EARLY PROTESTANTS, among them Martin Luther (far left) aiuf Ulrich Zwing-li, the great Swiss reformer (right, in cap), appear to be shieUeil by John Frederick the Magnanimous, Elector of Saxony (center) in this group portrait painted about 1530. The Saxon ruling family stanchly protected Luther from Roman wrath and, by extension, supported the entire Reformation.
While Luther remained hidden in the Wartburg, other men were busy carrying his ideas—and new ones—to conclusions he had not foreseen. The result was a splitting of Christendom into several denominations that came to be known generally as the Reformed Churches. Many men contributed to the movement; three were to stamp its development as decisively as Luther had stamped its beginning. In Luther the Reformation had had a prophet; it was to have an executor in a Swiss, Ulrich Zwingli; a lawmaker in a Frenchman, John Calvin; and an apostle in a Scot, John Knox.
The first people to develop the ideas generated by Luther were the Swiss, who were by language kindred to, but by temperament and politics distinct from, the Germans.
The Swiss were a physically sturdy and mentally resourceful people, and by 16th Century standards they were singularly independent. To survive the hardships of the cold and rugged Alpine terrain required not only stamina, but also a harnessing of individual ingenuity to group cooperation. At various times foreign rulers had made attempts to control Switzerland, but time and again the clever and hardy Swiss had defeated them. Repeated rebuffs of foreign interference had inspired a fervent patriotism that by the 16th Century was an important part of the Swiss national character.
The territory now called Switzerland was a confederation of 13 cantons, or states, that had a remarkable degree of democracy. The land was nominally part of the Holy Roman Empire, but the Confederation governed its own affairs. The cantons had a common legislative body for dealing with foreign affairs; and each canton had several councils for regulation of its own affairs. Most of the representatives served by election, but some assemblies consisted of the entire male citizenry. And just as they were independent of emperors and dukes, so the Swiss were largely independent of the popes. The same city and canton councils that governed civic affairs also supervised the activities of the clergy and taxed Church property, and even the bishops were bound by their laws.
Whereas other countries had a series of social classes extending downward from monarch to serfs, Switzerland had only two classes; the bourgeoisie.
Who lived in the cities that had sprung up where merchants stopped in the mountain passes en route across the Continent, and the free peasants, who made their living by shepherding and dairy farming. There was some conflict of interest between the cities and the Forest Cantons—and this was to make itself felt in religious terms—but in foreign affairs the Swiss national patriotism generally superseded local differences.
The most advanced city of the Confederation was Zurich. Situated on a tributary of the Rhine and at an opening in the mountains, it shared in the river and overland commerce between Germany and Italy. Lying near Basel, where a distinguished university nourished humanism and a center of printing turned out books that vied with those of Renaissance Italy, it was the beneficiary of new ideas. Some of the priests there had for years been preaching against indulgences and corruption of morals. Into this city, in 1519, came a new priest in the person of Ulrich Zwingli.
Zwingli was born January 1, 1484—less than two months after Luther—in a gabled cottage of oak beams and mullioned windows that still stands in Wildhaus, a snowbound hamlet high in the mountains of the canton of St. Gall. He received his early education under the tutelage of an uncle who was a parish priest. At an early age he showed a flair for music; he learned to play half a dozen instruments well, and he had so good a voice that a group of Dominican monks tried to enlist him for their choir. When he was 10 he was sent away to a school in Basel, where he promptly distinguished himself for his brightness. He later studied at Bern, and at the Universities of henna and Basel, where humanists taught him to value the classics and scorn ecclesiastical corruption.
Zwingli was ordained in 1506, when he was 22, and for a time he served as a parish priest in small villages. At 29 he began to learn Greek in order to read the New Testament in the original. At 35, having acquired some fame as a speaker, he was appointed to the cathedral at Zurich—and there, in 1519, he embarked on a career as a reformer.
