human inventions. He accordingly left them out of his Catechisms, and omitted the invocation of the Trinity from his litany, and declared that he much preferred to say God rather than Trinity, which had a frigid sound. Catholic writers therefore did not hesitate to call him an Arian.

Melanchthon, too, in the first work which he published on the doctrines of the reformers, instead of treating the doctrine of the Trinity as the very center of the Christian faith, passed it by with scarcely a comment, as a mystery which it was not necessary for a Christian to understand; and he also was charged with Arianism.

Even Calvin, who later on, as leader of the Reformation in Geneva, was to cause Servetus to be burned at the stake for denying the doctrine of the Trinity, declared earlier in his career that the Nicene Creed was better suited to be sung as a song than to be used as an expression of faith; while he also expressed disapproval of the Athanasian Creed and dislike of the commonly used prayer to the Holy Trinity, and in his Catechism touched upon the doctrine very lightly. He had in his turn to defend himself against the charge of Arianism and Sabellianism.1 Much the same might be said with regard to the views of other leaders of the Reformation: Zwingli at Zürich, Farel at Geneva, and Ecolampadius at Basel.

Now all this does not in the least mean that the chief leaders of Protestantism were at first more than half Unitarian in belief, or that they deserved the charge of heresy which their opponents flung at them, and which they with one accord denied; but it does mean that they were at least doubtful whether these doctrines of the Catholic faith could be found in the Bible, and whether they should be accepted as an essential part of Protestant belief. It is therefore 1 See page 15.

quite possible that if nothing had occurred to disturb the quiet development of their thought, these doctrines might within a generation or two have come to be quietly ignored as not important to Christian faith, and might at length have been discarded outright as mere inventions of men. Instead of this happening, however, it came to pass that when the reformers of Germany and Switzerland came at length to decide what statements of the Protestant belief they should adopt in their new Confessions, they kept as many as possible of the old Catholic doctrines, and especially emphasized their adherence to the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds.

Now, why and how did this result come about, leaving to Protestantism a system of belief of which one part was based upon the authority of Scripture, while the other was simply taken over from the tradition of the Catholic Church? There were two principal reasons, In the first place, those who first proclaimed beliefs which led in the direction of Unitarianism were leaders in the sect of the Anabaptists, and these beliefs were thus unfortunately associated, as we shall see in the next chapter, with certain extravagant and fanatical tendencies in that sect, which seemed to threaten the overthrow of all social and religious order. The fate of the Reformation still hung in the balance; and the reformers could not afford to take any risks by tolerating a movement which, on account of its radical social tendencies, would be certain to alienate the sympathy of the princes who had thus far supported it; for if these were now to abandon it, it must inevitably fail. Hence the reformers had to remain on conservative ground, and they therefore opposed the Anabaptists and tried to silence their leaders.

In the second place, Servetus, the first writer to attract

much attention in Europe by his writings against the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, instead of gently and subtly undermining it, brought fresh and severe criticism upon Protestantism by the sharpness of his attacks upon what had for a millennium been considered the most sacred dogma of the Christian religion, and he so shocked and angered the reformers themselves that they recoiled from him in horror. But for this reason also, they might perhaps have gradually gone on from their early misgivings about the doctrine until they had left it far behind. As it was, being forced to choose at once between seeming to approve of Servetus and his positions, and remaining on the perfectly safe ground of the old doctrines, they naturally enough did the latter, and with one consent disowned Servetus and denounced his teaching. How this result came about in this twofold way, we shall see in the next following chapters.

CHAPTER VII

ANTITRINITARIANISM AMONG THE EARLY ANABAPTISTS, 1517-1530

We have now to trace through several chapters the story of how, during the half-century after the beginning of the Reformation, Christians who could not accept the orthodox doctrines about the Trinity and the person of Christ tried in various parts of western Europe to proclaim views more or less Unitarian, only sooner or later to be met in each case by excommunication from the Church, banishment from home, imprisonment, or even death itself, until at length countries were found whose laws allowed them freedom of conscience, and thus made it possible for them to worship God after their own manner and to organize churches of their own.

The first of those to adopt and teach these views were found in what is known as the Anabaptist movement. This movement was one which, though it had some able and educated leaders, found its chief following among the humbler classes of society. It was in fact a loose fusion of two quite different elements: a popular religious movement of devout and earnest souls whose spiritual ancestry went back of the Reformation to circles of pious mystics and humble Christians in the bosom of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, out of which had come such devout classics as the Imitation of Christ; and along with this, a popular social movement among the peasantry, whose sense of the wrongs

and oppressions they had long suffered had been stirred up anew by the Reformation, and who looked for a reformed religion to bring them a reformed social order. Both religiously and socially they were the radicals of the Protestant Reformation.

The Anabaptist movement took its rise in 1525 at Zürich, as the radical wing of the Swiss Reformation which had begun there under the leadership of Zwingli; but it soon got beyond control, and it ran into such extravagances that some of its leaders were put to death, and others with their followers were banished. Yet the movement seemed somehow to answer a strong religious and social demand, and in spite of persecutions, and of an edict of the Diet of Speyer in 1529 that every Anabaptist should be put to death, it soon spread like wild-fire over large parts of Western Europe; and in our story we shall meet it in Western Germany, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, Moravia, Poland, Transylvania, and England. These Anabaptists embraced a wide variety of teachings, differing according to their leader or the locality; but the one thing which was common to them all, and which seemed most sharply to distinguish them from other Protestants, was their objection to infant baptism, and their insistence that upon reaching adult Christian life persons who had been baptized in infancy should be baptized again. Hence the name given them by their opponents, Ana-baptists (i. e., re-baptizers); although this name was ere long applied, in more or less reproach, to religious radicals of the period, in general, without much regard to their particular beliefs as to baptism.

Their interest in the question of baptism, however, was only incidental. Their first concern was in the establishment of a pure Church, reformed from the ground up by its strict adherence in every particular to the teachings of