in the Methodist ministry is a very different
man in his thought, his bearing and his general air, his
style of prayer and his religious experience, from a
man who has had a like period of training and service
in the Baptist ministry. One who has been familiar
with the different denominations can tell without
inquiry and with very considerable certainty, to what
denomination a minister belongs, upon hearing him
preach. Each of these, of course, thinks that his own
particular type is the highest, but that cannot possibly
be true. Some must be better and some worse.

But, moreover, the fundamental principles of church
life are a matter of great importance, not only to the

_^_^__

12 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

church itself, but to society at large, for society and gov-
ernment are very profoundly influenced by the churches.
Think, for instance, of the vast difference between
social life in Roman Catholic and in Protestant coun-
tries, which is familiar to us all. But think further
about this. If it were possible to have one nation filled
with Methodist churches and admitting no other,
another nation likewise filled with Baptist churches,
another with Presbyterian, and another with Episcopal
and still another with Roman Catholic, not only would
these different nations, in the course of a few genera-
tions, develop different types of Christianity, but also
of social life and of government, where would be seen all
the gradations from the absolute freedom and equality
of a model republic in the Baptist nation to the despot-
ism of an irresponsible monarchy, with its caste dis-
tinctions and divisions into privileged classes and tax
paying classes in the Roman Catholic nation. We
shall see by and by how profoundly the ruling idea of
a church has influenced civil government.

There is, therefore, a better and a worse, a right
and a wrong starting point, and it becomes a matter of
the utmost importance that our foundation principles
be right. It is, moreover, my profound conviction that
the foundation principles of our Baptist churches are the
right ones, and the more I study them the more I think
so; and it is still further my conviction, just as pro-
found, that we have a sacred obligation laid upon us to
defend them and to teach them. If we believe thai we
hold truth which others do not, we are certainly bound to
give it to them. Away then, with this false modesty

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE. IB

which lets others go on their way in error because we
might be thought sectarian if we told them the truth.
Why should so many of us be apparently anxious to
persuade others of our own insignificance? And why
should a Baptist be the only one among all the religious
bodies

"Who scarcely dare, with a malicious frown,
Assert the nose upon his face his own"?

But let us note, first, that New Testament religion
is not a matter of feeling, but of principle; a question
of loyal obedience to Christ. We are not to judge of
the "amount of religion" or of the piety we may pos-
sess by the frequency of states of blissful and ecstatic
feeling, but by the readiness with which we obey the
commands of Christ and the completeness of our sub-
mission to His will. Christ never said "Ye are my
friends if ye feel ffood," but "if ye do whatsoever I
command you." Love and sentiment and gush are
not piety, although there is no true piety without love.
Obedience to Christ is piety, and an ounce of obedience
is worth more than a ton of gush.

Let us note again, the inconsistency of professed
love and persistent disobedience. Jesus says, (Revised
Version) "If ye love me ye will keep my command-
ments." That was a hard question Jesus once asked
of the Jews, "And why call ye me Lord, Lord, and do
not the things that I say ?" To this question they gave
him no answer. Indeed, how could they give an
answer? There was nothing they could say; not a
word. Call him master and yet refuse to obey him!
Call him Lord and yet deny his authority ! The absurd-

14 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

ity and the sin of it is too plain to admit of any-
possible defence.

And let us note again, that a needless division
among christians is a misfortune and a sin; and let us
join heartily with those who cry out for christian
unity, although we may differ radically from most of
them as to the means by which it is to be secured.
Jesus prayed for his disciples that they all might be
one. Four times is that thought repeated in that one
prayer in the seventeenth chapter of John, and in spite
of all that may be said as to its advantages, I believe
that the present division of christians into discordant
and antagonistic sects is something which our Lord
never contemplated and wTith which he is not well
pleased. It is the product of insufficient intelligence
and incomplete consecration. It was not so in the
beginning and will not be so in the end, for we can not
believe his prayer will go unanswered. There are not
five New Jerusalems shown us in the Apocalypse nor
forty, neither are there a dozen brides of the Lamb, and
all at variance with each other, but only one. "That
they all may be one, even as we are one" is the prayer
of Jesus. That we may be one with each other, even
as Jesus was one with the Father and as we claim to be
one with Him; this is the ideal and this ideal is to be.

Whose sin is it then, this discord and division, and
whence did it come? It did not come from those who
follow the divinely appointed way and it will only
cease when christians everywhere return to that way.
But if needless division is a sin, then it is evident that
a body of christians ought not to separate itself, or

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE. 15

remain separated, from others except for very serious
cause. There must be some vital thing which they
feel they must have, and yet cannot find in other bodies
or churches, A denomination which has no distinctive
principle— nothing which can not be found also to a
good degree in some other denomination, has no suffi-
cient reason for its existence. It is needlessly multi-
plying divisions. It should disband, and so make one
less among conflicting names, and one less occasion of
sneers to the scoffer. But we must take our own
medicine. Can we show such a distinctive principle?
Would any vital thing be lost if we should cease to
exist? If not, then let us disband.

Now how many know whether anything wTould be
lost or not? Probably our people are better posted as
to the reasons for their beliefs and practices than those
of many other churches, because we have always met so
much scorn and opposition as to compel examination,
yet among Baptists there is still a lamentable ignorance
on these matters. Every Baptist pastor is obliged to
meet it and the questions asked by his own members
show that many vital things are not well understood,
and this is much more true as to our history than as to
our beliefs. Baptists themselves do not understand as
they should their own position, their own strength,
their own history, or the vital importance of their prin-
ciples to the world at large. To the great majority of
us an examination into these things would bring a most
surprising revelation. We have never properly appre-
ciated ourselves, and as to the opinion held of us by
others — wre know very well what that is. We know

16 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

what others think of us. There never was a people
more misunderstood and misrepresented, and it is high
time we ceased to be so timid about declaring our
principles, and defending them.

In the minds of very many (and otherwise intelli-
gent people too) the Baptists are a stubborn, narrow-
minded set of people, exclusive, self-righteous and
bigoted, who are forever harping about immersion and
making it a hobby of more importance than anything
else; who refuse to "commune1' with anybody but
themselves because they do not recognize anybody else
as christians, or at least, as being as good as them-
selves, and so forth. It is all sufficiently familiar to
us; we have heard it until we could almost say it back-
wards. It avails nothing to say in reply that Baptist
requirements for the "communion" are exactly the
same as those of every other church, namely, a christian
experience, an orderly walk, and baptism, and that
their baptism is only that which the best scholarship
of the world declares to be the baptism of the New
Testament, or that no one is more ready than they to
fellowship christians of every name and no name in
every labor of love, in prayer, in cordial sympathy, and
even at the table of our Lord when his own require-
ments concerning it have been met. But it is not
worth while to spend time in pointing out the utter
untruthfulness of this conception. Those who believe
these things are largely those who wish to believe
them or those who have had no practical acquaintance
with us. I must say, however, that many years' experi-
ence has convinced me that there is to be found among

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE. 17

Baptists fully as much of broad minded liberality and
christian charity as among any christians on earth,
and much more than among those who are foremost in
denouncing our "bigotry" and "narrow-mindedness."
However, there must be something to these Baptist
people, for see how they prosper and how they are
coming up in every way in spite of the most strenuous
opposition. They are more rigid in their discipline
than other churches; it is a harder matter to get into
their churches than into almost any other, and they
refuse many whom others accept. They are unpopular
everywhere and always have been, yet what a sweeping
growth they have made and what a power they have
attained to, and their growth, moreover, has always
been just in proportion to the strictness with which
they have held to their peculiar principles. They have
grown in this country, from a half dozen poor, op-
pressed, outcast, and despised, to number more than
four millions, and they have wealth and culture and
learning of the highest rank. They have now (in the
year 1899) more than forty-six million dollars invested
in schools of learning, of which they have a hundred
and seventy-nine, a larger amount than has any other
denomination in America. In these schools are more
than thirty-five thousand students. Their Foreign
Mission Society expends more than six hundred thou-
sand dollars annually and reports more converts from
among the heathen than any other American missionary
society. Taking the Baptists, Congregationalists, Meth-
odists and Presbyterians together for eight years past,
the Baptists have, with less than one-fifth the total

18 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

expenditure of money, sustained nearly one-third the
entire working force and have received more than one-
third of all the converts. Their Home Mission Society
expends more than half a million dollars annually. Their
Publication Society has the finest and most complete
printing establishment of any religious body in America,
if not in the world, and one of the most complete of any
kind, and also carries on extensive missionary operations
in connection with its printing business; or rather, its
printing business is the basis of its missionary operations,
as its wrhole work is missionary. As to men, they can
name a long list of those who take first place as schol-
ars, educators, preachers, governors, statesmen, etc.,
among whom are many who are known the world over.
There is among them no central authority as in other
churches, whose influence might hold them together,
but their organization is apparently a "rope of sand",
and yet they are as harmonious a body as any. Divi-
sions over creed questions and heresy trials that rack
other denominations do not seem to trouble them at all.
A "heretic", whether in high place or low, just seems to
drop out by some natural process of elimination, and
that is the last of him, while the church goes on just the
same as before. Occasionally an individual does come
to the front, with a great flourish of trumpets, declar-
ing that the whole denomination is honey-combed by
unbelief in the old doctrines; that the progressive spir-
its of to-day have altogether abandoned the standing
ground of the fathers, and that the rising generation of
ministers is full of unrest a\id dissatisfaction, unwilling
any longer to have their minds fettered by old creeds

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE. 19

and longing for "a larger liberty"; that it only needs
a leader to precipitate a universal stampede, and that
the whole denominational edifice is about to collapse.
And then this enterprising individual leads off, but
there is no stampede; this uneasy brick comes out of the
wall, but when, instead of the deafening crash of the
whole falling denominational edifice, there is heard only
a gentle plurik, it is discovered that only a single brick
has fallen and as we look to see the hole it came from,
lo, there is no hole there. Its place is already filled and
the wall remains perfectly solid. And when the good
brother himself thinks he heard something drop and
looks around to see what it was, he finds "it's him."
Now there must be some reason for all this, and if they
have been made thus solid and vigorous because of their
foundation principles, then let us study them.

Well, our distinctive principle is the explanation
of it, though the declaration of that principle will create
surprise in the minds of very many and call forth con-
tradiction in the minds of not a few. It is simply this:
THE ABSOLUTE SUPREMACY OF CHRIST IN
HIS CHURCH.

Notice that we speak of a distinctive principle, not
principles, for we have but one. All other things that
may seem distinctive come directly from that. We
insist that Jesus the Christ shall be king in his own
kingdom, Lord in his own domain, with no rival claim-
ant either in church authority, traditional practice, or
individual opinion, to dispute his sway, nullify his
commands, or change the things which He has ap-
pointed. "Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it" and

20 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

do it without question or delay. "Ye call me Master,
and, Lord; and ye say well; for so I am." We deny
to the church any authority whatever to legislate in
matters pertaining to the kingdom. Her place is to
follow and obey. In this position we stand alone; it is,
therefore, our distinctive principle. This may seem like
a sweeping statement and like a condemnation of every-
body but ourselves; but the question is not whether
it is sweeping or whether it is condemning, but whether
it is true.

Furthermore, we regard the New Testament as a
perfect and complete revelation of the will of Christ in
all necessary things and to be, therefore, implicitly
obeyed. If we may deviate in one point we may in
another, and the principle of obedience to Christ is lost.
It is the worst possible training for a convert, to teach
him in reference to baptism or anything else, that "it
makes no difference" whether he does what he thinks
Jesus wants him to do or some other thing. We have seen
njany a convert ruined in the beginning by some older
person telling him that "it makes no difference." It
cuts the nerve of his christian life and often in the end
destroys it altogether; for human depravity is such
tint he will be all too apt to follow out for himself the
logic of this teaching. He will say, consciously or un-
consciously, "If I am not bound to obey Christ in this
matter why should I be in that, and in that, and again
in that?" until he is really held to nothing and "his own
sweet will" becomes his only rule of action. We are
no more bound to obedience in repentance and faith
than we are in baptism and church order, and if I can

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE. 21

break one of the Lord's commands with impunity, I can
safely break them all.

Again, we believe that the Word of God was written
for men, for all men, and not for ministers and priests
only, and that every man, woman and child is at full
liberty and under solemn obligation to read it and to
interpret it, each for himself. The word of God is plain
enough, so that any one who really wants to know what
the will of God is can find out with but little trouble,
and it will be no excuse for misbelief or misconduct that
we have followed the interpretation of another, no matter
how great a personage that other may have been.

It is sometimes said that Doctor So and So teaches
this or that, and "he is a great deal smarter than you or
I," and therefore must know what it is right to do; but
our reply to that should be that there is such a thing as
being too "smart," and that when one gets to the point
where he knows more about what is commanded than
Jesus himself, who gave the command, he is altogether
too "smart" for us to follow with safety.

And here, by the way, we have come upon the reason
of our so substantia] unity. We are united because we
all believe the same thing, and believe it too, not
because some one told us we must, but because we
found it in the Word of God and in our heart of hearts
accept it as the truth of God; and this is the only
substantial basis of christian unity. "Can two walk
together except they be agreed?" or can you fully sepa-
rate them if they are agreed? Close proximity is not
unity. The intimate association of people of discordant
views and conflicting wishes is not harmony, as is

22 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

shown sometimes in political conventions; neither can
distance separate those whose hopes, whose fears, whose
aims are one, whose convictions of truth are identical,
and the ground of whose convictions is the sure word of
God. Put the breadth of the earth between them and
they are still in harmony with each other and no force
can really separate them. That is the reason that this
"rope of sand" has proven so strong. It is the strong-
est possible bond. And this, too, is the only possible
basis of christian unity. Let churches and christians
everywhere throw away their human traditions, rules
and creeds, and come at once to the inspired Word of
God, and the present discord and division will presently
cease.

We have, therefore, no confession, discipline, cate-
chism or creed, save a simple statement of what we
believe the Bible to teach on some main points, and
that was first published for the information of outsiders
and to save ourselves from being misunderstood, and is
still used as a convenient summary of our belief, but
not as a church standard to which all must subscribe.
To us, councils and synods and church fathers were
only human and uninspired, and we base no article of
our faith upon their findings. We are just as infallible
as they, and indeed more so, for we have much light
which they did not have and a better knowledge of the
Word of God than was possible to them. The opinions
of the Very Reverend Theophrastus Nonesuch, D. D.,
LL. D., have for us no authority and his threats no
terror. "The teachings of the church" is an expression
we never use, a sentiment we repudiate, and "the

THE DISTINCTIVE PKINCIPLE. 23

authority of Doctor So and So'1 is to us an absurdity.
"To the Law and to the Testimony; if they speak not
according to this word it is because there is no light in
them."

We stand at one end of a logical line, the Koman
Catholic church is at the other, and all other churches
are between the two, although some are nearer to us
and some are nearer to them. We regard the Bible as
supreme authority and admit only what it requires; they
regard the church as supreme authority and admit what
they please. Either position is consistent with itself,
although one or the other must be wrong. But all other
churches are between the two, and in a position conse-
quently, which is neither logical nor consistent. More-
over, they differ much among themselves. Some have
more Bible and less church and some have more church
and less Bible, but among these there can never be
agreement, for who shall arise with authority to declare
just what proportion of each makes the right mixture?
The attempts at christian union which have been made
within the last few years are quite instructive on this
point. To be consistent, one must go to one extreme
or the other. As a Catholic priest once said to one of
our pastors, "In the end they must either come over to
us or else go over to you."

But now, this is a bold stand to take, and we may
properly be expected to furnish proofs. We think that
a candid investigation into facts will reveal sufficient
proofs, and we cordially invite the fullest investigation.
Let us indicate some of the proofs.

We mention first, the organization of our churches,

24 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

their ordinances, doctrines and life. They will be found
to be patterned exclusively after the New Testament
model. We have no doctrines or ordinances that are
not clearly taught in the New Testament, and we follow7
those ordinances and doctrines without expanding,
curtailing or changing them. We do not believe in
"developing" a practice until it becomes just the oppo-
site of what it was intended to be, as has been the case
with both the ordinances; the one having been "devel-
oped" (to borrow a word from Dean Stanley) from a
simple memorial by the believer of the sufferings of his
Lord into a mysterious and miraculous sacrament, by
partaking of which one may be helped to become a
believer, or have some mysterious spiritual grace min-
istered to his soul; and the other, from a symbol of the
death of the believer with Christ and his resurrection
to a newness of life, the sign of a regeneration
already accomplished, to a rite by which the infant,
incapable of faith or regenerating grace, becomes "re-
generate and grafted into the body of Christ's church"
as is declared in the Episcopal formula for the baptism
of infants. It is our constant challenge thrown out to
all the world to show us anything in our practice or
belief which does not come directly from the New
Testament; or to show us anything in the New Testa-
ment which we have left out.

We mention next our standard of discipline, which
is the Bible alone. That is to say, in every so-called
"heresy" trial, or in any delinquency of morals the
reference is alwrays directly to the Word of God. If a
moral delinquency is involved, the charge is always that

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE. 25

of immoral or unchristian conduct, and if "heresy,"
it is always that of unscriptural teaching. The specifi-
cation is not that this is "contrary to article so and so
of om* articles of faith," or to "page so and so of our
book of discipline,1' but that it is contrary to the teach-
ings of the Scriptures, and by this standard is the
matter settled.

We mention again, the position always taken by a
Baptist in any matter of controversy concerning religion,
His appeal is always directly to the Bible. He may
know little and certainly cares less what the commen-
tators and church fathers have said about it, unless it
be some matter of history or of fact which is to be
settled by evidence outside of the Bible; neither does
he quote the authority of some great man, living or
dead, to substantiate his position. He has been taught
to refer all religious questions directly to the Bible for
solution and accept its voice as final.

Again, we mention the advice always given to young
converts when they ask for information on such matters
as baptism and church membership, which is simply
that they should read the New Testament on those
points. It is the old question of Christ to that other
young man who was seeking spiritual guidance, "How
readest thou?" This is so well known that it is some-
times called a Baptist trick. There are no others who
dare to put the New Testament into the hands of their
converts and tell them this: "Now read that book care-
fully, candidly, prayerfully; then follow it. Listen to
the voice of no man, no church, no book but that, and
then go where it leads you, do the things therein laid

26 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

down and unite with that church which seems to you
to be the most like the one therein described." Other
denominations dare not tell their converts this, for they
know too well where they would go. It is too often
their effort to persuade the young convert that he need
not do the things therein laid down, and that he may
follow men and books that teach things which are at
variance with this book.

A story from out West illustrates this so well that I
may be pai'doned for repeating it. A missionary, who
was not a Baptist, found an Indian out there who could
read and gave him a Testament. After several weeks
the Indian came to him declaring his belief in Christ
and asking for baptism. The missionary questioned
him, and finding that he was indeed converted, consented
to baptize him. He therefore procured a bowl of water
and was about to proceed when the Indian asked him
what he was going to do with that. He replied that he
was going to baptize him. "Ugh! no big enough" said
he, "take Indian to river." The missionary then pro-
ceeded to explain that "that isn't the way we do," that
"the amount of water isn't essential," that the great
majority of christians do not baptize in that way," and
that it "made no difference if only his conscience were
satisfied," &c, &c. The Indian listened patiently until
he had finished, and then handed him back the Testa-
ment with the remark, "You give Indian wrong book
then\ me read um all through."

But some one will say: "Do you mean to say that you
are the only ones who receive the Bible as the Word of
God!" O no, not by any means. No, indeed! What I

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE. 27

mean to say is that we are the only ones who receive as
authoritative nothing but the Bible. We receive the
Bible and the Bible only ; others receive the Bible and
something else, and it is just exactly that something
else that makes all the mischief. It is that something
else that has made all the corruption in church life, all
the discord of to-day, and all the persecutions and
atrocities of the days past. It was that something else
that made the awful history of the Roman Catholic
church and brought upon Europe the dark ages. It is
that something else that makes all the false Christianity
of to-day with its resulting scepticism and infidelity. It
is that something else that is eating the life out of great
christian churches and keeping them from being the
strong spiritual forces they ought to be. Therefore we
are afraid of it and will have none of it. What is in the
book we are sure of, but what is not in the book — we do
not know what it may lead to. We dare not take the
risk; we will stick to the book. Why do we not have
the things that others have, then? They are not in the
book. Why no presiding elders or ruling elders? It is
not in the book. Why no bishops, or baptism of babes,
or consecration of altars, or vestments, or candles, or
prayers for the dead, or any one of a hundred things
that others have? They are not in the book, and that
is the end of it.

We mention as a further proof, the historical genesis
of our churches as compared with that of others. They
are not the product of the thinking of any uninspired
man, but are built on the model of the New Testament.
Luther in the progress of the Reformation found it

28

THE BAPTIST IN HISTOBY.

necessary to establish a new church, and the Lutheran
church of to-day is the result of his efforts at church
building. He sought to throw off the Romish yoke and
Romish corruptions; to make the gospel free to rich
and poor alike and to bring the church back, in short,
to what he considered to have been the true catholic
standard before Romish corruptions crept in. The
church in his mind was never anything but a universal
organization under the protection of and co-extensive
with the state; and Lutherans are the followers of Luther
and his ideas. Calvin sought for a form of church
government which should be strong and effective and
yet Protestant. His plan was wrought out by a com-
mission of six men appointed by the city government
of Geneva and was modeled upon that government. Out
of that Genevan church grew the whole Presbyterian
system, with some necessary modifications and so the
Presbyterian church is what it is, in its form, because
the government of Geneva was what it was. Their
claim of Apostolic origin and precedent is without
foundation. Wesley did not at first intend to form any
new church, but only to infuse new piety into the old
church, and he himself lived and died in the Church of
England; and so it came to pass that the founder of
Methodism was himself never a Methodist. His aim
was to work a reformation in the Established Church,
but it resulted in forming a new church. And so every
one of these churches, as well as almost every other
existing church, can be traced as an historical move-
ment back to some one man whose life and influence
was its beginning. And these men, moreover, built

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE. 29

mostly upon models of their own, not supposing, appar-
ently, that the Lord himself had given any pattern of a
church; it seems never to have occurred to them to
search the New Testament for the model of a church
organization. Having been always accustomed to
ecclesiastical and episcopal or hierarchical forms, they
did not think of anything different.

But Baptist churches had no founder save the Founder
of Christianity itself. They have had leaders, but no
man ever stood to Baptist churches in the relation of
Luther to the Lutheran, Calvin to the Presbyterian, or
Wesley to the Methodist church. Their origin was
different. The churches of the Apostles' day were such
as are now called Baptist. They disappeared amid the
corruptions of the early centuries. They sprang up
again before the Reformation in scattered congregations
here and there with different leaders and somewhat
different practices. Becoming numerous, they again
almost disappear before the fiery deluge of persecution
by Catholic and Protestant alike. But again they
re-appear in a company here and there who have read
their Bibles and can not be satisfied with any of the
forms of church life which they see around them, and
from this point on they grow and multiply. Baptist
churches are the result of a spontaneous gathering
together of people of the same mind, actuated by
Bible principles, but established by no man as their
founder.

This spontaneous origin is well illustrated by the
history of the first modern Baptist churches in Germany,
organized by Dr. J. G. Oncken in 1834 and onwards,

30 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

by the history of the African Native Church, as given
in the Baptist Missionary Magazine for December, 1899,
and especially by the first Baptist church organized in
the Island of Cuba, which was gathered by Dr. Alberto
Diaz. This body of believers were desirous of forming
a church organization yet could not adopt that of the
churches by which they were surrounded, or of which
they had knowledge. They therefore betook themselves
to a prayerful study of the New Testament to see if
they could find the pattern of a church therein. As a
result of such study they agreed upon a simple organ-
ization, electing a pastor and deacons and adopting the
ordinances as they are given in the New Testament,
without knowing that they were forming a Baptist church
and were afterwards much surprised and delighted to find
that they wTere in entire accord and fellowship with a
great body of christians in America and England called
Baptists. The Cuban brethren had been organized
into a Baptist church two years before they knew that
they were Baptists. It is worth something to hear Dr.
Diaz tell the story of their origin.

Now, in contrasting the simplicity of Baptist organ-
ization with that of other churches, the question is
irresistibly suggested, have any of these things in
which they differ from us been an improvement? Are
they any stronger, any more harmonious, any more
spiritual, any more efficient than we by reason of these
things? Does their baptism of unconscious babes add
anything to their strength? Is the wearing of gowns
and the burning of candles any aid to the effective
preaching of the gospel? Are bishops and presiding

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE. 31

elders any aid to an independent manliness in the
ministry? Does the following of church tradition
rather than New Testament teaching deepen the spirit-
uality of their members? Is the wisdom of synods and
conferences and the laws of catechisms and books of
discipline a better guide than the written Word and
the independent leading. of the Holy Spirit? Are they
better off with these things or are we better off with-
out them? To us this is simply to ask whether man's
way is wiser than God's way; to ask if the Holy Spirit
did or did not really know what w7as best for all times
and all places; and if he really did direct the Apostles
in their establishing the visible forms of church life as
well as in teaching them the truths of repentance, faith
and sanctification. The question, it seems to us, needs
no answer.

The problem of the Baptist is, therefore, very simple.
Jesus and his Apostles preached that men should trust
in the Christ for their salvation; so therefore do we.
When men trusted, then they baptized them, and what
they did in baptizing them is very plain; they led them
down into the water, they immersed them in the water,
into the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy
Spirit, they led them up out of the water, and that was
the only "way of baptizing" they had. The modern
way has been introduced without authority and retained
without blessing. Then the believers, (who had been
baptized, every one of them), commemorated the Lord's
suffering in the "Lord's Supper'1, and these were their
only ordinances; all this therefore we do also. Further-
more we find that these baptized believers were gathered

32 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

into bodies called churches, each with a pastor, or
pastors, and deacons as their only officers, and that
every church conducted its own affairs. Thus, there-
fore, we form our churches. Then we find that they
were taught to live godly in Christ Jesus, and this is
all; all there is of it.

All this, thus far, has come directly out of our
distinctive principle as stated, namely: that Christ shall
be supreme in his own church -and that we shall simply
do what he requires. You will readily see that there
are involved in this the following things, each of
which is a cardinal doctrine of Baptist faith, and has
been largely accepted by others also, namely: a spirit-
ual church membership, that is, a membership made up
of converted persons only, those who are actually born
again; the baptism of believers only, and that baptism
immersion; the Lord's supper for the baptized only;
the freedom of every one to interpret the Bible for
himself; the entire separation of church and state as
occupying two distinct spheres; each church indepen-
dent of every other; the equal right of every one in the
church to a voice in its affairs; and the Word of God
overshadowing and dominating all. This combination
makes a Baptist church, and it is found in no other.

Now, "If ye know these things, blessed are ye if ye
do them." When the will of Christ has been expressed
in all these matters, are we under no obligation to
regard that will? They tell us that "there are Christians
in all the churches," which is very true, as we are glad
to know, but has nothing whatever to do with the case.
They tell us "it is of no consequence," just as if anything

THE DISTINCTIVE PRINCIPLE. 33

that our Lord commands could be of no consequence.
They tell us that it "makes no difference as long as
our consciences are satisfied." But that would have
justified Saul of Tarsus in his fierce hatred of the first
christians, or the King of Moab in offering up his own
son as a burnt offering, or the modern votary in the
senseless mummeries of the Papal church. To us it
does make a difference. When we consider the obliga-
tion of obediently following our Lord, it does make a
difference. When we see the fearful consequences of
admitting the traditions of men, it does make a difference.
When we consider that the tendency of men is always
toward sin and that the danger is always that we shall
drift away from Christ, it does make a difference, and we
dare not depart from the Word.

Then let others depart if they must and will; let them
reject what is commanded and adopt what is not com-
manded if they are bound so to do, and reap the
inevitable fruit of it. Let them dispute and distress
themselves if they must, over questions of human creeds
and matters of man's invention; as for us, the way is
easy and plain, for we "hear a voice behind us, saying:
This is the way, walk ye in it." So have we ever aimed
to do, so are we determined now to do, and that so we
may ever do, help us Almighty God.

"Lift up thine eyes round about and behold: ^.11
these gather themselves together, and come to thee.
tIs I live, saith the Lord, thou shall surely clothe
thee icith them all as icith an ornament, and gird
thyself icith them, like a bride. For, as for thy
waste and thy desolate places and the land that
hath been destroyed, surely note shalt thou be too
strait for the inhabitants, and they that sic alloiced
thee up shall be far away. The children of thy
bereavement shall yet say in thine ears, The place
is too strait for me: give place to me that I may
dwell. Then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who
hath begotten me these, seeing I have been be-
reaved of my children, and am solitary, an exile,
and wandering to and fro? and who hath brought
up these? Behold I was left alone: these, where
were they?"

II.

THE HISTORY OF BAPTISTS,

Having described the Baptist, the question now to be
answered is, Where in the records of the past do we
find him? We cannot, however, attempt to give even
a full outline of Baptist history for it is too long a tale.
To give the story of eighteen centuries in an hour's
discourse is altogether too large a task. Let me give
only the merest sketch, together with some necessary
cautions concerning it.

I. We need to keep in mind from the beginning that
Baptist history is not to be written upon the same plan
as any other church history, for the reason that Baptist
churches are not like any other church. It is not the
history of an organization which can be traced from a
definite beginning by definite steps to its present con-
dition, neither is it the tracing of a name which has had
at all times a definite meaning; for the name is compar-
atively modern and has been applied on the one hand
to those who were not Baptists, and on the other hand,
many who were really such were not known by that
name. It is the tracing of a principle which has been

THE HISTOBICAL LINE. 37

held by various bodies, sometimes with completeness
and sometimes not, and sometimes in close association
with other like bodies and sometimes by those who were
isolated and widely scattered.

