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A
History of the Baptists
All
who know much of the Baptist
denomination must have regretted that so
few are acquainted with its early
history. We are not surprised that those
who do not admit the scripturalness of
our principles should be thus ignorant;
nor can we be surprised that those who
have superciliously looked upon our
comparative feebleness should have put
us down as of latter-day growth; but it
remains a matter of great surprise that
our own congregations should be, for the
most part, uninstructed in the past
doings of our body. We certainly can
boast of godly defenders of the faith,
of noble men persecuted and contemned,
who have sacrificed position, wealth,
and life, for the truth; we can tell of
able preachers and learned divines, and
we can rejoice in the spirit of
enterprise and heroism which has existed
among Baptists of all ages. Why
therefore should there be so much
ignorance abroad as to the
ecclesiastical history of the
denomination? Why should so few know
anything, and so many care nothing for
the early Baptists, when their history
is beyond measure instructive and
interesting? We think there are several
reasons to be found for this apathy to
our own history. We are not sure, in the
first place, that Baptists have ever
been passionate lovers of ecclesiastical
history. Indeed, we have a notion—how
far it is true we leave our readers to
judge—that religious communities which
indulge too much in these
investigations, are apt to trust to the
past, which in view of present
necessities is about the worst thing a
religious body could do. Baptists, too,
in past days, being peculiarly obnoxious
to all state-churchmen, have had enough
to do to fight for very existence, and
have been too much intent upon taking
their part in the controversies of the
times, and, upon seeking present
edification, to spend much thought upon
presenting in the foreground the past
history of their body. Then, too, that
history has been, for the most part,
obscure and scanty, and even now, as Dr.
Angus confesses, the history of baptism
in the early church and in the middle
ages is still to be written. The few
books that have been compiled have been
too expensive for ordinary readers, and
a condensed and graphic abstract of
Baptist records has been much wanted. We
are glad therefore to find that Dr.
Cramp, the able president of a Baptist
College in Nova Scotia, has endeavoured
to meet this want. Dr. Cramp has long
been a laborious, painstaking student of
ecclesiastical history, and his works
have been distinguished by some of the
higher qualities of an historian. His
book on Baptist history* is
not intended for students; at least, it
is thrown into a popular mould, and will
be more acceptable to general readers,
to whom we most heartily recommend it.
All Baptists should possess a copy, and
even those of our readers who do not
sympathise with our view of the
ordinance of baptism, will probably be
glad to know what the immersionists have
to say about themselves. The time is
past, we hope, when religious rancour
forbids one body of believers to take an
interest in another. The work is so
pleasantly written, and so tastefully
produced, that it would form an
acceptable gift to our young men and
maidens. It traces the history of
Baptists from the foundation of the
Christian church, when he whose right it
was to give the mandate commanded his
disciples to baptise in the name of the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, to
the close of the last century; adding a
chapter — which to our minds is the
least satisfactory part of the work —
on the extension of the denomination and
the peculiarities of the present period.
The
primitive period is remarkable only
— so far as the point is hand is
concerned — for two things: viz., the
absence during the first two hundred
years of any reference in "The
Fathers" to infant baptism; and the
introduction, with other heresies, of
baptismal regeneration and children’s
baptism. Tertullian, at the in-coming of
the third century openly declared that
remission from sins, deliverance from
death, regeneration and participation in
the Holy Spirit, were spiritual
blessings consequent upon baptism. The
two things — the sacramental theory
and the baptism of children (not
infants) — probably came in at the
same time; for we find Tertullian
indignantly reproving those who had
begun the practice of administering the
ordinance to children, on the ground
that they were not old enough to repent
and believe. Chevalier Bunsen distinctly
points out that "Tertullian’s
opposition is to the baptism of young
growing children: he does not say a word
about newborn infants."
The
same must be said of Origen. But the
seeds of the evil had been sown.