Without consciously challenging the Church as Luther had done, Zwingli set about trying to raise the moral standards of his congregation—preaching against the sale of indulgences and the veneration of saints, encouraging an acquaintance with the Scriptures and urging simplicity of ritual. He seems to have arrived at his ideas through the influence of humanism and not through that of Luther, though at about this time he discovered the writings of the Wittenberger and arranged to have several hundred copies of Luther's works distributed among the people of Switzerland. Later he was to object when people called him "Lutheran," and to aver he had been preaching the Gospel "before anyone in our region had ever heard of Luther."
Zwingli agreed with much of Luther's doctrine, but he was far more rigorous in its application. He dispensed with all pageantry and, taking literally the Second Commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image," he discarded all the implements of ritual—not only crucifixes and statuary, but chalices, censers and clerical vestments as well, fie never lost his love of music (he is said to have calmed a class of obstreperous boys once by playing on the lute); but because he could find no authority in Scripture for liturgical music, he removed even the organ from the church and banned the singing of hymns.
These measures caused no iconoclastic riots in Zurich, as thev did elsewhere; the removal of statuary and the modification of laws proceeded under the orderly supervision of the civil authorities. The Bishop of Constance, hearing of Zwingli's innovations, urged him to desist, but the council of Zurich supported Zwingli, and so did his fellow priests. And the Pope seems to have learned a les-
IN INDIA, AN ERA OF TOLERANCE
While Catholics and Protestants in Europe were conducting holy wars and purges, India was entering a time of remarkable religious toleration under the reign of Ak-bar, greatest of the Mogul emperors (seen here in a contemporary sketch).
For centuries India had been the scene of bitter feuds between Hindus, Moslems, Jains, Buddhists and Parsees. Then in 1520 the armies of the Moguls—descendants of the fierce Mongol tribesmen who had ravaged Asia under Genghis Khan—crossed over the mountains from Afghanistan and conquered the Sultanate of Delhi in the Ganges Valley. Within two generations, Akbar, the grandson of the first conqueror, had subjugated most of India.
Though raised an orthodox Moslem, Akbar believed, as one awed chronicler reported, "that there were sensible men in all religions." He built a special house of worship where he could listen to debates among philosophers and holy men from
Every sect in India. (Even visiting Jesuits joined in, but their zeal often irked the other participants.) In the end Akbar, like many a dissatisfied European reformer, founded his own sect. A melange of many beliefs, it enjoyed only limited popularity and disappeared soon after his death.
Son from the loss of so many Germans through his treatment of Martin Luther; hoping not to lose the Swiss as well, he let Zwingli alone.
If the Zurichers accepted Zwinglian measures readily and the Pope overlooked them, the man who had started reform did not. Luther himself, now that he had broken with the Church, had withdrawn into conservatism. He had restored some of the traditional ideas he had once discarded, and the service performed in Lutheran churches was similar to that pf the Roman Church, except that the language was German instead of Latin. But Zwinglian ideas filtered into Germany, and in places they began to supersede Lutheran ideas and practices.
Once this process began, Luther engaged in pamphlet warfare with Zwingli. The followers of both men grew truculent, and soon the partisans of reform began to fear that the schism would mean an end for them all. In an endeavor to achieve unity.
Philip of Hesse, an ambitious young prince, invited Luther and Zwingli to a colloquy at his castle at Marburg in the fall of 1529. Here the two reformers at last confronted each other.
Both men assumed the infallibility of Scripture, but each was intransigent about the interpretation of it. Luther, who was essentially mystical, interpreted the Bible literally—or, as he expressed it, by faith; Zwingli, who shared the humanists' esteem for the intellect and aimed for a practical religion, interpreted the Bible by reason. Luther had by now taken the view that the body and blood of Christ were miraculously present in the bread and wine served at Communion; Zwingli held that the rite was simply a symbolic commemoration of the Last Supper. The two men tried hard to come to agreement, but they reached an impasse over this question.