The history of Presbyterianism, for example, is the
history of a definite form of church government, always
visible and easily traced, an organization beginning at
a definite time and place, the origin and developement
of which is fully recorded, and all the parts of which
have an historical connection with all the rest. The
same may be said of Episcopacy, Methodism, or Luth-
eranism, as well as of smaller bodies, but it can not
be said at all of us. These churches have come down
to us like a lengthening chain, every link fast welded
into the preceeding link, but Baptist churches are more
like a load of bricks which have been picked up along
the way, all alike because made in the same mold but
each complete in itself and independent of all the rest.

The effort to make out a Baptist succession is a failure.
That is, to find a succession of churches, each descending
from the preceding and reaching back to the days of
the Apostles, so that a continuous line of them oan be
affirmed to have existed from that time to this. Bearing
in mind that in the early days few records were made,
and the wholesale destruction of those that were made,
it seems to me that to deny positively the existence of
such a succession is going too far; but to assert it
positively is to assert what can not be proved. The
records of primitive times are very meager, and later
persecutions were abundant, so that for generations
Baptist movements were made mostly in secret and

38 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

nothing was committed to paper which might betray
them, and as has already been said, a full history of them
can never be written; yet there are facts which seem to
imply that the Baptist principle was much more
extensively and tenaciously held and consistently
carried out in those obscure periods than is generally
supposed. There are enticing hints and suggestions of
possibilities which one longs to follow out, but the
materials are wanting. It is certain that there was a
succession of christian bodies, known under different
names and stretching down from the Apostles' day to
this, who kept alive the truth of the gospel in its
essential purity. They bore strong resemblance to
those who were afterwards called by our name and
emphasized now this and now that fundamental article
of our faith; but we cannot find in them, at this late
day and with the incompleteness of their record, a
complete harmony with our beliefs. The stream of
pure truth continued to flow, taking the name of now
this and now that able leader and gospel worker. They
were always persecuted and always therefore, in obscur-
ity. If quiet and opportunity had been given to them
to organize and develop a formal life, doubtless they
would have shown a close likeness to the New Testament
pattern. All we can say is that we cannot clearly trace
this pattern from the beginning in the records that
are now left to us. There may have been a Baptist
succession but no man can now prove it; and it is but
fair to say that the more investigation brings to light
new facts, the less likely it seems that such succession
in the strict sense can be found.

THE HISTORICAL LINE. 39

But we do not depend for our authority upon an
ecclesiastical pedigree, nor upon grace that seems to
reside in the clothes, being put on and off with priestly
garments, but upon the authority of the Word of God
and upon grace that is ministered directly to the
believing soul, the Holy Spirit making valid that which
is done in his name and for his glory independently of
ordaining hands and priestly vestments. He is in the
true apostolic succession who has the apostolic spirit
and teaches apostolic principles and truths, and that
is an apostolic church which is built upon the New
Testament model, even though it have had no prede-
cessor for a thousand years. Indeed, the church that
can trace its history back through visible organizations
to the days of the Apostles proves thereby that it is
not &n apostolic church; for these visible organizations
have been full of apostacy, unspirituality, false doctrine
and all uncleanness. And why need any one be anxious
to claim an apostolic succession that must needs run
back through such monsters of iniquity as Pope Alex-
ander VI, or such a murderer of heretics as Innocent
III, or even such a political schemer as Gregory VII,
or one of such grasping ambition as Gregory the Great?
Kather let us glory that our spiritual ancestors were
too pure and true to be the companions of such as
these, and were among those who by reason of their
real godliness were driven into the wilderness.

And right here I wish to protest most emphatically
against the misnaming of much that is called church
history, and insist that it is not the history of the church
of Christ at all. For a thousand years it is the history

40 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

of a corrupt, oppressive, and sometimes unspeakably
vile religio-political organization, which never had for
its real aim the teaching of the true principles of
Christ's gospel and the uplifting and saving of men's
souls. It is the history of a hierarchy oppressing and
deluding the people, of the teaching of superstition
continually made worse and worse, of liberty destroyed,
of ignorance made more dense, of tyranny both civil
and spiritual made more tyrannical, and a blasphemous
usurpation by men of prerogatives that belong only to
God. To call this "church" history is surely keen
sarcasm, careless handling of names, or utter ignorance.
Let it be frankly admitted that in this organization
were many holy men at various times and that out of
it have come men whose names will be glorious for all
time, yet it remains true that they did not shape its
policy nor control its course, and that they themselves
were much blinded and hindered in their struggles for
purity and usefulness by its influence. The real church
history is to be found in the largely unrecorded struggles
of those who never recognized this institution, and the
heroes of the church are to be found in the appalling
list of those who suffered from its fury.

Yet, even if there be no Baptist succession in the
sense of a lineal descent of churches, it is quite possible
that there never was a time when there were not some-
where Baptist churches; not exact counterparts of
those of to-day, but in all essential principles the same.
When they failed in one place they had sprung up in
another, and so the various movements overlap each
other in point of time, though widely separated in

THE HISTORICAL LINE. 41

point of locality and not, as far as can be discovered,
vitally connected with each other.

II. It is supposed by many that Baptists have no
history; that they are a modern sect founded by Roger
Williams, or perhaps originating in England about the
year 1600 with one Smythe who is said to have baptized
himself, or at the farthest running back to the fanatical
so-called Anabaptists of Munster. But this is an
entire mistake. They are really the most venerable
body of christians, as to age, in existence, for their
continuous traceable history runs back for centuries
beyond that of any other existing church, (except the
Roman Catholic, and that is not in any proper sense a
church), and in their detached and independent history
they run back to the very beginnings of churches. In
the face of so much glorifying of antiquity and vaunting
of the history of other bodies, let me say it again, that
the Baptists are several hundred years older than any
other existing christian body. There were thousands
of Baptist churches before ever there was an Episcopal,
a Lutheran, a Congregational, a Methodist, or a Pres-
byterian church. Not that we are any the purer or
more spiritual today for that, but if antiquity is the
test of respectability, let us understand that we can be
very respectable. And more than that, their leaders,
for breadth of mind, clearness of insight, and purity of
life, have been second to none; their principles have
been broader, their aims truer, and their final achieve-
ments grander than any. While others have been
hampered by narrow views or selfish considerations,
they have wrought for all men and for all times, and in

42 THE BAPTIST IN HlSTOttt.

the great struggle for human right and human liberty
they have led the van which others have followed and
have been in the fore front of that conflict of wThich
others have enjoyed the results.

Compare this with other movements. The Presby-
terian movement has perhaps been as wide in its
development and influence as any other modern
religious movement, but it carried within itself the
seeds of oligarchy, developing into" narrow intolerance
when it gained the predominance, and as a religious
force, seeking intellectual rather than spiritual power,
culture rather than conversion, and so seeking flowers
from a seed not yet planted, the culture of a plant not
yet produced. The Methodist movement wTas a revival
of religious force and was greatly useful in emphasizing
the value of practical godliness, preaching the doctrines
of repentance with great power; but it came compara-
tively late in the day, it was monarchical in form and
spirit and it has largely lost its primitive force and
power by the working out of principles within itself.
It is strong in numbers and as an aggressive organization
but weakened and weakening in its genuine spiritual
force. Congregationalism has never developed such a
force and power as other movements have and its
influence has been mostly confined to England and
America. It is a striking fact that while it was the
first church to be well established in America, it now
numbers only about 630,000, while the Presbyterians'
number one and a half millions, the Baptists more than
four millions and the Methodists of various sorts more
than five millions. Episcopacy simply meant a division

TtlE HISTORICAL LINE. 43

of the Papacy and the formation of an independent and
reformed wing of it into a separate church. Luther-
anism was a reformation of the Papacy and has resulted
in a system which, practically, is but little nearer the
saving gospel truth than is the Papacy itself, although
not by any means so gross in its doctrines and influence.
Each of these was, in itself and in its time, a grand
movement and a great advance upon what had gone
before it, and it is not at all my purpose to belittle them,
but only to say that Baptists have wrought for a grander
principle and have toiled in a more universal struggle
than they all. They have contended for the complete
supremacy of Christ over all men and all things in his
church; for a spiritual church which should be a
spiritual power; for the absolute right of every man to
absolute liberty of conscience in all things, and for
freedom for him, not only from outside oppression but
from domination even by his own church. These may
seem like idle words of denominational glorification but
they are not so intended; they are the result of long
thought and study upon the fundamental principles of
church life and their practical working out, as seen not
only in the history, but also in the every day life and
work of the various religious bodies around us. They
are the statement of a deliberate judgment of the facts.
While others glorify themselves and thank God because
they are this or that, let me speak out my honest
convictions and say that I am proud of my spiritual
ancestry, that as I read their history I am thrilled by
their deeds, and that I am more than ever determined
to stand by their principles.

44 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

III. A word needs to be said also about the misrepre-
sentations of our history, although it is a topic we
might well wish to omit, and it requires some grace to
speak of it calmly. What a mess of stuff indeed, has
the world received for Baptist history, and for how long!
It is but within comparatively few years that the truth
has become known, and not yet with any fulness.
There is a plain reason for this misrepresentation; the
truth is hard to get at and those who have written have
not cared to take the trouble to get at it. The works
of our Baptist authors, except the more modern ones,
have perished, and we have for our guidance for the
most part only the story of their enemies. Even in the
works of such great historians as Mosheim there is
evident the spirit of bitterness and unfairness. The
descriptions of their lives, beliefs and deeds were
written by men who both could not and would not
understand them; could not, because too narrow and
unspiritual to understand them or their teachings, and
would not because too bitter in their hatred and
antagonism. Their history was written by the men who
drowned them and tortured them and burned them, and
did it because of a jealous hatred of them; and this is
taken for Baptist history! Of how much credence is it
worthy? Their own records are gone — burned with
their bodies — and only hidden remnants remain. Their
books were everywhere sought out and destroyed. No
public library would receive and preserve them and
what few copies were hidden and thus preserved perished
in various ways. Of most of their works we know but
the titles and these are preserved to us only in the

THE HISTORICAL LINE. 45

writings of their enemies. Their record is to be found
only in stray notices here and there, in the records of
the Inquisition, in the written files of courts of judg-
ment where they were examined and condemned, in
musty local registers, and in the attacks of their opposers;
and to write their history and write it truly requires
great patience, wide research and much study. Of
how much value would be the history of the abolition
of slavery written by some angry, disappointed slave-
holder? or a history of Prohibition written by John
Gund, or the editor of the "Wine and Spirit Gazette?"
or a life of General Thomas J. Morgan, late United
States Indian Commissioner, written by Monseigneur
Satolli or "Father" Cleary the Catholic priest of Minne-
apolis, who has publicly called him a fool and a knave
and a liar and several other not very pretty things?
Would you expect an honest appreciation of motives or
an unbiased judgment as to results from such writers
as these? Hardly. Of how much value as American
history would be a rehearsal of the lies and mud-slinging
of successive political campaigns? Of just as much
value as some of the representations of the Baptists.

Thus it is believed by many that they have always been
an ignorant and bigoted people, and Baptists because
they were ignorant and bigoted; that the early Baptists
of our own country were men of no intelligence or
power, and that all the intellectual force and broad-
minded intelligence was in the other denominations;
that the madmen of Munster were Baptists, and the
characteristic type of Baptists of their day, and that
their abominations of fanaticism, nakedness, polygamy

46 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

and riot were the result of Baptist teaching. Thomas
Muntzer and Balthazer Hubmeyer are supposed to have
been the leaders of these fanatics, the similarity of
Munster and Muntzer perhaps, having confused the
two. But Muntzer never was a Baptist. Although he
held some doctrines similar to theirs he opposed them
in more. He was sometimes a Lutheran and sometimes
a Catholic and he had been dead for several years when
these things happened. He did, indeed, deny the
scripturalness of infant baptism, but continued to
practice it to the day of his death. Hubmeyer never had
any connection with the Munsterites either, for he
likewise had been dead several years. The wildest
excesses of Munster were due to Rothman, a Lutheran
pastor. The strongest protest was made against these
fanatics by the two hundred Baptists who dwelt there,
until by their opposition one fourth of them lost their
lives and the rest were driven from the city.* Likewise
the principles and teachings of these fanatics were
repudiated both before and after the Munster uproar,
by the great majority of Anabaptists throughout
Europe. Often in their examinations under arrest we
read the question whether they were not the people
who were engaged in these things and who, if they should
come to power, would murder the rulers and revolution-
ize society, and always the reply that they were not of
those people and that they considered their teaching and
their doings wicked and wrong and not according to the
teachings of the gospel.

The real cause of the Munster kingdom was this: —
In the cruel oppression which they suffered, these

* Armitage, Hist. Bap. p. 375.

THE HISTORICAL LINE. 47

people saw no hope of relief from any earthly source,
and believing themselves to be the people of God, and
fired with the example of old Testament worthies, they
turned to a belief in the interposition of heaven. The
doctrine of the immediate coming of Christ to put down
his enemies and exalt his people strongly appealed to
their hope and their imagination. It needed only the
fiery eloquence of misguided leaders, who misinterpreted
prophecy, to persuade them to set up a heavenly king-
dom in preparation for Christ's immediate coming, and
the natural passions of men, which always come to the
front in times of religious fanaticism, did the rest. The
whole movement can be traced directly to the wrong
teaching of certain leaders as to the nature of the
kingdom of God and the immediate advent of Christ.

The peasants1 war has also been laid at the door of
the Anabaptists, but surely if ever a people had righteous
cause for rebellion these peasants had, and in the begin-
ning they were upheld by all the reformers, including
Luther himself, although afterwards he reviled them
and called for their butchery in terms most heartless
and brutal. That they sympathized in this struggle for
liberty is very true, as they have always sympathized in
every such struggle, and that some of them were engaged
in it is also true, and that it took on a semi-religious
character; but it was occasioned by the cruelty and op-
pression of the lords and nobles and not by religious
teaching. It was the struggle of a down trodden people
for their natural rights, and a brutal struggle because
they had been brutalized and degraded by their oppres-
sion.

48 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

The truth is, that every movement hostile to the ruling
power and every one who by any difference of belief
became obnoxious to the ruling church was dubbed
indiscriminately "Anabaptist," so that the name came
to include both those sober, pious folk who were really
Baptists on the one hand, and the wildest, most visionary
fanatics on the other, and the good suffered for the bad.
The effect of the Munster uproar was to arouse such a
hatred of everything that was called Anabaptist that
their persecution was renewed with redoubled violence,
and they were hunted to the death indiscriminately;
and to this day Baptists are despised because of Munster.
Professor Vedder says, "Many wTho were called by this
title were never Anabaptists but practiced pedobaptism
as consistently as any Lutheran or Romanist of them
all." He further says: "The Anabaptists were de-
nounced by their contemporaries, Romanist and Protes-
tant alike, with a rhetoric so sulphurous that an evil
odor has clung to the name ever since. If one were to
believe half he reads about these heretics, he would be
compelled to think them the most depraved of mankind.
Nothing was too vile to be ascribed to them, nothing
was too wicked to be believed about them, nothing in
fact, was incredible except one had described them as
God-fearing, pious folk, studious of the scriptures and
obedient to the will of their Lord as that will was made
known."*

Is it any wonder that one should boil over with
indignation to find himself in sympathy with a people
whom he admires, whose principles are also dear to him,
who are his own spiritual ancestors, and to find them

* Short History, p. 86.

THE HISTORICAL LINE. 49

so traduced, misrepresented, belittled and despised by
those who never had their nobility of character, and
their achievements calmly appropriated by those who
have no word of sympathy for their sufferings ? But the
truth of their history is beginning to appear and the
world will at last do them justice.

IV. To trace the history of Baptists, we are to look
for those who held to the supreme authority of the
Bible and discarded the authority of "the church," to a
spiritual church membership, the baptism of believers
only, the absolute freedom of conscience, and therefore
entire freedom from the control of the civil government
in religious matters; in short, for those who believed
what we believe and did what we do in all essential
particulars.

First, then, it is not an assumption of bigotry but
the statement of a simple fact to say that the apostolic
churches were Baptist churches. It is not mere denom-
inational buncomb to speak of the first organized church
as "the First Baptist Church of Jerusalem," as is
sometimes done by way of pleasantry, for if it were
exactly reproduced in Jerusalem today it would certainly
by common consent be called a Baptist church. It
surely would not be called Methodist or Episcopal or
Presbyterian. Certainly those first churches were
immersed churches, and converted churches, and they
had pastors and deacons as their only officers, and their
government was democratic, and they had no other law
than the will of Christ made known to them by the
teaching of the Apostles, directly and by inspiration,
which teaching, afterwards written down, became our

50 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

New Testament. They baptized no infants, they wore
no gowns, they burned no candles, they worshipped no
eucharist, they confessed to no priest, they held no
synods for the government of the churches.

But these churches became gradually corrupted, and
more rapidly than we would think possible. Those
were days of ignorance, of strongly intrenched heathen
notions on the one hand, and Jewish notions on the
other. Foolish and conceited heathen philosophy
sought to explain all things and it was inevitable that
the churches should soon become corrupted by these
things when the Apostles were dead. The only wonder
is that Christianity ever survived at all. It would have
been different perhaps, if then as now general intelli-
gence had been high and if every one had been able to
have and read a printed Bible, and so by constant com-
parison with the recognized standard constantly to
correct himself in his thought and his practice. But
when the New Testament was written it was only to be
found in single gospels and epistles here and there, and
when gathered up in one volume was only reproduced by
the manual labor of writing, and copies of it were so
costly that the scriptures were not possessed by the
majority of christians. In that case, people were mostly,
dependent on their pastors for their knowledge of the
Bible and the interpretation of it. The weight of great
names gave currency to wrong interpretations. Sad
errors in regard to almost every important doctrine
crept into the early church and men of influence gave
them currency. We see what is the influence of promi-
nent men in the spread of error in our enlightened days.

THE HISTORICAL LINE. 51

These leading men, too, were not free from worldly ambi-
tions and very soon were contending with each other as
to relative influence, which contentions finally crystal-
lized into claims of authority. As the doctrines of the
new birth and baptism were perverted, both churches
and leaders grew less spiritual and more ambitious, less
genuine and more formal, the contention for supremacy
grew sharper, until finally a few, then two, and at last
one gained recognition as chief; and so began and so
grew up the Papacy.

But no corruption was ever fastened upon the churches
without a protest from some pure minds and a struggle,
and there were various attempts to preserve the
primitive purity which resulted in bodies of various
names and holding more or less of Baptist principles,
but often less. Such were the Montanists, the Novatians,
the Donatists, and many others of various names, of
whom it has been claimed by some that they were
Baptists altogether and by others that they were Bap-
tists not at all. The truth lies between the two, but
most of them held errors that set them outside the
fellowship of Baptist churches. There is a gap of nearly
a thousand years in the traceable Baptist succession on
the continent of Europe, until we come to the Petro-
brusians about the year 1125. Here, four hundred years
before the Reformation, we come upon those who were
clearly Baptists. During this period of a thousand years
there are traces and probabilities or possibilities only
of pure churches, but no definite record. That a
primitive and pure Christianity was preserved in central
Europe all this time, hidden away in the forests and

52 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

mountains, is almost positively certain, but that it was
in all respects Baptistic we cannot show. This region
was the rendezvous for the remnants of persecuted
righteousness from many quarters, and as an abundant
harvest presupposes a broad seed sowing, so the great
crop of Anabaptists that sprang up all over central
Europe just before and during the Reformation leads
to the very strong presumption that there must have
been many antecedent teachers and preachers of their
doctrines of whom we know nothing. The truth is that all
Christendom seems to have gone off, during this period,
into such corruptions of life and doctrine as left little
semblance of true Christianity in it. The records of
the early centuries are astounding in their revelations
and if the primitive faith was anywhere preserved, it
must have been in some out of the way place where
current opinions and practices had little influence.
Very much of Christianity was only a baptized paganism,
and the reports of the "conversion" of nations and the
"baptism" of whole tribes at once show the spuriousness
of it. About all there was of their "conversion" was
their "baptism."

This gap is spanned according to a recent book, "The
Ancient British and Irish Churches," by the work of
"Saint" Patrick and his followers, whom the author
makes out to be substantially Baptist. We might
sincerely wish the claim made in this book could be
verified but an impartial investigation shows that it is
groundless. The early British and Irish history is very
interesting and contains many names which are famous
for missionary work. Among these are Patrick, Co-

THE HISTOBICAL LINE. 53

lumba, Ninian, Kentigern, Columbanus, Caedmon, the
first Anglo-Saxon poet, Aidan, and finally that long
suffering young Irish woman, Brigit. The gospel seems
to have been first preached in Great Britain about the
year 63, or at least during the first century, but by
whom we do not know. It has been credited in turn to
Joseph of Arimathea, Simon Zelotes, Paul, Philip the
Apostle, Peter, James the- son of Zebedee, Aristobulus,
and I do not know how many more, none of whom
probably ever saw the country. It is more likely that
some earnest trader or christian soldier first gave the
gospel to the island. The one thing clear from the
various traditions and also from subsequent history, is
that the origin of British Christianity was from the far
East and not from Borne. There had been more than
one mighty christian movement in Britain and Ireland
before the first Bomish emisaries were sent there, and
the primitive character of its Christianity is attested by
the cool reception they met when they did come and by
the struggle maintained for several hundred years before
Borne gained full control. The gospel took a strong
hold upon Britain and spread rapidly, and during the
persecutions of the Boman emperors Britain furnished
its martyrs and christian heroes in common with other
lands, although less in number because more remote.
Out of this vigorous British Christianity was raised up
the great apostle to Ireland, Patrick.

Patrick was a Briton whose father Calpurnius was a
deacon, and he was born near Dumbarton, now in
Scotland, probably about the year 360. Thus this early
British Christianity furnished an evangelist for Ireland,

54 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

which in turn evangelized much of Scotland and part
of England and wrought a great work upon the conti-
nent. So. curiously enough, the great patron saint of
all the Irish, the saint by whom every Irishman swears,
(and he would swear harder yet if he knew it), was an
Englishman. And still further, the Irish of his day
were Scotchmen, being the original Scots, and the
original Scotchmen were Irishmen, for they came from
Ireland and cpnquered the native" Picts, giving their
name to the country now called Scotland. Again,
Patrick has been sainted by the Roman Catholic
church, but in all his life he never heard of it nor ever
acknowledged any Pope; and indeed, the records call
Mm "papa Patrick;" i. e. Pope Patrick. For along time
he and his work were ignored by the Papacy because
he was not a Romanist, but finally all was claimed and
Patrick himself canonized as a Romish Saint.

At the age of sixteen he was captured by a band of
marauding Irish and for six years experienced the
hardships of slavery, herding swine and exposed to all
weathers. After his escape and return home he had a
vision of a man from Ireland and heard a voice of the
Irish people calling him to come and dwell with them,
and after the most strenuous opposition from relatives
and friends, about the year 396, (though some give the
date as late as 430), he began to preach the gospel in
Ireland. He was a man of apostolic zeal, untiring
energy and magnetic power, brave, unselfish and loving.
He aimed to give the gospel to the whole island and his
wonderful success was such that a large part of the
island was evangelized. There were a few christian

THE HISTORICAL LINE. 55

churches already established before his time, but in
comparison with the work he did they receive but little
attention. He is said to have erected seven hundred
churches and ordained the same number of bishops;
another account says three hundred and sixty-five
churches; the facts of his life are not all clear and
accounts differ. Twelve thousand are said to have been
baptized at one time and other great baptisms are
credited to him.

This was a truly missionary work, and the missionary
spirit remained with it after Patricks death. There
grew up great schools or monasteries such as at Durrow,
Bangor, Derry, and Iona, some of which were attended
by as many as three thousand students at one time.
In these monasteries teachers and preachers were
trained, and from them Southern Scotland was evan-
gelized and many missionaries were sent into England,
France and Germany. By the middle of the eighth
century these missionary churches were predominant
throughout the whole Rhine valley and the entire
South and West of Germany. As we look at the Ireland
of our day, it does not seem possible that it should have
been, and for centuries, the center of christian influence
and missionary activity for all northern Europe, but so
it was.-

Now as to the practice and teaching of Patrick and
his followers, it is not easy to get at the exact truth.
He was not himself well educated and left but two short
writings which have come down to us, one, his "con-
fession" or self defense, and the other an "epistle to
Caroticus," a marauding Welsh chief who had carried

56 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

off many of Patrick's "baptized christians.'* His only
baptism was immersion, but that counts for nothing
because no other was known in his day, sprinkling and
pouring not having yet come into use except for sick
people. He recognized three orders in the clergy,
namely, deacons, presbyters and bishops, which last
seem not to have been bishops in the New Testament
sense of the term nor yet in the modern sense of it.
His schools were of a monastic type and seem to have
developed later into genuine monasteries. There is no
trace of infant baptism but that delusion had not yet
become general. He seems to have made everything of
baptism after the fashion of those days, to the extent
that baptism and conversion were practically the same.
In his day baptism was Christianity and Christianity
was baptism, and it was profoundly venerated as a holy
mystery. Emphasis was laid on this rather than on the
love of Grod to sinners and the necessity of anew birth.
His wholesale baptisms look very suspicious. His
method of work seems to have been to "convert" a chief
and then "baptize" his whole tribe, or as many as would
submit to the ordinance. The warlike character of
these "christian" Irish shows the spuriousness of their
conversion, for their history for centuries is the history
of tribal jealousies, treacheries and massacres. Patrick
seems to have had monks and "virgins" and after his
day Ireland was full of them. There still exist plain
proofs of hermit monks who lived in small cells from
which they could see nothing but the sky and out of
which they never came. *

The earliest accounts of Patrick extant were written

* See "Ireland and the Celtic Church" by Dr. G. T. Stokes.

THE HISTOBICAL LINE. 57

more than two hundred years after his death although
embodying perhaps an earlier account, and they are so
full of the absurdly miraculous as to discredit their
facts. All sorts of miracles are ascribed to this "holy
saint,'1 such as kindling a fire by blowing upon a heap
of ice which he had gathered when they had no wood;
killing a heathen magician a la Ananias and Saphira;
raising a dead man whom he heard groaning under
ground, (the grave was a hundred and twenty feet long),
and finding he was suffering in hell, he preached to him,
baptized him and sent him back to heaven. He gathered
all the reptiles in Ireland upon the top of a hill and
drove them all down through a ravine into the sea with
"the staff of Jesus" which had been given him by the
Lord on some island in the Mediterranean Sea; — one
of the most remarkable round-ups on record. Reluc-
tantly we withdraw our claim, but facts compel us to
admit that Patrick was not a Baptist. If his work and
that of his successors had been genuine gospel work
and true to gospel principles, Ireland, largely free from
influences which elsewhere corrupted the truth, and
under better conditions than other lands for preserving
New Testament Christianity, would surely have had a
different religious history than is written of her.

There remains, however, an interesting branch of
British history which may show more Baptistic charac-
teristics. By the invasion of the Saxons, primitive
Christianity was early driven into the fastnesses of
Wales where, it is claimed, it has existed to the present
time in its purity. If this is true it will go far to
establish a Baptist succession but we fear that thorough

58 THE BAPTIST IN HlSTOEY.

investigation will show that this too was vitiated by the
errors of priestly ordination and baptismal regeneration
which were nearly or quite universal in the early
centuries. Welsh Baptists have always claimed for
themselves an apostolic origin, and it will gratify our
denominational pride if they can prove it. It is certain
that primitive Christianity continued there for centuries
from the beginning and also we can trace our churches
back from the present for centuries; but will the records
span the gap?

But now we return to the continent of Europe, where
we begin to hear the rumble of the Reformation, to find
in France another Baptistic people called Petrobrusians
from their leader, Peter of Bruys, who was burned
alive in 1126. The Petrobrusians were unmistakably
Baptists in their doctrines, their practices and their
spirit. They were democratic in their organization,
they baptized believers only, rejecting infant baptism
as folly because an infant could exercise no faith, their
only authority was the Bible and their great doctrine
was salvation through faith in Christ alone. Their
immersion excited no comment because the whole
Catholic church at that time practiced it, but they were
immersionists. Peter of Bruys was no more learned
than Peter the apostle, but like him was full of the
Holy Spirit and through him "much people turned to
the Lord,'1 burning their images and crosses and
forsaking the Romish priests and places of worship.
Thus the stream of Baptist influence begins again, to
run with increasing breadth and power until checked
and dried up by the fires of persecution which raged

THE HISTOEICAL LINE. 59

fiercely during and after the Beformation times.

Following the Petrobrusians were the Waldenses.
Peter Waldo was converted to Christ in 1160 and began
his work in the modern Baptist fashion of preaching
and translating the Bible into the language of the
common people. Persecution soon scattered the Wald-
ensians into numberless sects, scarcely any two of
which were alike, some of whom held quite closely to
Baptist principles, but the most agreed more closely
with Roman Catholic doctrines during the early part of
their history at least. Afterwards they came to hold
more scriptural views. But they were preachers of the
gospel and colporters of the Bible. They went every-
where as peddlers of fabrics and gems and thus found
opportunity to distribute bibles. Whittier has pictured
the Waldensian peddler as he went about on his mis-
sionary work, in his beautiful poem "The Vaudois
Teacher," a poem so beautiful that I quote it all: —

4tO lady fair, these silks of mine are beautiful and rare, —

The richest web of the Indian loom, which beauty's queen might

wear;
And my pearls are pure as thy own fair neck, with whose radiant

light they vie;
I have brought them with me a weary way,— will my gentle lady

buy?"

