\ 
 
 NOV I ^ 1917 
 
 BR 148 .V47 1917 
 
 Vernon, Ambrose White, 1870 
 
 1951. 
 Some turning-points in 
 
 church history 
 
SOME TURNING-POINTS 
 IN CHURCH HISTORY 
 
SOME TURNING-POINTS I 
 
 IN ; 
 
 CHURCH HISTORY^,.^^ 
 
 NOV 17 191^ 
 
 BEING V'^^y 
 
 THE SOUTHWORTH LECTURES (£/ D(^ \{,}^l%\ V^''^ 
 
 IN ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY' "*^— *" 
 
 FOR THE YEAR 1915 j 
 
 AMBROSE WHITE VERNON 
 
 Minister of Harvard Church 
 Brookline, Mass. 
 
 THE PILGRIM PRESS 
 BOSTON CHICAGO 
 
Copyright 1917 
 By frank M. SHELDON 
 
 THE PILGRIM PRESS 
 BOSTON 
 
TO MY TEACHER AND GUmE 
 
 ARTHUR CUSHMAN McGIFFERT 
 
 PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN UNION THEOLOGICAL 
 
 SEMINARY, NEW YORK CITY, 
 
 IN ABIDING ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION 
 
NOTE 
 
 These lectures are an attempt to consider those par- 
 ticular crises in Church History which have been so 
 far reaching as to determine the form of the organ- 
 ization of the Christian Churches. Their polity 
 has been determined chiefly, I believe, by four 
 outstanding historical events; the founding of 
 the Church, the establishment of the Christian 
 Ministry, the organization of delimited National 
 Churches and the formation of free Churches, 
 independent of both ecclesiastical and civil 
 authority. One lecture is devoted to each of 
 these pivotal events and to them a fifth is added 
 which deals with the establishment of free churches 
 on the shores of America. 
 
 The first of these lectures appeared in The Harvard 
 Theological Review for January, 1917, and three 
 of them have been delivered at Union Theological 
 Seminary. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE PAGE 
 
 I The Founding of the Church ... 3 
 
 II The Beginnings of the Christian 
 
 Ministry 33 
 
 III The Beginnings of the National 
 
 Churches 63 
 
 IV The Beginnings of the Free Churches 93 
 
 V Contribution of Congregationalism to 
 
 Church Polity 125 
 
LECTURE I 
 THE FOUNDING OF THE CHURCH 
 
LECTURE I 
 THE FOUNDING OF THE CHURCH 
 
 The church has come to have an enduring 
 place not only in history but in thought. At 
 least since the writing of The City of God it has 
 decided some of the most vital questions con- 
 fronting us because of a peculiar sanctity at- 
 tached to it. It is not therefore out of place 
 to demand from time to time that it show us its 
 credentials. The present lecture is an attempt 
 to discover if there is anything peculiarly 
 sacred about the manner of its founding that 
 would justify us in ascribing unique spiritual 
 authority to it. 
 
 And the surprising fact which we discover is, 
 that we cannot discover any actual founding 
 of the church whatever. We cannot be sure 
 that the church was founded in any accurate 
 sense of that term; it is probably more in 
 accord with the facts to say that the movement 
 which eventually became known as the church 
 grew. Creation by fiat seems as mythical in 
 this sphere as in more material realms. It 
 seems as if there were a church almost before 
 its members knew it. 
 
 In endeavoring to show that the founding of 
 the church is obscure and to discover some rea- 
 
 3 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 sons for such obscurity, we shall be obliged to 
 see if we can trace the rise of the idea of 
 the church in the minds of the early friends 
 and disciples of Jesus. Of course ideas and 
 words are never quite conterminous. A word 
 never covers an idea. If a word is laid on top 
 of an idea, the idea peeps out all around it. Yet 
 at the same time before an idea can clothe itself 
 with a word it is in a pre-natal state and can- 
 not be said to be properly born. And so, it 
 seems to me, our first, but not our only, duty 
 in attempting to come upon the birth-hour of 
 the Christian church, is to discover, if we may, 
 when the word ^^ church'' was first applied, 
 either by its friends or its foes or its members, 
 to the group of people who were held together 
 by common devotion to Jesus of Nazareth, 
 whom they recognized as the Christ. 
 
 Strictly speaking, there is only one thing to 
 say: that we do not know when this word was 
 first applied. But because we cannot know pre- 
 cisely, we are not excused from finding out all 
 that we can know; because our sources are not 
 all that we would wish them to be, there is no 
 good reason for refusing to find out from them 
 all that they have to tell us. We must there- 
 fore examine those early chapters of the Acts 
 of the Apostles which contain virtually all that 
 has even the faintest suggestion of being first- 
 hand information about the earliest months 
 and years in and about Jerusalem after the 
 death of Jesus. 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 There are so few things that are certain 
 about the authorship of the historical books of 
 the New Testament that it is refreshing to 
 come upon one of the few in connection with 
 this book of the Acts. There can be no doubt 
 that it was written by the same hand as that 
 which wrote the Third Gospel. In the preface 
 to that Gospel, the author virtually tells us that 
 he has consulted various sources for informa- 
 tion. The structure and language of the Acts 
 lead us to the supposition that when he came 
 to write the Acts he followed the practice he 
 had used in wl^iting the Gospel. Students of 
 the book have fathered many theories concern- 
 ing its structure, but they have had most to 
 say about two sources which many of them 
 have believed to underlie this work. One of 
 these is the familiar *^We'' source, so called 
 because of the sudden and unexplained appear- 
 ance of the first personal pronoun in some of 
 the later travels of Paul; the other has been 
 even more vaguely denominated and it has 
 been supposed to underlie the first, say, twelve 
 chapters of the book, which are devoted to giv- 
 ing us a picture of the beginnings of the church 
 in Jerusalem. Harnack, who has recently made 
 a valiant attempt to identify the author of the 
 ^*We'^ passages with the author of the entire 
 work, still admits Luke's use of probably writ- 
 ten sources for the first portion of the book.^ 
 The book itself cannot have been written of 
 
 1 Lukas der Arzt, pp. 84-6. Die Apostelgeschichte, Capitel 5. 
 
 5 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 course before the last event therein narrated 
 — the arrival of Paul in Eome. By that time, 
 as the letters of Paul testify, the word 
 ^^ church'' was applied as a matter of course 
 to the local Christian communities. The author 
 of the Acts, a Pauline admirer, would, there- 
 fore, be accustomed to use the word ^* church'' 
 for the various groups of Christian disciples 
 of whom he was writing and in particular for 
 the church at Jerusalem, which Paul so 
 peculiarly revered. Under these circum- 
 stances, we must attribute either to a phenom- 
 enal intuition or to his sources the astonishing 
 fact that until ^Hhe persecution against the 
 church that was in Jerusalem" arose on the 
 outburst and martyrdom of Stephen,^ we have 
 only one single instance of the use of the word 
 *^ church" for the Christian circle. 
 
 We hear of the filling out of the apostolate, 
 of the descent of the spirit in the upper room, 
 of the large addition to the Christian company 
 through the inspired speech of Peter, of the 
 first startling miracle performed by him and 
 John, of the imprisonment of the apostles and 
 their courage and release, of the growth of the 
 *^ multitude which believed" and of their 
 brotherly life, and though it seems to us the 
 most natural thing in the world to speak of 
 these events as the beginnings of the church, 
 that notable word is not once employed. We 
 are further instructed concerning the deceit 
 
 ^Ads 8:1. 
 
 6 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 and death of Ananias and Sapphira, of the re- 
 newed imprisonment and release of the apos- 
 tles, of the strife between the Hellenists and 
 the Hebrews, of the appointment of seven men 
 to see that they were treated equally in the dis- 
 tribution of food, of the character and genius 
 of Stephen, of his epoch-making speech in the 
 temple, of the rage of his hearers and of his 
 martyrdom; and though we should expect the 
 word ^^ church'' in every paragraph, it occurs 
 but once as a designation of the disciples. And 
 its occurrence is neither in connection with any 
 of the pivotal events of these stirring days, 
 nor in the heart of any of the narratives, nor 
 in those wonderful speeches of Peter and 
 Stephen, so full of verisimilitude and breath- 
 ing the spirit of the most primitive Christian 
 theology ; we find it in what I think may, under 
 these circumstances, be confidently regarded 
 as one of those seams with which an author is 
 accustomed to join together independent nar- 
 ratives. Just at the close of the story of the 
 death of Ananias and Sapphira, and before 
 the transition to the healing ministry of Peter 
 and the imprisonment of the apostles, we read 
 these words: ^*And great fear came upon the 
 whole church and upon all who heard these 
 things.''^ This is the solitary use of that 
 classic word in The Book of the Acts until the 
 time of Stephen. Instead of this word 
 *^ church/' which we should have used con- 
 
 8 Ads 5 : 11. 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 stantly and which all our teachers use 
 constantly in the retelling of these brilliant 
 narratives, we find other words, much less 
 pretentious, to us much less characteristic — 
 *^ believers, '' ^^ brethren,'' ^Hheir own com- 
 pany," and *^ disciples.'' Of these the word 
 ^^ disciples" seems to be the technical word, or 
 to be becoming the technical word, for this un- 
 technical group of people who were expecting 
 their Lord from heaven. It might have re- 
 mained such, had not, as we read, ^^the disciples 
 been called Christians first at Antioch. " * In- 
 deed until, in the last part of the eleventh 
 chapter, after the conversion of both Paul and 
 Cornelius has been recorded, we get to Antioch, 
 whither certain men of Cyprus and Cyrene fled 
 on the death of Stephen and where they 
 preached the Lord Jesus to Greeks as well as 
 Jews, the word ^^ church" is used only in the 
 seams of the narrative. Even in those seams, 
 it occurs but four times and save for the obvi- 
 ously editorial sentence, ^^So the church had 
 peace," ^ it does not occur at all in that portion 
 of the early chapters of Acts which on alto- 
 gether other grounds Harnack assigns to the 
 ancient Jerusalemic source.^ 
 
 This peculiar state of affairs must not be 
 dismissed from our minds until we have in- 
 quired whether it may have any historical sig- 
 
 < Acts 11 :36. 
 
 ^ Acts 9 :S1. 
 
 « Die Apostelgeschichte, pp. 1j^8-152. 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 nificance for our inquiry concerning the origin 
 of the church. 
 