They ended the meeting, as they had begun, in disagreement. Notwithstanding, Zwingli offered to shake hands in an expression of amity, but Luther indignantly refused, ffe later compared Zwingli to the Apostle judas betraying Christ, and pontificated: "I will not let the devil teach me anything in my church."
After he returned from Marburg, Zwingli devoted much of his time to writing, and to serving, through his influence over the city council, as virtual governor of Zurich. His rule was stern and his attitude toward opposition uncompromising, but he nevertheless remained a humanist at heart. Though he sanctioned persecution of heretics (because they menaced civil order), he was broadminded enough to avow that paradise would welcome admirable Jews and pagans; he once wrote that "there has not been any good man. . . from the very beginning of the world even to its end, whom you will not see fin paradise] with God." This was a rare attitude among reformers, and Luther for one concluded that Zwingli was a heathen.
Among the Swiss generally, Zwingli's practices were readily adopted in the urban areas, but he had to face opposition from the Forest Cantons. These were in the interior Alps, most of them off the trade routes; they were conservative, and they held to the Catholic faith. The religious split threatened to destroy the Confederation. Five cantons formed a Catholic League, and in 1531, after two years of growing dissension, sent an army of 8,000 men against Zurich.
Zwingli mustered 1,500 soldiers, donned a helmet and led the Zurichers in battle. The odds were too great. Zwingli was felled by a pike, and most of his troops were slain or scattered. At nightfall plunderers scavenging the field by torchlight found him under a pear tree, still alive, and slew him. The Reformation had lost perhaps its most humane leader.
The focus of reform now shifted to Geneva and the stern soul of John Calvin. Calvin was born in 1509 in Noyon, a cathedral city in Picardy, in northern France, where his father was employed as notary for the diocese. Even as a child he showed a remarkable precision of mind and a consuming urge for perfection. He made harsh demands of others and of himself, yet his schoolmates are said to have liked him.
Expecting to become a priest, Calvin went to Paris to study theology and Scholastic philosophy —a subject that must have been congenial to his exacting mind. Midway in his studies for the priesthood, however, he was suddenly sent by his father to study law at Orleans. Like Luther's father, the elder Calvin envisioned his son in a profession of money and rank. John was never to practice law, but he was always to regard law as the outstanding achievement of mankind. At Orleans he studied under some humanists, but the prevailing humanistic idea, that worldly pleasure was honorable, seems to have escaped him; instead, what seems to have impressed him most in the classics was the spirit of Stoicism—the Greek philosophy that exalted discipline and preached impassivity in the face of pleasure and pain. Never in the philosophy he formulated did he pay homage to Stoicism as such, but discipline and impassivity were to be fundamental to the Calvinist creed. While at Orleans, Calvin also fell under the spell of evangelical literature and began consorting with reformers.
France in the 1530s was an uncertain place for men of unorthodox views; King Francis I shifted between toleration and persecution of heretics, according to political considerations. In the fall of 1534 he was on the offensive; the new faith was being equated with violence and lawlessness. Calvin, fearing that he might be arrested for his association with reformers, left France for Basel.
In Basel he undertook to write The Institutes of the Christian Religion, which was both a defense of the reform movement and a textbook for instruction. It was to exert a powerful influence on the Reformation—more powerful even than any single work of Luther's. It was the first significant comprehensive and logical exposition of reform beliefs, and in it Calvin went further than Luther in revising medieval conceptions of religious law. And it was far more somber than the writings of Luther. Whereas Luther had envisioned God as eminently merciful and attacked the Church practices that obscured that view, Calvin conceived a God whose most significant aspect was His absolute sovereignty. Turning to the Old Testament for much of his inspiration, Calvin depicted a Jehovah far more forbidding than the God of Luther.
If the concept behind the Institutes was formidable, the book itself was a lucid, logical, systematic statement of reform beliefs, and it captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands. Besides the Old Testament, it drew from early Church writers—mainly St. Paul and St. Augustine, who figured largely in both Catholic and Lutheran thinking; from medieval Scholastic theologians; and from Luther and Zwingli. There were no original ideas in the book; Calvin synthesized the views of centuries of writers who preceded him.