And the lady smiled on the worn old man through the dark and

clustering curls
Which veiled her brow as she bent to view his silks and glittering

pearls;
And she placed their price in the old man's hand, and lightly turned

away,
But she paused at the wanderer's earnest call,— "My gentle lady,

stay!"

60 THE BAPTIST IN HlSTOKY.

"O lady fair I have yet a gem which a purer luster flings,

Than the diamond flash of the jewelled crown on the lofty brow of

kings,—
A wonderful pearl of exceeding price, whose virtue shall not decay,
Whose light shall be a spell to thee and a blessing on thy way!"

The lady glanced at the mirroring steel where her form of grace was

seen,
Where her eye shone clear, and her dark locks waved their clasping

pearls between;
"Bring forth thy pearl of exceeding worth, thou traveller gray and

old;
And name the price of thy precious gem, and my page shall count

thy gold."

The cloud went off from the pilgrim's brow, as a small and meagre

book,
Unchased with gold or gem of cost, from his folding robe he took.
"Here, lady fair, is the pearl of price, may it prove as such to thee!
Nay — keep thy gold — I ask it not, for the Word of God is free!"

The hoary traveller went his way, but the gift he left behind
Hath had its pure and perfect work on that high born maiden's mind,
And she hath turned from the pride of sin to the lowliness of truth,
And given her human heart to God in its beautiful hour of youth!

And she hath left the gray old halls, where an evil faith had power,
And courtly knights of her father's train, and the maidens of her

bower;
And she hath gone to the Vaudois vales, by lordly feet untrod,
Where the poor and needy of earth are rich in the perfect love of God !

It is no wonder that the preaching of the gospel was
so joyfully received by the people, for it was to them
a new story entirely. They knew only forms and
ceremonies, tithes and penances, and the offer of a full
and free salvation through simple trust in Christ was as
new and blessed truth to them as to the veriest heathen.
It was to them as the preaching of the gospel has lately

THE HISTORICAL LINE. 61

been to the people of Cuba and Puerto Rico, so lately
freed from Spanish and priestly oppression, and we have
seen how eagerly it is accepted there.

The Petrobrusians and Waldenses seem to have been
the immediate ancestors of the Anabaptists, who soon
sprang up over Europe and thickest where they had
been thickest. No definite origin can be assigned to
the Anabaptists nor can we tell by whom the name was
first given. They were not a new kind of people but
the old kind under a new name, and they were doubtless
only the spiritual descendants of those who before them
had taught the pure gospel; but they multiplied exceed-
ingly until the country was filled with them. In
northern Switzerland they increased marvellously in
the few years following 1520, as indeed also in Germany
and Holland, and developed leaders who were worthy
to rank with the martyrs of the past. Such were the
noble Hubmeyer who was burned alive March 10, 1528;
Blaurock, burned at the stake in the year following;
Hetzer, beheaded in the same year; Felix Mantz,
drowned in 1527; Sattler, torn with red hot pincers and
burned in the same year; and Grebel, who, for a wonder,
died a natural death.

Zwingli himself began his career with a declaration
of the fundamental Baptist principle that demands
obedience to the word of God in all matters of faith and
rejects what is not therein contained, but when he began
to see where this principle would lead him he refused
to follow it. He soon saw that in following this princi-
ple he must reject infant baptism, baptize only believers,
have a church composed of those only who had personal

62 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

faith in Christ, and cut loose entirely from the powers
of the world as to the support of his work, Luther
also came to the same place and in like manner turned
back. Both these reformers wished to return to Bible
Christianity, but both depended upon the civil power
to bring it to pass. They had not enough faith in God,
in the simple power of the truth and in the conscientious
honesty of the people to cut loose from the world and
go forth, as did the Apostles, in the power of the Holy
Spirit. The Anabaptists did have, and they wrought
grandly even unto death, while these reformers turned
back to lean upon the unsanctified arm of human power
— and spoiled their work; and Europe is what it is
to-day, spiritually formal and dead, because the Ref-
ormers prevailed and the Anabaptists were destroyed.

From Switzerland we follow this movement into Ger-
many where also "mightily grew the word of God and
prevailed." They spread over Bavaria; in Silesia infant
baptism became almost extinct; in Augsburg their
church numbered eight hundred members in 1527, and
eleven hundred a few years later when they had for
their leader the noble and distinguished John Denck.
We can not follow their growth in detail, but suffice
it to say that they were found in almost every province
and city and often in great numbers, until their rapid
increase seemed likely to overturn the state church, and
led to their bitter persecution and final extinction.
The story of their horrible persecution and cold blooded
murder is too sickening to follow in detail but we shall
see something of it in our next lecture; a people godly
and true, peaceable and honest, harried and hunted like

THE HISTORICAL LINE. 63

wild beasts until there was nothing of them remaining.

The remant that escaped from Germany took refuge
in Holland where they were known as Mennonites f rom
the name of their leader, Menno Simon, and where,
partly from their change of name and partly from their
obscurity, they were suffered for a time to dwell more
securely, though afterwards they suffered more fear-
fully than ever. The Mennonites continue to this day
both in Holland and in America.

But you will be much surprised to learn that most of
the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century did not bap-
tize; they were not immersionists. Apparently they
generally practiced sprinkling or pouring, though im-
mersion was practiced by those of St. Gall, Augsburg,
Strassburg and by the Anti-Trinitarian Anabaptists of
Poland. Even the noble Hubmeyer is said to have
"baptized" three hundred out of a milk pail. "But
then," you say, "they were not Baptists!1' O yes they
were, — in every principle except this, but of course
inconsistent. For immersion alone does not by any
means make a Baptist, although of course, it is necessary
to make a complete one. We forget that immersion
is not and never was, the fundamental article of our
faith, but only a necessary deduction from our funda-
mental principle. It is one of the two things that is
most prominent in the minds of other people when they
think of us, but let us not be ourselves beguiled into
thinking that all the difference between us and other
christians is that we immerse and they sprinkle. The
real difference lies far deeper than this. The truth in
regard to immersion is that for twelve centuries it was

64 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

the universal practice, by Roman Catholics, the Greek
Church, dissenters of every kind, and by the British
and Irish churches. Then there is a gap of three hun-
dred years or more when it was largely supplanted by
sprinkling and pouring, until it was again revived by
the English and Dutch Baptists and has continued to
the present time. The Greek church has never practiced
anything else and does not to-day. The great conten-
tion of these Anabaptists was for a converted churcJi,
and that has been the contention of Baptists always;
that baptism and church membership were and are only
for personal believers in Christ. This, rather than the
necessity of immersion, is and always has been the con-
trolling idea of a Baptist church, and this has separated
them from all others. Their opposition and protest
was against a church which included both godly and
godless, ministered to by priests who were extortionate
and unchaste, a church controlled by princes that were
often wicked and immoral, knowing nothing of Christ,
a church that only robbed the people and left them to
go down to perdition in their ignorance of gospel truth;
and it seems not to have occurred to them with any force
that they themselves were violating scripture in a very
important particular. The controversy of their day was
not on this point and it was not until later that the
inconsistency was seen, although it seems strange that
it was not seen from the first.

It is not too much to say that this fundamental idea
of a converted church, which had persisted through all
these centuries, kept alive by the various influences
mentioned, was what made the Reformation possible.

THE HISTORICAL LINE. 65

These were they that preached the real gospel and the
contrast of their pure lives and doctrine made the Papacy
more odious than ever and prepared the people to turn
from it. Indeed, as the learned Dr. Kellar says, the
Anabaptist movement was tlie real Reformatio?! move-
ment. It was the truest gospel movement of the age,
(notwithstanding it developed, in some of its aspects,
into fanaticism), not simply lopping off some of the
abuses of a corrupt church and leaving the seeds of
corruption still in their vigor to produce another like
harvest, but bringing the people back to a pure New
Testament Christianity as Christ and his Apostles taught
it. If they could have had their way the modern religious
history of Europe would have been entirely changed,
and it would not have lapsed into that kind of a false
and dead Christianity which it is today, the hot-bed of
rationalism and infidelity, and needing missionaries of
the gospel for its conversion as well as any heathen land.
Europe is, religiously, four hundred years behind what
it would have been but for the extermination of this
people. But the fear and jealousy and even hatred of
Catholic and Lutheran alike followed them until their
leaders were slain and their organizations annihilated,
and Baptist history disappears from Germany and
Southern Europe until the appearance of Dr. Oncken
in 1834. Baptists in Germany now number about
twenty-eight thousand.

So the line runs from Germany to Holland, and now
from Holland to England and from England to America.
The exact connection of English with Dutch Baptists
is not clear. Certain it is that early in the sixteenth

66 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

century some Dutch Baptists fled to England, but only
to meet the same sorrows from which they had fled.
Some of the first English Baptists also sent to Holland
for their baptism, as no immersed person was found
among them. There are evidences of many migrations
of German and Dutch Baptists into England even as
early as 1160 and from that onwards. Orchard says
that there was a Baptist church at Chesterton in 1457,
and gives his reasons for believing that such churches
had existed there from the time of William the Con-
querer. But however they originated, their history
becomes clear about 1612 when the first modern Bap-
tist church was formed in London. In 1626 this had
increased to eleven churches, and in 1644, to forty-seven.
The Welsh Baptists in connection with Vavasor Powell
were reckoned in 1654 at twenty thousand.* Their con-
fession of faith in 1660 is said to have been approved
by more than twenty thousand. Indeed, before this
time their influence had become so marked and the
opposition to infant baptism so strong that not only
were many treatises published against it and rational
arguments used by godly men, but it was openly
caricatured by the ungodly, so that cats and colts were
derisively christened in ridicule of it. f Their number
in England is now about two hundred and thirty-one
thousand, and in all of Great Britain about three hun-
dred and seventy-five thousand. Their history there
was a long struggle for toleration, (for England has not
yet secured full religious liberty, but only toleration,)
which was refused them first by the Episcopal body and

♦Orchard, Hist. Eng. Bap. p 284. fOrchard, p 272.

THE HISTOEICAL LINE. 67

then by the Presbyterian, until the Act of Toleration
in 1689, since which time active persecution in England
has ceased.

But Baptists have had their fullest and freest devel-
opment in "the land of the free" and this development
is enough familiar to us so that I do not need to trace
it. The first church organized by them in this country
and still existing was formed in Providence, Bhode
Island, in 1639, (though Newport claims that the
present Providence church is not the original church
and that the Newport branch of it is, and is therefore
the oldest,) and the growth has been rapid. In 1700
they had but twelve churches in the American colonies.
In 1804 Backus estimated them as having twelve hun-
dred churches and one hundred thousand members. In
1812 they numbered one hundred and seventy-three
thousand, in 1873 they had grown to one and a half
millions, and in 1899 they number four millions, one
hundred and forty-two thousand, and if we include those
bodies that are really Baptist though not given in our
own reports, they number four millions, three hundred
and seventy thousand in the United States, not includ-
ing a hundred and twenty-four thousand "Christians"
and a million and eighty-five thousand "Disciples."

The period of struggle, as far as this country is con-
cerned, is past and our position is one of respectability
and power. The directly evangelistic character of our
work gives promise of still more rapid growth, and the
prominence given to christian education will lead to a
still more stable church and a more powerful influence
on others. The net increase this year (1899) over last

68 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

in the United States is eighty-six thousand, one hundred
and eighty-nine.

Our statistics are never complete because we have no
way of requiring official reports, as in other bodies, and
the various clerks never do their whole duty; but as
nearly as the facts can be ascertained they are given in
our Year Book, (though certainly not up to the actual
totals,) and are as follows for the beginning of the year
1899:

Number of Baptists in the United States, . 4,141,995

in the rest of N. America, 143,098

" in South America, . . 1,389

in Europe, 478,268

in Asia, 119,745

in Africa, 6,700

" . " in Australasia, . . . 19,261

Making a grand total of 4,910,456

The total net gain over last year being . . 131,332

To these figures ought properly to be added those of
such bodies as the Free Baptists, the Dunkards, the
Seventh Day Baptists, (notthe Seventh Day Adventists,)
the Stundists, etc., of whose numbers we have no
account, for they are also Baptists as judged by the
broad definition we have given.

We are therefore, in fellowship with a grand com-
pany both present and past. Our brethren have not
been, for the most part, famous in the world, not
princes nor millionaires, but they have been true and
they have been known of God and blessed. To such

THE HISTORICAL LINE. 69

prosperity and strength as this have we grown and our
principles have been accepted far and wide. Let us
remember that the days of prosperity are the days of
danger, and let us fear lest liberty and prosperity shall
do for us what the dungeon and the stake were not able
to do, — turn us from a faithful witnessing for God, and
a steadfast and unworldly life. "Let us hold fast the
confession of our hope that it waver not; . . . and let us
consider one another to provoke unto love and good
works."

"dnd others were tortured, not accepting their
deliverance ; that they might obtain a better resur-
rection: and others had trial of mockings and
scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprison-
ment: they were stoned, they were sawn asunder,
they were tempted, they were slain with the sword:
they went about in sheepskins, in goat skins; being
destitute, afflicted, evil entreated, {of whom the
world was not worthy), wandering in deserts and
mountains and caves, and the holes of the earth.
$Lnd these all, having had witness borne to them
through their faith, received not the promise, God
having provided some better thing concerning us,
that apart from us they should not be made per-
fect"

III.

THE SUFFERINGS OF BAPTISTS,

In considering this part of our subject we need to
make a clear distinction between the sufferings of
christians as christians and the sufferings of christians
as Baptists: for persecution of christians by pagans
and because they are christians is one thing, and per-
secution of one sort of christians by another sort of
christians and because they are of another sort, is quite
another thing. The very early christians were Baptists
as we have seen, and they suffered; but they suffered,
not because they were Baptists and differed from other
christians, but because they were christians and differed
from Jew and pagan. What we are to consider is the
sufferings that came upon our spiritual ancestors on
account of those doctrines and practices which marked
them as a distinct people among christians, and which
form the substance of our faith today.

It is evident that there would be no persecution
among christians (or those who were called such) until
the church had become powerful enough to control the
secular power to a large degree, and unspiritual enough
to be intolerant of those who might oppose its interests;

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 73

and that did not come to pass until the rise of the
Papacy and its establishment in temporal power so that
princes and potentates would do its bidding. And
again, there would be no persecution until a considera-
ble body arose to call in question the doctrines or
practices of this dominating body and refuse obedience
to it. As long as no one protested against the perver-
sion of baptism by administering it to unconscious
babes, and the consequent ignoring of the fundamental
doctrine of Christianity, that salvation is through a
personal faith in Jesus Christ, no one would be burned
alive for their protest. But the true gospel had practi-
cally died out of continental Europe and it was not
until the twelfth century that a people arose to protest
and suffer. The main story of Baptist sufferings, then,
begins with the twelfth century.

But this was not the first of persecution for holding
our principles, which began, indeed, very early. The
Novatians, who arose in the latter half of the third
century, were ana-baptists, for they re-baptized those
who came to them, though for a somewhat different
reason than those who were later called Anabaptists.
They were separatists and considered that all ordinances
of the body from which they had separated were null
and void because the body itself was corrupt in life and
lax in discipline. The Donatists, beginning in the
fourth century, were also ana-baptists, and held much
in common with us, as they refused to baptize children,
re-baptized those who came to them from the Catholics,
their churches were independent and they repudiated
the union of church and state. Their questions: "What

74 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

has the Emperor to do with the church?'1 and "What
have christians to do with kings, or what have bishops
to do with a court?" sound very pertinent and refresh-
ing even now. Their influence became so strong that
Honorius and Theodosius, the emperors of the East
and West, were prevailed upon to issue a decree in the
year 413 that both persons who re-baptized and persons
who were re-baptized should suffer death; and two years
later the council of Mela in Numidia, with Augustine
at its head, decreed "We will that whoever denies that
children by baptism are freed from perdition and
eternally saved, that they be accursed." Many martyr-
doms and much suffering were the results of these
measures.* The Donatists continued for more than four
hundred years amid constant suffering. Their per-
secution ended with their extinction and infant
baptism was for centuries triumphant.

But let it be fully understood that the persecution of
Baptists was never for their immersion, (although
individuals have often been harassed for that in modern
times) but for their insistence upon a converted cTiurcli
membership and for their denial of infant baptism,
which two things are practically one. That that was a
church of Christ which was composed of unregenerated
and unspiritual persons, and that one could be made a
christian by the sprinkling of water with due ceremo-
nial form even in unconscious infancy, is what Baptists

*In the space of fifteen years Theodosius promulgated at least fifteen
severe edicts against heretics. Heretical teachers were exposed to exile
and confiscation. Religious meetings, by day or night, in cities or in the
country, were proscribed, and the building or ground where the assem-
bly was held was forfeited. "The office of Inquisitor of the Faith, a name
so deservedly abhorred, was first instituted under the reign of Theodo-
sius." Dutch Martyrology II, p. 187, note. London, 1853.

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 75

have always and everywhere denied. And that is just
what was believed in those days and is believed by
multitudes still — that baptism made their babies
christians — and believing it they, of course, had them
"baptized." It is hard for us now to realize that any-
body ever really believed that simply the performance
of such a ceremony could save a child, without choice
or faith or any action whatever on the part of the child,
but they actually did, and believing it, consistently
"baptized" their children. And that is the only possi-
ble ground or justification of infant baptism. If you
believe that baptism will save your child of course you
will have it baptized; but if you do not, there is no
reasonable reason to be given why you should do so.
They, therefore, practiced infant baptism consistently
but many of those who now practice it do so inconsis-
ently, for they deny the doctrine of baptismal regener-
ation while they continue the practice which originated
from and has its only justification in that doctrine.
As the German woman said to the amazed Congrega-
tional minister who asked her if she really thought he
could regenerate her babies and give them a title to
eternal life by merely putting a little water on their
heads, "To pe sure you can; and if you can't, vot's de
good of it?" Who can answer her question?

Nobody ever quarreled with us on account of our
immersion or denied its validity, except that quite
recently a few have been driven by stress of argument
to deny that it is scriptural at all. The evidence is
abundant that for thirteen hundred years immersion
was universally practiced and that any other form of

76 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

baptism, if admitted at all, was admitted only as excep-
tional, and valid only in cases where immersion could
not be performed. There was never any dispute about
this. There was a dispute for a thousand years as to
whether the candidate should be dipped three times or
only once, but there was never any dispute as to
whether he should be dipped at all. It was the apostolic
baptism, as is now admitted by candid scholars of every
belief, and no man with any reputation for learning
would wish to risk his reputation as a scholar by a
published statement to the contrary. If one of the
pillars of that old first church in Jerusalem could
appear on earth to-day, and happen in to the services
of one of these paedobaptist churches in time to see an
infant "baptized" or an adult sprinkled, he would not
in the least comprehend the ceremony nor understand
what it meant, for in all his life he never saw anything
like it. It certainly never would enter his mind that
it was meant for a baptism. It was clearly the baptism
of the early churches succeeding the apostolic times.
It was the baptism of the British and Irish churches.
It was the baptism of the Eastern or Greek church,
and still is, and it always seemed to me that those
Greeks ought to be able to understand their own lan-
guage in which the Apostles wrote. They "baptize"
infants, but they always immerse them.* It was also
the baptism of the Western church. Clovis, king of
the Franks, was immersed with three thousand of his
warriors in the year 476, and the font or baptistery in

*A very interesting description of a Greek baptism is given in the
Baptist Quarterly Review, 1870, p 80.

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 77

which tradition says it was done is still to be seen in
Paris. On Easter day in the year 627 bishop Paulinus
immersed three thousand Northumbrians in a pool
about two miles from Harbottle, England, and a monu-
ment in the shape of a cross stands in the middle of
the pool, bearing an inscription which declares that
fact. The pool is about twenty-four by twenty feet in size
and two feet deep at present, and by closing the outlet
could be made much deeper. Mosaics and paintings from
the fourth century to the thirteenth set forth baptism as
an immersion. Venerable Bede the historian, who died
about the year 735, after describing various immersions
and baptisteries, says: "For he truly who is baptized
is seen to descend into the fountain; he is seen to be
dipped in the waters; he is seen to ascend from the
waters." Cardinal Pulis, who lectured at both Oxford
and Paris, and was a very learned man, writes in the
year 1150: "Whilst the candidate for baptism in water
is immersed, the death of Christ is suggested; whilst
immersed and covered with water, the burial of Christ
is shown forth; whilst he is raised from the waters, the
resurrection of Christ is proclaimed. The immersion
is repeated three times."

There was no definite time when the change from
immersion to sprinkling can be said to have been made,
or the practice of sprinkling to have originated. Pour-
ing can be traced to a definite beginning but sprinkling
can not; like Topsy, it "jest growed." We find the
Council of London in the year 1200 enjoining immersion .
That of Sarum in 1217 and that of Oxford in 1222 did
the same. In 1240 the SyQod of Worcester decreed;

78 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

"In every church where baptism is performed there
shall be a font of stone of sufficient size and depth for
the baptism of children, and let the candidate for
baptism be always immersed." These decrees might
seem to show that an innovation upon the ancient
method had already begun. In 1311 the council at
Ravenna permits sprinkling as exceptional, and
before this it had no formal sanction. Immersion
continued the rule in England until after 1450. The
catechism of 1604 makes sprinkling valid, and within a
hundred years from that date that which had been the
exception became the rule and the ancient immersion
was superseded.

Dean Stanley says in his famous essay on baptism:
"In the Church of England, immersion is still observed
in theory. The rubric in the public baptism for infants
enjoins that unless for special causes they are to be
dipped, not sprinkled. Edward the Sixth and Elizabeth
were both immersed. But since the beginning of the
seventeenth century the practice has become exceed-
ingly rare."

Even as late as August 7th, 1664, the noted West-
minster Assembly, which framed the great confession
of faith known as the Westminster Confession, fell
into a "great heat" over the question of immersion.
The matter is worth giving in the quaint language of
Dr. Lightfoot, who kept a journal of the proceedings.
"Then fell we upon the work of the day, which was
about the baptism of the child, whether to dip or
sprinkle him; and this proposition, "It is lawful and
sufficient to besprinkle the child," had been canvassed

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 79

before our adjournment and was ready now to vote.
But I spoke against it as being very unfit to vote that
it is lawful to sprinkle when everyone grants it.
Whereupon it was fallen upon, sprinkling being
granted, whether dipping should be tolerated with it.
And here fell we upon a large and long discourse
whether dipping were essential or used in the first in-
stitution or in the Jews' custom . . . After a long dispute
it was at last put to the question whether the Directory
should run, "The minister shall take water and sprinkle
or pour it with his hand upon the face or forehead of
the child;" and it was voted so indifferently that we
were glad to count names twice; for so many were
unwilling to have dipping excluded that the vote came
to an equality within one; for the one side was twenty-
four, the other twenty-five, — the twenty-four for the
reserving of dipping and the twenty-five against it.
And then grew a great heat upon it; and when we had
done all we concluded upon nothing in it, but the
business was recommitted." The next day it was voted
that the Directory should read, "He is to baptize the
child with water, which, for the manner of doing it, is
no't only lawful but also sufficient and most expedient
to be by pouring or sprinkling water upon the face of
the child without any other ceremony." Note in this
account that immersion was not excluded but sprink-
ling was permitted; and note, also, the narrow majority
by which it was carried on the first vote.

The following from the dairy of John Wesley, written
in Savannah, Georgia, ought to be of interest, at least
to our Methodist brethren, "Saturday, 21st, February,

80 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

(1736). Mary Welch, 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." And
again, "Wednesday, May 5th. I was asked to baptize
a child of Mr. Parker, second bailiff of Savannah. But
Mrs. Parker told me, "Neither Mr. Parker nor I will
consent to its being dipped." I answered, "If you will
certify that your child is weak it will suffice, the rubric
says, to pour water upon it." She replied, "Nay, the
child is not weak but I am resolved it shall not be
dipped." This argument I could not confute. So I
went home and the child was baptized by another per-
son."

I could easily spend the whole hour in reading you
testimonies gathered from various writers living in
different countries and all the way down from the first
century to the thirteenth, showing that during all this
time immersion was the universal practice throughout
all Christendom, but will add on]y the following words
of Dean Stanley who sums up the whole matter thus: —
"For the first thirteen centuries the almost universal
practice of baptism was that of which we read in the
New Testament, and such is the very meaning of the
word "baptize" that those who were baptized were
plunged, submerged, immersed into water." He adds,
"Baptism by sprinkling was rejected by the whole
ancient church (except in the rare case of death-beds
or extreme necessity) as no baptism at all."

Nobody, therefore, ever had any quarrel with us on
account^bf our immersion. The creat matter of con-

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 81

troversy was first as to the subjects of baptism, and
later, both as to subjects and form. The whole horrid
history of Baptist persecutions has been on account of
infant baptism. We can hardly comprehend what an
awful hold the idea that infant baptism saves the child
has had on Christendom, so that for centuries all
Christendom iived and died in the full and complacent
belief of it. R was not strange, then, that men were
thrown into consternation when this foundation stone
of salvation was threatened with removal, nor that their
wrath was stirred against those wTho denied the reality
of that salvation in which they so implicitly believed.
To save that "beautiful" and "impressive rite," that
"triumph of christian charity" as some call it; to save
that masterpiece of Satan's ingenuity, as it really is; by
which more has been done to block the progress of the
kingdom of God than by any other thing that ever was;
by which more corruption has been brought into the
christian church; by which more people have been put
beyond the reach of converting influences than by any
other; by which untold millions of imregenerated, un-
saved sinners have been made to go down to perdition
in the full belief that they were christians and heirs of
eternal life; — to save this, fires have been kindled, racks
have been stretched, swords have been sharpened, and
oceans of innocent blood have been shed. Rightly does
the Presbyterian Dr. John Robertson of Glasgow call
it "a sinful addition to and reversal of the Word of
God," a "traditional lie," a "devil's delusion." He says,
"You may like it or dislike it, baby sprinkling, as a
simple addendum to the Word of God, and as such

82 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

inheriting the curse in the 19th verse of the 23rd Rev-
elation on all such human or diabolical addenda, is an
infernal lie. By this devil's door of baby-sprinkling
the great heresy of the church, the ex opere operato
delusion, the Roman and the Anglican semi-Roman
error of errors, baptismal regeneration, stalked in to
tread its grim march of death over the graves of the
multitudes of souls it has slain and damned forever!'1
This is from a sermon preached in his own church, the
City Temple Presbyterian Church of Glasgow, to a
congregation of four thousand people. The whole ser-
mon is very interesting reading and I heartily commend
it to our Presbyterian brethren. If a Baptist should
use such language as this there would be an uproar, but
when a Presbyterian says it perhaps we may be permit-
ted to say "Amen."

Infant baptism means baptismal regeneration; it
means sacramental efficacy, that is, salvation by the
magical influence of rites and ceremonies instead of by
personal faith; it means the perversion of the scriptures
and the setting up*of man's authority above Christ's; it
means an unconverted church; it means spiritual things
administered by unspiritual men; it means the church
a human institution and run on human principles; and
this is shown by actual experience as well as by logical
deduction. Against this Baptists have always protested,
and for their protest have been hated and imprisoned
and tortured and murdered. Let me repeat it again; —
the great reason for the persecution of Baptists in times
past and the hostility shown them in time present is
and has always been their rejection of infant baptism.

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 83

This is shown in many ways; by the charges of their
opponents, by the topics in disputations held and
by the question always and everywhere asked, if they
believed infants should be baptized or could be saved
without baptism, and especially in the language of the
decrees by which they were condemned. The phrase
constantly recurring in the decrees of their condemna-
tion is "because he held that the baptism of infants did
not profit," or "that the baptism of infants is unlawful,"
and "for the error of ana-baptism," i. e. re-baptism, and
"for re-baptizing." But why condemn for r^-baptizing?
What harm in two baptisms? Evidently this, that a
re-baptism is a declaration that the former baptism was
not valid. There is no other reason for a second one,
and this reason is clearly stated in some of their
decrees. It is the same thing that compels a Metho-
dist or Congregational pastor of to-day to refuse to
immerse one who is dissatisfied with his infant or other
sprinkling, (and their name is legion). For him to do
so would be to contradict his own teaching, admit the
invalidity of his own practices and endorse the position
of the Baptist. In the last Methodist General Confer-
ence the statement was made that they are losing to the
Baptists more than five thousand members every year
on account of dissatisfaction with their baptism received
in infancy, or sprinkling received in later years, and to
remedy this it was proposed to allow their ministers to
immerse those whose consciences were thus troubled.
But the proposition was wisely smothered, for that
would have been a practical concession of our whole
contention as to this subject.

84 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

This denial of infant baptism and not peculiarities in
regard to the "communion" is the real ground of oppo-
sition to Baptists today. This is why we are by some
actually hated, by others shunned, and by many more
regarded with suspicion. But to make so called "close
communion" the ground of opposition is an entire mis-
take. So are the Presbyterians "close communionists,"
for they will not "commune" with the nnbaptized, and
there are more than a hundred and fifteen thousand of
them in this country who will not even "commune" with
other Presbyterians.* So are the Episcopalians "close
communionists" for the same reason. So are the Luth-
erans and so at least in theory, is every other church.f
None of these, except as moved by the loose modern
liberalism, will "commune" with the unbaptized. No,
it is not that they are shut out from our christian
fellowship, for they have it in airpractical ways and
have it heartily. It is not that they desire with us
to commemorate the Lord's sufferings and are grieved
because they cannot. They do not mingle largely with
each other in this observance, and if we should throw
down all bars and freely invite them in they would not
come after the novelty had worn off. They want their
baptism endorsed, and that is the whole controversy.
The only ground on which we refuse to sit at the Lord's
table with them is their lack of christian baptism, and
our practice continually says to them, "You are not
baptized, you are not baptized, you are not baptized,"
and that is the whole offense.

