regenerated life-involving opposition of infant baptism and requiring rebaptism upon confession of faith; separation of Church and State; refusal to bear arms and take oaths; freedom of conscience and toleration. The changes to which these principles pointed were so far-reaching that Church and State alike persecuted this zealous body. By 1535 all the early leaders, such as Conrad Grebel, Felix Mantz, and George Blaurock, had perished.

At this time, Menno Simons (1492-1559), a native of Friesland and a recently converted priest, espoused the Anabaptist faith. He became one of their most influential leaders. His organizing ability so dominated the movement as to leave it his name "Menist", in America changed to Mennonite. He purified the doctrines of the Anabaptists. After his identification with them it was no longer possible for him to work in public. As outlaw and fugitive for more than twenty years, he labored in many places, gathering co-religionists into communities in various parts of Europe. He accomplished much by his writings, couched in a popular and edifying vein. Through the love he bore his followers, through his labors, books, and letters, he enabled the community to increase in numbers and to hold fast to their lofty morality. With Dirk Philips and others he toiled to establish a true Church of Christ. In his writings he aimed to prove the truth of his doctrines, and showed the wide divergence of his followers from the fanatics of Munster, who also went under the name of Anabaptists.

During the process of being compacted into an organized body the Mennonites suffered persecution, endured the internal strife of faction, and were weakened by the defection of various groups. Nevertheless their numbers increased, and their influence was great, especially in the early stages of the Baptist movement in Holland and England.

V

Certain principles of modern Protestantism were presented with new and cogent reasoning in the writings of Caspar von

Schwenckfeld (1490-1561). More emphasis was laid on the direct influence of the Spirit than on the formal statement of the Scriptures, without, however, disparaging the latter. The function of the laity, the right of presentation, freedom of conscience, the separation of Church and State, and many another principle now potent in all parts of Christendom found a staunch champion in him in days when these were heretical principles.

Descended from an ancient noble family of Ossig in Silesia, and a contemporary of Martin Luther, Caspar von Schwenckfeld was converted to Evangelical faith when the writings of Luther reached his native land. In the development of the Reformation in Silesia Schwenckfeld had a prominent part. He challenged Catholic and Protestant alike to pursue a course such as today is called religious toleration. He pleaded for the rights of the common people, the rightful claims of the untutored for enlightenment. The effects of one of his many writings led him to become a voluntary exile. He found his pilgrim home in the imperial cities. Frequently when enemies pressed him, some damp cave or rift in the Swabian limestone hills gave him his only shelter. During the thirty years of his wanderings he issued treatise upon treatise on all phases of Christian doctrine and practice. His influence reached souls of high and of low estate in many lands. He was the great lay-evangelist of the age.

He was a fearless, profound thinker. He investigated the great religious questions of the day with independent mind. In the development of his thought he shows the influence of Augustine and other Church fathers, of the German mystics, and, perhaps, contact with the Unitas Fratrum. He was inflexible in his opinions, yet in controversies with Luther and others he appeared to be one of nature's true noblemen who never forgot his manners. His theological views, revealing a mediating, spiritual trend of thought, show him to have occupied a neutral position between the great Protestant religious parties of his time. Hence the movement he fathered came to be known as the Reformation of the Middle Way.

Schwenckfeld never tried to organize his adherents into a Church. After his death Schwenckfeldians, as they were called, quietly withdrew from the organized Church and gradually acquired the more or less distinct character of a denomination, their congregations located chiefly in southern Germany. Though misunderstood and antagonized for years, they held to the views of their founder with singular fidelity. Early in the eighteenth century coercive measures directed against them drove what was left of the Schwenckfeldians to Saxony. When they were no longer safe there, on Count Zinzendorf's domains, they fled to America, settling in eastern Pennsylvania. There are now about a thousand communicants. They support missions at home, and in co-operation with other societies in China, India, and Japan. Many scholars have turned to the volumes of the "Corpus Schwenckfeldianorum" to study the tenets of the sixteenth century reformer, whose teachings appear to be giving no little stimulus to modern evangelical movements, particularly in Europe.

CHAPTER XIV

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

The minor sects protested against the claim that all citizens of a State must conform to the State religion. They thus carried the new principle of liberty to its logical issue and prepared the way for the separation of the religious from the political life.

T is difficult for present-day Christians, especially those of western Europe and North America, to realize how bitter

I

and revolutionary was the struggle from which was evolved the religious liberty they enjoy. They are tempted, therefore, to judge severely and uncharitably the attempt to maintain religious conformity by force. But coming down the stream of history one can see why men feared irregularity in Church and State. Civilization had never separated the two. Among Hebrews and Egyptians, the people of Asia Minor and of Greece and Rome, the Church and the State were inseparable. Men might add to a common religion some particular faith of their own, but unless they received a special license from the State they must not break with national religious customs. This position, which was common in the Roman Empire, naturally descended to later periods. Nor can it be overlooked that frequently religious Non-conformity was joined with political revolt.

Such an identification of religious with political elements inevitably led men to conceive of ecclesiastical Non-conformity and theological heresy as akin to political disloyalty. It was therefore to be punished like any other crime or rebellion. Only as one takes this point of view is it possible to estimate fairly the appeal to force which has marked the history of Christianity. From this point of view one can best appreciate the heroism

of those religious movements which broke all connection between Church and State. The organization of an independent or sectarian religious body is easy today; but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries originality and courage were demanded of men and women who ventured to say that they had a right to worship God in the way their conscience dictated, and could be loyal citizens without accepting the religion of the State. In such a situation they not only broke across the principle which had been formulated in the Peace of Westphalia, that the religion of the prince ought to be the religion of his subjects, but they also broke with the universal Protestant position which made the Church a phase of the State. That they should suffer prosecution and persecution was only natural. That they should be granted full religious liberty even when not persecuted was hardly to be expected. The political aspect of the Church was too deeply rooted in Protestantism for full religious liberty and equality to come in Europe. The only exceptions were Holland and sections of Switzerland. America was the natural refuge of such of these Non-conformist minorities as could find means to leave Europe. It was there in the fields that had been cleared from the continental forest of the new world that religious liberty was freely developed and the Christian movement released from political entanglement.

Separatist minorities marked a new cleavage in Western Christendom. As the State churches had withdrawn from the Roman Catholic, so these new bodies withdrew from the State churches-sometimes from all participation in government. Nor is this attitude difficult to understand. Government in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can hardly be said to have embodied the ideals which these biblical Christians felt were the great principles of life.

But the separation of Church life from politics was not to cease with the rise of separatist bodies. When groups of members of the State churches themselves migrated to colonial America they passed out from immediate ecclesiastical control of their governments. Thus they too became non-political.