Not surprisingly, considering Calvin's reverence for the law, the Institutes began with an exposition of the Ten Commandments. It went on to deal with creed, and it drew from the same creed used by the Church of Rome, affirming belief in a trinitarian God, the divinity of Christ and resurrection after death. On the question of salvation Calvin differed with both Luther and the Catholic Church. Luther had denied the Church's stand that salvation could be merited by good works; he made it dependent on faith alone. Calvin reduced this principle to a "doctrine of the elect," by which only the chosen of God were saved. Next Calvin took up the sacraments, accepting Baptism and the Lord's Supper and discarding the other five.
Finally—and most significant for the course the
Reformation was to take—the Institutes dealt with the relationship between church and state. On this Calvin disavowed the accusations of lawlessness that were being leveled against reformers, saying that "man is the subject of two kinds of government," the civil law and the rule of God, that the "civil government is designed... to establish general peace and tranquillity," and that "it is impossible to resist the magistrate without at the same time resisting God Himself."
But to this exaltation of the civil law Calvin added significant qualifications. He asserted that when Moses led the Jews against the king of Egypt he was "armed with authority from Heaven [and] punished an inferior power by a superior one. . . . The correction of tyrannical domination is the vengeance of God," he wrote, and the obedience due to the civil government ought "not to seduce us from obedience to Him to whose will the desires of all kings ought to be subject." These were subtle words from a man whose creed was centered in law. They were to travel all over Europe and set the Continent afire with political revolution that would rage for the rest of the century.
But that was still in the future. After publishing the institutes Calvin set off for Strasbourg, where he intended to devote himself to writing and study. En route he stopped in Geneva, meaning only to stay for the night; instead he remained, except for one absence of a few years, for the rest of his life. At Geneva he put into practice a theocratic regime and exercised a personal domination such as few men have ever achieved.
Geneva in the 1530s was a wealthy center of trade and manufacture, and a republic independent of the Swiss Confederation. Independence here was newer than elsewhere in Switzerland; Geneva had only recently thrown off the yoke of the dukes of Savoy, and it had been ruled as part of an area that today belongs to France. Like the cantons of
CALVIN'S"BLUELAWS"FOR INNS
If any one blasphemes the name of God or says, “By the body, 'sblood, zounds" or anything like, or who gives himself to the devil or uses similar execrable imprecations, he shall be punished.
If any one insults any one else the host shall deliver him up to justice.
The host shall be obliged to report to the government any insolent or dissolute acts committed by the guests.
The host shall be obliged to keep in a public place a French Bible, in which any one who wishes may read. '
|He] shall not allow any dissoluteness like dancing, dice or cards, nor receive any one suspected of being a debauche.
Fie shall not allow indecent songs.
Nobody shall he allowed to sit up after nine o'clock at night except informers.
Switzerland, Geneva governed itself by town assemblies, and these had jurisdiction over ecclesiastical as well as civil affairs. The people, however, were boisterous and undisciplined, heady with their new-won freedom and suspicious of foreigners. Their faith was an amorphous combination of Lutheran and Zwinglian ideas, and the most prominent preacher was a red-bearded Frenchman, William Farel, a man of such fiery disposition that a friend had to remind him that a preacher ought to teach rather than curse.
Farel had studied at the University of Paris, where he had come under the influence of French humanists. Like his masters, he had hoped for reform within the Church; despairing of it, he left France to wander through Europe as an independent preacher. On and off since 1532 he had been in Geneva and he mourned that the city had no leader to tame the roistering people. When Calvin arrived, Farel saw in his earnestness a stanch spirit capable of reforming the licentiousness that prevailed in Geneva. Ele exhorted Calvin to stay; Calvin demurred: Farel threatened him with the curse of God if he refused. Calvin stayed.