Children’s baptism was clearly
originated by the sacramentarians, who
considered that it was necessary to
salvation. But infant baptism was
instituted by a bishop of Northern
Africa, in the middle of the third
century, who confounded Christian
baptism with circumcision — a blunder
frequent enough nowadays. It must be
remembered that the body of the infant
was immersed, not sprinkled. Sprinkling
sick persons confined to their beds was,
however, a contemporaneous innovation.
We
next enter upon the transition period,
when the new system was quietly working
its way. As Neander puts it, "among
the Christians of the East,
infant-baptism, though acknowledged in
theory to be necessary, yet entered
rarely and with much difficulty into the
church-life during the first half of
this period." Novelty needed
extraneous power to bolster it up, and
infant-baptism was promulgated by men
who accepted state aid, and who were
backed by a royal command that all
infants should be baptised. The church
allied to the state, the tide of
persecution inevitably set in. The
state-church people were the
"orthodox," and as such were
recognised; all others were heretics. A
controversy sprang up with regard to
those who apostatised during the Decian
persecution, but who on the return of
tranquillity, sought re-admission into
the churches. Novatian held that
apostacy was a sin which disqualified
them from again entering into church
fellowship, and to secure a pure
community, he formed a separate church,
which elected him for its pastor. These
purer churches multiplied, and continued
in existence for more than three
centuries, the members being everywhere
looked upon as Puritans and Dissenters.
They were Anabaptists, baptising again
all who had been immersed by the
orthodox and corrupt church. The
Novatians, then, were Baptists.
Then
follows the obscure period — a
period of mistiness, doubtfulness, and
difficulty. What Dr. Cramp terms
"The Revival Period," which
extended from A.D. 1073 to A.D. 1517,
includes the Crusades, the martyrdom of
Huss, and the invention of printing.
Peter of Bruys, who suffered martyrdom
in 1124, was a Baptist minister, who
maintained that the church should be
composed alone of believers, that all
believers should be baptised, and that
baptism was of no use unless connected
with personal faith. Others followed him
in the advocacy of the same principles,
giving a great deal of trouble to the
Baptists by their denunciations of
ecclesiastical corruptions. "The
terrible storm which fell upon Southern
France in the crusade against the
Albigenses, doubtless swept away many of
the Baptist churches, and scattered
their surviving members. Notwithstanding
the vigilance of the persecutors, great
numbers escaped. Italy, Germany, and the
Eastern countries of Europe received
them." It is clear that "the
Morning Star of the Reformation,"
John Wycliffe, believed that faith was
required by those who were baptised, and
those who held that infants dying
without baptism could not be saved, were
regarded by him as "presumptuous
and foolish." It is also certain
that many of the Lollards, perhaps the
majority of them, strongly opposed
infant baptism. They were persecuted for
this by the Paedobaptists, for it was
held to be a grievous departure from the
truth to believe that infants could be
saved if unbaptised. There has been
considerable diversity of opinion among
historians as to the Waldenses, and both
by those who assert that they were
Baptists and by those who maintain that
they were not, it has been forgotten
that they were not distinguished by any
uniformity of belief. "If,"
says Dr. Cramp, "the question
relate to the Waldenses in the strict
and modern sense of the term, that is,
to the inhabitants of the valleys of
Piedmont, there is reason to believe
that, originally, the majority of them
were Baptists, although there were
varieties of opinion among them, as well
as among other seceders from the Romish
church." One of their earlier
confessions, has this distinguishing
belief, that it is proper and even
necessary that believers should
use the sacraments of baptism and the
Lord’s Supper, but that believers may
be saved without either. Immersion in
any case was still the mode, and
incontrovertible facts, which no one has
ventured to dispute, go to prove that it
was the universal practice.
Baptists
were always equally prepared for
conflict and, for persecution. At the
rise of the Reformation they openly
declared themselves, coming out of their
obscure positions, where they had long
worshipped their Master in quiet.
seclusion. They were prepared to enlist
themselves under the banners of the
Reformers. They looked upon the defiant
daring men of God whom no ecclesiastical
tyranny could tame, no Papal
fulminations could awe, no threatenings
could silence, as their brothers —
bone of their bone, and flesh of their
flesh. It is much to be regretted that
they should have been so bitterly
disappointed.