 I have said that the word ^ ^church'' was 
 never used in the heart of the early narratives 
 or in the course of the early speeches to de- 
 scribe the disciples of Jesus. But once in the 
 midst of Stephen's speech we find these words: 
 ''This is he [that Moses] . . . which was in 
 the church in the wilderness with the angel 
 that spake to him in the m,ount Sinai. ' ' ^ The 
 word ' ' church, ' ' though apparently not applied 
 to the Christian groups in the earliest times, 
 was applied by a prominent member of those 
 groups to the Israelitish nation quite as a mat- 
 ter of course. That this is no mere accident is 
 abundantly proved by reference to the Septua- 
 gint. Here we find the word ^'ecclesia,'' 
 ''church," used 71 times to translate "kahaP' 
 or its derivatives. It is also used 23 times in 
 those parts of the Septuagint for which we 
 have no Hebrew original. It is always em- 
 ployed as the equivalent of our word " assem- 
 bly '^ or "company.'' It is the word usually 
 employed to denote the assembly of Israel, in 
 what we should call the ecclesiastical or exclu- 
 sive sense. When, for example, we read that 
 "an Ammonite and a Moabite shall not enter 
 into the assembly of God forever," the word 
 for "assembly" is the word "ecclesia." When 
 it is said that "the transgressor shall be cut 
 off from the assembly of my people," it is 
 
 ■> Ads 7 : 38. 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 again the word '^ecclesia'' that is used. Har- 
 nack calls attention to the fact that in the 
 Septuagint ^^ecclesia'^ is usually the word used 
 to translate *'kahal/' the most sacred word 
 for the entire nation, whereas * ^ synagogue ^ ' is 
 used to translate ^^edhah/^ a more secular 
 word.^ 
 
 It therefore seems proper to suppose that 
 the reason why the early Christians did not 
 employ the word ^* church '^ to designate their 
 own gatherings is because they used it to 
 designate the assembly of the Jews to which 
 they still regarded themselves as belonging. 
 And that the author of the Acts preserved this 
 interesting fact in his sources may be due to 
 his knowledge of the Septuagint from which 
 his Old Testament citations are taken. 
 
 While the fact that the early disciples of 
 Jesus still regarded themselves as ^'Hebrews 
 of the Hebrews'^ is well known of course to 
 scholars, though not always duly appreciated 
 even by them, it is widely ignored by most of 
 us. This ignorance of ours makes it still dif- 
 ficult for us to do justice to the position and 
 the emotions of that mother ** church^' in Jeru- 
 salem. It is, however, written clearly on the 
 records that the early Christians *^were con- 
 tinually in the temple blessing God,^' ^ that the 
 apostles '^went up to the temple at the hour of 
 prayer, ' ' ^^ after they had seen the risen Lord, 
 
 8 Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums, p. 292. Note 4- 
 » Luke 24 : 63. 
 ^° Acts 3:1. 
 
 10 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 just as ihej had before, and that they preached 
 in one of the porches of the temple " — and 
 probably in the synagogues — as those who felt 
 themselves there at home. 
 
 The old Latin prologue to Mark^s Gospel 
 asserts that Mark, after having become a Chris- 
 tian, cut off his thumb so that he should not be 
 eligible for the priesthood.^^ This tradition 
 confirms the letter and the spirit of the early 
 chapters of Acts, and indicates that to the Jews 
 faith in Jesus as Christ did not disqualify a 
 man for ritual service in the holy place so 
 surely as the lack of a thumb. Nothing was 
 further from the minds of the disciples than to 
 cut themselves off from the church or assembly 
 of the Jews. Why should they take such a 
 step? They alone among their people had been 
 permitted to recognize the Messiah. Soon their 
 leader was to descend from heaven to restore 
 the kingdom to Israel and to choose from 
 their group those who were to reign over the 
 tribes of the nation. Would such a confident 
 hope lead them to make less or more of those 
 laws which had been given to prepare the way 
 of the Lord and which they had kept in com- 
 pany with him I He was crucified not for de- 
 nouncing the Jews, but for claiming to be the 
 Jews' prince. They had not separated from 
 their church when they were baptized by John ; 
 thereby they had been only more surely ad- 
 
 " Ads S : 11, 12. 
 
 ^"^Cf. Weiss: Das alteste Evangelium, p. 400. 
 
 11 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 mitted into membership of the coming king- 
 dom of the Messiah. And when either at Pen- 
 tecost or at the time of the earthquake they had 
 been baptized with the Holy Ghost, they were 
 not thereby separated from their people; they 
 were merely given the power to bring that king- 
 dom in. More than ever they recognized them- 
 selves as necessary to the redemption and to 
 the exaltation of the Jewish nation. It was 
 they who were to enable their countrymen to 
 repent so that their sins might be blotted out, 
 and in consequence the Lord might be sent from 
 heaven. Hence they called themselves ** be- 
 lievers'' as distinguished from their unbeliev- 
 ing countrymen, ^'disciples'' as distinguished 
 from crucifiers and mockers of their Messiah, 
 and *' brethren" as their Lord had indeed al- 
 ready called them; but the thought of cutting 
 themselves off from the church of the Jews, 
 the assembly of the people of God, did not 
 occur to them for a long time. And until it so 
 occurred to them, the church of Jesus Christ, 
 in any accurate sense of the words, as distin- 
 guished from the church of the Jewish people, 
 could not have been founded. 
 
 When we ask ourselves, therefore, regard- 
 ing the founding of the Christian church, we 
 ask ourselves to discover the point of time or 
 the point of consciousness when the Christian 
 disciples regarded themselves not as a part of 
 the Jewish nation but as a substitute for the 
 
 12 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 Jewish nation, not as belonging to the people 
 of God but as constituting the people of God. 
 
 And here it may be well to repeat the state- 
 ment which was made at the outset and which 
 I hope has become already better established. 
 We cannot come upon any one moment of his- 
 tory when the church was founded; we cannot 
 tell whether the church was founded ; it is prob- 
 ably more in accord with the facts to say that 
 it grew. Our sources do not record any final 
 and explicit break of the disciples with the 
 Jewish nation. They do, however, record such 
 a change of the relations of the disciples with 
 the Jewish church at one particular point and 
 perhaps also at one particular place that we 
 may say that then the church consciousness, 
 absent before, had arisen. 
 
 In our search for that moment when the early 
 disciples regarded themselves as the holy 
 group which had been substituted in the favor 
 of God for the ancient people of Israel, we find 
 ^YQ events which chiefly call for our scrutiny. 
 It may also be said that these five events seem 
 to church historians somehow or other to mark 
 the beginning of the church. 
 
 The first of these events occurred while our 
 Lord was yet upon the earth, going himself 
 habitually into the synagogue on the Sabbath 
 and regarding the temple as his Father ^s house. 
 It is that solemn moment that is set aside for 
 us all from other moments of time, when at 
 Caesarea Philippi, on a brief retirement from 
 
 13 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 the confines of Palestine, Simon Peter recog- 
 nized Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. Now 
 there can be no question that that moment 
 marked the definite recognition of the supreme 
 authority of Jesus Christ, and that it helped 
 to give to the words spoken on the mount and 
 by the sea, to the parables of the publican and 
 the prodigal and the ministering Samaritan, 
 the carrying power through which they swept 
 through — and swept out — the world. But does 
 that recognition of Jesus as the Messiah 
 amount to the laying of the corner stone of the 
 Christian Church? There is no such thought 
 in the earliest of the Gospels which report the 
 event.^^ Only in the Gospel of Matthew do we 
 find an interpolation in the older account which 
 might be construed in that sense. There we 
 read that Jesus blessed Peter for recognizing 
 him as the Messiah, and added, **Thou art 
 Peter, and upon this rock will I build my 
 church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail 
 against it. ' ' " 
 
 It is to this passage that those resort who like 
 to call Jesus ^^the Founder of the Church.'' 
 But there are three reasons which render it im- 
 possible to believe that we have here to do with 
 such an event. In the first place, the verb is in 
 the future rather than in the present tense. If 
 Jesus is to be regarded as the personal founder 
 of the church, it must be at some future and un- 
 
 13 Mark 8 : 29. 
 " Matt. 16 : 18. 
 
 14 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 discoverable moment. In the second place, the 
 words, if spoken by Jesus, would almost in- 
 evitably have been treasured with his most 
 sacred utterances. It is well-nigh inconceiv- 
 able that Mark would have omitted them as too 
 unimportant to mention, or that they would 
 have found — as seems the case — ^no place in 
 the Logia, the earliest collection of Jesus' say- 
 ings. The fact that the word '^church" is 
 never put into Jesus' mouth in the New Testa- 
 ment except here and in another passage in 
 this same Gospel of Matthew is very significant. 
 And the second passage bears even more un- 
 mistakable fniarks of a late origin. There Jesus 
 is represented as saying, **If a brother sin 
 against thee and thou tell it to the church, and 
 he refuse to hear the church, let him be unto 
 thee as the Gentile and the publican.'''' Not 
 only the word ^'church" but the words *^ Gen- 
 tile ' ' and ' ' publican ' ' seem utterly out of place 
 on Jesus' lips, in the significance in which they 
 are used. Moreover the conception of Jesus' 
 band of disciples as a disciplinary organization 
 seems quite unhistorical. If Jesus used the 
 words at all, the church to which he alluded was 
 the Jewish Church and not the Christian one. 
 And in the third place, we are confident that 
 the recognition of Jesus as the Messiah does 
 not mark the founding of the Christian Church, 
 because after that recognition Jesus went with 
 his disciples into the temple and purified its 
 
 15 Matt. 18 : 17. 
 
 15 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 courts, and partook of the feast of the Passover 
 with his disciples, as though they were all still 
 members of the Jewish Church. In it, indeed, 
 he had peculiar power, but to it he and they 
 alike belonged. The break with the Jews had 
 not yet come. 
 
 Weizsacker and Bacon are at one in regard- 
 ing Peter rather than Jesus as the Founder of 
 the church. They regard him as such, how- 
 ever, not because of his recognition of Jesus at 
 Csesarea Philippi as the Messiah, but because 
 he was the first to whom Christ was revealed 
 in resurrection glory." ^^He appeared to 
 Peter'' — this phrase out of the 15th of 1st 
 Corinthians seems to them to point to a greater 
 vision of Peter than any he liad while Jesus 
 walked by his side, and in virtue of which he 
 became the founder of the Christian Church. 
 Yet they hesitate to say definitely that the 
 appearance of Jesus to Peter marked the 
 founding of the church ; the event was too per- 
 sonal for that, and, as personal, it has quite 
 disappeared from the narrative of the Acts. 
 McGiffert, who inclines to the belief that Peter 
 was the ^^ second founder of the church'' ^^ does, 
 however, single out another definite moment — 
 of great importance in Christian history — for 
 our attention in seeking for the origin of the 
 church. ^'That Christianity has had a his- 
 
 16 Weizsacker: Das apostoUsche Zeitalter, pp. 5, 13, 15. Bacon: Founding 
 of the Church. Chapter 2. 
 " Apostolic Age, p. 4S. 
 
 16 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 tory/' lie writes/^ "i^ due to the fact that these 
 disciples did not go back disheartened to their 
 old pursuits and live on as if they had never 
 known Jesus, but that on the contrary, filled 
 with the belief that their Master still lived and 
 conscious of holding a commission from him, 
 they banded themselves together with the re- 
 solve of completing his work and preparing 
 their countrymen for his return. Their resolve, 
 put into execution when they left Galilee and 
 returned to Jerusalem, marks the real starting- 
 point in the history of the church. ' ' If indeed 
 they came to any such clear-cut resolve, the mo- 
 ment of that resolve plays an important part 
 in the gathering together of Christian believers, 
 but that gathering would have regarded itself 
 not as a church but as a favored group within 
 the Jewish Church. Preuschen, who also em- 
 phasizes the place of Peter among the Chris- 
 tian disciples, seems better to express the facts 
 when he says, *^ Peter gathered a company of 
 like-minded people, but without giving up com- 
 munion with the Jewish people and the Jewish 
 faith. ''^^ 
 
 The Day of Pentecost is the third great mo- 
 ment in the history of Christianity w'hich has 
 been hit upon for the founding of the Christian 
 Church, which seems so curiously to baffle our 
 search. Of all these moments it seems most 
 widely chosen for this great honor. ^^ While 
 
 18 Apostolic Age, p. ^2. 
 
 19 Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte : Das Altertum, bearbeitet von Erwin 
 Preuschen, p. 37. 
 