Together they set about establishing an austere regime in Geneva. They put strictures on gambling, drinking, singing and dancing, and ordered transgressors exiled. But the Genevese were not ready for such austerity as Calvin's, and both men were themselves exiled by an angry city council. A few years later the council had second thoughts and recalled Calvin: it appeared to the council not only that morals were going to ruin, but that the reform movement was losing to Catholicism and that the lack of discipline was making Geneva vulnerable to renewed threats from Savoy.
When Calvin returned his first action was to persuade the city council to appoint a commission of five clergymen and six lay councilors, with himself as its head, to draw up a legislative code. The
Result was the Ecclesiastical Ordinances, a constitution for the Reformed Church, which was to be supported by the state. It divided the Church into a hierarchy of pastors and teachers (clergymen), plus elders and deacons (laymen). New pastors, in order to preach, needed the authorization of the incumbent pastors, the magistrates and, in theory, the congregation.
Ffere was the first application of democracy to ecclesiastical affairs. But this democracy, like Calvin's words against the secular state, was subtle; actually the congregation took little part. Participation by laymen would not come until later, when other men expanded on Calvin as he had expanded on Luther and Zwingli. The law was the Bible; the pastors were the interpreters of the law; and the civil government was obliged to enforce that law as the pastors interpreted it.
The constitution also provided for a Consistory, or Presbytery, composed of five pastors and 12 elders. Calvin had no official post in the Consistory, but he dominated it nonetheless. The Consistory determined the worship and oversaw the moral conduct of every citizen of Geneva. It sent an elder to inspect every house at least once a year; it might at any time summon any member of the congregation to account for his actions; and it might excommunicate offenders. Excommunication denied the sinner participation in the Lord's Supper (the Communion rite, in which bread and wine were passed to the faithful) and forbade other citizens to associate with him—though he was expected to attend sermons for his enlightenment all the same. If he had not mended his ways in six months he was exiled from the city. Calvin was to rule this theocracy for 23 years, until his death, and it was a rule that knew no mercy.
But Calvin drove himself as mercilessly as he drove his congregation. He preached frequent sermons, sometimes as many as four a week, and all the citizens were expected to attend, save only the few excused to tend children or cattle. He carried on a prodigious correspondence with theologians far and wide. He wrote dozens of books and tracts, and revised his Institutes five times in 20 years. When he was done he had left no detail of doctrine or individual conduct unprescribed.
The people of Geneva, who were so proud of having overthrown the rule of Savoyard dukes and Roman prelates, submitted willingly to a tyranny far harsher and all-embracing. A few rash citizens who hated the theocrat called him Cain and named their dogs Calvin; but dissenters paid for their sins with their lives or eviction—Calvin was as harsh as Luther and the Church of Rome in regarding opposition as the handiwork of the devil and in suppressing heresy. And influential citizens kept him going; Swiss independence had been born of discipline, and most of the Swiss took discipline for granted. Furthermore, Calvin's doctrine of the elect flattered their vanity; for a people already steeped in patriotism, it was a short step to the proud belief that they were the chosen of God.
Calvin's rule extended into every phase of society. He introduced sanitary regulations that gave Geneva a cleanliness and neatness for which it is noted to this day. He persuaded the city council to finance new industry. He founded the Genevan Academy (later to be the University of Geneva) to train men for the ministry.
Though he employed the civil government to effect Church measures, Calvin never invoked nationalism; hence his creed was better able to travel than either Luther's or Zwingli's. And travel it did. Graduates of his academy went out all over Europe, carrying Calvin's influence beyond the Alps, the Rhine and the North Sea, as far away as Scotland. And here his teachings were taken up by another man, who was to graft Calvinism onto the Scottish soul—and in the bargain to transform the social and
Political organization of an undeveloped nation.
Scotland in the 16th Century lagged far behind the major countries of Europe politically and economically. It was ruled for much of the time by Mary of Lorraine, who as the widow of James V served as regent during the minority of her daughter, the future Mary Queen of Scots. Mary of Lorraine was French and Catholic (she was a sister of the Duke of Guise, who was political leader of the Catholics in France and whose heir was to vie with Henry IV for the French throne). During her time distaste for the French mounted, and so did distaste for the clergy, as bishops and priests exacted heavy dues from the people. Power was largely in the hands of feudal barons, whom former rulers of Scotland had never succeeded in subduing.