But further; infant baptism itself is of the nature of

*The United Presbyterians and the Reformed (Covenanter) Presby-
terians. fExcept, perhaps, the "Disciples."

PEESECUTIONS AND SUFFEKINGS. 85

persecution. It is the performance of a very impor-
tant religious act for the individual without his knowl-
edge or consent, depriving him of the privilege of
conscious obedience in the matter. It is doing for him
a thing of which his own conscience may not afterwards
approve, and when in mature years he wishes to be
baptized, the privilege is denied him on the ground that
he has been baptized. It thus denies the right of
individual choice, which is the very essence and
underlying principle of persecution. An incident in
my own pastorate a few years ago will illustrate this.
A very lovely young christian woman of my congrega-
tion, who had longed for the privilege of following
Christ in baptism but had been hindered by opposing
parents and relatives, was dying of quick consumption
and was already too weak to argue any matter or even
to converse. She was visited by the Rector of her
mother's church, who took her severely to task for
wishing to leave the bosom of "The Church" and
ridiculed the people of her choice unsparingly. He
told her that she had no right to unite with a Baptist
church, (she was of full age,) that she belonged to them
by reason of her infant baptism and training and that
nothing she could do would change that relation, and
that even if she should unite with another church
such action would be null and void, and much more of
the same sort. Had she been strong enough she would
have given him some information that would have done
him good, but under the circumstances it was an outrage.
Here was an explicit denial of her right of choice or the
exercise of her own conscience concerning her christian

86 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

duty, on the ground that it had all been settled for her
before she was old enough to know anything about it.
He needed but one thing more to make it full fledged
persecution, and that was the power to tell her "And if
you do go into that church we will burn you for it."

And furthermore, the only body that has persistently
repudiated infant baptism is the only body that has
never persecuted any one or advocated principles that
lead to persecution; — except, of course, those who
repudiate all external ordinances, as the Quakers and
some heretical sects, and except also those churches
whose origin was since the days of gross persecution
passed away. Baptists have never anywhere persecuted
others nor sought or accepted such an alliance with the
secular power as would have made such persecution
possible. This statement has seemed to some like
vaunting ourselves above others and has been denied,
but consider the following facts: —

1. Their fundamental doctrine of personal faith and
personal responsibility; that religion is a matter between
the individual soul and God alone, and that for the
performance of any and every religious duty whatever
the individual is responsible only to God. This is
the doctrine of soul liberty; that inasmuch as the
soul is responsible directly and only to God, no man
has any right either to force or forbid any one as to any
matter of religious belief or practice. That doctrine
made it impossible for them to persecute.

2. The wide spread doctrine, held for centuries by
them, that a christian ought not to bear the sword, that
is, be a magistrate; without which of course there could

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 87

be no compulsion of others. This teaching was clearly
a mistake, for if any man should be a christian and act
in the fear of God, surely he should whose duty it is to
rule and to judge. It was a christian doctrine as they
meant it, but it seemed to their enemies to be dangerous
socialism and it added much to their sufferings.

3. The first government ever formed by Baptists
and on Baptist principles specifically forbade any
interference by any one with the conscience of another,
and decreed that "No person within the said colony, at
any time hereafter, shall be in any wrise molested,
punished, disquieted or called in question for any differ-
ence of opinion in matters of religion." I shall refer
to this again.

If the matter is still disputed however, I demand an
instance, and challenge any one to show where and when
Baptists have persecuted in any wise. Dr. J. L. M.
Curry truly says, "No Baptist church can be found [in
history J which has ever favored an alliance with govern-
ment, and no Baptist author can be adduced who has
advocated the use of civil authority to control or regu-
late religious belief."* One single Baptist church has
been found however, the South Brimfield church in
Massachusetts, which did for a single year accept money
raised by taxation for the support of their pastor. They
had been persuaded to this by some dissatisfied Congre-
gational brethren, but they saw their mistake, unani-
mously voted to publish a confession of it, asked
forgiveness of God and their brethren, and, let us hope,
were forgiven. f

♦Struggles and Triumphs of Virginia Baptists, p. 25.
fLife and Times of Isaac Backus, p. 277,

88 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

"But" you say, "they never had a chance; they never
had control." Yes, but they have. They had control
in Rhode Island and they made religion abso-
lutely free. They had opportunity when offered
state support and adoption as the state church in
Holland in 1819, and refused it. They had opportunity
in Georgia in 1785 when the legislature voted a state
tax for the support of churches, and they secured the
repeal of the measure. They were in the majority in a
large part of the state and would have received much
money by it, but they opposed it unanimously. They
have control in some of the states of the Union today
but there is no disposition to take advantage of it.
Those who insist that every applicant shall give evidence
of the possession of the spirit of Christ before admission
to the church at all are not the ones to violate that spirit
by the persecution of their fellow christians. The great
heresy of the ages and the prolific root of every sort of
cruelty has been infant baptism.

The days of persecution seem like the memory of
some frightful dream. What a nightmare of horrors
history has been! It seems almost incredible that a
time could ever have been when such things were
possible, and we are almost persuaded that their story
is the product of some one's diseased imagination. It
seems incredible that at least three millions of christians
should have been murdered for their faith before the
year 312, yet that estimate has been made and it seems
not improbable, and certainly more than that number
have been murdered for their faith since that time. We
were exceedingly shocked by the horrors of Bulgaria in

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 89

1876 and of Armenia in 1896, and the cold chills ran
over us as we read the description by an eye-witness of
a ghastly pile of three hundred human bodies thrown
together by "the unspeakable Turk;" but what shall we
say when sober historians tell us of thirty thousand
Waldensians butchered for their faith and thrown into
a single heap at the instigation of the "Holy Catholic
Church," of sixty thousand murdered in that single
campaign, of two hundred thousand destroyed in a few
months, and this followed by other and still other
butcheries until the heart grows sick and the head faint
at the recital!

What Baptists have suffered is too sickening to read
and too horrible to tell: in Germany, in Switzerland, in
Holland, in Moravia, in Austria, in Italy, in France, in
England. Even in America they suffered; in Massa-
chusetts, in Connecticut, in Virginia, in New York, in
South Carolina, and so lately that those now living have
heard their fathers and grandfathers tell the story. It
does not appear however, that any Baptist suffered
death for his faith in America except indirectly as the
result of imprisonment etc., although four Quakers were
hung in Boston, two in 1659, one in 1660 and one in
1661, for the crime of being Quakers. The story of
these sufferings can not now be given in detail for that
would require many volumes to be written, and we can
only gather up some samples and indications of the
whole.

To get some idea of the awf ulness of the persecutions
of Baptists, consider how wfide spread and numerous
they were and then remember that except in Holland,

90 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

they were utterly exterminated. In the year 1530 there
was scarcely a village in the Netherlands where they
were not found, and in many localities they were the
leading influence. In Friesland one out of every four
was a Baptist, and they are not more numerous in any
place in the world today. The state of Georgia gives
us the same proportion, one out of four. As to Ger-
many, Dr. Kellar, the archivist of Munster, who probably
knows more about the Anabaptists than any other living
man, says; "The more I examine the documents at my
command the more I am astonished at the extent of the
diffusion of Anabaptist views; an extent no other
investigator has any knowledge of.1' He speaks of
their churches in city after city and province after
province all over the German empire and from the
North Sea to the Alps. They must have been numbered
by the hundreds of thousands, and yet they were
exterminated. So numerous were they that in many
places Catholic and Lutheran priests could find no
occupation, and they complain that their churches are
deserted, their teachings held in contempt, and the
infants withheld from baptism; although they may
possibly have exaggerated their grievances.

In Moravia there were estimated to be seventy thous-
and Baptists, which would make them about as numerous
as in Massachusetts at the present time. They must
have been more numerous in many provinces than they
now are in most of the United States, for, taking the
whole Union together, Baptists number about one in
seventeen of the population. In Minnesota they number
only one in eighty-four; in Wisconsin, one in seventy-

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 91

four; in Michigan, one in thirty-eight; in New York,
one in thirty- four; and so on down to Virginia with its
three hundred and thirty-three thousand Baptists, or
one in four and two-thirds, and Georgia with its three
hundred and seventy-seven thousand, or one in four.
Consider what a task it would be to exterminate the
Baptists of even a single state of the Union, and yet all
those hosts of central Europe were utterly annihilated.
They were systematically hunted out, as men hunt
wolves, with the set purpose of their complete extinction,
and that extinction was accomplished, so that for nearly
two hundred years not a Baptist was known in the
greater part of Europe.

For generation after generation it was as much a
crime to be a Baptist as to be a murderer. Nay, more
a crime; for there was often mercy for the murderer or
the lecherous villain, but for the Baptist, none. They
had no protection for life or property. It was a crime
for them to meet and pray together; a crime to preach
the gospel; a crime to instruct any one in the way of
life; a crime even to believe the teachings of Jesus. It
was a crime to deny any of the monstrous teachings of
the Roman Catholic church or the less mistaken teach-
ings of the Reformed churches. It was a crime to teach
any one of those truths which we hold most precious,
and above ail was it a crime to do that which is the
most precious privilege of a Baptist minister, baptize a
believing convert.

For these things they were beheaded, they were
drowned, they were sent to the galleys, they were burned
alive, they were buried alive, yes, some were actually

92 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

boiled alive! Not to speak of the slow torture of death
by starvation and in foul prisons where they died in a
manner worthy of Libby prison or Andersonville. Says
the chronicler, speaking of Moravia; "Some were torn
to pieces on the rack; some were burned to ashes and
powder; some were roasted on pillars; some were torn
with red hot tongs; some were shut up in houses and
burned in masses; some were hanged on trees; some
were executed with the sword; some were plunged into
the water; many had gags put into their mouths so that
they could not speak and so were led away to death.
Like sheep and lambs, crowds of them were led away to
be butchered and slaughtered. Others were starved or
allowed to rot in noisome prisons. Many had holes
burned in their backs and were left in this condition.
Like owls and bitterns they dared not go abroad by day
but lived and crouched in rocks and caverns, in wild for-
ests, in caves and pits. Many were hunted down with
hounds and catchpoles," and so the horrid recital goes on.
In Switzerland they were often tied at intervals to a long
rope made fast to the neck, and then made to stand
together upon some overhanging rock or platform, so
that when the foremost was pushed off into the water,
each in falling would drag the next one after him, and
so all would drown together both men and women.

They were systematically robbed of all they had for
the benefit of their persecutors. Their wills and con-
tracts were rendered void and their business ruined.
They were driven from their homes in winter to freeze
to death or to starve. Men were imprisoned for shelter-
ing them, for giving them food, or even for failing to

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 93

report them. Men were tortured to make them tell if
they knew where any poor Baptist was in hiding. The
infamous edict of the Zwinglian authorities at Zurich
in 1530 and the still more infamous edict of Charles V
in 1535 not only decreed death to the Anabaptist with-
out mercy, but severe punishments upon any who should
fail or hesitate in their zeal in hunting them out. The
even more atrocious edict of Philip II, who succeded
Charles V in 1535, demands that the men be "punished
with the sword; and the women by being buried alive,
if they do not maintain or defend their errors. But in
case they persist in their errors, opinions or heresies,
they shall be executed by fire;" and declares that if any
fail to make them known or shall harbor them in any
way they shall "be punished with the same punishment
as the heretic or criminal would be, if he were taken
and imprisoned." Many engaged in the wicked work
through fear for themselves, whose feelings of humanity
would otherwise have kept them from it. Every form
of meanest treachery was devised to trap them, and
spies were even hired to profess conversion with hypo-
critical tears, in order that they might be admitted to
their secrets and so betray their hiding places to those
who sought their lives. Their tongues were often
bored or burned, or even cut out, in order that they
might not be able to speak to the multitudes assembled
at their execution and infect them with their heresy.
Their leaders were not only butchered but tortured
with a cruelty that would shame an American savage;
— men with whom, for sweetness of spirit, for nobility
of character and spiritual culture as well as scholarship

'94 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

and learning, such a one as Luther, much as he is
praised, is not to be compared. For example Jacob
Huter, a godly man and a wondrously successful
preacher of the gospel, was seized and gagged and led
away to Innsbruck, where he was first thrown into cold
water and then into hot water, his flesh was torn with
red hot pincers and the wounds were filled with brandy,
and then the brandy was set on fire, and in this
awful torture he perished. Devils fresh from hell could
not invent worse torments than these gentle representa-
tives of a "holy" church, every one of whom had been
"baptized" in his infancy and thereby had "become
regenerate and grafted into the church of Jesus Christ."
But the story is too horrible to tell. If I were simply to
detail the list of horrors visited upon our poor Baptist
brethren, the women of this audience would faint in
their seats and the men would drive me from the plat-
form. And all this, mind you, was done in the name of
God and of his Christ and with the utmost sanctimon-
iousness conceivable. Let me give you a sample decree
taken from the records of the Inquisition in Switzer-
land in 1430:—

"In the name of God, Amen. We, Br. Ulrich of
Torrente of the Dominican order of Lausanne, and with
full Apostolic authority Inquisitor of heretical iniquity
in the diocese of Lausanne; and John de Columpnis,
Licentiate and specially appointed to this work by the
venerable father in Christ, Lord William of Challant,
Bishop of Lausanne, have directed by the pure process
of the Inquisition that you, Peter Sager, now 60 years
old, born at Montrich, thirty years and more ago fore-

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 95

swore the Waldensian heresy in the city of Berne, but
since that tinie have returned to that preyerse faith like
a dog to his vomit and held and done many things
detestable and vile against the most holy and venerable
Roman church. You have stubbornly asserted that
there is no purgatory but only heaven and hell;
that masses and intercessions and alms for the souls
of the departed are of no avail; and there are many
other things proven against you in your trial that show
that you have fallen back into heresy. O grief!
Therefore after consideration and investigation and
mature consideration and weighing of evidence; and
after consulting the statutes both of human and divine
law and arming ourselves with the revered sign of the
Holy Cross, we declare; In the name of the Father, Son
and Holy Ghost, Amen; that our decision may proceed
from the presence of God and our eyes behold justice,
turning neither to the right nor left but fixed on God
and the holy scriptures, we make known as our final
sentence that you Peter Sager are and have been a
heretic, treacherously recreant to your oath of recanta-
tion. As a relapsed heretic we commit you to the arm
of the secular power. However we entreat the secular
authorities to execute the sentence of death more mildly
than the canonical statutes require, particularly as to
the mutilation of the members of the body. We further
decree that all and every property that belongs to you
Peter, is confiscated and after being divided into three
parts, the first part shall go to the government, the
second to the officers of the Inquisition and the third to
pay the expenses of the trial,"

96 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

And the following is found upon the town record as
to the expenses of the execution:

Paid to Master Garnaucie for burning Peter

Sager, . ... 20 shillings.

For cords and stake, .... 10 u

For the pains of the executioner, . . .28 "
Special watchman during the execution

in the city, . . 17. shillings, 6 pfennings.

Special watchmen in the citadel, . . 9 sols.
For the beadles, ..... 14 shillings.
And twelve wagon loads of fuel were used in the burn-
ing.* This record speaks for itself; I cannot find
language adequately to comment upon it.

How many were thus put to death can never be told.
There is much doubtless, yet to be revealed from the
study of old records in Europe which w7ill make the his-
tory more complete. In the small province of the Tyrol
one thousand were put to death in four years. This is
at the rate of two hundred and fifty per year in one little
province, whereas, during the whole reign of her who is
called "bloody Mary,'1 and in all England, only twTo
hundred and sixty-four suffered death. Six hundred
were slain at Ensisheim;six hundred at Brixen; seventy-
three at Lintz; twenty at Rothenburg; sixty-eight at
Katzbuhel; thirty-nine at Salzburg; seventy-two within
five years at Antwerp; three hundred and fifty at Alzey,
between a hundred and fifty and two hundred in the
Palatinate, another small province, etc., etc. The records
speak of thousands upon thousands all over Germany,
Austria, Holland, Prussia, Switzerland and other coun-

♦Armitage, Hist, of Bap., p. 312.

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 97

tries. The official report of the Venetian embassador
to the court of Charles V in 1546 says that "In Holland
and Friesland more than thirty thousand persons have
suffered death at the hands of justice for Anabaptist
errors." This is the language of a-sRoman Catholic of
course, and so he calls their martyrdom for repudiation
of Papal abominations "suffering death at the hands of
justice." Of the seventy thousand already mentioned
in Moravia we can not tell how many were put to death
and how many were driven out, but, ruined by foreign
invasions, hunted by the Jesuits, they were pursued
until there were none remaining.

Catholics persecuted Lutherans and Lutherans per-
secuted Catholics in turn, but both together wreaked
their vengeance on the poor Baptists; and when at any
lull in the tempest the hand of persecution was lifted
and favors were granted to dissenting bodies, those
who denied the validity of infant baptism were specific-
ally excepted.

How shall we explain this persistent persecution,
especially when we know by many indications that they
were a peaceable, pure, God-fearing people? So true
was this that their very piety was a means of pointing
them out to their persecutors. Was anyone observed
at prayer? He was an Anabaptist. Did anyone offer
thanks before eating? He must be an Anabaptist.
Did he refuse to curse and swear and even to become
angry? He was surely an Anabaptist. A letter written
in these times says: — "If anyone will speak for God,
for a christian life, against the ungodliness of the times,
he must be regarded as a most wicked Anabaptist, and

98 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

many think they cannot otherwise escape this brand
than by frequent revellings. For to this pass has your
evangelic freedom brought the world, that every one
earnestly striving to reform their lives, who will not
wallow with the drunken swine, that is, live unchastely,
must be an Anabaptist."*

The persecutions were due to several things, and
chiefly to the fear that the existing order of things
would be overturned by the new doctrines. As of old
and ever, these chief priests and Pharisees feared the
loss of their prestige and power and desired to continue
their monopoly of religious prerogatives. But many
doubtless were sincere in their alarm. Knowing nothing
of the experience of a real spiritual regeneration, they
believed the church in which they had been trained to
be the only true church and to offer the only salvation,
and it seemed to them that the church of God was
being torn to pieces by these heretics. And again, the
Anabaptist doctrine that a christian should not "bear
the sword," that is, be a magistrate to rule and judge
his brethren, seemed to them to be a wild and danger-
ous socialism, subversive of all law and order. The
Anabaptists looked upon the magistrates around them
and saw only those who were cruel and unjust and
used their power for oppression and persecution.
Magistracy was to them synonomous with wickedness
and oppression and they said, the christian ought not
to be a magistrate; the christian should suffer wrong
rather than do wrong. But to those who could not
appreciate this truly Christ^like acceptance of the

♦Quoted in Dollinger's Reformation, I. 65.

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 99

gospel teaching, their position seemed like a denial of
all properly constituted authority, and they looked upon
them as anarchists and charged them with all the wild
and wicked schemes with which we charge the anarch-
ists of today.

But all this does not by any means fully explain it.
It does not explain the vindictive meanness of their
treatment, the intentional and shameless exposure of
women during torture or at their death, the tortures of
the pincers and the rack before their execution, the
mean vilification of them both living and dead, the
calloused obtuseness to the force of their arguments
and their uniform condemnation in spite of reason-
ings, protests and denials; for there was never but one
ending in their trials. They were hated, simply hated
for their purity of life and for the necessary exposure
by contrast of the false religious life and teaching of
their persecutors. Their life and teaching was of
necessity a continual condemnation of the false Christi-
anity of Catholic and Lutheran and condemnation of
self, whether just or not, is the last thing a man will
submit to. If they were right others were wrong and
their very existence as Baptists contained a logical
force which was resented just as it is today. If they
were simply regarded as dangerous people whose exter-
mination was a necessity, why not kill them off as
quickly and painlessly as possible, and so let them go
without the abominable tortures which only hate could
invent or permit ? No ! the circumstances of their taking
off showed a vindictive hatred which was felt and voiced
even by as good a man as Zwingli in that famous cold-
ly <tf u.

100 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

blooded sentence of his, more terse in the Latin than it
can be made in English, "Qui iterum mergit, merga-
tur;" "He who a second time immerses, let him be
immersed," that is, drowned.

There was not a Reformer of any prominence who did
not stain his hands with the blood of his Baptist
brethren; Luther, Melancthon, Zwingli, Bucer, Bullin-
ger, Calvin, Knox, Cramner, Latimer, Ridley, and many
others, who endorsed these cruelties and in the face of
whose opposition they would not have been committed.
Some of these in turn were burned at the stake them-
selves, in the carrying out by the Romanists against
them of the same line of argument which themselves
employed against the Baptists. When defending them-
selves they claimed the rights of conscience and denied
the right of others to persecute, but wThen opposing
Baptists, urged the necessity of the extinction of heresy
even by putting heretics to death. They could not see
that they themselves were also heretics, and that others
had just as good a right to differ from them as they had
to differ from the Catholics.

But this brief recital has given us only the merest
scraps and hints of suffering. Fill out for yourself the
particulars and consider how much suffering of every
kind was involved; homes broken up and fathers mur-
dered; the tears and fears of orphaned children left to
the tender mercies of their enemies; the struggles of
widowed mothers to find bread for their fatherless
children; the hardships of families driven out from
their homes and despoiled of all their possessions to
find food among strangers or starve; and with all this

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 101

the constant thought of the galling injustice of it all
and of the ill will and contempt which they must bear,
which was only the product of prejudice and supersti-
tion and ignorance. The cool calculation of cruelty
which they suffered was infamous. Communities were
driven out just before the harvest time, when there
would be no possible chance to raise another crop with
which to feed themselves, and when the fruits of their
year of toil would fall into the hands of their persecutors.
Nor were they even suffered to depart voluntarily in
peace though empty handed. Witness this instance
among many: — "In a mountainous district of Switzer-
land a numerous body of Baptists were visited by a
friend from Moravia who persuaded them to migrate to
his country, where means of living were more abundant
and they would be beyond the reach of their persegutors.
They disposed of their possessions and set forth upon
their long journey. But in a strange land on the way
their enemies overtook them. All the men were
beheaded, the women drowned, their property and their
little ones carried off."* They were even forbidden by
Philip II to change their place of abode lest they should
seek another habitation and so escape with their lives.
What a world of pathos there is in the words of Menno
Simon: "What misery and anxiety have I felt in the
deadly perils of persecution for my poor sick wife and
little children. While others lie on soft beds and
cushions, we must often creep away into secret corners.
While others engage in festivities to the music of the
fife and of the trumpet, we must look around whenever

♦Heroes and Hierarchs, p. 103.

102 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

a dog barks, fearing the spies are on our track." What
a revelation of heartache in these words of Bunyan:
"The parting from my wife and poor children hath
often been to me in this place as the pulling of my
flesh off my bones . . . especially my poor blind child,
who lay nearer my heart than all I had beside. I was
as a man who was pulling down his house upon the
head of his wife and children. Yet, thought I, I must
do it, I must do it." Very truly and tersely says Dr.
Bitting, "Through long centuries of anguish and conflict
Baptists have toiled, at every tread detailing their
martyrs to dungeon and to death, and faltering not
until victory dawned. With a welcome to every living
soul to share the sweet results of their conflicts, they
returned to build their waste places and to enlarge their
borders, only to find their deeds denied or forgotten,
their history calumniated, their very name a target for
reproach and they only called bigots."*

In England and America the story is less awful; yet
in England in 1535 fourteen Dutch Anabaptists were
burned alive, two of them in London, the others being
scattered in various towns, doubtless as a warning to
others. In 1538 six more were burned at the stake.
In 1539 a body of thirty-one wTere driven out and fled
to Holland where they were beheaded. In 1575 two
were burned alive. Twenty-six were thus martyred in
a few years in different places, but this is only the
beginning of the list of English Baptist martyrs. We
have no records of an Inquisition in England to fur-
nish information as to those who were put to death

♦Religious Liberty and the Baptists, p. 17.

PEKSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 103

or died in prison, else the list would be very much
extended. Of this the statement of Orchard may be
taken as an indication, who says, that "the computation
of those who suffered for non-conformity between the
restoration and the revolution amounted to seventy
thousand families ruined and eight thousand persons
destroyed, though the calculation was not finished.
The property of which they were plundered, consisting
of money and estates, is said to have amounted to twelve
or fourteen millions1' — of pounds, which would be from
sixty to seventy millions of dollars. A large part of
these were Baptists. On the eleventh of April, 1611,
Edward Wightman gave up his life at the stake, and
thus was closed by a Baptist the long list of English
martyrs which had been begun two hundred and eleven
years before by the burning of another Baptist, William
Sawtry. But fines, disabilities and imprisonment
followed them, however, until the Act of Toleration in
1689 when active persecution ceased.

Yet not even now are Baptists or other dissenters on
an equality with those who belong to the state church,
as they are still shut out from various positions and
advantages and are still taxed for the support of a clergy
which knows little of the gospel and is often of the
"sporting" class if not positively immoral. So great a
Baptist as Charles Spurgeon was obliged to the day of
his death to pay taxes for the support of Episcopal
ministers, and the younger brother of our own Dr.
Williams,* a Baptist deacon in Wales, and whose father
was also a Baptist deacon, is compelled to pay more

*Dr. O. A. Williams, District Secretary of the American Baptist Home
Mission Society.

104 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

than one hundred dollars every year for the same
purpose, while after doing this he can not pay one
quarter of that sum for the support of his own pastor.
If he did not pay it the officers would seize his cattle
and his teams and his crops and sell them from him.
The records of English Baptist history are meager and
we are not able to give with any fulness either the story
of their successes or their sufferings.

At the time of the settlement of America the age of
bloody religious persecutions was passing away, and we
find no record that any Baptist in America was put to
death for his opinions, except it may be as a result of
exposure in imprisonment in cold jails and other like
hardships. Jails and prisons in those days were
miserable affairs and from this exposure some did die,
as really martyrs as if they had been beheaded. Yet
they were banished, they were whipped, they were
stoned, they were hunted with dogs, they were dis-
franchised, they were robbed of their homes and their
living, for preaching, for baptizing, for observing
together the Lord's Supper, for refusing to have their
babies sprinkled, for going out of church when other
people had their babies sprinkled, for refusing to attend
the preaching of unconverted ministers, and even for
meeting together privately to pray. Everywhere they
were taxed for the support of the state churches or
"standing order," and when they refused to pay such
taxes on the ground that it was recognizing man's
authority to dictate in matters which pertain only to
God, their property was taken by force and sold, often
for a mere fraction of its value. This, of course, was

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 105

less grievous than to be beheaded or burned at the stake,
yet in those days of poverty it was sufficiently galling
and the cause of much hardship and suffering. Men
sometimes rave and swear even now when compelled to
pay assessments upon their property for improvements
which they do not desire and for which they can not
afford to pay, and it is no matter for complacency even
for a christian man to have his lasi cow or his team or
his home sold perforce by the sheriff, and the money
given to a man in whom he has no confidence either as
a man or as a christian minister, and who is moreover,
the representative of a hateful religious oppression.

The story of the banishment of Roger Williams in
October, 1635, and his consequent sufferings is one with
which we may all be supposed to be familiar, and there
is not time to recount it here save to say that the main
opinion for which he was banished, namely, that the
magistrate has no right to punish men for a breach of
those commandments which concern the duties of men
to Grod only, is now a cardinal principle in the creed of
every true American.

The shameful whipping of Obadiah Holmes in Boston
in 1651, for quiet worship in a private house and because
he "did baptize such as were baptized before," is well
known; but it is not so well known that John Spur and
John Hazle were each sentenced to ten lashes or the
payment of forty shillings for simply taking Holmes by
the hand with a "Blessed be God," as he was led from
the whipping post. Friends paid their fine without
their consent. Hazle was sixty years old and quite
infirm, and had come more than fifty miles to comfort

106 THE BAPTIST IN HISTOBY.

his old friend in prison. He died on the way before
reaching home again. Thirteen persons suffered in one
way or another for expressing sympathy with Holmes.

In Boston May 7th, 1668, brethren Thomas Gould,
William Turner and John Farnum were banished for
holding Baptist views, but they refused to go and
were therefore imprisoned. After four months a petition
signed by sixty-five persons of standing was received
by the court for their relief, but so far was it from
accomplishing its object that the signers were severely
reprimanded by the court and fined for their humanity.
March 6th, 1680, the Baptist meeting house in Boston
was nailed up by the marshall and the people held their
service in the yard, "Itt being a cold wind yt day butt
through grace none received any harm.'1 The church
record says, "Butt to returne our Dores being nayled up
we provided A shedd which we made Against ye howse
with bords, butt coming ye next lords day expecting to
meete under our shedd, we found our dores sett open &
consulting by ourselves whether to goe in, we considered
the Court had not donn itt legally Acting by noe law,';
so they went in and worshipped.

Not alone in Massachusetts was there persecution but
in some of the other colonies as well, and the severest
of all and the longest continued struggle was in Virginia.
Here the culmination of oppressive laws was reached
in 1611, when it was required that every one go to an
Episcopal minister and give an account of his views.
If he refused to go he was to be whipped. If he then
refused to go he was to be whipped twice, and if he
still refused, he was to be whipped every day until he

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 107

did go. How galling such a provision was and how
belittling to one's self respect, perhaps an independent
and self respecting Baptist can understand better than
any one else. Many ministers in Virginia were arrested
and imprisoned, the manner of it adding indignity to
the arrest itself. They were sometimes dragged from
the platform while preaching or even wdiile praying and
taken away to be imprisoned or fined or publicly
whipped. There appear among those thus treated the
names of the three Craigs, Waller, Webber, Childs,
Anthony, Eastin, Weatherford, Tanner, Walker, Ware,
Maxfield, Loval, Greenwood, Young and a host of others.
Joseph Ware was hunted wTith dogs. James Ware and
James Pitman were imprisoned for having preaching
in their houses. John Koons, Thomas Wafford and
others carried the scars of their whippings to their
graves. James Ireland was imprisoned in Culpepper
jail where powder was put under him to blow him up,
brimstone was burned to suffocate him and poison
administered to kill him; but he lived to preach the
gospel a number of years more and win many souls.
On the very site of that Culpepper jail stands today a
Baptist church wherein more than two hundred mem-
bers regularly worship.