 17 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 the apostles and disciples,'' writes Philip 
 Schaff, ^^ about one hundred and twenty in 
 number, no doubt mostly Galileans, were as- 
 sembled before the morning devotions of the 
 festal day and were waiting in prayer for the 
 fulfilment of the promise, the exalted Saviour 
 sent from his heavenly throne the Holy Spirit 
 upon them and founded his church upon earth. 
 The church of the new covenant was ushered 
 into existence with startling signs which filled 
 the spectators with wonder and fear. ' ' ^^ And 
 George P. Fisher, not quite so certainly, writes, 
 ^^With the day of Pentecost the career of the 
 'Church Militant' fairly begins. "^^ And Wil- 
 helm Moller, still more cautiously, says, *'The 
 Spirit, proceeding from the Ascended One, not 
 the earthly manifestation of Jesus nor his 
 teaching in itself, is the really church-founding 
 [element], yet even this [is to be taken] in the 
 sense that the separation of this particular fel- 
 lowship from the general religious-national 
 fellowship of the Jewish people was first the 
 result of a gradual process."-^ 
 
 But the result of that outpouring of the 
 spirit was not the founding of a church but 
 the preaching to brethren of an already estab- 
 lished church by those who were thus spiritu- 
 ally endowed from on high. So far was Peter, 
 who was the spokesman of those thus filled with 
 the spirit, from thinking that a new church had 
 
 ■ 20 History of the Christian Church, Vol. I, p. 228. 
 ^^Ibid., Vol. I. p. 19. 
 ^^Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte, Vol. I, p. 60. 
 
 18 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 been founded and that he had been cut off from 
 his people, that he appealed to his fellow Jew- 
 ish Church members to hear the prophet of 
 whom Moses had testified, saying, ^' Every soul 
 that heareth not that prophet shall be cut off 
 from among the people. ' '^^ Peter evidently ex- 
 pected that the Lord was about to purify that 
 ancient church, which had been almost ^* since 
 the world began.'' It is impossible therefore 
 to think that the Day of Pentecost marks the 
 moment when the disciples believed themselves 
 to supplant the children of Israel as the chosen 
 people of God. They were reformers, not 
 revolutionists. 
 
 The fourth event, of sufficient importance to 
 call for a brief mention, is the choice of seven 
 men by the early believers to see to it that 
 equitable division of food and necessaries of life 
 was made between the Jewish and Hellenistic 
 widows among the disciples in Jerusalem. It 
 is hard for us not to use the word *^ church'' in 
 this connection, but it does not appear to have 
 entered into the mind of the author of the Acts ; 
 ^^When the number of the disciples was mul- 
 tiplying," is the sentence with which he intro- 
 duces the narrative.^* This incident was 
 enhanced in its importance for a long time by 
 the almost universal belief among church his- 
 torians that it marked the institution of the 
 diaconate, thereby regarded as the earliest 
 
 23 Acts 3 : 23. 
 ^i Acts 6:1. 
 
 19 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 body of which they had positive information in 
 the early church. A more careful reading of 
 the account, however, has brought to light that 
 these seven men were chosen for a temporary 
 and definite task, and that they are never once 
 named deacons in the book which narrates 
 their selection by the disciples. Their selection, 
 therefore, does not betray any church-con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 There is left for our final scrutiny an event 
 that is connected with one of these seven men 
 who were chosen to oversee the distribution 
 of food among the widows of the disciples in 
 Jerusalem. Stephen had engaged in serious 
 and keen dispute with the members of one of 
 the synagogues in Jerusalem. It is not alto- 
 gether clear what that dispute was about. But 
 so fundamental was it in character that his 
 opponents summoned him before the council 
 and the high priest called upon him for his de- 
 fence. Nothing can be clearer than that 
 Stephen was recognized as a Jew in regular 
 standing, and that he recognized the high priest 
 as the chief power in the church to which he 
 felt that he belonged and concerning which, 
 indeed, by that very title he spoke in the de- 
 fence that he made before the council. To him 
 the church was still the Jewish church, the 
 people of God. In his defence, he seems to 
 have laid emphasis on two quite diverse points 
 — the blindness of heart that had always char- 
 acterized Israel, and the temporary character of 
 
 20 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 all buildings made with hands, whether syna- 
 gogue, tabernacle, or even temple. The report 
 of his speech is too fragmentary for us to be 
 certain concerning his thought. That he men- 
 tioned Jesus is clear, but precisely what he 
 said about him we cannot tell. It seems, how- 
 ever, overwhelmingly probable that he set him 
 higher than Moses both before God and in the 
 church of the Jewish people. At the close of 
 his defence the council and the witnesses stoned 
 him to death. Thus they separated him from 
 the people of God, from the church, in the man- 
 ner prescribed in the law. The disciples were 
 aware that he had been stoned for the convic- 
 tions which many of them shared. It may be 
 that the closest friends of Jesus did not agree 
 with Stephen in what he may have said about 
 the temporary character of Jewish institutions, 
 for we read that the apostles remained at Jeru- 
 salem during the persecution which now broke 
 out there upon the disciples. But a great num- 
 ber of the most loyal Christians were compelled 
 to flee from the sacred city, under a virtual 
 sentence of excommunication from the church 
 to which they had up to that time given most 
 devoted adhesion. The authorities of the 
 church of God had denied their right to par- 
 take of the worship of the temple and of the 
 privileges and promises of the fathers. What 
 was to be done? In the Book of Acts we read: 
 ^^They therefore that were scattered abroad 
 upon the tribulation that arose about Stephen 
 
 21 
 
Some Turning-points in Church History 
 
 travelled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and 
 Antioch, speaking the word to none save only 
 to the Jews. But there were some of them, men 
 of Cyprus and Cyrene" — of the very syna- 
 gogue to which Stephen seems to have been 
 attached — ^^who, when they were come to An- 
 tioch, spake unto the Greeks also, preaching 
 the Lord Jesus. And it came to pass that even 
 for a whole year they were gathered together 
 in the church, and that the disciples were called 
 Christians first at Antioch. ' ' ^^ 
 
 The fact that in this short passage, which I 
 have curtailed in citing, the infrequent word 
 ^' church'^ occurs twice, has some significance, 
 particularly as ft occurs in the heart of the 
 narrative; but the strikins: thing is that the 
 disciples were no longer Jews either in their 
 o^\Ti eyes or in the eyes of outsiders. They were 
 a new company, made up of Jews and Greeks, a 
 new religious group, whose main characteristics 
 were developed from their allegiance to a 
 Christ, whatever that term may have meant to 
 those who first dubbed them by the immortal 
 nickname ''Christian.'^ But we can tell what 
 it meant to the disciples. To all of them, 
 whether Greeks or Jews, Jesus was the Christ. 
 Certainly here has arisen the consciousness of 
 being a peculiar people of God, of having a 
 standing with the Messiah, which the Jews as 
 such no longer shared with them. Throughout 
 the book of the Acts we find a continual sense 
 
 25 Acts 11 : 19, 20, 26. 
 
 22 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 of tlie turning from the Jews, who rejected 
 their own Christ, to the Gentiles, who accepted 
 the Jewish Christ and yet no longer the Jewish 
 Christ. For, as the Fourth Gospel has it, he 
 had come ^^unto his own and his own had re- 
 ceived him not. But as many as received him, 
 to them gave he the right to become children 
 of God, who were born not of blood but of 
 God.''^® Jesus soon ceased to be the prince 
 of the Jewish nation and became ^^the Head 
 over all things to the church, which is . . . the 
 fulness of Him that filleth all in all.''^^ The 
 church was the kingdom of God; in it Jesus 
 reigned; to it he brought his gifts. It was the 
 saints in Corinth and Rome and Ephesus that 
 were to judge the angels.^^ They were in time 
 past no people, but they had become the people 
 of God.^^ When this feeling arose, the word 
 ^^ church, '* heretofore used to denote assem- 
 blies which considered themselves sacred, 
 whether of Diana in Ephesus or of the people 
 of Jehovah, was naturally applied to the Chris- 
 tian disciples. It was applied at first perhaps 
 to all Christian disciples in their capacity of 
 people of God, but it soon became common to 
 call each local Christian assembly by that 
 name. 
 
 I do not wish to be understood as locating 
 the origin of the church by detecting the pres- 
 
 ^6 John 1 : 12, 13. 
 
 2' Ephesians 1 : 22, 23. 
 
 28 1 Corinthians 6 : 3. 
 
 29 / Peter 2 : 10. 
 
 23 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 ence or absence of any single word. The word 
 ^^ church" had never come in the Septuagint to 
 have a strictly sacred meaning. For example, 
 there occurs in the Psalms the phrase, ^Hhe 
 assembly of evil doers, '^^^ where the word 
 which is translated by '^ assembly'^ in English 
 is translated by ^^ecclesia'' in Greek. We must 
 by no means decide the origin of the church by 
 the mere use of the Greek word for it. And yet 
 I feel that, roughly speaking, the growth of the 
 idea ^* church" among the disciples may be said 
 to coincide with the use of the word ^^ecclesia" 
 to designate their gatherings. And I find very 
 great significance in Epiphanius' declaration — 
 which seems to bewilder some of the historians 
 — that the Jewish Christians rejected the word 
 ^^ church" as a designation for their gatherings 
 in favor of the word * ^ synagogue. " ^^ They 
 could not bring themselves to give their endur- 
 ing allegiance to anything but the Jewish 
 Church nor to find in Jesus anything but the 
 Jewish Messiah, whom they were fortunate 
 enough to recognize. I feel that Weizsacker is 
 right in affirming that the Christians in general 
 would not call themselves a synagogue, because 
 they believed themselves to be in possession of 
 the kingdom of God and to constitute the church 
 of God.^^ *^The church of God" was perhaps 
 the first name rather than ^Hhe church of 
 Christ," because it was ^Hhe people of God 
 
 30 Psalms 26 : 5. 
 
 ^^Epiphanii Opera: ed. Dindorfius, Vol. JI. p. 110. 
 
 ^"^ Weizsacker: Das apostolische Zeitalter, pp. 39-40. 
 
