And our ancestors of three hundred years ago were not a bit better off.
They had their Anabaptists.
The most popular “Outline of History” of the sixteenth century was a certain “World Book” or chronicle, which Sebastian Frank, soap-boiler, prohibitionist and author, living in the good city of Ulm, published in the year 1534.
Sebastian knew the Anabaptists. He had married into an Anabaptist family. He did not share their views, for he was a confirmed free-thinker. But this is what he wrote about them: “that they taught nothing but love and faith and the crucifixion of the flesh, that they manifested patience and humility under all suffering, assisted one another with true helpfulness, called each other brother and believed in having all things in common.”
It is surely a curious thing that people of whom all those nice things could be truthfully said should for almost a hundred years have been hunted down like wild animals, and should have been exposed to all the most cruel punishments of the most bloodthirsty of centuries.
But there was a reason and in order to appreciate it you must remember certain facts about the Reformation.
The Reformation really settled nothing.
It gave the world two prisons instead of one, made a book infallible in the place of a man and established (or rather, tried to establish) a rule by black garbed ministers instead of white garbed priests.
Such meager results after half a century of struggle and sacrifice had filled the hearts of millions of people with desperate disappointment. They had expected a millennium of social and religious righteousness and they were not at all prepared for a new Gehenna of persecution and economic slavery.