In New York, in Connecticut, in South Carolina and
in other colonies Baptists were harassed to a less degree.
They were taxed as others for the support of Episcopal
or Congregational ministers and for these taxes their
property and their homesteads were taken away. They
were also imprisoned on various charges and fined, for
there were many ways of harassing Baptists even when

108 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

they could not be directly persecuted for their opinions.
These arrests were so timed in many cases as to work
the most discomfort possible. The mother of Isaac
Backus, the first American Baptist historian, for exam-
ple, a widow fifty-four years old, was arrested at nine
o'clock at night, October 15th, 1752, and with several
others taken seventeen miles to jail in a cold October
rain, where she was kept thirteen days until her fine
was paid by some person unknown. There is in my
own church a very intelligent and faithful old lady
whose grandfather's grandfather, an old man of eighty
years, was arrested at the same time of night and while
preparing for bed. He was taken away without being
allowed to resume the clothing he had laid off, and kept
for some time in a cold jail without fire or bed-clothes.
It was evidently the hope of his captors that the expos-
ure would kill him but his physical system, like his
faith, was of too rugged a nature to be easily destroyed.
The charges against him were of a trumped up character
while his real crime was that he was too outspoken a
Baptist.*

But when we have given the record of the imprison-
ments and martyrdoms of our ancestors in the faith we
have not by any means told all the story of indignities
and sufferings. There was much that can not be put
on record and yet, perhaps, was not less hard to bear
sometimes than actual suffering: the contemptuous
treatment of their appeals and petitions, while others
were respectfully listened to; the mean spitefulness

*It is a matter of interest to me that in every audience that has heard
these lectures someone has afterwards come to me with a relation of
similar experiences in their own family or family line.

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. 109

which was shown them by officers, courts and people
alike; the way in which laws were devised to harass
them and the unfairness with which other laws were
interpreted when applied to them; the bitter prejudice
they met and the misconstructions put upon their
motives; the scorn of those who were far beneath them
in integrity of character and spiritual strength; all these
things and many more made their lives a daily trial.
To bear all this and go right on, doing that which was
right in the sight of God and trusting Him to vindicate
their cause in his own time, bearing patiently what
they must and not answering scorn with hatred — that
is heroism; a heroism we cannot afford, for our own
benefit, to overlook or forget.

As we read this long and distressing story of how an
innocent and faithful people have been hounded and
murdered, harassed and hated because they had firm
convictions as to the truth of Christ and faithfully
followed them, is it any wonder to us that Baptists have
struggled and plead, always and everwhere, for religious
liberty, and that they have been the foremost opposers
of every form of church oppression and of that union
of church and state which makes such oppression
possible?

The question cannot fail to present itself, was it
worth while to suffer thus for these religious opinions?
Why be so stubborn for a principle? Would it not
have been better to lay aside their convictions and save
themselves this distress? Why did they endure such
things? They suffered these things because they had
consciences, and we cannot too much honor those who

110 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

hold to principle rather than policy. Because their
opinions were not opinions merely, but convictions as
to God's own truth which no man is at liberty to dis-
regard. Because they knew that God had spoken and
they dare not disobey his word. They suffered for the
same reason that so many now stand apart from other
professed christians to be misjudged and sneered at as
self-righteous and narrow minded; because they would
have no fellowship with what they knew was contrary
to God's word and subversive of the vital principles of
Christianity.

They suffered because they were converted men and
women. They knew what spiritual experience of
salvation is and valued the presence of Jesus in their
souls more than life itself. They could not go back or
deny the truth. They suffered because they loved their
families and longed for their salvation. The prohibition
of their activities was a prohibition of salvation to their
loved ones, for they knew that they were mistaughtand
deluded by their own ministers — blind leaders of the
blind — and they must preach to them and they must pray
for them, and for this multitudes suffered and multitudes
died. Mark this well, that the opposition to the Baptists
was an opposition to the preaching of the true principles
of the gospel, by which alone man can be saved. They
knew that men had no right to deny them the right to
obey God and teach others to obey him, and do it, too,
in the name of religion; had no right to kill and plunder
and force and tax for matters in which it is the right of
God alone to judge, and they would not give up a true
principle for a false one. They were not cranks or

PERSECUTIONS AND SUFFERINGS. Ill

fanatics, nor were they merely stubborn. They were
the best and purest of the men and women of their time
and we need not sneer at them, especially when we
remember that if they had not resisted the corrupted
Christianity of their day and taught a better, no other
would have been known. Men in their day drowned
and burned heretics and "thought that they offered
service unto God,'1 and but for their sufferings and
teaching would be doing it yet, and we ourselves, instead
of rejoicing in the free grace and presence of Jesus
Christ, would have been still under the blighting and
damning influence of a priestly church.

But why did men inflict such things upon their
fellow men, — pure minded people too, and innocent of
any crime? Why should christians persecute christ-
ians? Because they were not christians. They were
of a church which was no true church and recipients
of a salvation which saves nobody, and yet regarded
themselves as the true and only church of Christ. The
cruelty of their work, the treachery and injustice to
which they descended to gain their ends is witness
against them that they knew nothing of Christ. Their
salvation was only one of rites and ceremonies and they
had no comprehension of personal faith, personal obedi-
ence and personal responsibility to a personal Saviour.
A late writer well says, "To say the church did it is
blasphemy. It was the work of fiends incarnate." There
were some, however, whose noble service and pure lives
make us hesitate to affirm that they were not christians,
who yet endorsed and encouraged these persecutions and
without whose consenting influence they would not have

112 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

been carried on. Of such we can only say that they could
not trust the power of the truth but must try to bolster
it tip by force. They could not trust the consciences of
men to make them accept the truth when it was seen, nor
could they trust God to watch over his own work and
vindicate his own way. But more than all, they did not
comprehend that there might be realms of truth where
they had not traveled nor admit the possibility that
their victims might be right and" they themselves mis-
taken; and yet we know that they were mistaken —

awfullv mistaken.

*/

There was yet another motive which worked mightily
in this direction, and that was the priestly instinct that
ever seeks to thrust itself into power and influence and
is exceedingly jealous of whatever interferes; that same
power which brought Jesus himself to the cross. It
was the ambition for church power, which is still such
a mighty motive in the world and leads to many sadly
unchristian things. It wTas not a conviction that the
gospel would not be taught and souls wTould not be
saved, if these heretics had their way, that led to their
persecution, but an alarm lest the church should be
shorn of her power and her priests be left without a
following and so without influence and glory.

But does not this record give us more of an appreci-
ation of our christian liberty, and does it not inspire us
to more of a spirit of loyalty to the truth and resistance
to error, and to a determination that we will be worthy
successors of those who fought the good fight and kept
the faith, until we also shall receive the crown ? Let us
never be known as degenerate children of a noble
ancestry.

"He hath sent me to bind up the broken hearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening
of the prison to them that are bound."

" For freedom did Christ set us free; stand fast,
therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of
bondage"

IV.

BAPTIST INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT,

The natural condition of barbarism and heathenism
is tyranny; we see that illustrated everywhere in the
heathen world of today as in the days past. Barbarism
is the reign of brute force unguided by right moral
principles or rules of justice, and barbarism and heath-
enism go together. The rule of heathenism has always
been an irresponsible monarchy, which is tyranny, and
even when in brilliant periods as in Greece and Rome
there has been something like popular government, it
has sunken back again into monarchy. The history of
Christianity has been a history of civilization; and the
history of civilization has been the history of peoples
struggling for their natural rights against ancient
oppressions, hereditary privileges and the time honored
usurpation by a few or by an individual of the prerog-
atives that belong to all alike; and so through this
struggle have grown up governments by the people and
for the people, instead of for the few and by the few.
The people have won their rights only after a long
conflict and many defeats, as witness the growth of

116 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

liberty and constitutional government in England and
in France, and the struggle now going on in Germany
and Russia.

Again, the gospel has always been the great agent
and basis of liberty wherever the gospel has been
preached in its truth and purity. A study of modern
missions in connection with this thought is most inter-
esting; to see how the entrance of the gospel into
heathen nations has broken up ancient and cruel
despotisms and lifted the people up into civil liberty.
The gospel emphasizes the dignity of man as an indi-
vidual, a redeemed soul, of infinite worth in the sight of
God, of dignity and importance because capable of
becoming a child of God, and therefore possessing
individual responsibility and individual rights. Thus
the man is brought into a consciousness of himself and
into rebellion against the usurpation of unjust authority,
and in the end, out from under the dominion of tyranny
into the enjoyment of popular rights. So wherever the
gospel goes liberty and a just government follow.

It might be expected therefore, that that church
which has best preserved the purity of the New Testa-
ment teaching would not be without its influence on
civil government; that its influence would be on the
side of the largest and truest liberty, and just so we find
it. A state church has never been a pure church, and
a state church has never been the friend of liberty. In
the nature of the case it cannot be. It derives its
prestige and power from the favor of government, and
its privileged priests have the same motive for preserv-
ing their authority over the people that the privileged

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 117

ruler has, and their sympathies in every struggle will
be with him. Always the dissenting churches have
been those that have been friendly to the people and
foremost in the struggle for popular rights; and among
these, that church which has been the farthest from the
established form and nearest to the Apostolic pattern
has been the very foremost.

Moreover the church is always behind the govern-
ment and profoundly influencing it, in spirit as well as
form, and has been from the days of Nebuchadnezzar
to the present. Whether in England or America, in
Spain, Mexico or Switzerland, the influence of prevail-
ing religious ideas is seen in government. For the
religious feeling is deepest of all feelings and religious
ideas run through all a man's activities and their tone
and color are seen in all his life. Men are first moved
in their religious nature and the ideas thus received
work out into their due fruitage in social life and civil
life. A revolution in church therefore, means, sooner
or later, a revolution in state; a revolution in religion
means a revolution in government.

The struggle for religious liberty therefore, has had
a large part in history and has been at the bottom of
many a political movement. Keligious liberty has
carried with it civil liberty, and while men have been
struggling for liberty to worship God they have also,
though perhaps unwittingly, been working out a larger
liberty for all mankind. To whom then, is due the
present victory and largeness of liberty in which we
stand? Whose are the slain who fell in the battle and
whose were the wounds and the groans, the toil and the

118 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

weariness and whose should be the crown ?

There is a very natural disposition to think that what
we ourselves believe we and our fathers have always
believed, and that the things we now hold are the things
that our fathers fought for. Every kind of a belief
seeks to prove for itself an antiquity, and every kind
of a society seeks to show that the benefits men enjoy
are the result of its ancient influence; and so those in
these days who were not in the battle are claiming the
victory, nay, even those who fought against the now
triumphant truth. Hence it comes to pass that those
principles which for centuries were peculiar to the
Baptists, and which in the early days no others contended
for, are now largely adopted by those who are scarcely
willing to admit that they have not always held them,
and what is due to their long and painful struggle is
now claimed by others as their own victory. I do not
wish in the least to disparage others nor to glorify
ourselves, and have no sympathy at all with the feeling
that because we are we therefore we are, and of right
ought to be, the people; but we have been so often
disparaged and our achievements so often appropriated
by others that it is due to ourselves that a just state-
ment be made.

We are not now alone in our insistence that the state
and the church are separate and distinct, and that neither
the church should interfere in political matters nor the
state seek to prescribe rules for the church. We are
now, in other words, no more loyal to the idea of com-
plete religious liberty than those of other denominations
whose spiritual ancestors did not see these things thus.

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 119

An attempt by court or government to establish one
church above another or to hinder anyone from adopting
such forms of religious belief or practice as he might
choose would raise a universal outcry and would be no
more quickly resented by Baptists than by Episcopa-
lians, Presbyterians or Congregationalists. But it was
not always so.

Let it not be thought that we claim for ourselves the
entire credit of human freedom, or claim that Baptists
have been the sole cause of the liberties we enjoy.
Every movement of religious revival and reform has
been a movement towards at least partial liberty, and
besides the religious influence that has been at work,
there is in the heart of every man a feeling of natural
right which has sought to gain its own. Some things,
however, are true, and some things are due to Baptist
principles in the past and in the present, and these
things we will try to indicate.

First then, Baptists were the first to declare the
doctrine of complete religious liberty and have always
been the leaders in the struggle for its attainment, and
to them more than to any other body is due the credit
of its final attainment. Perhaps there was a reason for
this. They were more persecuted than any others and
therefore more longed for peace and liberty. They
were still oppressed when others had rest and therefore
strove for it still when others were satisfied. But more
than all, they had a principle of liberty which did not
find satisfaction in anything less than complete freedom,
and which would not rest until the last possible weapon of
oppression was destroyed, namely, that man, in matters

120 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

of religion, is responsible only to God. This thought
was fundamental with them and would not let them
rest under any compromise or mere toleration. There
were others who joined in the struggle, such as the
Quakers, and there were those who at different times
sought and obtained a partial freedom for themselves,
but they were the first and the chief and the only body
who always and everywhere have stood for complete
liberty for all men. This spirit 'of liberty they have
also carried out among themselves, and there is no
denomination where there is more complete liberty of
thought and action, limited only by the requirements of
the divine Word, than among them.

That Baptists were the first to plead for equal rights
and full religious liberty for all men there is universal
testimony among candid writers. These are the words
of Bancroft the historian: "The Baptist party, whose
trophy from the first was freedom of conscience, un-
limited freedom of mind, was trodden under foot with
foul reproaches and most arrogant scorn, and its history
is written in the blood of the German peasantry; but
its principles, safe in their immortality, escaped with
Roger Williams to Providence, and his colony is the
witness that naturally the paths of the Baptists are the
paths of freedom."* Macaulay remarks that Bossuet
was able to say "we fear with too much truth, that on
one point all christians had long been unanimous — the
right of the civil government to propagate the truth by
the sword: that even heretics had been orthodox as to
this right, and that the Anabaptists and Socinians were

*Hist. U. S„ Boston, 1855, II, 66-7.

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 121

the first who called it in question.1' * Schaff, in his
"Progress of Religious Freedom," says: "Baptists and
Quakers alone were consistent advocates of universal
toleration and put it into their creeds." Judge Durfee,
writing of Roger Williams, says: "The future of Rhode
Island, and to some extent the future of the world,
hung suspended on the issue of the struggle. It was a
pivotal transaction in universal history. His doctrine
was that every man has a natural right to follow the
dictates of his conscience as long as he keeps the civil
peace; a right which the state can neither give nor take
away nor control, even with the consent of the individ-
ual, since no man can absolve himself from fealty to his
own conscience. The right has never been expressed
with more completeness. This is his glory, that he,
first among men, made it a living element of the state,
turning it from thought to fact, giving it a corporate
existence in which it could perpetuate and practically
approve itself.1' Pastors of other denominations some-
times give the same testimony, as when Rev. Dr.
Leonard Swain, pastor of the Central Congregational
church of Providence, Rhode Island, said at the centen-
nial of the Warren Association in September, 1867,
"You Baptists fought the battle of religious liberty and
we all enjoy the fruits of the victory."

Every Baptist martyr has died proclaiming this
doctrine; every Baptist preacher and writer has set it
forth; many confessions of faith have specifically
declared it and denied to the civil power any authority
whatever to compel, restrain or punish in matters of

*See Bossuet, Vol. X, p. 356

122 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

religion. The treatises, discussions, remonstrances and
appeals upon this topic have been innumerable.

The first confession of faith to declare the doctrine
of full religious liberty was that of the Swiss Anabap-
tists in the year 1527. This confession makes a clear
distinction between the temporal authority and the
spiritual and entirely disclaims the use of the temporal
in the church. It says: "In law the sword is ordained
over the wicked for punishment and death, and the civil
power is ordained to use it. But in the perfection of
Christ, excommunication is pronounced only for warn-
ing and for exclusion of him who has sinned, without
death of the flesh, only by warning and the command
not to sin again. " It has been generally supposed that
its author was Michael Sattler, who was burned at the
stake three months later. The Confession of certain
English Anabaptists of 1611 says: " We believe that the
magistrate is not by virtue of his office to meddle with
religion or matters of conscience, to force or compel
men to this or that form of religion or doctrine, but to
leave the christian religion free to every man's con-
science, and to handle only civil trangressions, injuries
and wrongs of man against man, in murder, adultery,
theft etc., for Christ only is the King and Lawgiver of
the church and conscience."* The confessions of 1643
and 1660 and others declare at great length the duty
of obedience to civil magistrates in civil things, but, "In
case the civil power do, or shall at any time impose things
about matters of religion, which we, through conscience
to God, cannot actually obey; then ... we will not yield,

♦History Anti-Pedobaptism, p. 392.

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 123

nor in such cases in the least actually obey them; yet
humbly purposing, in the Lord's strength, patiently to
suffer whatsoever shall be inflicted upon us for our
conscionable forbearance."* Compare with this the
language of other confessions of about the same date
as, for example, the Westminster Confession, Chapter
XX: "And for their publishing of such opinions, or
maintaining of such practices as are contrary to the
light of nature or to the known principles of Christianity,
whether concerning faith, worship or conversation; or
to the power of godliness; or such erroneous opinions
as, either in their own nature, or in the manner of
publishing or maintaining them are destructive to the
external peace and order which Christ hath established
in the church; they may be lawfully called to account
and proceeded against by the censures of the church,
and by the power of the civil magistrate "\ Underbill,
in his "Struggles and Triumphs of Religious Liberty,"
says: "There is not a confession nor a creed framed
by any of the Reformers which does not give to the
magistrate a coercive power in religion, and almost every
one at the same time curses the resisting Baptists."
Lecky says in his "History of Rationalism,'1 "Persecu-
tion in the sixteenth century was a distinct and definite
doctrine, digested into elaborate treatises, indissolubly
connected with a large portion of the received theology,
developed by most enlightened theologians and enforced
against most inoffensive sects." We have already seen
that there was not a reformer of any eminence who did
not uphold the persecution of those whom they called

*Conf essiori of 1660. f The Confession now in use omits the last clause.

124 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

heretics and make himself responsible for it.

The first modern treatises on religious liberty were
written by Baptists. Hubmeyer had written a powerful
plea for religious liberty in "Heretics and their Burn-
ers" about the year 1525, but the work has perished.
The first treatise in English was by Leonard Busher in
1614, entitled "Religion's Peace, or a Plea for Liberty
of Conscience." It pleads "that it may be lawful for
every person or persons, yea, Je\ts, Turks, Pagans and
Papists, to write, dispute, confer and reason, print and
publish any matter touching any religion either for or
against whomsoever;" language which for breadth of
liberality cannot be surpassed even in these days. In
1615 appeared another: "Persecution for Religion
Judged and condemned, by Christ's Unworthy Wit-
nesses, His Majesty's Faithful Subjects, Commonly,
but most Falsely called Anabaptists." It says: "Earth-
ly authority belongeth to earthly kings, but spiritual
authority belongeth to that one spiritual King who is
King" of Kings." In 1620 appeared "A most humble
Supplication of Many of the King's Majesty's Loyal
Subjects," etc., which was written by a prisoner in
Newgate prison. It was written in milk upon the
paper stoppers of the bottles in which the milk was
furnished and these fragments of writing were then
arranged by the friends of the prisoners and published,
and they show no small ability on the part of their
author. Indeed, considering the circumstances of the
writer the language used and the quotations made are
very remarkable. It is a direct and pointed argument,
quoting from the king's own words, the spirit of which

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVEKNMENT. 125

can be judged from the following words in the conclu-
sion: "You may make and mend your own laws and be
judge and punisher of the transgressors thereof; but
you cannot make or mend God's laws, they are perfect
already. You may not add nor diminish, nor be judge
or monarch of his church, that is Christ's right, he left
neither you nor any mortal man his deputy, but only
the Holy Ghost, as your highness acknowledged."
This treatise, as Koger Williams said, was "written in
milk and answered in blood." In 1642 Busher's treatise
was reprinted. In 1647 appeared one by Thomas Richard-
son; in 1660, one by prisoners in Maidstone jail; in 1662
"Zion's Groans for her Distressed," by a committee of
London Baptists; and in 1659 had appeared Milton's
"Treatise of the Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes,
showing that it is not lawful for any human power on
earth to compel in matters of religion." In those days
no others taught the doctrine of full religious liberty.
No writings can be adduced from that early time, except
from Baptist authors, which taught that the right to
worship God according to the dictates of one's own
conscience was a natural right, belonging to every man.
The first treatise on religious liberty by an American
author was by Roger Williams in 1644. Mr. Hall, a
congregational minister at Roxbury, had sent the treat-
ise written in Newgate to Mr. John Cotton, famous in
New England history, and his reply to that was by some
one published and a copy of it came to Mr. Williams,
who answered it in a famous treatise entitled "The
Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience
Discussed." Cotton replied in a treatise entitled "The

126 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

Bloudy Tenent Washed and made White in the blood
of the Lambe." Williams again answered in "The
Bloody Tenent yet more Bloody by Mr. Cotton's En-
devour to wash it white in the blood of the Lambe etc."
This discussion created great interest, and the argu-
ments of Mr. Williams in contrast with the rather
choleric utterances of Mr. Cotton were of telling effect.
Thus was the gauntlet thrown down and the controversy
begun which was only to end with the complete vindi-
cation of these principles and the destruction of
religious tyranny in America.

The first government ever organized on the basis of
complete religious liberty, and the first in which that
principle was ever fully recognized, was the Baptist
government of Rhode Island. Here in their funda-
mental law it was declared that "No person within the
said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be in any way
molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question
for any difference of opinion in matters of religion
which do not actually disturb the civil peace of our said
colony; but that all and every person or persons, from
time to time, and at all times hereafter, freely and fully
have and enjoy his and their judgment and consciences
in matters of religious concernment, they behaving
themselves peaceably and quietly and not using this
liberty to licentiousness and profaneness, nor to the
civil injury or outward disturbance of others." This was
no mere matter of form, for we find that a man was
actually punished, for the first time in the history of
the world perhaps, for interfering with another in
religious matters. One Joshua Verin attempted to

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 127

compel his wife to give up her religion and keep away
from religious meetings, using abusive violence for this
end, and the court decreed that he "for breach of
covenant in restraining liberty of conscience shall be
withheld from voting till he declare the contrary!"
Moreover it was here in Rhode Island that, long before
the days of Abraham Lincoln, his famous declaration
"a government of the people, by the people and for the
people" was for the first time made a reality. It was
Roger Williams who first declared the principle of
democracy which is the very foundation of our American
government, that the sovereign power of government
is in the people and in all the people. This principle
was brought out in his opposition to those laws of
Massachusetts which denied the franchise and the
privileges of office to all who were not members of the
church, and to the giving away by kings and rulers,
through patents and monopolies, of lands and privileges
which did not belong to them but to the people. Thus
in thje first Baptist state was embodied that idea which
was to rule the nation and is yet to rule the world.

The first college to open its doors to all alike and
offer its privileges and honors to every person without
any religious test or requirement was the first college
founded by Baptists, namely, Rhode Island College,
now called Brown University, at Providence. All the
universities of the old world were founded and controlled
by state churches down to the middle of the last century
and from them all dissenters were of course, excluded.
Not all of them even yet are open to all alike. The
first college to be foimded in this country was Harvard

128 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

and its first President, Henry Dunster, after years of
most distinguished service, during which he brought it
up from an academy of uncertain prospects to a recog-
nized college, was driven from the presidency because
he had declared against infant baptism in a public
sermon (for which he was indicted by the grand jury
and convicted), and for refusing to have his own infant
child baptized, for which he was & second time indicted
and punished. A hundred years after this Tale College
expelled students for choosing to worship with Separa-
tists. In contrast to this, note the language of the
charter of the first Baptist college in this country: "Into
this liberal and catholic institution shall never be
admitted any religious tests. But on the contrary all
the members hereof shall enjoy free, absolute, and
uninterrupted liberty of conscience, and the places of
professors, tutors and all other officers, the President
alone excepted, shall be free and open for all denom-
inations of Protestants, and the youth of all religious
denominations shall and may be admitted to the equal
advantages, emoluments and honors of the college or
university . . . and the sectarian differences shall not
make any part of the public and classical instruction."
The early Baptist ministers of this country were sneered
at as illiterate ignoramuses, but they were shut out from
schools of higher learning by religious tests to which
they could not subscribe, and it was only with great
difficulty that they secured one of their own. In no
colony except Rhode Island could Baptists at that time
have secured a charter for a college or a school of any
kind.

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 129

Secondly: Baptists were the first, and for centuries
the only ones who grasped the idea of full religious
liberty ; that is, not mere toleration but actual liberty,
for toleration is one thing and liberty is quite another.
This distinction is not always clearly made and there-
fore much confusion on this point has resulted and
many false claims have been made. Toleration is per-
mission but liberty is exercise of absolute right, which
asks no permission and refuses to receive any. Religious
toleration says, "I grant you the privilege of worship-
ing as you may choose;" but the very bestowment of
a privilege implies the right to revoke that action and
withdraw what has been bestowed, and liberty which is
held only at the will of a master is no liberty at all.
Religious liberty says, "Your choice of worship is no
matter of mine; it is a thing which belongs to you by
natural right; a privilege which I can neither give nor
take away." Baptists would not be tolerated, would
not accept as a privilege what they claimed as a natural
right, and just upon their making of this distinction
hangs all that religious freedom which is so precious to
us.

And again a distinction is to be made in that while
others demanded liberty for themselves, Baptists de-
manded it for all and w^ere willing to grant to others
also what they desired for themselves. We have
already seen how the Reformers urged their right to
think for themselves when contending with the Papal
power, and argued nobly for immunity from persecu-
tion, and yet when they came into power, these very
same men turned to persecute those who differed from

130 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

them. The Puritans and Pilgrims likewise exiled
themselves from home and native land in order to find
freedom to worship God, and yet they, having come
part way out of Papal corruptions and old world tyranny,
were not willing to tolerate those who were minded to
come all the way out. Baptists, on the other hand,
both in theory and in practice, have granted to other
men the right to hold and exercise whatever opinions
they might choose, even though those opinions might
seen to them infidel and destructive, and have defended
them in that liberty, allowing only reasoning and per-
suasion as the weapons to be used against them.

The claim of leadership in the struggle for religious
liberty has been made for almost every denomination,
partly, perhaps, from a confusion of ideas, partly from
a desire to make the best showing possible for one's
own people. Episcopacy has made the claim, in spite
of Laud and Smithfield, and put forward the treatise
on "The Liberty of Prophesying" by Jeremy Taylor in
1647 as being the pioneer in the discussion. It was
indeed a noble plea for a churchman in his times to
make, but this was not the first by nearly the life time
of its author, for Pusher's treatise wras published when
Taylor was only a year old, and a number of others had
also preceeded it. Moreover, when examined carefully,
it comes far short of the positions taken in them; for
Taylor excepts from his toleration those who deny
fundamental articles, declares heresy "against an article
of the creed'1 (i. e. an essential), to be "a very grievous
crime" and "worse than adultery or murder." He
declares that "God hath made religion to grow up with

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 131

empire and lean upon the arm of kings and it cannot
well go alone;" and that the religion of the Anabap-
tists is "as much to be rooted out as anything that is
the greatest pest and nuisance to the public interest."
At the best it is only a plea for toleration, not for full
liberty, and besides it was written when he himself was
under condemnation by the dominant party; but when
he came to power again he found his liberal views some-
what difficult of explanation in view of his practice and
the fact that he deposed more than thirty Presbyterian
pastors who refused to be episcopally ordained. The
scenes of many a martyrdom in the old country and of
New York and Virginia in the new, refute this claim.

It has been claimed for Congregationalism, and with
more plausibility than for some others, but Obadiah
Holmes and Roger Williams and the multitude of
suffering Baptists of Massachusetts refute this claim.

It has been claimed for Presbyterianism; and indeed,
Presbyterian writings make large claim for Presbyter-
ianism that it has always been the great bulwark of
liberty, and that to it the liberties of our own land are
most largely due. As far as this country is concerned
it is true that Presbyterians have been found, for the
most part, on the side of liberty; but it is not true that
they were the first to teach these doctrines or that they
have taught liberty in its broadest, truest sense. Their
history in England and Scotland and on the continent
quite refutes their claims. Appeal has been made to
their great documents, such as the Scotch League and
Covenant, as being milestones on the road to liberty;
but this Covenant, which was adopted by the General

132 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

Assembly of Scotland, the Westminster Assembly and
both houses of Parliament in 1643, was made, not for
the securing of complete liberty to all men, but for the
unifying and strengthening and enforcement of Pres-
byterianism. Under it no minister but a Presbyterian
could preach, and it bound its signers "that we shall in
like manner without respect of persons, endeavor the
extirpation of Popery, Prelacy, superstition, heresie,
schisme, profaneness and whatever shall be found to be
contrary to sound doctrine and the power of godliness,"
themselves, of course, being the sole judges of what was
"contrary to sound doctrine," which is the vice of all
such efforts. Because such large claims have been made
for them, let me quote somewhat at length from various
Presbyterian writings:

Article XXIV of the first Scotch Confession, 1560:
"Mairover, to Kings, Princes, Rulers and Magistrates,
wee affirme that chieflie and most principallie the
conservation and purgation of the Religiouns apper-
teinis; so that not onlie they are appointed for civill
policie bot also for maintenance of the trew Religioun,
and for suppressing of Idolatrie and Superstitioun what-
soever," etc.