 24 
 
 M 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 and not 'Hhe people of Christ'' for which it was 
 substituted.^^ 
 
 But it is not the use of the word ''church" 
 upon which I would place the chief emphasis. 
 It is used but 23 times in the entire book of the 
 Acts,^* that is to say, infrequently even after 
 the founding of the church in Antioch. It is 
 true that while it is little used, and not used at 
 all in most of the early chapters of the Acts 
 where we should have constantly expected it, it 
 is used constantly in the letters of Paul. But 
 as I have said, we must not depend upon the use 
 of a word to point us to the moment when the 
 thing the word denotes arose. Our idea of the 
 founding of the church depends in large degree 
 upon the connotation of the word ' ' church ' ' for 
 us. It seems to me that by the word "church'' 
 the early Christians meant the peculiar people 
 of God. In Sohm's masterly Kirchenrecht the 
 church is said to signify "a gathering of the 
 New Testament Covenant people before and 
 with God."^^ That they were His peculiar 
 covenant people seems to have dawned upon 
 them in Antioch, or going to Antioch, where 
 they were first set off from the rest of the 
 world as Christians at about the time when that 
 nickname was first fastened upon them. There- 
 fore it seems to me correct to say that the 
 church — in the sense in which its first members 
 understood it — was founded neither by the 
 
 33 C/. Acts 20 :28; Gal. 1 : 22; 1 Thess. 1:1. 
 
 34 Cf. Harnack: Lukas der Arzt, p. 25, n. 3. 
 ^^Kirchenrecht, Vol. I, p. 18. 
 
 25 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 Lord (save as all things were believed to be 
 under His control) nor by Peter, neither at 
 Caesarea Philippi nor on the Day of Pentecost, 
 but when, after the excommunication of 
 Stephen, the disciples found themselves ban- 
 ished from the church of the Jews and yet not 
 without God or hope in the world. It was 
 founded in part by those who upon that perse- 
 cution went everywhere preaching the word — 
 and making a people out of those who had 
 never been a people — and partly also by the 
 council of the Jews who stoned Stephen as he 
 was calling upon God and saying, ^'Lord Jesus, 
 receive my spirit!'' 
 
 If this be true, or in the direction of the 
 truth, the exact moment of the founding of the 
 church cannot be marked off accurately, nor is 
 it important so to mark it off. The church was 
 an outgrowth of historical development and 
 came into being through the opposition of 
 the foes of Jesus to the claim of his friends to a 
 place in the church of the Jews to which he and 
 they had alike belonged and which was un- 
 speakably precious to them all. Stephen and 
 those who stoned him must be regarded as the 
 most likely founders of the Christian Church. 
 
 These beginnings of the Christian Church 
 justify two considerations. In the first place, 
 neither Jesus nor his earliest disciples were 
 separatists. They did not separate. They 
 were separated by the authorities from the 
 church to which they belonged. The love of 
 
 26 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 Jesus for the Jewish Church, for its temple and 
 its synagogues, is apt in our time to be ob- 
 scured. He began his public career at Naza- 
 reth by employing the opportunity open to Jew- 
 ish teachers in the synagogue. Among the 
 events which brought about his death, his start- 
 ling cleansing of the temple occupies a prom- 
 inent place. To him the Jewish temple was a 
 house of prayer for all nations, a place where 
 all men were to find access to their God, as 
 children in a Father's house, a place wide 
 enough for him and inexpressibly sacred to 
 him. He realized that the Jewish people 
 needed a new conception of the mercy and lov- 
 ing-kindness of their God. But there was noth- 
 ing further from his mind than the proclama- 
 tion of a new God or the establishment of a 
 new family. He appealed constantly to the 
 Scriptures as an authority against the newer 
 traditions of his time. He had no wish to sep- 
 arate from the Ten Commandments and from 
 the twenty-third Psalm. He had only come to 
 fulfil the expectations of men whom he regarded 
 as the very spokesmen of God. One of the 
 great problems of New Testament study is the 
 degree to which he opened the Kingdom of 
 Heaven to any save Jewish believers. The God 
 he revered was the God of his fathers ; it was 
 of that God that he believed himself the Son. 
 We cannot of course conceive that he believed 
 Jews only to have a duty toward God, but, un- 
 less our sources utterly deceive us, he believed 
 
 27 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 that the highest duty men could have was 
 toward the God of the Jews. A Bible without 
 the New Testament is to us an absurdity; a 
 Bible without the Old Testament would have 
 been to him a blasphemy; perhaps we ought 
 to say that any other Bible than the Old Testa- 
 ment was for him unthinkable. Be that as it 
 may, Jesus was anything but a dogmatist; he 
 was not beginning religious history de novo; 
 the majestic utterances of the Jewish prophets 
 were to him a revelation of the eternal God. 
 Inclusion and reverence were the marks of his 
 religious temper; the fanaticism and narrow- 
 ness of come-outers seem completely foreign to 
 his spirit ; he came to expand and not to contract 
 the boundaries of the family of God. I am sure 
 that he would regard any holy fellowship as in- 
 complete which did not include the sublime 
 ethical monotheists from whom he sprang. 
 What he would have us remember is that he 
 died not by the Jews but for them. 
 
 And the second consideration is thus: the 
 spirit of Jesus was much more important to 
 our Lord than the church of Jesus. With the 
 one he would have identified himself; of the 
 other he knew nothing. If we must choose be- 
 tween the spirit of Jesus without a church and 
 the church of Jesus without his spirit, we 
 will choose the former. Undue attention 
 to the organization of the church and to 
 its useful ceremonies has blurred, distorted, 
 almost erased, the spirit of Jesus, which 
 
 28 
 
The Founding of the Church 
 
 was before the church and is independent 
 of it. There can be no doubt that history 
 has justified by the stern law of necessity 
 the gathering and the maintenance of the 
 Christian Church. It embraces for us, as for 
 the fellow-believers of Stephen and of Paul, all 
 people who believe on God through Jesus, His 
 well-beloved Son, and who through that belief 
 stand in a peculiar relation of intimacy with 
 Him. But no more with us than with Jesus is 
 the church the object of our spiritual allegi- 
 ance; our supreme devotion must, like his, be 
 reserved for God and men. And the ultimate 
 purpose of our lives must be not to build up 
 a strong church but to open the human heart 
 through all possible means to the divine spirit 
 of Jesus. 
 
 29 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 MINISTRY 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 MINISTRY 
 
 The first great moment in ecclesiastical his- 
 tory, as we have seen, was the establishment 
 of the church. The precise moment of its es- 
 tablishment eluded us, but we felt that we 
 could come within a few years of it. And al- 
 though the cause of its establishment was not 
 exactly stated in the early records, it seemed 
 comparatively clear that it was brought about 
 by the decision of the leaders of the Jews not 
 to allow the followers of Jesus to worship with 
 them. It was through their expulsion from the 
 Jewish Church that the early disciples were 
 forced to believe that God had gathered a new 
 church for Himself out of those who recognized 
 the Messiahship of Jesus. And when the Gen- 
 tiles also accepted him they realized that those 
 who were his people were called to be the 
 people of God and so to separate themselves 
 from all other people of the world. 
 
 The second great moment in ecclesiastical 
 history was another moment of separation, the 
 separation of the Christian clergy from the 
 laity of the church, the origin of the Christian 
 ministry as a distinct class among Christian 
 
 33 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 believers, the fixing of a deep gulf between 
 ordinary and extraordinary Christian disciples. 
 We must now try to discover the origin of this 
 fateful distinction in the Christian church and 
 the causes which produced it. 
 
 Among Protestant scholars, there seems 
 to be little difference of opinion either about the 
 beginning or the end of this inquiry of ours. 
 We seem to know both the starting-point and 
 the goal of that movement in the Christian 
 church which produced a Christian hierarchy, 
 culminating in the power and authority of the 
 pontifex maximus, the Bishop of Rome. It is 
 about the impulses and the stages of the move- 
 ment that sharp diversity of opinion exists. 
 With the meager time and limited scholarship 
 at my disposal, it would be futile for me to at- 
 tempt to trace the exact evolution of the Chris- 
 tian bishop, the Christian pastor with a sugges- 
 tion of priest, the figure which dominates the 
 development with which we are to-day con- 
 cerned. It does not seem to me that the sources 
 which are open to us allow us to be dogmatic 
 concerning it. I am anxious, simply, to dis- 
 cover sufficient grounds for the institution of 
 the distinction between clergymen and laymen 
 in the church, to estimate their moral worth, and 
 to aid in deciding whether the distinction is of 
 Christ or of Anti-Christ. 
 
 The starting-point of this movement toward 
 the bishopric is made thoroughly clear to us 
 in PauPs earlier letters, and particularly in his 
 
 34 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 letters to the Corinthians. In these letters we 
 find the people of Christ governed by the Holy 
 Ghost. The important question whether that 
 Holy Ghost proceeded from God or from Christ 
 need not here detain us. In any case, it de- 
 scended from above upon the disciples of Christ 
 and upon them alone. It imparted power to 
 each but the power was diverse. It was given 
 only in part for the individual who received it, 
 chiefly for the community of which each was a 
 citizen. Every Christian was an ordained man 
 — ordained by divine power for a divinely or- 
 dered function of a divine people. There was 
 no male or female, no Greek or Jew, no bond 
 or free. The Spirit gave to each not as each 
 would but as He would. There were no orders 
 and there was not much order. It cannot be said 
 that the first beatitude was much in vogue in 
 the first century. To be poor in spirit was not 
 as common in the Christian churches as to be 
 poor in this world's goods. And I imagine that 
 we could find no surer way to understand why 
 this beatitude stands at the top of the list than 
 to be ushered into a gathering of the primitive 
 church. It was not a self- governed body; it 
 was not an ecclesiastically- governed body; it 
 was a spirit-governed body. And it would ap- 
 pear that the gifts of the spirit ignored each 
 other. One would spring to his feet in ecstasy 
 in one corner and another in another; others 
 would feel suddenly called upon to interpret 
 these mysterious shoutings and babblings and 
 
 35 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 contortions to their fellows ; two or three would 
 feel called upon at once by the Spirit to pro- 
 claim a message from God to men. In spite of 
 the sincerity and joy all about them modern 
 men present at such a gathering would find 
 themselves longing for a poverty of the Spirit. 
 But there were, after all, definite marks of 
 order in these gatherings from the first. To 
 begin with, each man who became a Christian 
 was baptized. Baptism and the Spirit could not 
 long be separated. Which usually preceded the 
 other is not so clear as that either one led to 
 the other or that they were coincident. There 
 may have been unbaptized Christians, but we 
 do not hear of any. There is no doubt that we 
 should have regarded those who desired bap- 
 tism after hearing the preaching of the gospel 
 by Paul as Christians before they received it, 
 but there is more doubt as to their own feelings 
 on the matter. Then there was also a meal 
 together ; at first this meal may have been eaten 
 to appease hunger, but by the time of Paul 
 such a motive was regarded as blasphemous. 
 In Corinth from the very beginning — and 
 Corinth is a fairly early church — the meal was 
 regarded not as a supper but as a rite. Very 
 soon, moreover, we hear of almsgiving in the 
 churches. This may have been exclusively a 
 matter between individuals at the first ; we can 
 only say that our earliest sources indicate 
 that it soon came to be a church matter. Chris- 
 tian communities were asked for gifts as com- 
 
 36 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 munities and managed their gifts as communi- 
 ties. Now I suppose that if we had ashed the 
 early Christians why they baptized and cele- 
 brated the supper of the Lord and managed 
 their finances carefully, they would have attrib- 
 uted these marks of order to the Spirit, but 
 whether they were asked that question — by 
 others or themselves — is not quite clear. Sohm, 
 who seems sure that they were, draws a picture 
 of the early church which is not impressionistic 
 enough to be accurate, I think; the lines are 
 all filled in, as though the early Christians were 
 alive to the logical inferences that a modern 
 German might draw from their fundamental 
 premises. It is certain that Paul believed that 
 the quiet ministries of Christians were gifts of 
 the spirit,^ but we cannot be sure that he was 
 not consciously endeavoring to persuade the 
 Corinthians of that fact. At Corinth certainly 
 ^^spirituaP' and *^ ecstatic '^ had pretty much 
 the same connotation; yet even in impetuous 
 and enthusiastic Corinth, there were church 
 poor and therefore church finances, there was 
 crying need for orderly procedure in the Chris- 
 tian gatherings and there were set Christian 
 rites. Even in Corinth, therefore, avenues of 
 development toward the bishopric were open. 
 