The
Reformers were not as yet sufficiently
wide in their sympathies, nor
sufficiently clear in their
Protestantism, to extend the right hand
of friendship, and loving communion to
the despised Baptists. As now, so then,
Baptists were a go-a-head race, always
prepared to travel beyond others. They
were persecuted, destroyed, forsaken,
had their possessions confiscated, and
were reduced to the lowest depths of
poverty. In spite of the Reformers who
were bemisted by Popery, they maintained
that the church of Christ should be kept
as pure as possible; that there must be
no indiscriminate mixing of wheat and
tares, as though both were so much akin
that there was no difference between
them; that believers only were the
proper subjects of baptism; that
Scripture and Scripture alone was the
sole arbiter in all theological
disputes; and that civil magistrates and
earthly potentates had no control over
God’s free gift to man-conscience. We,
as Baptists of the present day, have
precisely the same principles to defend,
and in demanding the disestablishment
and disendowment of the Irish church,
that embodiment of injustice and bulwark
against the progress of
Protestantism in the sister country, we
do but propagate opinions and principles
which were tenaciously held by the
Anabaptists of Reformation days —
principles which find their source and
authority in Holy Writ.
No
one disputes that the conduct of the
Baptists of this era, was marked at
times by folly. Yet it has been the
habit too much to magnify their
wrong-doings, and to stigmatise all for
the acts of some. The Reformers
themselves chose out of their vocabulary
all the offensive epithets they could,
and flung them at their brethren — the
Baptists. Latimer denounced them as
"pernicious," and their
opinions as "devilish." Hooper
regarded them as "damnable;"
while other and equally mild aspersions
were made upon their zeal, their
honesty, and even common decency. The
Baptists declared their sympathy with
Luther in throwing off the Pope’s
authority, and carried out their
principles to their legitimate
conclusion, by proclaiming themselves
free from Luther’s, or any other
man’s authority. Then came the
Peasant’s War, in which Munzer joined,
and for which he paid by the forfeiture
of his life. Occasion was taken by his
connection with the insurgents, to load
all Baptists with obloquy and reproach.
They were persecuted and hunted down,
obliged to worship in woods, far removed
from the hot fierce hand of their
enemies. An historian of these times,
Sebastian Franck, affirms that within a
few years no fewer than "two
thousand Baptists had testified their
faith by imprisonment or
martyrdom." Yet despite the odium
cast upon them, and the laws of
repression enforced against them, they
continued to spread in Germany, in
Italy, in Switzerland, Austria, and
Bavaria. They were hunted like sheep and
compelled to emigrate in large numbers
to Moravia, and to the Netherlands,
where they were not free from the
oppressor’s yoke. The records of
Baptist martyrology are very voluminous.
Our readers should be acquainted with
the doings and the sufferings of these
brethren, who were singled out for
unsparing manifestations of cruelty and
vengeance. We recommend them carefully
to read Dr. Cramp’s admirable
condensation of their trials during this
long and suffering period. One man, by
name Jeronimus Segerson, who boldly
declared that he would rather be
tortured ten times every day, and then
finally be roasted on a gridiron, than
renounce the faith, was burned at
Antwerp. His wife, Lysken, was drowned
in a sack — a fitting death it was
thought for a Baptist. The account given
in the work entitled "Baptist
Martyrology," written in Dutch, is
very affecting. "She very
boldly," we are told, "and
uudisguisedly confessed her faith at the
tribunal, before the magistrates and the
multitude. They first asked her
concerning baptism. She said, ‘I
acknowledge but one baptism, even that
which was used by Christ and his
disciples, and left to us.’ ‘What do
you hold concerning infant baptism?’
