These views were quite opposed to the ideas of the Zurich Council, who contemplated a State Church reformed from Romanist abuses, but strictly under the control of the State, and supported by the tithes, as the mediæval Church had been. They refused to adopt the ideas of the Anabaptists; and this was the beginning of the antagonism. The Council found that the great majority of the petitioners had doubts about infant baptism, and were inclined to what are now called Baptist views; and they brought matters to a crisis by ordering a Public Disputation on Baptism (Jan. 17th, 1525). Among the Anabaptists who appeared to defend their principles, were young Conrad Grebel the Humanist, Felix Manz, and Brother Jörg from Jacob’s House, a conventual establishment near Chur, who is always called “Blaurock” (Blue-coat). They were opposed by Zwingli, who insisted that infant baptism must be maintained, because it took the place of circumcision. The Council decided that Zwingli’s contention was right, and they made it a law that all children must be baptized, and added that all persons who refused to have their children baptized after Feb. 1st, 1525, were to be arrested. The Anabaptists were not slow to answer the challenge thus given. They met, and after deliberation and prayer Blaurock asked Conrad Grebel to baptize him in a truly Christian fashion, “there being no ordained person present,” and Grebel did so. “When this had been done the others entreated Blaurock to baptize them, which he did; and in deep fear of the Lord they gave themselves to God.” They resolved to preach and baptize, because in this they ought to obey God rather than men.[618]
When the Council heard that adult baptism had begun, they enacted that all who had been rebaptized after Feb. 8th (1525) were to be fined a silver mark, and that whoever was baptized after the issue of their decree should be banished. They also imprisoned the leaders. When they found that neither fines, nor threats, nor imprisonment, nor banishment had any effect on the Anabaptists, the Town Council thought to terrify them by a death sentence. Two were selected, Manz and Blaurock. The latter was not a citizen, and the sentence of death was commuted to one of public scourging and being thrust out of the town; but Felix Manz, a townsman, was put to death by drowning (1527). Zwingli insisted that this judicial murder was not done because of baptism, but because of rebellion!
What was done in Reformed Switzerland was seen all over Roman Catholic and Lutheran Germany. It is only fair to say that the persecution was more murderous within the Romanist districts; but the only Lutheran Prince who refused to permit a death penalty on Anabaptism was Philip of Hesse. He was afterwards joined by the Elector of Saxony.
In 1527 (Aug. 26th), the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria published an imperial mandate threatening all Anabaptists with the punishment of death. Two months later, two thousand copies of this proclamation were sent to the provinces of the German Empire, calling on the authorities to extirpate these unfortunate people. The rulers in Salzburg and in the Tyrol obeyed the order at once, and a fierce persecution soon raged. The minds of the population were inflamed by infamous calumnies. It was said in Salzburg that the Anabaptists had planned to massacre all the priests and monks within the principality. The well-known dislike of the brethren to war was tortured into the accusation that on a Turkish invasion they would side with the enemy against all loyal Germans. A certain Leopold Dickius, who wrote an atrocious book against the Anabaptists, demanded that all the men should be slain and the women and children suffered to perish from starvation; in this way only, he said, could their errors be stamped out.
The Salzburg chronicler, Kilian Leib, a Romanist, gives details of the persecution. He tells us that men, women, and young maidens suffered death by fire, beheading, and drowning, not only uncomplainingly, but with solemn joy. He dwells on the case of “a beautiful young girl” of sixteen, whose gentle innocence excited universal compassion, and who utterly refused to recant. The executioner pinned her hands to her sides, plunged her head downwards into a horse trough, held her there till she was suffocated, and then took her body away to burn it. The official lists show that the victims came from all classes in society. Noblemen, girdle-makers, wallet-makers, shoemakers, a town clerk, and ex-priests.