Second Book of Discipline of the church of Scotland,
1578: "It perteinis to the office of a Christian magistrat
to assist and manteine the discipline of the Kirk: and
punish them civilly, that will not obey the censure of
the same," etc.

John Knox, History of the Reformation in Scotland,
pp. 264-5. "In such places I say, it is not only lawful
to punish to the death such as labor to subvert the true

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 133

religion, but the magistrates and the people are bound
to do so unless they will provoke the wrath of God
against themselves."

Richard Baxter, "Plain Scripture Proof of Infant
Church Membership, and Baptism,1' p. 246, London,
1650: "My judgment in that much disputed point of
liberty of Religion I have always freely made known.
I abhor unlimited liberty and toleration of all and think
myself easily able to prove the wickedness of it."*

Professor A. H. Newman says, "From 1674 onward
the Reformed (Calvinistic) church sought persistently
to destroy the Mennonites, but they enjoyed the pro-
tection of William the Silent and afterwards of Maurice
of Nassau. The Synod of Dort in 1574 decided to
exhort the government to tolerate no one who would
not swear obedience to it, to compel the Mennonites to
have their infants baptized, and in case of their refusal
to turn them over to the Reformed ministers to be dealt
with . . . Though their membership constituted as yet
only a small fraction of the population, (one tenth
according to some authorities), they sought to secure
recognition as the established church of the land with
power to coerce dissent." (And in the published report
of a disputation), "The preface concludes with an
impassioned appeal to the authorities to withdraw all
protection from the Anabaptists, whose principles are
declared to strike at the root of saving truth and of
civil and religious order, and whose doctrine, founded
in lying hypocrisy, eats as doth a gangrene.'1 And
again, "The most determined efforts on the part of the

♦Appendix to Vedder's Shor History of Baptists.

134 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

Oalvinists to crush out the Mennonites by the use of
the civil power were continued almost without inter-
mission throughout the seventeenth century. If the
Mennonites were not destroyed root and branch . . .
it was due to no lack of zeal on the part of the Reformed
ministers but rather to their powers of endurance and
the restraining influence of the government.""*

But, strangest of all, the leadership in the struggle
for religious liberty has been claimed by the Roman
Catholics! That church at whose doors lie the crimes
of the Waldensian murders, of St. Bartholomew's day
and of the inquisition! That church which for ages
has been drunk with the blood of the saints, and which
in our own land today is seeking to undermine our
liberties and destroy the bulwarks of our free institu-
tions! Archbishop Hughes wrote in 1852, "The palm
of having been the first to practice it (i. e. religious
liberty), is due beyond all controversy to the Catholic
colony of Maryland." But the Maryland act of Tolera-
tion was not passed until 1649, when Rhode Island was
already established, and it provided that blasphemy or
denial of the divinity of Christ or the doctrine of the
Trinity should be punished with death, and "persons
using any reproachful word or speeches concerning the
Blessed Virgin Mary or the Holy Apostles" should be
fined, whipped or imprisoned and if obstinate, banished.
Later oppressive laws were also passed, as in 1663 when
a fine of a ton of tobacco was decreed upon any who
should refuse the baptism of their children.

Pope Gregory XVI in his encyclical letter of 1832

♦History of Anti-Pedobaptism, pp. 318-20.

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 135

declares "the opinion that for every one whatever is to
be claimed and defended the liberty of conscience"
to be "a most pestilent error," the "ravings of delirium,'1
and "that pest of all others most to be dreaded in a
state,1' and speaks of "that worst and never enough to
be execrated and detestable liberty of the press.11 Pius
IX in his encyclical of 1864 utters similar sentiments.
His language is very involved and verbose, but it clearly
means that it is impious and absurd to maintain that
the civil government ought not to make it a part of its
duty to compel its subjects by penalties to observe the
true religion; and in his accompanying "Syllabus of
Errors" declares it a damnable error "that the church
has not the power of availing herself of force or any
direct or indirect temporal power."*

One of the principal Roman Catholic organs has said,
"Religious liberty, in the sense of liberty possessed by
every man to choose his own religion, is one of the most
wicked delusions ever foisted upon this age by the
father of all deceit. Shall I hold out hopes to my
erring Protestant brother that I will not meddle with
his creed if he will not meddle with mine? Shall I
tempt him to forget that he has no more right to his
religious views than he has to my house or my purse
or my life blood? No, Catholicism is the most intol-
erant of creeds."f With this last statement we shall
most certainly agree.

Besides the broad promulgation of principles and the
innumerable testimonies through their sufferings in so
many places, there are some direct influences of Baptists

*The full text is given in Littel's Living- Age, 18th March, 1865.
fRelig. Lib. and Baptists, Dr. C. C. Bitting, p. 36.

136 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

upon the struggle for religious liberty which we do well
to note. Amid the general intolerance of the sixteenth
century, Holland under William of Orange gives the
only instance of broad-mindedness in religious matters.
In 1572 the continent was ablaze with persecution and
the soil of Holland was soaked with the blood of more
than fifty thousand martyrs. Henry II of France and
Philip II of Spain had compacted to make the Eoman
Catholic church completely triumphant by put-ting to
death every Protestant in the Netherlands and William
had determined to arouse the Protestant population to
throw off the Spanish yoke. He had spent his own
money, had sold his plate and mortgaged his estates to
carry on the war against Spain and was nearly obliged
to give up the contest, when an apparently trivial
circumstance gave him new courage. He was walking
one day near his headquarters in discouragement and
anxiety when two strangers approached him and en-
quired for the Prince. Making himself known, he found
that they were two Baptist preachers, John Friedericks
and Dick Jans Cortenbosch, who had come to offer
their services and enquire what they might do. They
explained to him" their principles and he told them
his need, upon which they promised to solicit money
for the cause among their friends and were heartily
thanked by the Prince. Many years of persecution
had left to the Baptists very little of the world's goods,
yet by strenuous exertion and after one collector had
lost his life in the effort, they raised and sent in a
thousand florins. When nobles and wealthy men were
proving selfish and false this material help was of far

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 137

more value than it might have seemed, and afterwards
when rebuking the authorities at Middleburg for at-
tempted oppression, the Prince praises the Baptists who
had brought their contributions at the peril of their
lives, and commands that they be let alone. The
Mennonites who were a branch of the Anabaptists,
contributed liberally to the materials of war although it
was against their principles to fight, and often furnished
substitutes.

In England under Cromwell the Baptists came grandly
to the front to strike for liberty, and they loyally sup-
ported him until it was evident that he was going wrong
and usurping powers that would only end in irrespon-
sible rule again. Some of his most trusted officers and
counselors like General Harrison and Colonel Hutch-
ison were Baptists, and so were very many of the
common soldiers of his army.

The American Encyclopedia, Article, "Baptists," says :
"In England, from the time of Henry VIII to William
III, a full century and a half, the Baptists struggled to
gain their footing and to secure liberty of conscience to
all. From 1611 they issued appeal after appeal,
addressed to the king, the parliament and the people,
in behalf of soul liberty, written with a breadth of view
and force of argument hardly since exceeded. Yet until
the Quakers arose in 1660, the Baptists stood alone in
its defense amid universal opposition. In the time of
Cromwell they first gained a fair hearing, and under
the lead of Milton and Vane would have changed the
whole system of church and state but for the treason of
Monk. In the time of Charles II the prisons were

138 THE BAPTIST IN HISTOBY.

filled with their confessors and martyrs, yet their
principles gradually gained ground in the public mind
and prepared the way for the revolution of 1688. 'The
share which the Baptists took' says Dr. Williams, 'in
shoring up the fallen liberties of England, and in
infusing new vigor and liberality into the constitution
of that country is not generally known. Yet to this
body English liberty owes a debt it can never acknow-
ledge. Among the Baptists christian freedom found
its earliest, its stanchest, its most consistent and its
most disinterested champions.' "

But as the most marked development of Baptist
strength has been here in America, so here also has
been their most marked influence on the civil govern-
ment. This influence began with Roger Williams and
that discussion of principles which led to his exile and
the founding of Rhode Island Colony upon principles
of absolute soul liberty. "This small territory was
settled under circumstances new and peculiar, and here
were planted principles as to religious freedom, which
at the time, in the fullest and most literal sense of the
statement, all the world opposed as visionary in theory,
dangerous, disorganizing and impractible. The system
adopted by the founder of this state, on the principles
of an unlimited toleration of all the varying creeds of
theology, and of the unfettered and unobstructed exer-
cise of all the rites and forms of religion which erring
and imperfect mortals might choose to adopt, was
treated with ridicule and contempt, with banter and
abuse, not only by a pampered priesthood and lordly
prelates, but also by the very men who had long been

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 139

the victims of ecclesiastical oppression, and who. by the
intolerant laws of the old country, had been driven to
seek an asylum in these then Western wilds.* But the
influence of this little government has been tremendous.
Judge Story says, "In the code of laws established by
them, we read for the first time since Christianity
ascended the throne of the Caesars the declaration that
conscience should be free, and that men should not be
punished for worshipping God in the way they were
persuaded he requires." Senator Anthony said, in a
speech delivered upon the occasion of the unveiling of
the monument to Roger Williams in the National Cap-
itol, January 9th, 1872, "Religious freedom, which now
by general consent underlies the foundation principle
of ^civilized government, was at that time looked upon
as a wilder theory than any proposition, moral, political,
or religious, that has since engaged the serious attention
of mankind. It was regarded as impracticable, disor-
ganizing, impious, and if not utterly subversive of
social order, it was not so only because its manifest
absurdity would prevent any serious effort to enforce
it." And yet Gervinus the German philosophical
writer says of Roger Williams in the introduction to
his history of the civilization of the nineteenth century,
"He formed in Rhode Island a small and new society
in which perfect freedom in matters of faith was allowred ,
and in which the majority ruled in all civil affairs.
Here in a little state the fundamental principles of
political and ecclesiastical liberty practically prevailed
before they were even taught in any of the schools of

*Benedict, Hist. Bap., p. 423.

140 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

philosophy in Europe . . . But not only have these
ideas and these forms of government maintained them-
selves here, but precisely from this little state have they
extended themselves throughout the United States.
They have conquered the aristocratic tendencies in
Carolina and New York, the high church in Virginia,
the theocracy in Massachusetts and the monarchy in
all America. They have given laws to a continent and,
formidable through their moral influence they lie at the
bottom of all the democratic movements which are now
shaking the nations of Europe. "

Perhaps the direct influence of Baptists upon the
spirit and form of the American government can best
be understood by considering several different particu-
lars, such as their organized effort in Massachusetts and
Virginia to secure liberty by law, their share in the
"Revolution, their influence through Jefferson and
Madison, and their influence in the adoption of the
Constitution of the United States and in securing the
First Amendment.

I. The Baptists in New England had suffered much
from the tyrannical oppressions of the "Standing Order11
as it was called, or in other words the Congregational
church, which was established and upheld by law. A
very brief perusal of the history of that time is sufficient
to show how determined the authorities were that their
own doctrines and practices should be preserved intact,
as if they were entirely without error, and every
other doctrine or opinion absolutely prohibited. Such
indeed, was their intolerance that they were more
than once rebuked by the king and even by their

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 141

Congregational brethren of intolerant England. A
sketch of the laws passed for a hundred years from
1631 shows this determination very clearly. In that
year citizenship was refused to all but members of the
churches; then one uniform (Congregational) order for
the churches was established and any other kind of a
church forbidden; then excommunicated members were
fined for not seeking to get back into the church and
threatened with imprisonment and banishment while
every one was compelled to "voluntarily contribute"
for "upholding the ordinances" on pain of being sold
out by the constable. Banishment was decreed for
opposition to infant baptism or. if one should "purposely
depart the congregation at the administration of this
ordinance.11 If any staid away from church they were
to pay five shillings fine. If one renounced his member-
ship in the "Standing Order" (by turning Baptist for
instance), he was fined forty shillings a month until he
came back. If he scoffed at the gospel or at the minister
he was to be pilloried. Quakers were to be whipped and
imprisoned immediately upon their arrival in the colony
and banished; if they came back, one ear was to be cut
off; upon the second return the other ear was to be cut off;
the third time their tongue was to be bored through with
a red hot iron and the fourth time they were to suffer
death. These laws against the Quakers however, were
not long in force. No one could build a church without
license from the (Congregational) court and every one
must pay tax for the support of the regular minister. No
one could preach within the parish of a regular minister
without his consent, and of course he would consent to

142 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

none but his own kind. In 1728 a law was passed (to
be in force only five years) ostensibly to relieve Baptists
from taxation for the support of other ministers and
this was followed by others; but they required them
to acknowledge themselves as #;z#-baptists, — r^-bap-
tizers, which was an intentional slur, they were hedged
about with requirements of registration, certificates and
so forth, and so defective that they could not be enforced,
so that they were an added source of aggravation and
expense instead of being a relief. Finally the Baptists
determined to make a firm and united stand against all
this and secure their liberties and their rights, and after
due consultation a systematic and determined effort was
begun for the repeal of unjust laws and the securing to
all full liberty of conscience. At a meeting of the
Warren Association in 1769, (which then practically
included all New England Baptists), a committee was
appointed to secure full information of particular cases
of injustice, formulate petitions and present them to the
authorities, prepare appeals to the people, and in every
way agitate for religious liberty. This committee on
grievances was continued for thirty-six years. The
next year Bev. John Davis was appointed the official
agent of the churches for this purpose and upon
his death two years later Bev. Isaac Backus was
appointed in his stead and held the position for fifteen
years, and in fact was a leader until his death in 1806.
Here then, was a Baptist organization with a paid agent
the sole purpose and effort of which was to break the
yoke of religious oppression and secure equal rights of
conscience for all. That their cause was just would

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 143

abundantly appear if we had time for the relation of
their losses of money and property, homesteads and
even church and burial place, by reason of the unjust
taxation, to say nothing of endless aggravation and
personal suffering and loss in imprisonments and fruit-
less processes of law.

For a long time their efforts were laughed at and
themselves ignored. As Dr. Hovey says, "Their prin-
ciples were carricatured, their purposes maligned, their
integrity questioned, their petitions slighted and their
hopes deferred ;"* but finally they gained a hearing and
the justice of their case was seen. The Great Awakening
in 1741 and succeeding years added many to their
numbers and increased their influence; for the Separates
and New Lights, as they were called, were Baptists in
principle and in large numbers became such in name,
sometimes a whole church with its pastor avowing
themselves as Baptists and being received as such.
They could no longer be ignored nor their rights denied,
and these rights were at length granted, although it was
not until 1833 that the establishment was finally broken
and the last law against full religious liberty swept from
the statute books of Massachusetts.

II. A like systematic attempt was made also in
Virginia, where Baptists were even more bitterly
persecuted than in Massachusetts and where the conflict
was more fierce and the victory more quickly won. The
charter of Virginia made Episcopacy the exclusive
religion of the state, and under this charter many
oppressive laws were passed at different times. The

*Lifeand Times of Isaac Backus, p. 157,

144 THE BAPTIST IN HISTOKY.

law of 1611 already noticed required every one to go to
an Episcopal minister and give an account of himself,
and for the first refusal he was to be whipped, for the
second to be whipped twice and to make public confes-
sion, and for the third to be whipped every day until he
would go. Episcopal ministers were supported and
farms were bought for them by taxes laid upon every
one. Fifty pounds of tobacco was the fine for staying
away from Episcopal church service, and two thousand
pounds for refusing to have a child sprinkled. Mar-
riages and funerals could only be conducted by Episco-
pal ministers. Every one but an Episcopal minister
was forbidden to preach,, but the Baptists did preach,
in private houses, in farm yards, in forests and even
from jail windows, and thousands were converted. It
seems to have been the need of concerted action against
these oppressions which first brought about a state
organization of the Baptists called the General Associ-
ation, and this body went immediately to work. Their
first victory was in 1775, when they secured the
admission of Baptist chaplains to the army. This was
a great step, for it implied their recognition as a
denomination. One movement followed another in
which they were ably supported by Thomas Jefferson
and James Madison and Patrick Henry, whose political
prominence made them invaluable allies, until in 1779
the laws authorizing taxation for the support of the
clergy were abolished, religious freedom was established,
and the establishment entirely done away. A proposi-
tion was afterwards made to tax all alike for the support
of religion but allowing each one to designate his money

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 145

to whichever church he chose. Episcopalians, Metho-
dists, and some Presbyterians petitioned for the passage
of this measure, but the influence against it was too
strong and it was dropped. The work was finally
finished in 1802, when the parish farms, paid for by
taxation, were ordered to be sold and the money applied
to public uses. We may probably accept the testimony
of (Episcopal) Bishop Hawkes when he says, "The
Baptists were the principle promoters of this work, and
in truth, aided more than any other denomination in its
accomplishment;" and the testimony of Bishop Meade,
when he says of what he calls "the Baptist church in
Virginia" that "it took the lead in dissent and was the
chief object of persecution by the magistrates, and the
most violent and persevering afterwards in seeking the
downfall of the establishment;" and again when he
wails thus: "The warfare begun by the Baptists seven
and twenty years before was now finished. The Church
was in ruins and the triumph of her enemies was
complete.1' For says Dr. Carry: "In this grand struggle,
while individuals of all parties joined in the opposition,
the Baptists as a denomination stood alone, except so
far as they were aided by the few Quakers."

III. But these movements in Virginia and Massa-
chusetts were only part of a more general struggle for
religious liberty for the whole Union. When the first
Continental Congress assembled the Baptists were there
and well represented by a strong committee headed by
such men as Isaac Backus, President Manning, Hezekiah
Smith and Morgan Edwards, who came with strong
arguments in support of their demand for justice. This

146 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

action bore large fruit though not immediately, but
they were grossly misrepresented for it as disloyal to
the cause of the colonies against the mother country,
and as if they had presented claims and threatened to
prevent the union of the colonies if their claims were
not allowed. But no people more heartily and loyally
supported the revolutionary movement than the Bap-
tists, and from the whole history of the war there is not
left to us the name of so .much as one Baptist Tory.
Judge Ourwen, who was a Loyalist and in his " Journal
and Letters" gives much valuable information concern-
ing Loyalist exiles, gives the names of nine hundred
and twenty-six persons of note who sympathized with
the British and a still larger list of those who as Tories
were exiled by colonial law, but there is not one known
Baptist among them. Three hundred were prohibited
from coming back into Massachusetts. Of the twenty-
one chaplains in the revolutionary army whose names
are known six were Baptists, which is much more than
their proportion. Bhode Island was about two-thirds
Baptist and Rhode Island furnished a larger number of
soldiers proportionately than any other colony and a like
thing was true of Virginia and other and smaller districts
where Baptists were numerous. The loyalty of Baptists
to the revolution was so well known to the British that
they were special objects of vengeance, and a far larger
proportion of their churches were destroyed in the war
than of any other denomination. Washington also
wrote to the General Committee of Virginia Baptists in
reply to an address upon the new Federal Constitution,
"While I recollect with satisfaction that the religious

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 147

society of which you are members have been throughout
America uniformly and almost unanimously the firm
friends of civil liberty and the persevering promoters
of our glorious Revolution. I cannot hesitate to believe
that they will be the faithful supporters of a free yet
efficient general government."

When the Constitution of the United States had been
adopted by the convention gathered to frame it, it was
submitted to the various states to be ratified. Immed-
iately the Baptists gathered to consider whether it
sufficiently secured their religious liberties, and con-
cluded that it did not. The only provision it made as
to religion was that "No religious test shall ever be
required as a qualification to any office or public trust
under the United States." Nevertheless they advised
its adoption, as they were not willing to imperil the
government by its defeat. The favorable action of nine
states was necessary for its adoption and its fate seemed
to hang upon the vote of Virginia. It was the action
of Rev. John Leland, famous in Baptist annals, which
turned the scale for its adoption in Virginia.. He was
nominated as the anti-federalist candidate to the con-
vention which was to decide the issue for the state, Mr.
Madison being the opposing federalist candidate. His
popularity was so great that his election was deemed
sure notwithstanding the eminence of his opponent.
According to the custom of those days, the citizens
assembled to hear the opposing candidates set forth
their views and argue their case one after the other.
Mr. Madison spoke first and Mr. Leland listened with
careful attention, and after his conclusion, ascended the

148 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

platform and, instead of opposing him, declared him-
self convinced by the arguments of Mr. Madison that
they ought to vote for the new constitution, and with-
drew his candidacy. This action of Mr. Leland secured
Mr. Madison's return to the convention, when his
opposition would surely have prevented it. As it was
Madison's influence in the convention that carried the
new constitution through it, and as without Virginia
the nine states necessary for its adoption could not have
been secured, a Virginia statesman, in his eulogy on
James Madison, publicly declared that "the credit of
the adoption of the Constitution of the United States
belonged to a Baptist clergyman, formerly of Virginia,
by the name of Leland."*

But the Virginia Baptists immediately began an
agitation to make freedom in religious matters more
secure, and by the advice of Madison they addressed
Washington upon the subject, and received from him
strong assurance of his sympathy with them in the
matter of securing religious freedom. It was through
their efforts that, a month after this, the famous First
Amendment to the Constitution was proposed under
the leadership of Madison and Jefferson, and though
earnestly opposed in Congress was finally passed and
ratified by the states; and thus came into the Constitu-
tion those words so often quoted, "Congress shall make
no law respecting an establishment of religion or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof." As Dr. Gambrell
said at the Young People's Convention in Baltimore,
"If there had been no Baptists there would have been

*See Bap. Quar. Review, 1871, p. 250.

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 149

no First Amendment to the Constitution.1' This did
not, of course, do away with the existing establishments
of churches in the various states nor forbid oppressive
state laws, but it threw the influence of the national
government against them, and since 1787 no attempt
has been made towards the establishment of a church
in any state.

V. Another influence often mentioned and some-
times disputed is that which came through a Baptist
church upon Mr. Jefferson in furnishing him with ideas
of government which he afterwards embodied in the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of
the United States. At the basis of every great move-
ment and at the turning point in every crisis stands a
man, and in the mind of that man there is a thought.
He may or may not be conscious of the origin of that
thought. It may have come to him at the suggestion of
some other, himself obscure, but in his mind it takes root
and through him becomes the power to move a nation.
So the world may or may not know the real origin of
its best things. In this way, through Thomas Jefferson,
is the Baptist principle in church government said to
have given shape to this government. And indeed, in
those familiar words, " We hold these truths to be self
evident that all men are created equal; that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness," we seem to hear the far away voice of the
early Anabaptists; and in the words "that to secure these
rights governments are instituted among men deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed," to

150 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

see only the broader gleam of that principle long before
established by Roger Williams and practically exhibited
in every Baptist church. There was a Baptist church
not far from Mr. Jefferson's home in Monticello whose
meetings for business he sometimes attended, (Curtis
says, for months in succession), and with whose pastor
he was well acquainted. It is said that this pastor, Rev.
Andrew Tribble, once asked him how he liked their
church government and that he replied that it struck
him with great force and interested him much; that he
considered it the only form of true democracy then
existing in the world, and that he had concluded that
it would be the best plan of government for the
American colonies. This was several years before the
Declaration of Independence.

I see no reason to doubt the truth of this statement,
and indeed, if we must doubt it then we are uncertain
of very much that is taken for history, for it is better
attested than many things that are received. Mr.
Tribble made this statement himself to Dr. Fishback
and by him it was written down. Mr. Curtis in his
"Progress of Baptist principles" states that "a gentle-
man of the highest respectability and well known in
North Carolina'1 told him personally "that his attention
had been called to the subject and he, knowing that the
venerable Mrs. Madison had some recollections on the
subject, asked her in regard to them. She expressed a
distinct recollection of Mr. Jefferson speaking on the
subject, and always declaring that it was a Baptist
church from which these views were gathered."* It is

♦Page 357,

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 151

certainly true that both Jefferson and Madison and
their families were well acquainted with the struggles
of the Baptists .and deeply interested in them, and it is
not possible that they, being the men they were and
working with them so long for the same ends in Virginia,
should not have known and thoroughly understood the
principles which they advocated and upon which their
churches were conducted. Jefferson's mother was an
Episcopalian but her sister, his favorite Aunt, was a
Baptist, as was also a brother of Madison. Jefferson
also writes "To the members of the Baptist Church of
Buck Mountain," calling them his friends and neighbors
and thanking them for congratulations," We have acted
together from the origin to the end of a memorable
revolution and we have contributed, each in the line
allotted to us, our endeavors to render its issues a per-
manent blessing to oar country." He understood their
aims and worked with them for their accomplishment.
Mrs. Madison was a remarkable woman, was intimately
acquainted with Mr. Jefferson and certainly had ample
opportunity to know his views and their origin, and her
testimony should be decisive. To be sure he was not
ignorant of the history of other republics, and to be
sure he could not be conscious of the ultimate source
of all his thoughts; but certainly we ought to receive
his own statement, repeatedly made, as to the origin of
his ideas of government and Mrs. Madison testifies that
he always declared that it was from a Baptist church
that he derived them. There seems no room to doubt
therefore, that it was the practical working of Baptist
principles in a Baptist church that, through Mr. Jeffer-

152 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

son, largely gave form and spirit to the government of
this Union, and that it was the working out of Baptist
principles in a Baptist government, influencing the
nation in an ever widening circle, that worked mightily
to the same end.

And again, the Baptists are the leaders in the struggle
which is now going on for the extension of this principle
of religious liberty throughout the world. They were
the original agitators for the separation of church and
state in England, and are still leaders although others
have adopted their principles and are working side by
side with them; and although bitterly opposed by
interested Lords and clergy, we can clearly see that
disestablishment in England is bound to come at no
distant day.

Through the struggles of Baptist missionaries the
entering wedge has been inserted in Sweden and
Norway and Denmark and is being driven home. The
struggle begun again in Germany with Dr. Oncken is
being bravely carried on by our brethren of today. In
Mexico Baptists and Presbyterians are teaching prin-
ciples of liberty and the nobility of regenerated man to
those who have known only the superstition and
despotism of a vile and tyrannical church. And in our
own land the more than four millions of Baptists are
lifting up their voice in the demand that the last vestige
of the unholy alliance shall be swept away and all forms
of state aid to any church be forbidden. The contest
over government appropriations for Indian schools is
still fresh in our minds, and we remember with pleasure
that it was General Thomas J. Morgan, a Baptist min-

INFLUENCE ON CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 153

ister and teacher and now Secretary of our Home
Mission Society, who, when Indian Commissioner of
the United States, gave the death blow to the system by
which millions of dollars have been given by the gov-
ernment for the teaching of Roman Catholicism and
the making disciples to this and other forms of religion.
Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episco-
palians, Friends, Mennonites, Unitarians and Lutherans
were all receiving government aid for their denomina-
tional schools, while the Roman Catholics were receiving
far more than all the rest together and the Baptists
alone consistently supported their own schools, never
asking or receiving aid from the government. To the
honor of these other denominations be it said that as
the agitation of the question brought out the inconsis-
tency and wrong of their position, one after another
voluntarily relinquished such aid, first the Methodists,
then the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, and then
the rest, until now the Roman Catholics stand alone
in opposition to all others in the matter. As the years
go by and the final outcome of the matter is more fully
seen, the importance of this action will be more apparent
and the influence of Dr. Morgan in it more fully
appreciated.

Thus the struggle goes on, and thus through the
centuries victory follows victory, and thus it will go on
until the principle of man's right to his own conscience
is established, not only in this country but throughout
the world, and the anomalous spectacle of a church
claiming to be the church of Christ upheld, patronized
and forced upon unwilling souls by the power of a

154 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

worldly government, will be a thing of the past. When
that time comes and the influence of what has been
gained has gone round the world; when the work has
been accomplished and the sum of human liberty is
complete, then it will be seen that Baptists from the
beginning have held the right principle, that their
struggles and their sufferings have been a priceless gift
to the world, and that they have been the strongest
single force which has contributed to the grand result.

Let me now close with an extract from Dr. Bitting:
"Here and now, except Romanists, all christians and
the unconnected masses defend the doctrine of religious
liberty. Just here it is that, on review, Baptists claim
their noblest moral victory in the contest. Not only in
codes but in hearts have they lodged those sublime
principles for which their blood was profusely shed in
the past; for which they once and long stood up alone,
and by which any man of any faith may find immunity
from the fierceness and relentlessness of religious hate,
persecution and vengeance. Baptists do not cite the
facts in any mere love of boasting or with any wish to
wound, but simply to defend their history; to repel the
mis-statements of malice or ignorance; to remind them-
selves and their children of the cost of our heritage of
freedom and to warn them to preserve it from the
bigotry which would proscribe any man's religious
privileges."

" 'With a great sum' did Baptists buy that liberty
wherein we were 'born free.' Let no Baptist stain or
disgrace it with either infidelity or intolerance."

"Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways and
see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good-
way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for
your souls"

"That which was from the beginning, that which
we have heard, that which we have seen with our
eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands han-
dled, concerning the Word of life .... that which
we have seen and heard declare we unto you also,
that ye also may have fellow ship with us: yea and
our fellowship is uith the Father, and with his Son
Jesus Christ: and these things we write that our
joy may be fulfilled."

BAPTIST INFLUENCE ON THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF
OTHER RELIGIOUS BODIES.