The land was as badly off economically as it was politically. It had few cities and these were small; therefore it had little commerce and industry. Even most of the soil was poor, so the peasant had a harder lot than elsewhere.
But Scotland had fertile soil of another kind. Respect for old ways was breaking down, and new ideas were filtering in. In this promising ground a Calvinist-inspired itinerant preacher, John Knox, was to sow the seeds of Reformation.
Knox was a Scottish peasant born in the county of East Lothian. A peasant who hobnobbed with monarchs and barons, he was to take the doctrine of the elect, which Calvin had addressed primarily to a patrician bourgeoisie, and give it to a people who were rooted in the earth.
The date of his birth is uncertain, but it was probably about 1514. Except that he was ordained a priest, almost nothing is known of his life until 1546, when he was associating with reformers in the town of St. Andrews.
In June of 1547, St. Andrews was besieged by the French fleet, which had been called in by Mary of Lorraine to put down insurgents who had seized a cardinal's residence. Several reformers were captured, including Knox, who spent the next 19 months in chains on a ship on the Loire River.
When he was released he went to England for five years, where he won such fame for himself that he was appointed preacher to the royal court. With the accession to the throne of Mary Tudor, who tried to restore an already displaced Catholicism to England, he was obliged to leave. Next he traveled through Europe for several years, meeting reformers in Frankfurt, Dieppe, Geneva and elsewhere, but maintaining a correspondence with friends at home who were now agitating seriously for reform.
The Scottish nobles had in the meantime drawn together in a "Common Band." Calling themselves the "Lords of the Congregation of Jesus Christ," they demanded "that it be lawful to use ourselves in matters of religion and conscience as we must answer to God." Meeting with resistance from the regent, they found they needed a leader to organize their movement. Remembering Knox, they sent word to him in Geneva, asking him to come back and assist their cause. He came in May of 1559.
Though it was on the invitation of the nobles that he came, Knox's message was directed at the populace. The reform he instituted, modeled on Calvin's Geneva, gave laymen a voice in the affairs of the Church. The common people, who had previously been of little account in Scotland, began to emerge as a political and social force; in fact, the organization of the Church raised a new class out of the lower bourgeoisie. An Englishman, hearing of this development, was moved to exclaim, "God keep us from such visitation as Knox hath attempted in Scotland: the people to be orderers of things!"
And indeed, before they learned to manage themselves responsibly, the people caused considerable disorder. Fired by Knox's preaching against idolatry and his reminders of "what commandment God had given for the destruction of the monuments there-
A HISTORIC CONFRONTATION, the trial of Mary Queen of Scots marked the end of years of intrigue between Mary, a Catholic, and her cousin Elizabeth, the Protestant Queen of England. Accused of conspiring to assassinate Elizabeth, Mary (A) was tried by a court of English nobility, among them the Lord Chancellor (1), the Earl of Oxford (3) and Sir Francis Walsingham (28). She was executed in 1587.
Of," the multitudes destroyed images and razed churches, pillaged monasteries and assaulted priests. Riots occurred wherever Knox preached—in Perth, Edinburgh, St. Andrews—culminating in civil war.
Mary of Lorraine again tried to put down the rebellion with armed force; and the future Mary Queen of Scots, living in Paris as the wife of King Francis II, sent troops from France. The Lords of the Congregation formed a league with Queen Elizabeth of England, who sent troops that put an end to the civil war. Later they signed the Treaty of Edinburgh, which secured the independence of Scotland against England and France alike.
Soon after these negotiations the largest Parliament yet to convene in Scottish history assembled to consider the religious question. Hundreds of small nobles and bourgeoisie turned out who had never bothered to come before. They called on Knox to draw up a confession of faith; he did, and based it on the Calvinist creed. Parliament then passed laws abolishing the pope's authority and forbidding Catholic rites. It made the maintenance of religion the duty of the state, and provided for the payment of ministers by the government.