 But if there were bishops in Corinth, they 
 played so small a part that Paul does not even 
 mention them or appeal to them in a case of 
 flagrant immorality for which he demanded 
 
 1 1 Cor. 12 : 8, 28. 
 
 37 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 church discipline, about 25 years after Christ's 
 death. We do well to think of the early 
 church there as a democrac}^ with the Spirit 
 as an extra-constitutional monarch. But only 
 six or seven years later, we find Paul address- 
 ing a letter to ' ' the church at Philippi with its 
 bishops and deacons.''^ Whether or not the 
 church at Philippi was lacking in prophets and 
 speakers with tongues, we cannot say ; it would 
 seem strange for a church of that time and 
 place in the first years of discipleship to be 
 altogether without them; but at Philippi, at 
 any rate, in the year 56 a.d. it was the proph- 
 ets and not the bishops that were found un- 
 necessary to mention, while the bishops were 
 singled out with the deacons as the proper per- 
 sons to whom Paul should direct his letter. 
 Thus early do we find in prominent place the 
 bishops of a Christian church. It is our task 
 to find why they rose to prominence and what 
 turned prominence into authoritative control. 
 After many years of research, the leading 
 scholars have settled upon the three more or- 
 dered features of early church life, to which I 
 have already alluded, as marking out the main 
 avenues of development from the primitive 
 Christian democracy to the authoritative bishop 
 of the middle of the third century. They usu- 
 ally emphasize one of the three at the expense 
 of the others, but the three leading avenues 
 from democracy under the Spirit to episcopacy 
 
 2 Phil. 1:1. 
 
 38 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 under Rome are, first, the care of the church 
 finances, second, the moderatorship of the 
 church meetings, and third, exclusive rights in 
 the Eucharist. Among our modern scholars 
 Hatch is the name we associate with the first 
 avenue, Liitgert with the second and Sohm with 
 the third. 
 
 That the unexciting matter of church finances 
 played an important part in the early Chris- 
 tian communities can scarcely be doubted. The 
 first real crime recorded in the Acts of the 
 Apostles as committed in church circles is the 
 financial deceit of Ananias and Sapphira, and 
 the love of money it seems was the root not 
 only of the first sin but also of the first election 
 in the church at Jerusalem. Seven men had to 
 be chosen to see that Greeks and Hebrews ob- 
 tained their proper shares of the daily minis- 
 tration. The epochal conference in Jerusalem 
 concerning Gentile Christianity seems to have 
 insisted that whereas the Jews had imparted 
 spiritual goods to the Gentiles, the Gentiles 
 should impart material goods to the Jews. In 
 the midst of crucial matters, personal and 
 moral, Paul urged the duty of this financial 
 contribution upon his Gentile churches and was 
 writing friendly letters about the messengers 
 who had been chosen to collect it.^ Almsgiving 
 was one of the leading Christian virtues as it 
 had been one of the leading Jewish ones. ^'The 
 Teaching of the Apostles,'' written at about 
 
 3 Cf. 2 Cor. 8 : 18-24; 9 : 1-15; Gnl. 2 : 10; Rom.. 15 : 25-29. 
 
 39 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 the turn of the first century, devotes its initial 
 chapter to this matter. And so when Paul ad- 
 dresses his letter to the Philippians to the 
 bishops and deacons of the church to express 
 his thanks for the church's generous contribu- 
 tion to his material needs in prison, some say 
 that it was because those officers had gathered 
 it. Furtliermore, Hatch presents evidence — 
 perhaps somewhat meager for quite so sweep- 
 ing an assertion — to prove ^Hhat the officers of 
 administration and finance of non-Christian 
 organizations of Asia Minor and Syria were 
 chiefly known" either by the title of **epime- 
 letes'' (caretaker) or of "episcopos" (over- 
 seer).* It is clear that administrative officers 
 of municipalities and standing committees and 
 permanent commissioners of government were 
 known as episcopoi '' bishops. '' And it may 
 well be — though we can say no more than that 
 — that the title ^* bishop'' was introduced into 
 the early church because the function of its 
 bearer was administrative and financial, as it 
 was in Greek communities and in the Septuagint 
 usage. The financial status of the early Chris- 
 tians and the growing necessity for Christian 
 workers soon made the offering for the poor 
 one of the chief functions of Christian worship. 
 In a famous passage of his Apology, Justin 
 Martyr describes in detail the collection of the 
 offerings of the people at the Eucharist and 
 
 * Edwin Hatch: The Organization of the Early Christian Churches, pp. 
 36-37. 
 
 40 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 their presentation to the Christian who pre- 
 sided at this feast.^ **The Teaching of the 
 Apostles" advises the appointment of bishops 
 and deacons to perform the service of lacking 
 prophets and teachers, and as this advice is 
 given just after directions regarding the eu- 
 charistic meal, it is fair to suppose that *^The 
 Teaching" means these bishops and deacons 
 to preside over that rite and to collect the cus- 
 tomary offerings there made.^ And there can 
 be no doubt that as a matter of fact the bishop 
 had control of these offerings at the beginning 
 of the third century/ 
 
 All this makes it very probable that we are 
 following no blind alley when we regard a 
 bishop as a financial and administrative 
 ^^ officer" of the early Christians. Finance is 
 certainly one of the avenues which led from 
 democracy to episcopacy. But important as 
 finance is, is there anything in finance to create 
 a sacred order of clergy, from which the entire 
 laity is excluded! Church Treasurers are im- 
 portant now and they were more important in 
 the early days, but when we think of the 
 prophets and the teachers, of the apostles and 
 martyrs, of the body of elders from which the 
 bishops were chosen, and of the administration 
 of the sacred rites of baptism and the Eucharist, 
 it seems scarcely possible that church treas- 
 urers should have obtained an exclusive right 
 
 5 Apology. Chapter 67. 
 
 6 Teaching of the Apostles. Sec. 15. 
 
 '' Cf. Sohm: Kirchenrecht, pp. 70, 75 and notes. 
 
 41 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 to appoint their own successors and to domi- 
 nate the life of the churches. It is indeed true — 
 and I marvel that New Testament scholars have 
 not impressed us more with its significance — 
 that even in PauPs time, the gifts of the spirit 
 seem to have been regarded as given to indi- 
 vidual Christians for their life-time or at least 
 during their good behavior. The gift of 
 prophecy made the man who received it not a 
 mere recipient of the gift of prophecy, but 
 a prophet; the gift of teaching made a man a 
 teacher and so on. It is, I suppose, possible 
 that the gift of managing finances made a man 
 a treasurer — a ^'bishop,'' if you please — for 
 life, and a bishop by divine appointment. But 
 others would have had divine appointment for 
 more weighty and spiritual duties, and the as- 
 sent of the whole church would probably have 
 been necessary for the employment and demon- 
 stration of the gift of caring for the church 
 moneys. It seems, to say the least, improbable 
 that the oversight of church moneys should 
 have been the only cause or even the main 
 cause for the creation of the Christian hier- 
 archy. 
 
 The second avenue from spiritual democracy 
 or theocratic democracy to episcopacy lies in 
 the domain of public order. It is perhaps well 
 staked out for us by the title of one of Profes- 
 sor Liitgert's interesting monographs: *^The 
 Conflict of Office and Spirit.'' In a series of most 
 
 42 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 suggestive monographs,^ this Halle Professor 
 has sought to make clear that the chief conflict 
 in the early church was not between Christianity 
 and Judaism, as we would suppose, but between 
 Christianity and a kind of docetic enthusiasm, 
 which later became known under the name of 
 Gnosticism. It appears to me that in the light 
 of what Reitzenstein^ and others have uncov- 
 ered to us concerning the milieu of the early 
 church, the position of Professor Lutgert is 
 essentially correct. When the early Jewish 
 Christians, after the death of Stephen, took 
 Christianity into Asia Minor, they took it into 
 a region where men were seeking to escape 
 from the ills of human flesh by escaping from 
 human flesh itself. This escape they made not 
 by the avenue of death but by the avenue of 
 religious rites. Through these mysteries they 
 passed, as they supposed, from human into 
 divine life and received here on earth the 
 divine, deathless, invisible, untrammeled spirit. 
 They treated the body with the same contempt 
 which is meted out to it by the Christian Scien- 
 tists of to-day. Indeed I think we shall do more 
 justice both to Christian Science and to Gnos- 
 ticism if we remember that they belong to the 
 same genus. But there was this great differ- 
 ence between our case and theirs. The church 
 has formed the atmosphere into which Chris- 
 
 8 Freiheitspredigt u. Schwarmgeister in Korinth 1908. Die Vollkommenen 
 in Philipperbrief und die Enthusiasten in Thessalonich 1909. Die Irrlehrer 
 der Pastor albriefe 1909. 
 
 9 Die hellenistischen Mysterien-Rcligioncn. 
 
 43 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 tian Science has intruded; the mystery re- 
 ligions foiTQed the atmosphere into which 
 Christianity intruded. What wonder if a great 
 body of early Gentile disciples, hearing Paul's 
 earnest proclamation of freedom from the Jew- 
 ish law and freedom in the Spirit of God, should 
 have regarded Christianity as a means of 
 bringing them into that blessed realm of the 
 spirit where sin had no entrance and where 
 ^^the resurrection was past already," ^^ by new 
 mysterious rites and by a more miracle-work- 
 ing spirit than any which Eg^'pt or Persia could 
 produce. It is because we no longer ignore the 
 world of the first century in our reading of the 
 New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers that 
 we see in the condition of the Corinthian 
 church, at the time Paul wrote his letters to it, 
 a sort of cross-section of early Christianity as 
 a whole. This much at least may certainly be 
 said. In Corinth, at about the year 50 a.d., dis- 
 order, due to ecstasies of the Spirit, prevailed 
 at the gatherings of Christians." The infalli- 
 ble sign of Christ's presence was the gift of 
 tongues, as the event narrated in the second 
 chapter of Acts bears witness. At Philippi, 
 about the year 58, there were those who re- 
 garded themselves as * ^ perfect. " ^- Xot so 
 much later, perhaps, as we have been led to 
 believe, we hear in the Pastoral Letters of the 
 presence of those who proclaim that ^'the resur- 
 
 " 2 Tim. 2 : 18. 
 
 " See particularly 1 Cor. I A. 
 
 " Phil. 3 : 15. 
 