Looking back beyond the beginning of the present
century, or perhaps to the middle of the last century,
we can see that a very great change has taken place in
the beliefs and practices of religion. At that time were
found everywhere state churches; religion enforced by
law; churches only formal and religion only a matter
of ceremonies; the mass of the people unreached; spir-
ituality dead or too feeble to utter any effective protest;
vital piety preserved only in a few proscribed sects;
evangelical and missionary enterprise unknown; infant
baptism almost universal and church membership only
by infant baptism and subsequent confirmation; the
great body of the church membership unconverted and
a considerable part of it actually licentious, drunken and
vile and sometimes even atheistic; the ministry no better
than the people; sacred things commonly ministered
by men destitute of spiritual knowledge and often
immoral and profligate; sermons and religious teaching
only dogmatic or philosophic essays, giving stones

158 THE BAPTIST IN HISTOKY.

instead of bread and serpents instead of fish; the minis-
try not a ministry but a priesthood, for which education
without spiritual qualifications was considered sufficient
preparation. But now we find everywhere in what we
call the evangelical denominations a genuine, spiritual
Christianity, and much of it even in those churches
which have been state churches; conversion is a requi-
site to church membership generally, even though
conversion be loosely defined; missionary enterprise is
everywhere exhibited; the Bible is honored more than
at any other period of history; churches are active in
every social and moral reform; irreligious life in church
members is a matter of popular remark and general
condemnation; revivals are frequent and sought for;
ministers for the most part are spiritual men and an
unconverted ministry is condemned; immorality in the
ministry is sufficient ground for deposition from office;
and the preaching of the pulpit is for the most part
gospel and efficient. Truly the change has been great.
Again as we look at the state churches, the Lutheran,
the Episcopal, the Presbyterian and the Boman Cath-
olic, we see a great change even in them and especially
in this country. The Presbyterian church has dropped
its character as a state church altogether and become
openly evangelical. The Episcopal has taken on a
character of religious zeal and activity altogether foreign
to it in earlier days. The dead formalism of England
has been improved in America into something very like
to spiritual life. The Lutheran church is quite changed
as to its influence and teaching and from some at least
of its pulpits the saving truths of the gospel are declared

INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS LIFE. 159

with clearness and power. In many Lutheran churches
prayer meetings are held and Sunday Schools conducted,
which is a thing unknown in the old country; Sunday
Schools there being only to prepare for confirmation.
Their churches are for the most part thronged and their
ministers of a character to command respect. In
contrast to this, note the statements of a recent lecturer,
for more than four years a student in German univer-
sities, concerning the churches in Germany. The
Protestant churches, he says, are mammoth organiza-
tions having a membership ranging all the way up to
seventy-five thousand in a church, but the great
majority pay little or no attention to church services.
Seven years ago there were six hundred and sixty-six
thousand members of state Protestant churches in
Berlin and only fifty thousand seats in all the Protes-
tant churches of the city. At morning preaching
services on Sunday in a church having forty thousand
members, he counted only eighteen present, and at
another with twelve thousand members, a hundred
and fifty present. There are in all Germany with
fifty-three millions of population, only thirty thousand,
two hundred and fifty preachers, Protestant and Cath-
olic, while in America among the four millions of our
faith and practice alone there are about thirty-three
thousand ordained preachers.

The changes in the Roman Catholic Church are not
as marked, for it is the boast of Rome that she never
changes. Yet evangelical influences have greatly
modified even Rome, and there is noticeable a better
intelligence and a naore independent spirit among the

160 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

people and a less arrogant attitude of the priests to-
wards the people, especially in this country. The occa-
sional uprisings of a parish against the church
authorities which are reported in the newspapers when
some unwelcome priest is forced upon them or some
favorite, but too liberal, priest is taken from them, are
very significant of a growing spirit of freedom and a
restlessness under domination, -even among the Roman
Catholics.

In another respect also tKere has been a great change.
At the middle of the last century not only was there an
established church upheld by persecuting laws in all
the countries of Europe, but also in every one of the
American colonies except Rhode Island and Pennsyl-
vania. The Papacy ruled in France and other parts of
Europe and Protestants were few and feeble. Luther-
anism ruled in Germany and had driven the Baptists
out. Episcopacy collected its money tax in England
and its tobacco tax in Virginia, and while Presbyteri-
anism was established by law in Scotland, Congrega-
tionalism sustained itself by taxes and fines in New
England. While here and there individuals were for
freedom in religion, not a single religious body save
the Baptists and Quakers had lifted up their voice for
it, but all in turn had claimed, and as far as possible
had exercised, the right to define and promote religion
by law and to pursue and punish those who disputed
their definition. Now it is different. In no part of
these United States is there a church upheld by law to
the exclusion of others, nor is there to be found more
than two bodies (Catholics and Mormons) who would

INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS LIFE. 161

either favor or permit it. Court after court has decided
that it knows nothing of any church save as a body of
people claiming protection in their natural rights, and
that before its bar every church has the same privileges
and may claim the same protection. In France, Catholic
France, Protestant missions are conducted openly and
with safety. In Italy Baptist and Methodist preachers
lift up their voices within sound of the Vatican and the
Pope growls harmlessly. In most of Germany and in
Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Baptists may live and
work without molestation save as it may arise from the
jealousy of the priests and the prejudices of the people.
In Scotland the Free Kirk stands side by side with the
Established Kirk, equal to it in numbers and influence,
and disputes its authority. In Ireland the Establish-
ment has disappeared. In England full half the people
are dissenters, and the Establishment is upheld only
by the selfish interest of the House of Lords and the
power of a conservatism which bows low before prece-
dent and venerates antiquity; and in Wales the main
hindrance to its overthrow is the certainty on the part
of its supporters that if it were lost in Wales it could
not be saved in England. Truly these changes have
been great.

What has produced them? Several things. Un-
scriptural religion and unchristian Christianity has
demonstrated its own impotence even as did ancient
heathenism. The natural humanity of man has revolted
from the scenes of cruelty and suffering it has witnessed
and has lost faith in a principle which could produce
such scenes, and so there has been a revulsion in favor

162 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

of liberty. Better bible facilities have made the people
better acquainted with the word of God wherein they
read of the loving spirit of Jesus, of the liberty where-
with he makes men free, and of a church of spiritual
membership, baptized upon profession of personal faith
and regeneration. The personal work of the Spirit of
God has brought great revivals among men, leading
them to a truer knowledge of real religion and a better
spirit in religious things, a more spiritual life and a
closer obedience to Christ's will. But while the law of
the race under a gospel dispensation is progress and
many things work together for the same end, it is
always true that there are leaders in this progress, some
whose privilege it is to be specially marked as instru-
ments of good in producing such great changes. And
as to these changes, we can but notice that they have
been just along the line of Baptist teaching and are, in
fact, but a fuller acceptance of those truths which have
been our principles from the beginning; "and therein
do we rejoice, yea, and will rejoice." We remember
that in the beginning Baptists were the only agitators
of these questions and that they have been the most
persistent agitators of them all the way through. We
remember the great amount of their writings and dis-
putations upon these subjects, their confessions pub-
lished to the world or given before magistrates and
tribunals, their testimonies given under torture and
their sublime deaths, which have called attention to
their principles. We remember the very large infusion
of Baptist blood into other churches, at least in this
country; the thousands upon thousands converted

INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS LIFE. 163

under Baptist influences and for various reasons uniting
with other churches, and the multitude of Baptist
daughters who have married Pedobaptist sons and
gone with them into Pedobaptist churches, and the
other thousands who have accepted Baptist principles
and yet remain in other churches, all these to be a
leaven and an influence of no small importance. We
remember all these things, I say, and think it not too
much to claim that these changes have been very large-
ly due to Baptist influence. They have been made in
response to a call back to the true spirituality and sim-
plicity of the New Testament, and in just so much as
they have been a return to a true gospel may every one
of us be grateful and glad.

But before discussing these more modern influences
let us go back for a little while to the times of the
Reformation. The name of Martin Luther has been
vastly praised and lauded, and multitudes bowing down
before his utterances have worshiped him as other
multitudes have worshiped John Calvin and John
Wesley, and the impression often made upon the young
student is that the great Reformation was almost
entirely his work, just as it is often called Luther's
Reformation. But nothing could be more of a mistake
than that. One man cannot make a reformation, and
had he not had many predecessors and many helpers,
Luther himself would never have been heard of. We
hear most of the great commanders, but a commander
alone can not carry on a campaign or win a battle.
Back of him there is a great army of common men,
and to win his fame many a heroic deed is done by the

164 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

soldier in the ranks whose name, even, the world never
knows. So, had there not been a long period of prepa-^
ration and a large background of gospel teaching and
believing among the people, and many lesser movements
preceeding, the great Reformation had never been. A
reformation in religion, like a reformation in govern-
ment, implies a wide spread movement among the
people. This preparation was plainly the work of the
older and evangelical forces of an Anabaptist character,
known at various times under different names as Wal-
densians, Arnoldists, Hussites, Anabaptists, etc., terms
which are not exclusive of each other, as these various
bodies run into each other in a way which makes clear
distinction between them often impossible. Of the
forces of the Reformation itself the truest and the
purest was the great Anabaptist movement, which
sought not to re-form but to re-create, bringing the
people back to the true gospel and the right way of
salvation through faith in Christ and cutting loose
from unspiritual princes and worldly powers as well as
from the slavery of dead forms; and bitter indeed was
the disappointment of these gospel workers when they
found that some of the worst features of the old corrupt
establishment were to be preserved; that the new
churches, instead of being spiritual bodies, were to be
composed of a motley mixture of materials and to be
controlled, directed and supported by the secular
power.

What Europe would have been today if the despised
Anabaptists had been allowed their liberty is not
difficult to imagine. The continent would have been

INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS LIFE. 165

filled with evangelical churches, living pure lives and
preaching a pure gospel. The Reformation would have
gone as far beyond Lulheranism as Lutheranism did
beyond the Papacy. The Papacy itself would have
been honeycombed with gospel truth and well nigh de-
stroyed. The enterprise of modern missions would have
been begun two hundred years sooner than it was, and
the world today would have been fully evangelized.
Popular liberty would have taken the place of imperi-
alism, and old world monarchy would have been a thing
of the past, even though the form of it were still main-
tained. State churches would have been long ago
abandoned with their oppressive priesthood, and a long
and awful story of religious bigotry and hate would
have remained untold. And, what to the christian is a
thought of infinite sadness, untold millions who have
lived and died would have learned the way of life and
chosen it, instead of being left in delusion to follow a
path of darkness and go out into deeper darkness at
the end. When we consider a hundred years of our own
history and see what a free church in a free state has
done, this picture does not seem overdrawn.

What the condition of the reformed church is today
has been already told. State churches with their
unconverted ministers, christian members few and far
between just in proportion as they have not been
influenced by dissenting bodies; that is the picture.
All the rationalism and infidelity of the day is the
product of these false churches, and all the wild schemes
of men to break down the authority of God and uproot
his Word among men have been hatched by their

166 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

accredited Professors of Theology and Doctors of
Divinity. Dr. Samuel Haskell says that some years
ago he heard it publicly stated by a Presbyterian
clergyman who had studied abroad in his young man-
hood, that when Robert Haldane, the Scotch Baptist,
entered Geneva in the year 1816 tltere was not known
to he a converted person in that historic center of
Reformation Christianity, and the surprise awakened by
the statement was only increased by the investigation
which verified it. He says, "Under this spiritual death
the creed of Calvinism was but a skeleton, nor even
that without the loss of its principal parts. Pastors
and theological teachers, students and people at large
had gone over to formalism and rationalism. Arian,
Unitarian and rationalistic essays had usurped the
place of preaching and teaching the Lord Jesus. Bible
instruction was unknown. Worldly life and dissipating
pleasures overran the sabbath and vitiated common
morality. It had even come to pass that the fundamen-
tal doctrines in our religion were prohibited themes of
discussion. Candidates for the ministry were required
to sign a pledge not to agitate such subjects as the
innate sinfulness of man, the God-head of Jesus, the
Trinity, spiritual regeneration and the election of
grace;"* and as Haldane began to discuss these prohib-
ited themes, efforts were made to banish him from the
city. And this in Geneva, the city of John Calvin,
where his main work was done and where he supposed
the best triumphs of his life were wrought! Such was
the outcome of the work of one of the greatest of the

♦Heroes and Hierarchs, p. 240.

INFLUENCE ON KELlGlOUS LIFE. 167

Reformers and of the church formed under his own
hand! It only shows again how a wrong principle
adopted in the beginning will in the end bring to
naught the work of the greatest men, and that a church
made up of unregenerate people, brought in through
infant baptism is not the church against which the
gates of hell shall not prevail.

The Reformation was a mighty movement; towards
a purer doctrine, for the most of Lutheran theology is
good; towards learning, to which a great impulse was
given; towards liberty, for the power that was enslaving
men was broken, and although not destroyed, it never
regained its hold and never will. And yet the Refor-
mation viewed as a spiritual force, a spiritual movement
resulting in a true church and leading men to Christ,
was a failure, (how much a failure those can best under-
stand who have lived and tried to do christian work
fully under the blighting and deadening influence of
the Lutheran church); and the Reformation churches
have found their true prosperity and success only in
proportion as they have abandoned Reformation prin-
ciples of church life and come over upon Anabaptist
ground; and in proportion as they have adopted the
principles of those whom, in that time, they persecuted.
Upon the very ground and among the same peoples
where the Reformers taught, the work of the Reform-
ation has now to be done over again, and a large part
of the Reformation church is as truly missionary ground
as is the Papacy or heathenism. Reformation princi-
ples have proved themselves defective and Anabaptist
principles have proved themselves true. I would like

168 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

to suggest as the subject of a most interesting and
instructive treatise which some well qualified person
ought to write, "The failure of the Beformation."

But what became of that which we have described as
the best element of the Beformation, — those thousands
upon thousands of Anabaptists? Have they left any-
permanent influence upon Europe, and if not, why not?
It is a fair question but the answer is not far away;
indeed we have already had the answer. Their princi-
ples were scorned, their writings were destroyed, their
teachings proscribed, and they themselves perished
amid the fires of persecution. Only a remnant escaped,
foot sore, weary, poverty stricken and haunted, to meet
anew those same fires in England and America until
they were finally quenched by the spirit of freedom.
Europe has waited to feel again in this century the reflex
influence of that which there began, and her princes
and priests again are trembling before those principles,
now grown strong, which she then sought to destroy;
and the twenty-eight thousand German and the forty-
six thousand Scandinavian Baptists are seeking to do
for Europe under better conditions, what they were not
allowed to do in the days of the Beformation. The day
will yet come when the Anabaptist influence in Europe
will be powerfully revived to the blessing of the whole
continent.

Beturning now to more modern movements, the
chief progress in religion has been mainly in two
directions, namely, towards a spiritual cliurcli member-
ship, and towards a fuller recognition of the supreme
and sole authority of the Bible. These are specifically

INFLUENCE ON KELIGIOUS LIFE. 169

Baptist doctrines, for they were not in the constitution
and have not, until late years, been in the practice of
other churches. To be sure, every church claims bible
authority for its principles, but why then, such princi-
ples as are not to be found in the gospel and are con-
trary to it? And why. the presence, and as far as they
are concerned the omnipresence, of a little book which
supersedes and contradicts the Bible in giving rules
for the church? And to be sure, every church claims
a christian membership, and in these days the member-
ship of evangelical churches is mainly made up of
converted persons, but that is a departure from the
original idea, and some of them are very loose in their
definition of conversion and make very small demands
upon candidates for membership. The fundamental
idea of a Baptist church is convei^sion, by which we
mean regeneration; the idea of the other churches is a
profession, a training in religiousness, and a standing
in church connection. This fundamental idea of con-
aversion is not in the Presbyterian standards, though it
is largely in their practice, but the church is made to
consist of believers and their children, a phrase which
occurs over and over in Presbyterian writings, and the
unbelieving children are held to be proper subjects of
a church ordinance and, after certain teaching, of
membership in the church. Their theory of a church
is that of a training school wherein unbelievers are
educated into holiness, rather than a company of those
who have been regenerated into holiness. It is not in
the Methodist Discipline, which provides that any per-
son having the desire for a godly life may become a

170 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

member of the Class on probation, and at the end of six
months, if he still have the same desire and is striving
for righteousness and has lived a correct life, he may
be received into full connection; and yet he may know
full well and his minister may know that he has never
experienced a change of heart and is not a child of
God. It requires only a desire and a struggle, not a
regeneration. It is not in tha early Congregational
theory or practice, for they admitted to membership
the unconverted who had been sprinkled in infancy, at
first not to the "communion," but afterwards, fully.
Backus says that they never demanded conversion,
even in their ministers, until after the Great Awaken-
ing in 1741. When Princeton Theological Seminary
was being founded by the Presbyterians in 1812 it was
a matter of formal and sober discussion whether it was
necessary that a minister be a converted man, and con-
sidered that it was not* The doctrine of the Baptists
was that a minister must be himself taught by the
Spirit and so qualified by his own inward experience;
that he must even be conscious of a. personal and special
call of God to that work, and they emphasized these
qualifications in contrast to those who required only a
full course of scholastic training. And yet now all
these churches are seeking conversions and rejoicing
in revivals which once were considered improper and
unauthorized and inadmissable. A hundred years ago
the Baptists were the only body who held conversion
to be an indispensible requisite to church membership,
but this has now come to be generally recognized.

♦Curtis1 Rise and Prog., Etc., p. 66.

INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS LIFE. 171

The other line of progress is not less marked, namely,
a growing acknowledgement of the supreme authority
of the Bible; and this is really what has produced the
improvement of which we have just spoken. This, you
will remember, is what we gave as our fundamental
principle; the absolute authority of Christ in his
church, and therefore the absolute authority of the
New Testament which is His will revealed. It has been
the custom of others to run back to creeds and councils
and church fathers for their authority, but the hold of
the too much revered fathers on the conscience of the
church is being broken, and the bible is coming to take
a much larger place. The devil has noted this change
with his accustomed shrewdness, and has therefore
mustered all his available forces of scholarship on the
one hand and liberalism on the other, in a desperate
attempt to discredit the bible and break its hold on
men, or at least, to weaken it as much as possible. But
the effort already begins to fail.

This increased influence is due partly to the constant
appeal of Baptists to the inspired authority as against
the uninspired, and partly to the wide spread distribu-
tion of the Bible itself; for the common people read it,
and their common sense tells them that if it is the word
of God they ought to follow it instead of the word of
man. As long as there are bibles there will be Baptists,
and the more those bibles are studied the more will
their tribe increase; for no matter what men may teach
as ancient or venerable, or as to what is convenient or
inconvenient, or as to what "makes no difference11 and
what does, there will always be some honest and hard

172 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

headed individuals to stand up and say, "But the bible
does not teach it that way," and to insist that the bible
way should be followed.

This drift bible-ward is shown in several ways. For
example, it used to be sufficient to quote the fathers
and the doctors, and the opinion of a learned man was
counted as sufficient defense of any given practice; but
now men have begun to feel that their positions must
be sustained by arguments from the Bible. This has
given rise to all sorts of absurd and ridiculous things, to
be sure, since men have invented all sorts of institutions
and practices of their own without any command of
God, and now are trying to defend thern by appealing
to his commands, and defend human institutions as if
they were set up by divine authority. So we are asked
to accept the infallibility of the Pope on the ground of
the primacy of Peter whose successor he claims to be,
when Peter was never a leader of the Apostles in any
other sense than as the one of a company who is the
quickest to think and act naturally comes into promi-
nence and leadership, when his leadership was soon
superseded by Paul's, who "rebuked him to his face,"
and in comparison with whose permanent influence
upon the church of Christ Peter's is very small indeed.
Besides there is no evidence that Peter was ever in
Eome until the very last of his life if even then, and
never as its bishop, while we know that Paul was.
The Papacy committed a great blunder in not claiming
descent and heritage of office from Paul instead of
Peter. Again, Peter's supposed successors have insisted
on the celibacy of the clergy, while he is the only one

INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS LIFE. 173

of the Apostles of whom we positively know that he
was a married man; for we read that Peter's mother-in-
law was sick.

In like manner infant baptism is defended by the
claim that it takes the place of circumcision, a claim
that involves contradictions and absurdities, and of
which not the least mention is made in the New Testa-
ment, although there were many occasions which
certainly required its mention if it had been true.
Circumcision was fundamental in their faith, as infant
baptism has been in that of Pedobaptist churches, and
Paul was constantly assailed for his insistence that it
was no longer necessary. You remember how vehe-
mently he declares to the Galatians "Behold I Paul say
unto you, that, if ye receive circumcision, Christ will
profit you nothing." And again he alludes to his con-
tinual persecution as proof positive that he was not (as
some seem to have represented him as doing) preaching
circumcision. How easily he could have let himself
out of the continual trouble with the Judaizers by
simply saying "Why yes, brethren, I still uphold our
ancient rite of circumcision, only now, you know, it has
been changed and we baptize the children instead of
circumcising thein." It is not conceivable that he
would not have said some such thing if it had been
true, for the occasion demanded it. It is also defended
by the assertion that in the New Testament household
baptisms there must of necessity have been infants
included; an assertion which rests purely upon the
imagination. A good reply was made by a Baptist
brother once when a Methodist brother insisted that

174 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

there must have been infants in the household of Lydia,
and that therefore they were baptized. "Why no, my
dear sir," said he, "you are mistaken. Lydia was a
widow, and the only children she ever had were two
daughters, one of whom was at this time seventeen
years old and the other twenty." "Indeed!" replied the
Methodist, "and where did you get such astonishing
information as that?" "Why," s&id the Baptist, "I got
my information just where you got yours; I guessed at
it, and my guess is just as good as your guess."

The drift is seen again in the disposition to revise or
discard or disregard the old creeds and doctrinal state-
ments of the churches, and to set aside the decisions of
councils which for ages have been venerated as much
as the Bible itself. We remember, for instance, the
late discussion concerning the revision of the West-
minster Catechism, in which such revision was openly
called for by many prominent ministers and upon the
ground that its statements are not according to bible
teaching and are not believed by the Presbyterians of
today.

It was a growing sense of the importance of the Bible
and of having its every word an exact and true repre-
sentation of the original that led to the Revised Ver-
sion of of 1881, to produce which the best scholarship
of England and America gave its best etfort; though
even here an ancient conservatism and church influence
was too much felt, and it stops short of the whole
truth. The wonderful impulse given to bible study in
these late years, showing itself in bible conferences,
classes for study and published helps innumerable,

INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS LIFE. 175

needs no remark, and in this the Revision was largely
instrumental. But to the Revision itself a great im-
pulse was given by Baptist influence, for they were
the beginners in the work, agitating the subject through
millions of pamphlets, tracts and other documents, and
a copy of our own Bible Union version of 1865 was in
the hands of each one of the revisers — a version which
for faithfulness and clearness has never been surpassed.
Baptists have always been foremost in bible translations
and revisions. The great British and Foreign Bible So-
ciety owes its origin to the interest aroused by the
translation and publication of the scriptures in India by
Dr. Carey, one of our ministers, and to the energetic
efforts of Rev. Joseph Hughes, another of our ministers.
Though thus founded by a Baptist, his brethren were
afterwards driven out of it for their insistence upon a
faithful version for the heathen, as they were soon after
from the American Bible Society for the same reason.*
The first notable translations into heathen tongues
were made by William Carey, and with the help of
Marshman and Ward the Bible was translated into
thirty-one different languages in ten years." The first
complete Chinese bible was translated by Dr. Marsh-
man, and the Chinese New Testament now in universal
use by Dr. Josiah Goddard, the Assamese and the
Japanese bibles by Nathan Brown, the Burmese by
Judson, the Siamese by John Taylor Jones, the Shan
by Dr. J. N. Cushing, the Karen by Drs. Mason and
Cushing, the Telugu by Dr. Jewett, all Baptists; and
besides these there have been many others. The first

♦This action is fully discussed in "Bible Societies and the Baptists"
by Dr. C. C. Bitting-, a little book which every Baptist oughtlJto read. It
is issued by the Publication Society,

176 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

translation into the language of the American Indians
was made by Roger Williams twenty years before
Elliott's famous Indian bible. And the only revision
of the English bible ever undertaken by a single
denomination was the Bible Union version already
referred to.

Again, this drift is seen in the increasing number of
immersions in other denominations and in the increas-
ing number coming from other denominations to us on
account of dissatisfaction with their baptism. I know
of a large Methodist church not far away of which
three fourths the members were immersed after con-
version. I have seen a Methodist church in which a
baptistery was built and nearly all of whose members
are immersed, and have been told of two others. It is
worthy of remark that nearly all the famous evangelists
of the day have felt themselves obliged to receive
immersion in order to be themselves obedient to the
gospel they teach, although they think it expedient not
to say much about it, and still hold their membership
in Pedobaptist churches. The baptism of such noted
men as Dr. A. T. Pierson of Philadelphia, and Dr. John
Robertson of Glasgow, from whose sermon on believer's
baptism and baby sprinkling I have already quoted, is
noteworthy also, both being Presbyterians, and likewise
the remark of Dr. Philip Schaff, probably the most
noted Presbyterian scholar in the country, made before
the Saratoga Bible Convention, that he believed in
immersion and that, were it not for lifelong Presbyter-
ian associations, he should be himself immersed and
join with the Baptists.

INFLUENCE ON KELIGIOUS LIFE. 177

But an especially interesting evidence of a return to
New Testament principles is found in the decline of
infant baptism. For myself, I am glad it has gone
into a decline; may its sickness be without suffering;
may its decline be rapid; may its demise be speedy and
without regret, and may the world never look upon its
like again. This change of feeling in regard to infant
baptism means not only a difference but a revolution in
church life, which is slowly working itself out; for this
practice is not incidental in the churches which use it,
but fundamental. It stands for a whole system of doc-
trines, and when it goes they go with it. It means
baptismal salvation; it means the efficacy of sacraments;
it means the authority of tradition as opposed to the
authority of the Bible; it means a preaching of rites
and ceremonies and forms instead of repentance and
faith, and there are many other things that belong with
it. Its discarding means the coming over of the
churches upon the ground of personal faith and a
regenerated life and personal obedience to our Master
and Lord. It is beyond question that this practice does
not have the hold upon the churches which it once had.
Some Pedobaptist pastors are candid enough to admit
that it is entirely without scriptural foundation, as does
Dr. Lyman Abbott, in an editorial in the "Outlook!1 of
November 27th, 1897. In discussing the recent Baptist
Congress he says, "They" (the Baptists) "all hold, and
hold as strongly as ever, the doctrine that Apostolic
baptism was a symbolic expression of repentance and
faith, and that to baptize infants who can neither repent
nor exercise faith is a change of the original ceremony

178 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

from its original purpose. Historical scholarship abun-
dantly confirms this contention. Infant baptism was
unknown in the Apostolic church. It was introduced
into the church at a post-Apostolic date. It has com-
pletely changed the significance of the rite. The change
can be justified only on the ground that no rite is of
the essence of Christianity, and that the same spirit of
christian liberty which allowed -the christian church to
dispense with circumcision allows it to change baptism
from a symbolic act of faith by a penitent to a symbolic
act of consecration by a parent." We may perhaps, be
allowed our own opinion about the "christian" quality
of such "liberty," and be allowed also to remark that,
as circumcision never had any place in the christian
church it never was "dispensed with." So it is now
defended upon different grounds, and many Pedobaptist
ministers do not care to defend it at all. Indeed the
most of them do not care to talk about it and in a long
conversation with a Methodist minister some time ago
on this and kindred topics, all he would say was, "We
don't make as much of that as wre used to." It is not
spoken of now as a necessary ordinance but as a matter
of preference; not as a baptism at all, indeed, but only
as a consecration or dedication of the child, or a pre-
sentation before the Lord. These things are significant
but the figures on the subject are more significant, for
they show that actually less infants in proportion year
by year are thus "baptized" or "dedicated" or "conse-
crated" or "presented." There are several lines of
evidence of this fact; first, the admissions of those who
practice infant baptism, then the increase in the number

INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS LIFE. 179

of adult baptisms and their proportion to infant bap-
tisms, then the actually decreasing proportion of infant
baptisms to membership.

The writings of Pedobaptists themselves show that
in their opinion the practice is falling behind. Thus
as to England, a writer in the London Spectator, F.
Simcox Lea, stated, July 10th, 1880, as a well known
fact that a comparison of the birth registers of London
with the parish registers showed that less than half the
children were "baptized." In a report of one of the
Classes, or Presbyteries, of the Dutch Reformed Church
held in 1879, we find that "In view of the great neglect
of infant baptism the Classis at its Spring session
requested Rev. F. H. Van Derveer D. D., to prepare a
paper on this subject. An exceedingly able and instruc-
tive paper was presented by Dr. Van Derveer and a copy
of the same was requested for publication/' Note the
phrase "in view of the great neglect of infant baptism.''
The "Christian at Work," some years ago, gave some
figures on infant baptism and then said, "But one con-
clusion is deducible from these statistics; the adherence
to infant baptism is not only practiced by less than one
half the Presbyterian church membership but there is
a decided falling off in the practice;" i. e. among those
who still do practice it. A Chicago correspondent of
"The Presbyterian" notes that "In our German churches
during the last year, the baptisms of infants were one to
every seven and one-half members, while in our Amer-
ican churches for the same time they were only one to
thirty members/' Records of Methodist Conferences
contain references to the same sort of falling off, such

180 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

as this from the North Carolina Conference of 1880;
"During the progress of the twentieth question the
matter of infant baptism came up, owing to the small
number reported baptized in some of the districts. Rev.
A. W. Mangum spoke in reference to the injury done
to the cause of infant baptism by a prominent Metho-
dist publication." After some further remarks, the
Bishop enjoined strict attention-to the matter and they
went on with their business. The Boston Congrega-
tionalist says under date of January 18th, 1882, "The
simple fact appears to be that the doctrine of the
evangelical churches as to infant baptism is in a trans-
ition state, and has at present a materially loosened
hold upon the popular conviction . . . Congregation-
alists — under the attrition of Baptist friction on the one
side, and the force of their own principles of individu-
alism on the other — have become a good deal demoral-
ized in this particular." " 'The attrition of Baptist
friction' is good, very good."*

I have taken great pains to gather full and official
figures of the five leading Pedobaptist denominations in
America, giving the membership and the number of in-
fant and of adult baptisms for each and every year as
far back as the records have been preserved, and have
carefully figured out also the ratio of baptisms — both
infant and adult — to membership each year. The
records of the (Dutch) Reformed church go back to the
year 1825, of the Presbyterian to 1827, of the Methodist
to 1857, of the Congregationalist to 1859, and of the
Episcopal to 1868, with partial reports back to 1850.