This was the situation that greeted Mary Queen of Scots when she arrived to ascend the throne in 15bl. Having been brought up in France during her mother's regency in Scotland, she was French and Catholic in temperament and in outlook.
In 1561 Mary was 18 and already a widow. She was tall, beautiful, high-spirited and ambitious. She came from the most luxurious court in Europe to a bleak land where her religion was outlawed, her Gallic style distasteful to a dour people, and her power curtailed by commoners whom she held in contempt. She bungled her relations with the Scots and had a tragic reign.
Knox was preaching in Edinburgh when Mary landed, and Mary sent for him, hoping to tame the rabble-rouser. They had five interviews, in which.
According to Knox's account, there was on Mary's part so much "womanly weeping. . . that her cham-berboy could scarce get napkins enough to dry her eyes." He informed Mary that "right religion took . . . authority [not] from worldly princes but from the Eternal God alone"—meaning, of course, from himself as spokesman.
Two unpopular marriages, scandal, court intrigue and a murder for which the Queen was blamed (probably rightly) led eventually to Mary's being deposed by Parliament—and, by extension, to the final disgrace of Catholicism. The son Mary left behind when she fled was brought up a Protestant; he and Parliament and Knox together settled Calvinism in Scotland forever.
The Scots under Knox and Mary's son, James VI, had no freedom of worship—in theory the penalties for holding Catholic rites were confiscation of property, exile or death—but there was so little resistance to the Reformed Church that there was no persecution to speak of. Despite the earlier iconoclastic riots, the Reformation in Scotland was the least bloody of any in Europe.
Much blood was yet to be spilled elsewhere, however. Without exception the very reformers who won their own freedom by challenging established order would brook no opposition from others. To them, as to the Catholic Church they scorned, dissent meant heresy, and they countered heresy with persecution.
The worst of the persecution was visited on the Anabaptists, adherents of various offshoots of the reform movement. Anabaptism, which means literally "baptizing anew," was a catch-all name given to different groups that practiced adult baptism. The Church of Rome and the major reformers administered baptism to infants.
According to the beliefs of some Anabaptists, no Christian could take part in a secular state, because the secular state was sinful; thus the Anabaptists seemed to others subversive of everything that held society together. A few Anabaptists were radical anarchists, but most were orderly—and, interestingly, the Anabaptists were the only religious group in that intolerant era who ever made freedom of worship a tenet of their creed.
The first Anabaptists arose in Zurich in 1525, and others sprang up elsewhere, some independently, some inspired by refugees. Wherever they went they met with persecution, whether the prevailing faith was Lutheran, Calvinist or Catholic. Their survivors wandered all over Europe. Some eventually found haven in Moravia and Poland; others finally came to the American Colonies. The Amish and the Mennonites in Pennsylvania and the Middle West are descendants of the Anabaptist movement, and even today they seclude themselves from the world that surrounds their communities. In the 16th Century the Anabaptists' eccentricities were so unsettling that the major reformers would never admit that such a mutation had sprung from their own roots.
But the Anabaptists were a variant. The Reformation proper was carried by men more attuned to the spirit of the times—men of whom Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and Knox were the spokesmen. Their ideas varied, but they all held these principles in common: reliance on Scripture, justification by faith, and repudiation of rule from Rome. Where they differed was in national heritage and prevailing politics. They had challenged the Church of Rome not only because of its corruption, nor only because corruption had become confused with doctrine, but because national states were emerging. A struggle for power therefore ensued in which secular men wrestled with ecclesiastical men for rule. That may have been obscure to the reformers themselves, but it influenced them nevertheless, and it was to be the paramount issue in the future of the Reformation all over Europe.
ACQUISITIVE BURGHERS, a moneylender and his wife weigh their receipts in a portrait ordered to proclaim their success.
World History
