Fr. Corn. Tush, tush! you are beginning to preach again, are you? Hence one more question, and then enough. In good faith, if an unbaptized person of your Anabaptistic church were instructed far enough in your devil’s faith, to receive baptism, and he should come to be baptized, and should become so sick and faint as to lose all self-consciousness, and could therefore not confess his faith before or in baptism, would you also suffer him to die unbaptized, I suppose you would? hence your nonsense and twiddle-twaddle deserve no respect or regard.
Jac. Though he should die in that faintness, unbaptized, he would be saved through his faith; for Christ (Mark 16:16) says: “But he that believeth not shall be damned.”
Fr. Corn. Well, I have no desire to dispute any longer with you. I shall go my way, and let the executioner dispute with you, with a burning fagot * * * and afterwards the devil in hell, with burning pitch, brimstone and tar, see.
Jac. No; for Paul writes (2 Cor. 5:1): “If our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”
Fr. Corn. Bah! in hell, in hell. Expect nothing else than to go through this temporal fire into the eternal; hell yawns and gasps for your soul, you accursed, damned Anabaptist that you are, see.
DISPUTATION BETWEEN HERMAN VLECKWIJK, IMPRISONED BY THE LORDS OF THE COUNTRY VAN DEN VRYE IN BRUGES, AND FRIAR CORNELIS, IN THE PRESENCE OF MR. JAN VAN DAM, ON THE 1OTH OF MAY, A. D. 1569.
Fr. Corn. I would say, Good-day, Herman: but I am quite wrought up and angry yet from yesterday, at your accursed hedge-preacher, or teacher, who has so wickedly seduced, deceived, crazed, bedeviled and bewitched you and your fellow Anabaptists by his damnable, hellish, Anabaptistic heresies, out there in the miserable Gruthuysbosch. Hence I must now come here and try whether I can draw you away again from this Anabaptism, and convert you to our Catholic Christian faith; have you a mind for it, or not? Let us hear now.
Herm. To judge from your speaking, I should think that you are angry, and if you had not told me yourself, I would have thought, that you wanted to frighten me. But why are you so angry at that friendly, pleasant man, who I think did not give you one hard word?
Fr. Corn. He nevertheless called me a papist once or twice; but I do not care * * * for that; but I am very angry that he would in no wise suffer himself to be converted from his accursed Anabaptism and all other accursed heresies, in regard to which I have spent so much labor in vain; and the most vexatious of all is, that though I so well showed, and convinced him of, his bad, evil, wicked, false, heretical faith, as these good lords have well heard, it was all of no avail; ill betide him.
Herm. I think, that he nevertheless clearly showed you with the holy Scriptures, that his faith is in Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God; whereby then could you show him, that his faith is bad, evil, wicked, false, and heretical, as you say?