asked the sheriff. To which Lysken
answered, ‘Nothing but a mere
infant’s baptism, and a human
institution.’ On this the bench stood
up, and consulted together, while Lysken,
in the mean time, confessed, and
explained clearly to the people the
ground of her belief. They then
pronounced sentence upon her. Lysken
spoke in the following manner to the
bench: ‘Ye are now judges; but the
time will come when ye will wish that ye
had been keepers of sheep, for there is
a Judge and Lord who is above all; he
shall in his own time judge you. But we
have not to wrestle against flesh and
blood, but against the principalities,
powers, and rulers of the darkness of
this world.’ " Two monks visited
her in prison, but could not move her
from her confidence. "On Saturday
morning we rose early, some before day,
some with the daylight, to see the
nuptials which we thought would then be
celebrated; but the crafty murderers
outran us. We had slept too long; for
they had finished their murderous work
between three and four o’clock. They
had taken that sheep to the Scheldt, and
had put her into a sack, and drowned her
before the people arrived, so that few
persons saw it. Some, however, saw it.
She went courageously to death, and
spoke bravely, ‘Father, into thy hands
I commend my spirit.’
Thus
she was delivered up, and it came to
pass, to the honour of the Lord, that by
the grace of God many were moved
thereby."
The
history of English Baptists is full of
interest. From the first they were
peculiarly offensive to "the powers
that be." Henry the Eighth — who
did so much for the Anglican
Establishmentarians that he ought to be
regarded by them as a pet saint, even as
he was befooled and belarded by the
intriguing Cranmer — when he assumed
the headship of the Anglican church
which never acknowledged Christ to be
its only Head, proclaimed against two
kinds of heretics, viz., those who
disputed about baptism and the Lord’s
Supper; and such as were re-baptised.
These Anabaptists were commanded to
withdraw from the country at once.
Cranmer ordered some to be burnt, and
burnt they were. Mr. Kenworthy, the
present pastor of the Baptist church at
Hill Cliffe, in Cheshire, has stated
that if the traditions of the place are
to be trusted, the church is five
hundred years old. A tombstone has been
lately dug up in the burial ground
belonging to that church, bearing date
1357. The origin of the church is
assigned to the year 1523. It is evident
that there were Baptist communities in
this country in the reign of Edward VI.,
since Ridley, who was martyred in the
following reign, had the following among
his "Articles of Visitation:"
"Whether any of the Anabaptists’
sect or other, use notoriously any
unlawful or private conventicles,
wherein they do use doctrines or
administration of sacraments, separating
themselves from the rest of the
parish?" A fearful crime which many
Anglicans of the present day would be as
ready to punish were it not that other
notions of religious liberty exist and
powerfully influence public opinion. We
can trace the same spirit, though in
embryo perhaps, in the ritualistic
prints of the present age, and indeed in
the two delightfully amiable Evangelical
newspapers whose unbounded hatred of all
outside the pale of their theology and
clique is as relentless and unscrupulous
as the bitterest feelings of Papal days.
All history teaches that state-churchism
means persecution, in one form or
another, according to the sentiments of
the age; and the only cure for the evil
is to put all religions on an equality.
Elizabeth,
like her father, found it needful for
the peace and quiet of the Anglicans, to
banish Baptists from her realm. This she
did so effectually that Bishop Jewel
congratulated his brethren, in 1560, in
the following terms: — "We found
at the beginning of the reign of
Elizabeth a large and inauspicious corps
of Arians, Anabaptists, and other pests,
which I know not how, but as mushrooms
spring up in the night and in darkness,
so these sprang up in that darkness and
unhappy night of the Marian times. These
I am informed, and I hope it is the
fact, have retreated before the light of
purer doctrine, like owls at the sight
of the sun, and are now nowhere to be
found; or at least, if anywhere, they
are no longer troublesome to our
churches." With all this system of
repression and persecution, and
notwithstanding the emigration of large
numbers, many remained in the country,
and soon made their appearance, as
history attests, in what Dr. Cramp has
denominated "the troublous
period," which extended from
A.D. 1567 to A.D. 1688 — from the days
especially of James I. to the period
when Benjamin Keach suffered in the
pillory. For an interesting abstract of
the history of our denomination during
those times and during the quieter
period which followed, with its
peculiarities of controversy, and
conscientious differences, we must refer
our reader to the book which we have
already warmly commended to their favour.
C.
H. Spurgeon
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