 44 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 rection is past already. ' ' ^^ At the turn of the 
 Century a long section of the Epistle of 
 Clement might be considered irrelevant, unless 
 the writer were tactfully appealing to those in 
 Corinth who disbelieved the resurrection, as 
 they had disbelieved it at an earlier time/* 
 Early in the second century we hear from the 
 *' Teaching of the Apostles'' that prophets were 
 given to having visions which accrued to their 
 own material comfort, and from the Second 
 Letter of Peter that new-made converts were 
 seduced by those who promised them liberty 
 while they themselves were slaves of cor- 
 ruption/^ Ignatius, at about the same time, 
 in the letter to the Trallians, avers dis- 
 tinctly that there are those who affirm 
 both that they themselves are mere sem- 
 blance and that Christ suffered in sem- 
 blance only/^ We have only to mention the 
 words. Gnosticism, Montanism, Marcionism, to 
 call before us the extent and the longevity of 
 enthusiastic and extravagant movements in the 
 Christian church. Now there can be no doubt 
 that the staid and sober sort of people in the 
 Christian church who from the beginning had 
 '^despised prophecy" ^^ would increase in the 
 face of the extravagances of those who as late 
 as the ^'Teaching of the Apostles" had to be 
 
 13 2 Tim. 2 : 18. 
 
 " Clement to the Corinthians. Sec. 24-26. 
 
 16 2 Pet. 2 : 19. 
 
 i« Ignatius: Epistle to the Trallians. Sec. 10. 
 
 V t Thess. 6 : 20. 
 
 45 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 cautioned not to despise bishops/^ The char- 
 acter of the time allows us to have great sym- 
 pathy with those who opposed the Christian 
 liberty which Paul proclaimed — and to revere 
 even more deeply that great apostle, who in- 
 sisted that that liberty was not a liberty unto 
 the flesh but the liberty of the humble, minister- 
 ing, childlike, loving spirit of Christ. As time 
 went on the elders of the community would 
 more and more vigorously assert themselves 
 against the youthful or newly converted enthu- 
 siasts. The connotation of this word *^ elder" 
 is not as clear as we would wish, but whether 
 it signifies long years of life or long years of 
 church membership, in either case the influence 
 of the elders would probably be cast on the side 
 of order. If old in years, they would have 
 grown weary even of spiritual orgies, if proud 
 of their conversion by the apostles or of their 
 acquaintance with traditions of the church, they 
 would realize in the esoteric and exotic mys- 
 tery-teachings a departure from the highest 
 motives of the best and most substantial Chris- 
 tians. From this group of elders, the bishops 
 were always taken. In Philippi, at any rate, 
 and probably in a very wide area there were 
 several bishops in a church. Perhaps it was 
 simply another name for elder at first ; it came 
 gradually however to be applied to that elder 
 who presided at the church meeting and who 
 therefore, as we have seen, received the church 
 
 18 Teaching of the Apostles. Sec. 15. 
 
 46 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 offerings. Doubtless then as now the older 
 men had usually more to give than the young 
 and more wisdom in its distribution. And in 
 spite of the enthusiasts there was a reverence 
 for experience and age in those days greater 
 than in ours. The group of elders commonly 
 dominated the gatherings of the churches and 
 the older churches instinctively took the same 
 attitude of authority to the newer churches that 
 the older Christians took to the newer Chris- 
 tians. The bishops, then the bishop, gradually 
 became their spokesman, the representative to 
 those outside as well as to those within, of 
 established and ancient and orthodox Chris- 
 tianity. Soon the bishops came to be regarded 
 as the sacred representatives of the apostles. 
 Even ^'The Acts of the Apostles '* informs us 
 that the apostles appointed elders in every 
 church' — at least about Lystra, Iconium and 
 Antioch.^^ Clement confirms this, only substi- 
 tuting bishops and deacons for elders, and 
 affirms that such appointment was prophesied 
 by Isaiah who said: *^I will appoint their 
 bishops in righteousness and their deacons in 
 faith. ''^^ Eegarding their appointment as go- 
 ing back thus pretty well to the beginning of 
 things and as the goal of the divine will, it 
 is no wonder that he regarded the church 
 of Corinth as guilty of ^'no light sin for 
 thrusting out those who had offered the 
 gifts of the bishops' office holily.^' For we 
 
 19 Acts 14 : 23. 
 
 20 To the Corinthians. Sec. 4^. 
 
 47 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 read in his letter : ' ^ Our apostles knew through 
 the Lord that there would be strife over the 
 name of the bishop's office. For this cause, 
 therefore, having received complete foreknowl- 
 edge, they appointed the aforesaid and after- 
 wards they provided a continuance, that if 
 these should fall asleep, other approved men 
 should succeed to their ministration. Those 
 who were appointed by them or afterwards by 
 men of repute with the consent of the whole 
 church — these men we consider to be unjustly 
 ejected.'' ^^ The ending is somewhat lame, it 
 is true, but surely the passage prepares us for 
 the unblushing declarations of the great bishop 
 Ignatius on his way to martyrdom — of which 
 repeated declarations these samples must suf- 
 fice. ^^We ought to regard the bishop as the 
 Lord Himself. "^^ ^^Be ye zealous to do all 
 things in godly concord, the bishop presiding 
 after the likeness of God and the presbyters 
 after the likeness of the council of the apostles 
 with the deacons also who are most dear to 
 me. " ^^ It was only about forty or fifty years 
 later that Irenseus could point to the apostolic 
 churches as sure repositories of Christian doc- 
 trine, because their bishops were in direct 
 and continuous succession from the apostles. -* 
 Curiously enough we have a close parallel to 
 the apostolic succession of Christian bishops 
 
 21 To the Corinthians. Sec. U- 
 
 ^^ Epistle to the Ephesians. Sec. 6. 
 
 ^Epistle to the Magnesians. Sec. 6. 
 
 ^^ The Writings of Ircnaeus {Ante- Nicene Library), Vol. I, pp. 260-264. 
 
 48 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 in the Mosaic succession of Jewish Rabbis. In 
 the Midrasch to Genesis, from about the sixth 
 century, we read that Moses imparted the Holy 
 Ghost to the Elders of Israel without lessening 
 his own supply and that from that time on 
 each teacher had lit his torch from his prede- 
 cessor. Weber informs us from his studies in 
 the Talmud that this lighting of the torch refers 
 to the ceremony of ordination. It is indeed 
 distinctly said in Sanhedrin 14 that in the time 
 of Hadrian the last famous teacher had or- 
 dained five elders for the express purpose of 
 preserving the succession of the Spirit.^^ In 
 the third century the Mechilta proclaims that 
 to receive a Rabbi means to receive the Shekina 
 of God. And the practice of the Jews, so thor- 
 oughly in accord with this theory, is proof 
 enough that something much akin to apostolic 
 succession gave to the Jewish Rabbi the author- 
 ity and standing of a Christian bishop. As the 
 theory was developed much at the same time 
 as that of the apostolic succession, it is pre- 
 sumable that even the Jews were not free from 
 the extravagant teachings of spirit-filled enthu- 
 siasts and tliat Mosaic succession like apostolic 
 succession was the refuge of the orthodox. But 
 there is one essential distinction between the 
 Jewish and the Christian situations. The 
 whole atmosphere of late Judaism was legalis- 
 tic ; the Thora was the authority and the keep- 
 ing of it the way to salvation. In the Gentile 
 
 "^^ Ferdinand Weber: System der Altsynagogalen Paldstinischen Theologie 
 p. 123. 
 
 49 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 Christian churches, though from the first there 
 were always those who regarded the Gospel as 
 the new law, Christianity had arisen as a life 
 given by a risen Lord, had put down the move- 
 ment for all external standards, and was 
 marked by a joy and a vitality altogether 
 foreign to the remnant of the Jews. Before 
 therefore we attempt to explain the authority 
 of the bishops from their function as pre- 
 servers of order, by moderating in meetings of 
 enthusiasts and by deciding about doctrine, we 
 must turn to the third avenue from democracy 
 to episcopacy and examine the rights of the 
 pastor or bishop at the Eucharist. 
 
 If at any point we long for full records of 
 the early church, it is regarding its conception 
 of the Lord's Supper and its customary cele- 
 bration thereof. And nowhere are the records 
 so meager. It will take us less time than we 
 wish to record the facts regarding the connec- 
 tion of the bishop with the Eucharist. From 
 PauPs counsel to the Corinthians, ^^ Wherefore, 
 my brethren, when ye come together to eat (the 
 Lord's Supper), wait one for another,'' ^^ it is 
 clear that no one in particular was designated 
 to preside at the feast and to offer the thanks- 
 giving; various groups of Christians partook 
 at their convenience. At the time of Justin, 
 as we have seen, there was one who presided, 
 who received the offerings and who later dis- 
 tributed them to the poor. In the Teaching of 
 
 2«i Cor. 11 :33. 
 
 50 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 the Apostles a prescribed prayer of thanks- 
 giving at tlie Eucharist is given in full and then 
 we read: ^^But permit the prophets to offer 
 thanksgiving as much as they desire. ' ' ^^ And 
 Justin tells us that to pronounce the thanks- 
 giving was the privilege of the presiding of- 
 ficer. ^^ In this same document, immediately 
 after the directions for the Eucharist, the 
 churches are counselled to elect bishops and 
 deacons, and not to despise them, for they can 
 perform the service of prophets and teachers. ^^ 
 Ignatius commands: Let that be held a valid 
 Eucharist which is under the bishop or one to 
 whom he shall have committed it.^° From that 
 time on the language regarding the bishops be- 
 comes more and more priestly in tone. In the 
 Teaching of the Apostles we are told that the 
 prophets are the chief priests of the Christian 
 and are to receive the first-fruits, and that if 
 there be no prophets in any church, the first- 
 fruits are to go to the poor.^^ But from the 
 time of Ignatius, the bishops, who took the 
 place of the prophets at the Eucharist, are more 
 and more addressed as priests and given 
 control of the alms of the church, until we hear 
 Cyprian speaking of the bishops constantly and 
 naturally as the priests of God.^^ These are 
 
 27 Teaching of the Apostles. Sec. 10. 
 
 28 Apology. Chapter 67. 
 
 29 Teaching of the Apostles. Sec. 15. 
 
 30 To the Smyrnaeans. Sec. 8. 
 
 31 Teaching of the Apostles. Sec. 13. 
 
 32 Writings of Cyprian (Ante- Nicene Library), Vol. I, pp. 120, 164, ^^6, 
 243, etc. On the whole subject cf. Sohm: Kirchenrecht, Vol. I, pp. 66-69, 
 205-211. 
 