The persecution in the Tyrol was severe and thorough. A large number of the miners of the district were Anabaptists, and it was resolved to root out the so-called heresy. Descriptions were published of prominent Anabaptists, who wandered from place to place encouraging their brethren to steadfastness. “One named Mayerhofer has a long brown beard and wears a grey soldier’s coat; a companion, tall and pale, wears a long black coat with trimming; a third is shorter; a fourth, thin and of a ruddy complexion, is known as a cutler.” Conrad Braun, an assessor to the imperial Chamber and an eye-witness to the persecutions, wrote,—“I have seen with my own eyes that nothing has been able to bring back the Anabaptists from their errors or to make them recant. The hardest imprisonment, hunger, fire, water, the sword, all sorts of frightful executions, have not been able to shake them. I have seen young people, men, women, go to the stake singing, filled with joy; and I can say that in the course of my whole life nothing has moved me more.”[619] In the Tyrol and Görz the number of executions by the year 1531 amounted to a thousand, according to the chronicler Kirchmayr. Sebastian Franck reckons the number in Enisheim, within the government of Upper Austria, at six hundred. Seventy-three martyrs suffered in Linz within six weeks. The persecution in Bavaria was particularly severe; Duke William ordered that those who recanted were to be beheaded, and those who refused were to be burned. The general practice, made a law by Ferdinand of Austria in 1529 (April 23rd), was that only preachers, baptizers, Baptists who refused to recant, and those who had relapsed after recantation, were to be punished with death.[620]
In these bloody persecutions, which raged over almost all Europe, most of the earlier leaders of the Anabaptists perished; but the great body of their followers were neither intimidated nor disposed to abjure their teaching. Persecution did not come unexpectedly. No one was admitted into an Anabaptist community without being warned of the probable fate which lay before him. Baptism was a vow that he would be constant unto death; the “breaking of bread” strengthened his faith; the sermon was full of exhortations to endurance unto the end. Their whole service of worship was a preparation for and an expectation of martyrdom.
The strain of Christian song seemed to rise higher with the fires of persecution. Most of the Anabaptist hymns belong to the time when their sufferings were greatest. Some are simply histories of a martyrdom, as of Jörg Wagner at Munich, or of the “Seven Brethren at Germünd.” They are all echoes of endurance where the notes of the sob, the trust, the warning, the hosanna of a time of martyrdom, blend in rough heroic strains. They sing of Christ, who in these last days has manifested Himself that the pure word of His Gospel may again run through the earth as it did in the days of the early Church. They tell how the arch-enemy of souls seeks to protect himself against the advancing host of Jesus by exciting bloody persecutions. They utter warnings against false prophets, ravening wolves in sheep’s clothing, who beset all the paths of life leading towards the true fold, who pour forth threats and curses against the people of God, and urge on the rulers of this world to torture and to slay. They depict how the evil world storms against the true Church, shrieks out lies against the true followers of Jesus, and threatens them with burnings and all manner of cruel deaths. They mourn that the disciples of Jesus are slaughtered like sheep who have lost their shepherd; that they wander in wildernesses full of thorns that tear; that they have their homes like the night-birds among the cliffs or in the clefts of the rocks; that they are snared in the nets of the fowler; that they are hunted with hounds like the hares. Others, inspired by the internal hope which lives undying in every Christian heart, tell how Christ the Bridegroom seeks the love of the soul His bride, and how He wins her to Himself by His love-gifts of trial and of suffering, till at last the marriage feast is held, and the soul becomes wholly united to her Lord. The thoughts and phrases of the old Hebrew prophets, of the Psalmist, of the hymns of the Apocalypse, which have fed the fears and the hopes of longing, suffering, trusting generations of Christian people, reappear in those Anabaptist hymns. Life is for them a continuous Holy War, a Pilgrim’s Progress through an evil world full of snares, of dangers, of temptations, until at last the weary feet tread the Delectable Mountains, the River of Death is passed, and the open gates of the heavenly Jerusalem receive the wayfarer who has persevered to the end.
These poor persecuted people naturally sought for some city of refuge, i.e. a municipality or district where baptism of children was not enforced under penalties, and where the rebaptism of adults was not punished by imprisonment, torture, and death. For a time they found many such asylums. The Anabaptists were for the most part good workmen, and patient and provident cultivators of the soil, ready to pay all dues but the unscriptural war-tax. They were a source of wealth to many a great landed proprietor who was willing to allow them to live their lives in peace. Moravia, East Friesland, and, among the municipalities, Augsburg, Worms, and Strassburg gave shelter until the slow determined pressure of the higher authorities of the Empire compelled them to act otherwise. All that the Anabaptists desired was to be allowed to live in peace, and we hear of no great disturbances caused by their presence in any of these “cities of refuge.”
This brings us to what has been called “The Kingdom of God in Münster,” and to the behaviour of the Anabaptists there—the communism, polygamy, and so forth, which are described in all histories of the times.