♦The above references are taken from Prof. H. C. Vedder's pamphlet
on "The Decline of Infant Baptism, " published in 1890.

INFLUENCE ON HELlGIOUS LIFE. 181

These figures I have either copied myself from the
official published reports or obtained from the publica-
tion headquarters through the favor of those in the
employ of the various Boards.* A study of them is
very interesting for many reasons. Having them all
before us we can readily settle the question of the
decline of infant baptism and its present status. There
are variations — and sometimes quite notable varia-
tions— in the figures from year to year of course, but
taking a long series of years together the steady increase
in some columns and the steady decrease in others is
very striking.

Taking first the adult baptisms; if we find them in-
creasing year by year, the inference would naturally
be that infant baptisms are decreasing, else these
adults or many of them, would have been already bap-
tized in infancy. If we find them proportionately
increasing, the inference is plain; and if we find them
proportionately increasing while the infant baptisms
are proportionately decreasing, the conclusion is beyond
question. In all the denominations we find, as we should
expect as the denomination grows larger, an increase in
the actual number of adults baptized. In three of these
denominations there has been a decided increase in the
proportion of adults baptized to membership, in another
a slight increase, while in the other one there has been
a decrease in the proportion both of adult and infant
baptisms, which would seem to show that this denomi-
nation is not holding its own in the matter of growth.
Taking an average of the first ten years of the record

*See full table of figures at the end.

it

" 26.8

U

a

u

" 19.4

il

" 128.6

a

a

a

" 35.

a

" 78.2 '

a

a

a

" 77.2

182 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

in each case and comparing it with the average of the
last ten years, we have the following proportions of
adult baptisms to members:

INCREASE.

Presbyterians, from one in 50.2 members to one in 41.1
Methodists, "

Congregationalists,
Reformed, "

DECREASE.

Episcopalians, from one in 32.3 members to one in 51.2

Looking at it another way, we find that the Presby-
terians, during the first twenty years, when their
membership ran from a hundred and thirty-five thou-
sand to two hundred and twenty thousand, baptized
about seven thousand, three hundred and fifty less
adults than infants each year on an average, but during
the last twenty years, when their membership has been
more than four times as large, and the difference there-
fore should be four times as great, they have averaged
only about five thousand and nine hundred less each
year. The Congregationalists in the first ten years
from 1859 baptized four thousand, six hundred and
fifty-five more adults than infants, but in the last ten
years, while the membership is two and a half times as
large, the excess of adult over infant baptisms is about
seven times as large. Among the Methodists the
ratio of infant baptisms is very regular, but in the
column of adult baptisms there is great variation. In
only four years have the infant outnumbered the adult
baptisms, namely, in 1857, 1861, 1865 and 1881, while

INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS LIFE. 183

in other years the adult baptisms have outnumbered
the infant from a few hundred in 1880 and 1882 to one
hundred and twelve thousand and five hundred in 1892;
and in the ten years ending with 1897 they baptized
three hundred and fifty-three thousand and eight hun-
dred more adults than infants. In the Episcopal church
the ratio of adult to infant baptisms remains about the
same. In the Reformed church, while the proportion
of adult baptisms to membership has increased very
slightly, the proportion of infant^ baptisms has fallen
decidedly, so that whereas they did in the first ten years
baptize five and a half times as many infants as adults,
in the last ten years they have baptized only four and
three-tenths times as many. We find, therefore, that
the adult baptisms have increased both actually and
proportionately in all the denominations but one.

Coming now to the infant baptisms we find that in
each case there has been a decrease in the proportion
of baptisms to membership, and in all except the Metho-
dist figures the decrease is a decided one. There is an
increase, of course in the number of infants baptized,
but their number has not grown nearly as fast as the
number of members. We notice too, that this decrease
has been very regular, showing that an educational
process is going on and that a change of sentiment is
being produced in regard to the matter. We notice too,
that while there are great variations in the adult bap-
tisms, showing years of revival and years of coldness,
these years have affected the infant baptisms but
slightly. The columns of ratios show very plainly that
the feeling of obligation in regard to infant baptism is

184 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

gradually dying out and a belief in believers' baptism
taking its place.

Taking up the denominations separately, we find the
Presbyterians baptizing one infant to each thirteen
and two-tenths members in 1827, and that they have
never reached as high an average since. * In 1837 the
ratio is one in eighteen and eight-tenths; in 1847 one in
nineteen; in 1857 the same as twenty years earlier, but
from that point on there is a marked decrease, so that
1867 gives us one in twenty-three and nine-tenths, 1877
one in twenty-nine and eight-tenths, and in 1899 it
reaches its lowest point, one in thirty-nine and three-
tenths, just about one-third as many infants in propor-
tion to members as in 1827.

But taking up one of their official records — and the
one at hand happens to be for the year 1897 — and ex-
amining the list of churches in detail, some very
interesting things come to light. Thus it appears that
the larger churches are very generally allowing the
practice to fall into disuse, (and these, of course, are
supposably led by their ablest pastors), and that the
average is kept up by the smaller churches. Many
churches of from one hundred to five hundred members
report only a few, less than half a dozen, and in a
majority of the churches of four hundred members
and upwards, (a class of churches in which fifteen years
ago, the average was from one in fifty to one in eighty),
the average is only from one in seventy to one in a
hundred, and a number of very large churches report
none at all. For example, the Westminster church of
Minneapolis, with sixteen hundred members, reports no

INFLUENCE ON KELIGIOUS LIFE. 185

infant baptisms; the Cincinnati Second, with four
hundred and eighty-four members, the Albany Second,
with three hundred and thirty, the LaPorte, with three
hundred and forty-four, and the Logansport, with five
hundred and thirty-five, all report none. The Oakland
First, California, with thirteen hundred and twelve
members reports five; the Chicago First, with seven
hundred and nine members, reports one; Newark, NewT
Jersey, Third, with five hundred and seventy members,
reports three; Albany Fourth, with eight hundred
members, reports four; Ithaca, New York, with six
hundred and sixty-five members, reports two; Fifth
Avenue, New York City, Dr. John Hall pastor, with
two thousand six hundred and fifty members, reports
seven; (in 1880 they reported seventeen hundred and
thirty members and twenty-one infant baptisms). The
Madison Square, New York City, reports eight hundred
and one members and three infant baptisms, and the
Westminster, four hundred members and one infant
baptism. The Pennsylvania churches of all kinds seem
to average higher in infant baptisms than those of any
other state, yet Germantown First, with nineteen hun-
dred and ninety-one members reports no infant bap-
tisms. But to show what a church can do when it really
sets out to do something, we have the Madison Street
Church of Baltimore, which with two hundred and
twelve members baptized two hundred and fifteen
babies! This beats the record of any church that has
yet been discovered. But they must have gathered up
nearly all the babies in Baltimore, for the La Fayette
Square church with three hundred and seventy-four

186 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

members could only find two to baptize and the West-
minster, with three hundred and forty-three members
did not find any.

The Congregationalists show some surprising things
in their statistics. Their ratio nowhere runs as high
as either of the other denominations, yet they are the
only ones that anywhere show any actual gain in the
proportion of infants to membership. Beginning with
one in forty-nine and four-tenths in 1859, they reach
the lowest point in 1881 at one in eighty-nine and a
half, and since then have come back to the same figure
in 1897 as at the beginning. Yet over against this fact
is to be set the fact that their Triennial Council, held
in Portland in 1893, revised and recommended to the
individual churches for adoption a confession of faith
in which all reference to infant baptism was intention-
ally left out. Inasmuch as the Western churches show
a higher average than the Eastern, and the smaller
ones than the larger ones, I attribute their increase in
infant baptisms to their growth in the newer communi-
ties of the West, where the effort to gather in and the
contact with families of every faith would naturally
lead to the baptism of everybody's babies. If a Con-
gregational pastor can get a foothold in the family of
one brought up in Lutheran or Methodist faith, and to
some degree attach them to his church by baptizing
their baby, he will naturally do it, especially in a
small community where several struggling churches
are striving for members. They are the only body that
are not now baptizing less infants than ever before,
and their last ten years compared with the first ten

i

INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS LIFE. 187

shows an increase from one in fifty-nine to one in fifty-
one and a half.

Bat here are some interesting things and some sur-
prising variations: The Congregational Year Book for
1897 shows that the Western states averaged from one
infant baptism in forty-two members to one in fifty-
three; but Massachusetts, the home of Congregational-
ism, shows only one in sixty-nine; New Hampshire, one
in a hundred and sixteen; and Maine one in a hundred
and fifty-one, and in 1898, one in a hundred and eighty-
two! Wisconsin, with almost twenty-two thousand
members reports five hundred and eighty-three, and
Vermont, with not two hundred less members, only two
hundred and seventy-three. Ohio with more than three
times the membership of Pennsylvania, reports only
thirty-three more infant baptisms, and in 1898 reports
six less. Minnesota, with a little more than eighteen
thousand members reports four hundred and one, and
New Hampshire, with a little more than twenty thous-
and reports a hundred and seventy one. The whole
number of churches reporting in 1896 was five thousand
five hundred and forty-six, and of these two thousand,
six hundred and twenty-five or nearly half, reported no
infant baptisms, though many of, these were small
churches. Churches of from four hundred to a thousand
members are not very plenty in any denomination, yet
in the Year Book for 1898 we notice twenty-four such
churches that report no infant baptisms and fifteen more
that report not more than three, besides many others
that only report half a dozen or less. The other denom-
inations show the same sort of variations.

188 THE BAPTIST IN HISTOKY.

These curious variations can mean but one thing,
namely, that the doctrine of infant baptism is not held
by many churches with any strictness and that churches
in the same denomination vary much in the regard they
have for it. It should be remembered too, that any-
thing below the very highest averages shows a falling
off in the practice; for the highest averages are the nor-
mal ones if the doctrine is strictly held, because of course
no one baptizes more babies than they have, and when
the average falls, it must be that not all have been bap-
tized. The census reports show about one birth in
twenty of the population each year, but we find the
Presbyterians baptizing one to every twelve or thirteen
of the membership, the Episcopalians one to five or six,
and the Reformed even as many, in 1823, as one to
three. Difference in conditions is also to be taken into
account, and the fact that in the older states there has
been much emigration and in the cities families are not
as large, but that does not by any means explain it all.
The only conclusion is that the doctrine is loosening its
hold upon the churches.

The Methodists nowhere show as high an average as
do the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians or the Re-
formed, nor is theje a marked difference shown from
year to year; yet, taking the first ten years and compar-
ing them with the last ten, we find a decrease from one
in twenty-four and six-tenths to one in twenty-six and
seven-tenths, and in the last two years for which I have
full figures the ratio is one in twenty-nine and six-tenths
and one in thirty. Their highest ratio is one in twenty
and one-half and their lowest one in thirty.

INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS LIFE. 189

The Episcopal records previous to 1868 are only
partial but serve well enough for purposes of compar-
ison, as it is assumed that fuller records would not
materially change the ratio of baptisms to membership.
Their reports are given only once in three years and
the membership given is that for the year of the report,
while the baptisms given are the total for three years.
The ratio therefore, is obtained by taking the average
of baptisms and dividing the membership by it. This
does not give a perfectly accurate result for any one
year but does give accurate results for purposes of com-
parison during a series of years. The twenty-eight
dioceses reporting in 1850 show a membership of a few
less than eighty thousand, and one infant baptized to
every six and three-tenths members. In 1859 it increases
to one in five and six-tenths, and from that point stead-
ily and evenly decreases to one in thirteen in 1898,
when their last report was given. We should expect
that here, if anywhere, the proportion would be main-
tained, but they are baptizing only about half as many
as they did.

The Eeformed church has preserved its records
farther back than any of the others and I have complete
figures back to 1815 except two years. But beginning
in 1825, we find them baptizing one infant to every six
members. In fourteen years they have fallen off one-
half. In 1845 the ratio is one to fourteen and nine-
tenths; in 1865 it is one to seventeen and six-tenths; in
1881 it drops off to one in twenty-one and three-tenths,
which is exceptional, and comes up in 1899 to one in
eighteen and six-tenths.

190 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

Gathering up these figures now, we have the highest
and the lowest proportions as follows:
Presbyterians, highest, one in 13.2, lowest, one in 39.3
Methodists, " " 20.5, " " 30.

Congregationalists, " 47. , " " 89.5

Episcopalians, " " 5.6, " " 13.

Reformed, " " 6. , " " 21.3

Comparing the first year of the record used with the
last, (and looking over the whole table of figures, this
seems to give a very fair representation), we have the
following:

Presbyterians, in 1827, one in 13.2, in 1899, one in 39.3
Methodists, " 1857, " 25.4,' " 1897, " 30.
CongregatTts, " 1859, " 49.4, " 1898, " 54.6
Episcopalians, " 1850, " 6.3, " 1898, " 13.
Reformed, " 1825, " 6. , " 1899, " 18.6

And finally, averaging now this last table, we find that
the decrease in the five denominations taken together
and during the various periods given is from one in
twenty to one in thirty-one and one-tenth; a falling off
of a little more than one-third.

What has made this falling off in the matter of
infant baptism? When we consider that Baptists are
the only ones who do not, and have not always, taught
that it is a beautiful and holy thing, a duty and an
obligation; that by it great blessings are brought to the
dear children and safeguards thrown around their lives;
but that they have always denied it and fought it, have
shown its absurdity in reason and its utter lack of
foundation in scripture, while they have taught the
true significance of believers' baptism; and when we

INFLUENCE ON EELIGIOUS LIFE. 191

consider the great increase in numbers and influence
of these same Baptists, there seems but one answer;
they did it.

Thus the Baptists have been a restraining influence
to keep other denominations from suffering to the full
the evil results of their own principles, and a leavening
influence to permeate them with better principles.
Were it not for the Baptists and the printed Bible,
which is continually making Baptists, what is to hinder
other denominations from speedily falling back to the
low level of two hundred years ago? Their principles
and doctrinal standards are the same now as then.
They have preserved within themselves the seeds out of
which the state church and dead formalism grew, and
what would hinder the same sort of seed from produc-
ing a second time the same sort of a crop? Nay, they
have within them the very roots out of which grew the
Papacy itself with its awful history; namely sacerdo-
talism, which shows itself in ministerial rule and
government by the Synod and Conference, and sacra-
mentarianism, which shows itself in infant baptism and
false views of the Lord's Supper. But for the Baptists,
would not infant baptism soon be universally practiced
as it was in the middle ages? For do not the creeds of
these other churches call for its observance, and do not
their pastors teach it as a sacred thing? And would
not the infants, when grown, come into the churches as
they used to do, by virtue of their baptism and not by
virtue of their being born again? Would not these un-
converted infants become teachers and preachers,
filling the churches with worlcUiness and false doctrine

192 THE BAPTIST IN HISTORY.

and sin? And would not these false churches thus
produced become again oppressors and persecutors of
God's true children, filling the land with the groans of
of the saints and pursuing true godliness even unto
death? I verily believe that the Baptist force is that
which upholds and preserves Christendom, and that if
they were suddenly annihilated — a consummation which
is devoutly to be wished by some narrow minded souls
— it would be the greatest calamity that could happen
in the religious world as it was in Europe in the
sixteenth century.

We have seen now, what Baptists have held as
guiding principles, what they have suffered for those
principles and what those principles have done for the
world; how they have been vital to purity of religion
and freedom in government, and how they have brought
a spiritual Christianity and the broadest liberty where
they have come. Surely our holding faithfully to these
principles, and in their fulness, is not merely a question
of courtesy to other denominations or a matter.of mere
indifference, but a matter of vital necessity to the purity
of Christendom and the coming of the kingdom of God
in this world. In view of our history we can lift up
our heads in the face of anyone and say in the language
of Luther, "Here I stand. God help me! I can no
other," and feel that we are in the company of those
of whom in all the ages we have no need to be ashamed.
Here in this land of ours, whose freedom we did so much
to secure, we may feel that we have a heritage and a
right, for with a great price bought we this freedom.

INFLUENCE ON RELIGIOUS LIFE. 193

We need not labor for the triumph of our name but for
the triumph of the truth, and we may hope for the
time when the name will be no longer distinctive. A
solemn obligation is upon us forever to insist upon the
divine origin of our principles and their entire correct-
ness; to declare them fully and fearlessly in the spirit
of love and of a sound mind; to practice them faithfully
and honestly until they shall prevail, for prevail they
surely will; until everywhere only the regenerate shall
be admitted to Christ's church; until complete and
willing obedience to Him and Him alone shall be the
recognized test of discipleship; until everywhere God's
Word is supreme and the fundamental article of our
Baptist faith shall be the foundation of the creed of
every christian, and CHRIST SHALL BE ABSO-
LUTELY SUPREME IN HIS OWN CHURCH.

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APPENDIX.-Table of Membership and Baptisms.

PRESBYTERIAN.

METHODIST (North).

CONGREGATIONAL.

EPISCOPAL.

REFORMED.

m
>

so

s

■5' 3-

p a.

p

•si

so

3

CO >

SO

£|

50

s
-■ 1

CO >

_!

p 3.

50

s

II

II

B-S

■s 1

■x

s
i: i

II

_. |

||

„g

m
>

»

• §

: O

3

I 9

1

:' O

»

: O

»

: 0

: 7

&

; 0

3

■ °

i 7

i

: 0

"

: 9

1825

10,076
11,260
10,039
13,683
11,703
14,122
14,316
20,214
22,469
21,984
21,054
22,604
19.441
21,923
22,212
23,783
23.962
23,758
211,322
31,214
32,883
32,200
32.840
34,100
33.980
33,553
34,586
35,616
36,597
37,020
38.927
40,413

105
136

97
125
110
190
310
589
478
265
187
135
109
277
319
197
277
253
682
523
217
150
169
169
219
259
238
224
350
262
290
369

05.0
82.8
103.4
109.4
106.3
74.3

34.3
47

112..
167.4
178.3

79

69.6
120.7

86.5

93.1

43

59. (

214! 7

194.3

201.7

155

120.5

145

104.5
141.3
134.2

109..-

1.626

1.607

2.2ll
1.379
1.760
1.764

2(101

L944

1 .585
1.860
2.025
1 .853
1,860
1.983
1 ,858
2.211
2.185
2.195
2.152
2.074
2.015
2.395
1.995
2.075
2.570
2 59 1

2' 188
2,754

7

8

6

8.4

8

8

10
10

8

10,8
11.9
10.4
10.8
12
12.7
12
12.2
15.2
11.2
14.9
15
15.S
16.9
14.2
16.8
16.6
15
15.2
15.9

11,6

1826

135,285
14(1.308
162,816

182.017

217,318
233,580
247,964

2,01,5
3.380
3,082
3,255
4,390
0.050
0.050
5,738

43
41

22.5
33.6
43.2

10.220

10700

12,171

12,202
12,108
13.286
14,035
13,004

13^2
13.6
13.3

15-0

1HW

1828

1829

1830

1831

15

16.3
16.6
19

1832

1833

1834

18H5

183fi

219,126

220.557

177,605*-

128.043

120,583

134,433

140,433

159,137

100,487

171,879

174,714

1711.453

1 '.12.022

200.830

207,254

210.300

210,414

210,203

225,401

231.40-1

2,729
3,031

2,002
1,044
1,741

1 ,8 12
2,748
4,303
3.287
1,020
2,050
1,704

' -II.
2,772
2,918
2,5 10
2.042
3.507
3,433
3,189

89

72.7

66

77.9

73

72.9

36.4

50.6

85.8
100
82
82.2
74.8
72
82
74.5
62.6
67.4
70

11,089

IO.10I
7,714
7,844

8,305

10,025

9^608
9,677
9,342

0,837
0,805
10,372
10.001
11,000

11,1,44

12,041
11,734
11,021

19.7

18.8

17.3

16.5

16

16

14.9
15

17.9

18

19

19.5

20.3

20

19

19

18.8

18

10 . 7
IS 6

1856

1837

1838

1839

1840

1810

1841

1841

184'?

1842

IS 13

1843

1844

1814

1845

1815

1S4f>

1846

1847

1847

1S4S

1848

Is 19

1849

18.-.0

79,987 *

210

34.5

12,679

6.3

1850

1851

IS5I

1852

IS52

is;,::

IS55

is:, j

1851

IS",",

1855

1856

1859 279,630

3.370
5,170

0,072

72.2
50

13,007
13,084
16,104

18.8
18.5
17.2

709,968

27,583,

25.7

27.957

2., 1

44,443
46,197

50.304

407

847
978

109

54.4
51.4

5.162
3,172
3,814

14

13.3
13

1557
185S
1859

832,657

40,101

10.0

,-,!,

21.8

250,152

10.52;

"23"

5.001

49 4

139,611}

4,907

28.4

24,851

5.6

i860

._)!).> ,|J,

5.150

56.8

15.031

8 7

855,726

39.464

21.6

32.902

26

253,765

35(

50.295

463

108. (

3,506

14.3

1860

1861

3,070

81.7

15,130

12.3

865,446

32.347

36

34.411

25

255,034

2,151

118

4.54-

56

50.427

470

107.2

1.050

12.4

1861

lso-l

303.280

2.282

124,370"

3,694

33, (

20.141

6.1

51.528

387

133

5.0S0

16.6

IS62

lsr,:i

2''7 575

2,105

105

.0,104

12 3

822,845

24.138

34

52.24 1

2.) 2

260,284

3,321

78

4.123

63

53.007

399

132.5

3.155

16.7

1865

1SI',4

231.01 ;o

2.380

97.4

0.801

'1 0

829,379

21.809

33.4

32.190

25.6

202.649

4.02°

53.833

585

91 A

3.215

17

1864

I SI if,

232,450

2.821

S2.4

0,002

13 0

822,711

20.150

28

:5i soi

25

263,296

4,97,

53

4,133

63 5

148,068§

4,384

33 r

22,31b

6.6

54 286

540

100.6

3.004

17.6

IS05

i860

230,300

5.003

47.8

i 0.000,

'5 0

871,113

47,419

18.3

55.551

24.4

267.453

5,22]

55.917

605

92.4

3.507

16.9

1866

iso7

246,350

5.200

46.7

10,209

13 0

971,866

50,083

16.4

42.65,-

22 5,

278,708

8,720

32

5,012

55 0

57,846

937

61.7

3.229 17.9

186,

ISliS

252,555 5,191

48.6

1 1 ,212

22.5

1,060,265

67.065

15.8

10.207

22.9

291.012

7.861

195,183

6,419

34

20,85:

7.2

49,508

919

53.8i 5,155 1 14.4

1,808

I 809

258,003 ' 4,236

60.8

1 1 33,3

>,:>, 8

1,114,712

61,147

18,2

17.501

23.4

300,362

7,094

42.3

5,022

59.8

58,796

797

7.) , 3,585 | 10.4

1S70

446,561 10.122

44

10.170

28

1,173,000

00.481

17 6

5(1 155

25,2

306.515

6,335

61,144

974

02.7

5,121

17.8

1870

LR71

455,378

S.585

53.6

17.420

26

1,231,008

65,770

18 7

54 517

22.5

312,054

5,797

53.8

. 265

59.4

235,006

7,297

32.;

■-0 ,s:

7.6

69 . 7

3.877

10,1

1871

1872

408,164

S.S25

53

16,781

m

1,272,496

61,311

•'() 7

53,45;

23.8

318,916

6,57:

1.106

.,.8

1.190

1872

1873

472,023

8.450

55.8

16 088

25 2

1,288,704

50.103

■12 0

53.287

24

323,679

5.871

55

4.57C

70.8

745

90

1874

405,03 t

11.082

42.5

18,838

20 3

1,345,089

71.015

18 7

58.011

22.5

330,391

6.89S

282,359

7,373

38.2

31,721

951

75 . 8

1875
1876

500.034
535,210

1(1. 0 10
15,753

47.5
33.9

17,004
18.087

28 ' '

1,384,152

1.-124,994

66.718

80.234

20.7
17 7

52.218
56 308

26...
25.2

338,313
350,658

8,745
10,466

38.6

5,184

65

74.600

1 ,95 1

38 | 4.230

17.4

1876
1877
1878
1879
1880
1881

1882
1885

1877

557.071

15. ->63

36.5

18,(102

30 8

1,471,777

76.248

19 3

55.851

26.3

505,505

12.318

29.6

5 -1

68.2

297,387

8,434

35.2

8.7

IS

IK7N

567,855

11.010

48.9

19,220

29 5

1,505,577

7O.S90

21 2

50.725

26.0

375,654

10.686

80,228
80.208
80,591

75.3 .,.si4

J),,

574,480 10,018

57.3

18,501

31

1,523,306

24

50.557

26.9

352.510

8.37C

45.7

5.371

71

....

1.-.S 1

62.4 1.148

11,,

1880

578,071 I 0.232

02.0

18,960

30

1,564,105

59.330

58.555

26 51

384,332

5,893

344,034

7,732

44.4

9.5

(38

j°;; ' 1 *sg

'i'-'

1881

581,401 , 8,174 7]

17.480

33.2

1,553,540

50,972

30 1

55.957

25.7

555. 655

5,560

69.3

4,309

89.5

....

BRQ

107

1882

1SS3

000,005 10397

61
57.7

19,026

17,728

31

1,572,177
1,601,072

57.241
01.802

27.1
25 8

50.8115
55,876

27.0

387,610
590.209

5.99!

6.374

62

5,366

73.8

364,367

'6,997

"02"

36.25-1

i(J 80.156

940 St. Si 5.989

20

ISSI

015,042 11,942

51.5

10,483

31.6

1,047,719

09,1-15

22, 8

02.025

26.6

401,549

8,290

! s-''"o-> ' 1 0(9 ' "OS J ""I

19,5 ' IS85
17.0 | I8S0

1885
1886

044,025 16,191
001,800 18,471

42.3
35.8

21.012
21.010

30

30.6

1.000,010

1,765,228

78.417

98,814

21.5

17 8

04.01.
07.075

26.3
26

418,564
436,379

13,075

9,882

10.357

12.560

11.655
12.664
11,494

57

51 : 2
52

47

52.8
49.4
54.6

423,280

8,608

49.1

41,534

10.1 85.057 1.001 75. s 1.70S

1SS7

007,835 20,114

34.6

25.100

295/

1.800,501

101.520

18 4

74,638

25

457,584

12,039
ISjSO

lsss
1889

753,740 'lo',547

38.6

23,869

21,501',

30.3
30.6

1. 931, 002
1.998,293

91.500

loi.m;-,

21

10 7

72.305
74,01"

26.9

491.085

33

41.4

48

56

486,866

10.512

46.1

46.073

10.5

5,8,812

1.268

70.5

5.258

16.0

17

IS81I

is; it)

775 0O3

17,471

44.4

25.487

30.8

2,064,437

80.15-'

25 6

77.5 I'.

21 , . 4

,00 .5

91.32:!
95.965

1.6111

5,666

1891

800,700

21.570

37

20,121

30

2.157.915

112.6112

18 7

81.441

14,040

15.247
17.70.1
15,943
14,881
13.055
11,202

11.351

49.5

49.137

11.4

1.211

79

5.776

16.fi

1.892

IHHi>

830,170

2(1.830

2,201. OS 1

197,505

11

84.739 20.^

97.520

1.191

81.6

5.597

17 1

1,895

isn:

855,080

21.758

39.3

26,247

52.0

2,260,196

113.028

19.8

87,806 25.8

555 550

615.195
625.-04
625,254

10l|8||

1.501

07

6. 178

16

1894

1S'.)4
L89E

IS'. II

1891

is; is

895,997
022,004
013,710
000.1111
075,877

2S.2I2
25.720
24,1.81
21 .500
21.571

31.8

36
38

44
15.2

28,051

2V 15;

33.3

'2,366,374
2,454.645
2.522.112
2,558.210
2,608,694*

ll.;~'-"2

1 I9052
100 205

16.3 93.107, 20. J
17.6! OS. 121, -■<
21.2 88.45S l.1.0

21 4 84 I'1 !C ;

618,500
678.999

11,844

ii.867

52
"hl.2,

50.968
:1 ;■•?

12
ill"

103.54s

101.701
107.900
110.713
111.665

1.580

1,181

1.315
1.117

1 III

71.1

7(50
82

97.0

5.917
6.155

155

5.987

17.1

17

17

;

18 6

1895
1896
1897

1898

IS99

189!

17.0S2

55.5

24,008 395

2,616,238*: si) -vi

*From IS17 b> IS7U tin- tiuuus ^iven are tor the

"These nWeToTeT

tSdiScSJepSrt'ii'f ISdiocls'Srlp"",'!.'.'^ ,,

■-( lid School" onlv. 1 his table includes only the

lf ,hc presb>'terlans-

the comparisons made

page IS. home fract.o,,. .re dropped. 1|