 51 
 
Some Turning-points in Church History 
 
 meager facts, but I think they justify us in 
 saying that strong as was the desire for order 
 and unity in the early church, and powerful as 
 was the pastor or bishop as the official expres- 
 sion of that desire, it was only after he had 
 obtained the exclusive right of presiding (or 
 designating him who should preside) at the 
 Eucharist that he became set apart from his 
 brethren and by virtue of an ordination, in 
 which the people had no share, received the Holy 
 Spirit for the performance of an essentially 
 priestly sacrifice in the Eucharist. In the words 
 of Professor Allen: ^^The separation between 
 clergy and laity (the authority for the clergy 
 coming from a source external to the people) 
 was deepened into an impassable barrier by 
 Cyprian's doctrine of the sacerdotal character 
 of the ministry. ' ' ^^ 
 
 If we are right then in coming to the conclu- 
 sion that the main avenue from democracy to 
 episcopacy runs through the eucharist, and that 
 it was because of the function of the bishop and 
 his associates here, that there grew up a fatal 
 and irretrievable class distinction in the Chris- 
 tian church, it remains for us to estimate the 
 Christian character of the Eucharist, to in- 
 quire as to its meaning for the early church, 
 and the source or at least the milieu from 
 which that meaning came. Here again our 
 sources are meager, though somewhat more 
 clear than on the connection of the bishop with 
 
 33 Christian Institutions, p. 1£4. 
 
 52 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 the feast. The Corinthian Christians, appar- 
 ently in harmony with other Gentile Christians, 
 believed that the bread and wine gave them the 
 same fellowship with the body and blood of 
 Christ that their heathen contemporaries in the 
 various mystery-religions believed themselves 
 to possess with their divinities through similar 
 rites.^* Paul himself undoubtedly believed that 
 because the body of Christ, obtainable in the 
 sacrament, had not been properly reverenced 
 and received, some Corinthian Christians were 
 smitten with disease and others with death.^^ 
 Out of many similar utterances of Ignatius I 
 select these as the clearest indications of his 
 belief : ^ ' Breaking one bread, which is the medi- 
 cine of immortality and the antidote that one 
 should not die but live for ever in Jesus 
 Christ. ''^^ **Be ye careful therefore (for the 
 avoidance of schism) to observe one Eucharist 
 for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ 
 and one cup of union with his blood, there is one 
 altar, as there is one bishop. ' * ^^ " They ab- 
 stain from Eucharist and prayer because they 
 allow not that the Eucharist is the flesh of our 
 Saviour, Jesus Christ, which flesh suffered for 
 our sins and which the Father of His goodness 
 raised up. ' ^ ^^ There can therefore be but little 
 doubt that from a very early time in the Chris- 
 tian church many of the converts believed that 
 
 M 1 Cor. 10 : 14-22. 
 3^ Ibid. 11 :S0. 
 
 36 Ephesians 20. 
 
 37 Philadelphians 4. 
 
 38 Smyrnaeans 6. 
 
 53 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 in partaking of the Lord's Supper, they were 
 being nourished on the transformed and immor- 
 tal flesh and blood of Christ. 
 
 Our final question is: From whence came 
 this idea, final founder of the Christian clergy, 
 eventual materializer of our faith? 
 
 In this age, it is certainly unnecessary to 
 show how foreign the conception is to the 
 thought of Jesus. Neither would it have arisen 
 by a misunderstanding of the scene in the upper 
 room or as a re-enactment of a passover-feast 
 among men who were constantly expecting the 
 return of their Lord from the skies. Whence 
 then did this feasting on the immortal body of 
 Jesus come to muddy the transparent living 
 water of the Gospel? After what has been said 
 regarding the prominent part played by the 
 mystery-religions in the atmosphere of the 
 early church, the answer is not difficult. In his 
 brochure on ^'Baptism and the Eucharist in the 
 Primitive Church" Heitmiiller has collected 
 certain interesting analogies between the Eu- 
 charist of the Church and the sacred meals of 
 the mysteries. In these religious associations 
 he tells us that common meals in honor of the 
 god or of the founder or of a deceased patron 
 play a prominent part. Just as Paul speaks 
 of the table of the Lord, so the devotees of the 
 heathen mysteries speak of the table of the 
 Lord Serapis or of the God Herakles. To 
 quote: ^^Men longed for purity and pardon, for 
 immortality and divine life and for their mate- 
 
 54 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 rial guarantees. The mysteries supplied them 
 in all sorts of ceremonies. We happen to know 
 of two mystery-religions in the very territory 
 of the missionary activity of Paul, which pro- 
 vided sacred meals for their worshippers. The 
 servants of Mithras celebrated a meal consist- 
 ing of bread and a cup (in this case of water) 
 which had supernatural effects. The similarity 
 of this meal with the Christian Eucharist was 
 so striking that Justin (Martyr) averred that 
 the devil had contrived it. And similarly the 
 worshippers of Attis recognized a holy meal 
 as the center of their mysteries. The details 
 escape us, but it is certain that in the mission- 
 ary territory of Paul, particularly in Syria and 
 Asia Minor, the belief in the mediation of 
 divine powers through eating and drinking was 
 widespread. '^ ^^ The Lord's Supper, as the 
 church of the second century understood it, was 
 one of a genus that had little in common with 
 Christianity. 
 
 We are forced then, are we not, to this con- 
 clusion, that the three avenues which lead from 
 primitive Christian democracy or theocracy 
 to mediaeval episcopacy and papacy are the con- 
 trol of the finances, the regulation of undue and 
 unmoral ecstasies, and the rights in a peculiarly 
 divine feast. The priesthood of the bishop and 
 those associated with him may have been due, 
 in part, as Sohm believes, to the fact that the 
 
 39 Heitmuller: Taufe und AhendmahJ im Urchristentum, v. 78, cf. pp. 
 
 esff. 
 
 55 
 
Some Turning-points in Church History 
 
 bishop was regarded as the steward of God, 
 because he controlled the natural gifts which 
 in Sohm's view were regarded as God's prop- 
 erty and not as the property of the church. But 
 Sohm insists that that control of God's prop- 
 erty that was lodged in the bishop was a con- 
 sequence of his presiding over the Eucharist.*^ 
 The priesthood of the bishop, too, was undoubt- 
 edly prepared for by his authority in putting 
 down the extravagances of those under the con- 
 trol of the spirit at the church gathering, and of 
 his leadership against the inroads of pagan 
 mysticism. But the priesthood of the bishop 
 was actually founded by the mystery of the 
 Eucharist, an institution transformed from its 
 original intent by the atmosphere of the time, 
 created as that atmosphere was by the mys- 
 tery-religions, from which so many of the con- 
 verts came. In other words it is impossible 
 for us to disguise the fact that just as the 
 church was in large part founded by its perse- 
 cutors, so the Christian ministry was in large 
 part established as a clergy by the heathen 
 religions of the first centuries. 
 
 The basis of this institution was not Chris- 
 tian, but upon that basis has been built one of 
 the most splendid religious edifices ever erected 
 in this world. It culminated in the Papacy and 
 in the Holy Catholic Church, with its earthly 
 capitol at Rome. Before it, every religious 
 man should bow with greatest reverence. As 
 
 «o Kirchenrecht, Vol. I, pp. 66-81. 
 
 56 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 time went on the bishop as the presiding officer 
 of an individual church, or as we should say a 
 pastor, develoiDcd into the presiding officer of 
 a central church and its outstations, much as 
 a missionary upon our foreign fields to-day. 
 Then a bishop became a superintendent of a 
 diocese and eventually, much against Cyprian's 
 will, these bishops became a regular hierarchy 
 with archbishops to rule it and with the Pope 
 as chief priest above all. This hierarchy re- 
 tained supervision over the finances of the 
 churches and soon there came to be a genuine 
 Catholic treasury or at least a Catholic control. 
 Much more important, however, than any mat- 
 ter of finance, these bishops retained their 
 rights in the sacrament. Over it they presided 
 or ordained those who should represent them at 
 that solemn and life-giving sacrifice. There 
 came thus to be a vast spiritual organization 
 of the civilized world. It incarnated the great 
 idea of a supreme spiritual fellowship which 
 spanned all national divisions and which made 
 men realize a common human life. The word 
 humanity for the first time sprang into sight 
 of men on a large scale. It deepened and sanc- 
 tified every individual life, for each was a citi- 
 zen of a vast City of God. And this human life 
 common to all was no earthly life. It was an 
 immortal one. And to the immortal element, 
 all that was of this world was subsidiary. The 
 Holy Catholic Church fixed the eyes of men 
 upon their spiritual being. To it was com- 
 
 57 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 mitted an eternal food which it could impart to 
 all men and women and children, assuring them 
 of immortal bliss but also bestowing upon them 
 in this present world an immortal flesh which 
 should gradually transform their own. Every- 
 where men were in touch with God. Every day 
 His power could break forth through them into 
 miraculous announcements of His presence and 
 favor. No electric cars were built nor super- 
 dreadnoughts, neither was sanitation or sur- 
 gery in the foreground of men's attention. But 
 generations of men were produced which have 
 made it impossible for the generations that 
 have followed and that will follow to regard 
 themselves as animals and which have given 
 men those motives and impulses which alone 
 assure progress and vitality. And in this great 
 spiritual fellowship, the men of the spirit, the 
 magicians of the spirit if you choose, were the 
 rulers and leaders. Monarchs and courts were 
 their servants, raised up to do the lower work 
 of the world, and utterly under their hands to 
 bless or to ruin. The secular was subordinate 
 to the spiritual, trade to religion. Never before 
 and never since, until the Anabaptists rose in 
 Zurich or perhaps not until the Mayflower 
 sailed for Plymouth or perhaps never at all, 
 has a greater ecclesiastical idea dominated the 
 minds of men. For if this be indeed a spiritual 
 life which we lead together, the spiritual must 
 manifestly and admittedly and universally 
 have charge of the material. The men who 
 
 58 
 
The Beginnings of the Christian Ministry 
 
 best embody religion must control, though they 
 need not manage, the affairs of men. And all 
 this vast empire of the soul the Holy Catholic 
 Church symbolized and in a large measure in- 
 carnated. With what it deemed a historical 
 and with what was an unquestioned right, it 
 stood as the representative of God in the world. 
 It dimly pointed to a mysterious but historic 
 Christ, who had showed that the earthly life 
 was only the transparent shell of the divine; 
 it covered him up by his miraculous birth and 
 by his cross, but those were better coverings 
 than trappings of luxury and lust. It united 
 and organized and spiritualized mankind. 
 What wonder that it still lives to-day! What 
 wonder that it looks do^vn upon sects and 
 despises less catholic and less venerable priest- 
 hoods and liturgies! What wonder that from 
 the throne of its high accomplishments, its un- 
 dying zeal and its truly Catholic hope, it 
 despises Anglican orders and exterminates 
 Modernism as a doctor cuts out a mole! It 
 lives because it embodies in the most visible 
 and affecting form the supremacy of religion 
 over animalism, and the universal and immor- 
 tal fellowship of men. It insists upon and it 
 visualizes the authority of conscience and God ; 
 it directs the ignorant; it holds all men to- 
 gether. No religious man should stand aloof 
 from its mighty history, its transcendent hopes, 
 its vast and permanent achievements. Like 
 much other religion in the world, it is not Chris- 
 
 59 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 tian; it must therefore be transformed and 
 purified. But only when Christianity becomes 
 as vast and purer, only when men live by the 
 passion of Jesus as Catholics have lived by the 
 passion for immortal life, only when Christian- 
 ity rules our individual spirits and a multitude 
 of individual spirits, as the Roman Church 
 ruled the early centuries, will Jesus see of the 
 travail of his soul and be satisfied. 
 
