The next year after this, William of Orange had occasion to call to order, as it appears, some of his own subjects. The magistrates of Middelburg had announced to the Baptists that they must take an oath of fidelity and arm themselves, or give up their business and shut up their houses. The Baptists had recourse to William, promising to pay levies and taxes, and desiring to be believed on their yea and nay. William granted their request, their yea was to be taken in the place of an oath, and the delinquent was to be punished as for perjury.
In William Penn’s Treatise on Oaths it is stated that William of Orange said, “Those men’s yea must pass for an oath, and we must not urge this thing any further, or we must confess that the Papists had reason to force us to a religion that was against our conscience.”
About nine years after William had thus reproved the magistrates of Middelburg, or in the year 1586, the Baptists came to grief elsewhere. It is stated that those called Anabaptists, who had taken refuge in the Prussian dominions, were ordered by “the prince of the country” to depart from his entire duchy of Prussia, and in the next year from all his dominions. This was because they were said to speak scandalously of infant baptism.
About the close of the century, pleasanter times for the Baptists seem to have followed. “When the north wind of persecution became violent, there were intervals when the pleasant south wind of liberty and repose succeeded.”
“But now occurred the greatest mischief in Zurich and Berne, by those who styled themselves Reformed;” but others of the same name, “especially the excellent regents of the United Netherlands,” opposed such proceedings.
The Martyr-book says, in substance, “It is a lamentable case that those who boast that they are the followers of the defenceless Lamb do no longer possess the lamb’s disposition, but, on the contrary, have the nature of the wolf. It seems as if they could not bear it that any should travel towards heaven in any other way than that which they go themselves, as was exemplified in the case of Hans Landis, who was a minister and teacher of the gospel of Christ. Being taken to Zurich, he refused to desist from preaching and to deny his faith, and was sentenced to death,—the edict of eighty years before not having died of old age. They, however, persuaded the common people that he was not put to death for religion’s sake, but for disobedience to the authorities.”[16]
After the death of Hans Landis, persecution rested for twenty-one years, when the ancient hatred broke out afresh in Zurich.
The Baptists now asked permission to leave the country with their property, but this was not granted to them. “They might choose,” says the Martyrology, “to go with them [the Reformed] to church, or to die in prison. To the first they would not consent; therefore they might expect the second.”
This brings us to the era of the persecution described in the hymn-book of which I formerly spoke,—the book now in use among the Amish of our county.