A vast number of earnest souls were not satisfied with any of these forms of official religion, and even in the earliest days of the Reformation, preachers arose who went beyond the moderate reforms of Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin, and whose teachings gained a ready acceptance. In Saxony, in Hesse, in South Germany, and in Moravia; in the cities of Constance, Strasburg, Augsburg, and Nuremberg; in the Netherlands and in Switzerland, there was much preaching and formation of independent religious communities quite apart from, and indeed in opposition to, the official Reformation. [Footnote: Moeller, Hist, of the Christian Church (English trans.), III., 36, 64, 88, 94.] These radical preachers and their followers represented very different beliefs and practices. That which was common to them all was an acceptance of the Bible literally interpreted as a guide both to doctrine and to church organization. The effort to return to the apostolic organization of the church led them to reject any but an unpaid ministry, and to insist that none should be members of their congregations except such as were personally converted and who conformed their lives to the teachings of the Bible.
Their idea was, therefore, the formation of little companies separated from the surrounding people of the world rather than the Lutheran or Zwinglian plan of a reorganization of the national church on Protestant lines en masse. An austere piety, the wearing of plain clothes, the avoidance of forms of social respect, the refusal to take an oath or to hold civil office, an assertion of the sinfulness of paying or receiving tithes or interest, an approach to communistic practice in matters of property—some or all of these were widely disseminated among the lower classes of the people to whom such teachings principally appealed.
The doctrine which came nearest to being a point of uniformity and a possible bond of union among these reformers was their objection to infant baptism. To them baptism was the mark of a personally attained relation to Christ, and was, therefore, meaningless when administered to an unconscious infant. Certain "prophets" who came to Wittenberg from Zwickau confronted Luther and Melancthon with this principle as early as 1521; and radical reformers proclaimed it in opposition to Zwingli at Zurich in 1523. Everywhere advocacy of an exact adherence to the verbal teaching of Holy Writ and a rejection of the claims of an established church, were accompanied by opposition to infant baptism. In 1525 for the first time the logical deduction from their premises was made; those baptized only in their infancy were asserted not to have been effectively baptized at all, and were rebaptized as a sign of their conversion. [Footnote: Moeller, Hist, of the Christian Church (English trans.), III., 65.] From this time onward re-baptism, or, from the point of view of its advocates, the first valid baptism, became the test and mark of adoption into many communities of true believers. Those who practised this rite were, therefore, called "Anabaptists"— that is to say, those who baptized a second time—or, more frequently, merely "Baptists."
The rebaptism of a person who had been already once baptized was not only in the eyes of the established church an impiety, it was in the eyes of the established law a capital crime, and the history of Anabaptism in Germany is the history of a long martyrdom. In Catholic and Protestant countries alike these radicals were persecuted. From Strasburg and Nuremberg they were expelled, in Zurich their leaders were drowned, in Augsburg they were beheaded, in Austria, Wittenberg, Bavaria, and the Palatinate they were burned at the stake.
In 1534 their sect was brought into sudden and fatal prominence by the revolt in Munster and its vicinity. Here a body of adherents of radical religious doctrines added to their creed a tenet not common to the general body of Anabaptists—that is to say, the duty of taking up temporal arms to overthrow the existing powers and to introduce the New Jerusalem. The old episcopal city was seized by the Anabaptist leaders, bloody battles were fought, and after a six months' orgy of fanaticism, libertinism, and violence the rebels were defeated by the united troops of Catholic and Lutheran powers and a terrible vengeance taken.
Anabaptists everywhere, no matter how peaceable and moderate their principles, suffered under the imputation of holding such doctrines as had led to the terrible excesses at Munster, as they had long before been held to sympathize with the Peasants' Revolt; and their persecutions became correspondingly harsher. Nevertheless, they continued to form communities and to spread through Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The attractiveness of the teachings of wandering Anabaptist preachers long continued unabated, and their regularly organized congregations or communities, because of their thrift, honesty, and plainness of life, survived and flourished, wherever they could obtain even the barest and most temporary toleration.
They were necessarily a people without a national home. Seldom for a whole generation did any considerable body of Anabaptists or Pietists remain undisturbed in any one locality. Expelled by imperial edict from Bohemia, they made their way to Hungary and Transylvania; fined, imprisoned, and in danger of death in Protestant Switzerland, they migrated to the Tyrol, to the Palatinate, and to the south German cities, only soon to be visited there with still worse persecution. During the two great religious wars they suffered especial hardships, and in the midst of the Thirty Years' War they were rigorously expelled by the emperor from all his hereditary dominions, even from Moravia, where they had been allowed to exist for almost a century. [Footnote: Moeller, Hist. of the Christian Church (English trans.), III., 437- 442.] Either from original differences of doctrine and personal influence, or from later divisions and reorganization, grew up those bodies which, although often, as has been seen, grouped under the general head of Anabaptists, have become known in Europe and America as Mennonites, Amish, and Dunkers; and each of these bodies has experienced various divisions. The Schwenkfelders, Boehmists, and other mystics or pietists, are habitually grouped with these sects, rather because of their similar historical origin and attitude to the established churches than of any identity of religious belief.
By the close of the seventeenth century the condition of these dissenters from the established churches had become more tolerable; but they were at best a remnant, narrowed in spirit by persecution, repeatedly separated from their earlier homes, still under the ban of ecclesiastical disapproval, and even where tolerated living under burdensome restrictions. The rising colonies of the New World, especially those which promised religious liberty, and above all that one of them whose Quaker founder held doctrines so like their own, must have exerted, notwithstanding their alien race and tongue, an almost irresistible attraction upon them. In view of the political and religious history of Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is therefore no wonder that a vast number of Germans emigrated to America, and that in Pennsylvania were soon to be found numerous representatives of every religious sect that existed in the fatherland.
The religious divisions which sprang from the Protestant Reformation were not restricted to the Old World. In America, also, religion was a centrifugal influence, splitting up old colonies, and establishing new centres of population, which in turn attracted other groups of emigrants from Europe, and brought into existence still other types of government and society. [Footnote: Eggleston, Beginners of a Nation, 266-346.] The results were shown in the characteristics of Rhode Island and Connecticut, of Germantown and Bethlehem, in some of the principal contrasts between New France and New England, and in many of the lesser diversities that have distinguished different sections of America in their subsequent history. Many influences combined to give form and character to each American settlement: its race elements, the commercial requirements of the controlling chartered company, the demands of the home government, the theoretical ideas of the founder, the habitudes of the colonists in the lands from which they came. Among these influences, as among the motives for emigration, the religious experiences and desires of the settlers were a prime factor.
The Reformation indirectly affected America by wars which soon led to the rise of some nations, the fall of others; they pitted Catholic states against Protestant states, they weakened Germany, France, and the southern Netherlands by a sanguinary civil struggle, and were avoided in England only by harsh persecution.