 60 ] 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL 
 CHUECHES 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL 
 CHURCHES 
 
 The great ideal which erected the papacy 
 held Western Europe in a spiritual fellowship, 
 almost unbroken, for centuries. Even an ex- 
 treme Protestant must be awed by its strength, 
 its fine accomplishment and its vaster promise. 
 In so vast a fabric, he feels inclined to think 
 that room for the diversest growth of individ- 
 ualism might have been found. Its fall seems 
 even to him a calamity and the cause of wide- 
 spread disaster and confusion. The unity of 
 Western civilization was endangered; for what 
 was believed to be Christendom the nation was 
 substituted as object of allegiance and pro- 
 tector of rights. While through the fall of the 
 Papacy, religious thought became freer, re- 
 ligion itself from being regarded as the mis- 
 tress of the world became the arm of the state. 
 The price we paid for the freedom of the mind 
 was the secularisation not only of the State but 
 of the Church. 
 
 It is our present task to trace the rise of 
 what seems to me the most inadequate of all 
 the historical forms of church organization, 
 the church of a delimited nation. 
 
 (53 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 I desire, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, to 
 limit my subject. I do not think that the Roman 
 Catholic or Greek Catholic churches properly 
 fall under the caption of National Churches. 
 That they were in official relation with the State 
 is undeniable, but the State with which they 
 were related was not delimited ; ideally and dog- 
 matically speaking, the State was Catholic in 
 character and made some pretension at being 
 world-wide in its scope. We are not consider- 
 ing the principle of Establishment, per se, but 
 of a limited national establishment. But I also 
 desire to exclude from consideration the an- 
 cient Eastern Churches, both because their his- 
 tory would take us far afield from our own 
 immediate interests and also because these 
 churches did not definitely fall away from a 
 universal church for the sake of establishing 
 a narrow, national organization. The Arme- 
 nian Church existed as a national church from 
 its inception and other eastern churches arose 
 on doctrinal grounds, becoming national only 
 incidentally and perhaps somewhat gradually. 
 What I desire to consider is the formation of 
 Protestant churches which consciously split 
 off from a larger whole and which took shape 
 according to the boundaries of their civil 
 governments. 
 
 We Americans have never been conscious of 
 much exaggeration in Longfellow's familiar 
 lines upon our country: 
 
 64 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 " Humanity with all its fears, 
 Vv^ith all the hopes of future years, 
 Is hanging breathless on thy fate! 
 Our hearts, our hopes are all with thee, 
 Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, 
 Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, 
 Are all with thee, are all with thee ! " 
 
 But surely if there was ever a human insti- 
 tution to which without apparent blasphemy 
 these words could be addressed it was the Holy 
 Catholic Church of the West with its high tra- 
 ditions, its glorious cathedrals, its rich litera- 
 ture, its sacred liturgy, its noble saints, its 
 effective and proven organization. Only a 
 combination of the strongest causes could have 
 produced its fall. Only in an upheaval of 
 Christian civilization could the most precious 
 structure of the ages perish. In the time at 
 our disposal it is possible only to mention in 
 the briefest fashion four great grounds of its 
 fall. 
 
 The first, of course, is the manifest disloyalty 
 of the leaders of the Church to their sublime 
 ideal. The ideal was too large for men to sup- 
 port. The Popes instead of seeking to serve 
 the Ideal sought to make the Ideal serve the 
 most narrow and trivial of interests. More 
 compelling than the sublimity of their vast 
 Ideal was the affection that bound them to 
 their kin, the lust that drew them to their for- 
 bidden offspring, the love of luxury that sub- 
 stituted splendor for purity. In support of 
 
 65 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 this assertion we have only time to cite a ver}^ 
 few instances from the long catalogue which 
 Henry C. Lea has so laboriously gathered. 
 Sixtus IV bestowed upon a nephew of his not 
 only an archbishopric but at the same time 
 seven bishoprics and two abbacies. To another 
 nephew, a Cardinal and a libertine, he gave 
 a group of bishoprics yielding 60,000 ducats 
 a year (the actual value of the gold m the 
 coin being over $125,000). He pawned his 
 sacred tiara for gold and redeemed it by creat- 
 ing 18 new secretaries, and forcing each one to 
 pay him 2,600 florins. Leo X, Luther's Pope, 
 appointed 60 chamberlains from whom he ex- 
 acted in payment for their offices 74,000 ducats. 
 The holder of every benefice throughout Eu- 
 rope was forced to return a stipulated sum to 
 the Pope who, for ease of collection, employed 
 the Fugger banking house at Augsburg for 50 
 per cent, of the total. Confessors in the Hos- 
 pital of San Giovanni on almost indisputable 
 authority are said to have notified the physi- 
 cians of the wealth of their various patients, 
 the richest of whom were systematically pois- 
 oned. Innocent VIII and Alexander VI gave 
 public weddings for their o^vn illegitimate 
 daughters. Concubinage of the priests was 
 quite universal. Large sums of money for 
 crusades against the infidel, purchased by the 
 sale of indulgences, which guaranteed freedom 
 from criminal prosecution here as well as from 
 purgatorial pains hereafter, were applied to 
 
 66 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 current expenses of the Papal court and the 
 aggrandizement of the Papal families. It is 
 not strange that nepotism, the form of family 
 enrichment which is most in favor with sup- 
 posedly childless clergy, has become the best 
 known word to describe the most shameless 
 graft. But we must take only so much further 
 time as is necessary to outline the career of 
 the son of Eene II, Duke of Lorraine. At three 
 years of age, he was appointed coadjutor to his 
 uncle, the Bishop of Metz. At ten years of age 
 he succeeded to the bishopric. He resigned it 
 after a while in favor of his own nephew, aged 
 four. At nineteen, he became also Bishop of 
 Toul and at twenty Bishop of Terouanne also 
 and Cardinal by grace of the Pope. In the next 
 five years he added three more bishoprics, in- 
 cluding that of Verdun. His avarice still un- 
 satisfied, he became Archbishop of Narbonne, 
 Eeims and Lyons without resigning any of his 
 bishoprics. Truly catholic in his tastes, he 
 added thirteen abbeys to his rule. His ex- 
 travagances throughout life were so great that 
 notwithstanding his large income he was al- 
 ways poor.' When we consider that these vari- 
 ous offices assigned to papal favorites were 
 often farmed out to the highest bidder, who in 
 his turn auctioned off his pile of sacred offices, 
 we can understand how to the people who paid 
 dear for heartless services the Church began 
 
 1 For these and similar facts, cf. Cambridge Modern History, Vol. I. 
 Chapter XIX. 
 
 G7 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 to be the exploiter instead of the sanctifier of 
 the religious life of men, a splendid burden 
 instead of a liberator and savior. Had the 
 Church insisted upon being the friend of men, 
 I do not, for one, believe that the Christian 
 Revolution would have been possible. 
 
 The second, though quite subordinate, cause 
 of the fall of the Catholic Church was that large 
 movement for the advancement of the human 
 intellect and for the release of the spontaneity 
 of the human heart that the word Renaissance 
 is employed to cover. Its center was, of course, 
 the discovery of the classics of the Greeks and 
 Romans. Here, before the Church or its Lord 
 had ever worked upon the hearts of men, there 
 was unexpectedly exhibited to the world, that 
 had begun to feel the bondage of the church, a 
 pure delight in nature and in the development 
 of human character and of human society that 
 was astounding. The high ideals of the human 
 mind in Plato and Virgil and Cicero and Seneca 
 and the joy and nobility of heart that their 
 writings evinced, the largeness and childlike- 
 ness of Homer, the glimpses at the beauty and 
 charm of the antique world, all made the per- 
 haps unacknowledged appeal of a freer, glad- 
 der day to men suddenly aware of living in 
 prison. The leaders of the Church and of the 
 Universities abandoned themselves almost 
 without reserve to the earthly Paradise of 
 which they seemed to catch a first vision and 
 men began to be bound together on high levels 
 
 68 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 of feeling by ties which had absolutely no con- 
 nection with Christ or the Church. The life 
 thus revealed seemed more full of promise and 
 delight than any which their religion had ever 
 offered them. Human nature did not seem as 
 evil as the Church had found it or perchance 
 even had maintained it. It could be trusted 
 as well as the divine instruction of the priest; 
 it needed expansion more than redemption. 
 With the discovery of the Classics went also the 
 discovery of the Early Fathers and the in- 
 evitable conviction spread abroad that the 
 church of the primitive days and the majestic 
 and debauched institution of their time had 
 but very little in common. In the famous anony- 
 mous dialogue of Peter and Pope Julius, the 
 Pope is represented as shuddering at the very 
 thought of being ^^ reduced to the level of the 
 Apostles.''^ The freedom of the intellectual 
 air and the dawning perception of the worth 
 of an individual human being, made men 
 wonder if the Church were a refuge or a 
 prison, the guide or the seducer of the spirit. 
 Mere distrust of the Church, however, would 
 not have produced her ruin. She stood for too 
 vital an element in human life for that. Match- 
 ing these two negative influences there were at 
 least two constructive forces at work which 
 assured her terrible chastisement. The first 
 of these, of course, was the individual religious 
 experience of Martin Luther. 
 
 ^Froude: Life, and Letters of Erasmus, p. 168. 
 
 69 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 Into this sublime event in the history of man- 
 kind it is neither possible nor necessary to 
 enter. At nearly every one of the vital turning- 
 points in the organization of the Church, there 
 stands a personal revelation of God. Behind 
 the founding of the Church stands the experi- 
 ence of Jesus with God; with the deliberate 
 freeing of the Church from racial limitations 
 there stands connected the experience of Paul 
 with God ; sanctifying the arrogance of the bish- 
 opric stands the experience of Ignatius with 
 God and with death ; as a commentary upon the 
 rise of Catholicism there stands the experience 
 of Augustine with God, and behind its fall, the 
 experience of Luther with God. I do not mean 
 that these personal experiences were equally 
 determinative of the outer movements of the 
 church; but the personal character of our re- 
 ligion manifests itself in the fact that at these 
 vast turns in its historical course we find the 
 supporting strength of the revelation of God in 
 the soul of an individual man. Of all these per- 
 sonal experiences, the experience of Luther was 
 most patently and immediately determinative 
 of a change in the organization of religion. The 
 experience of Jesus, as we have seen, though, 
 of course, standing behind the founding of the 
 Church, stood a good distance behind it; the 
 experience of Paul occurred after the first steps 
 in the formation of a Church, untrammeled by 
 the Jewish State; the experience of Augustine 
 also was a reinforcement of a movement al- 
 
 70 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 ready under way, though a reinforcement of 
 determinative power; but the experience of 
 Luther was at once translated into the sphere 
 of Church organization by Luther himself. 
 The experience of God in his own soul was to 
 him so authoritative and unquestionable and 
 satisfying, that it was impossible to modify or 
 obscure or support it by the holiest traditions 
 of the Church. What the Church was in the 
 world to do for men, God had done for him in 
 the church but apart from its supposedly indis- 
 pensable organization. He believed that his 
 experience of God was in harmony with these 
 other personal revelations of God to which I 
 have referred, but there was nothing about any 
 of them that depended upon the consent of the 
 Eoman Catholic or Greek Catholic Churches; 
 the church organization could not therefore be 
 regarded as essential to the revelation of God 
 in the soul of man and the redemption of man 
 by the Spirit of God. ^^What," he says, *4s 
 the entire gospel other than the good tidings 
 of the forgiveness of sins? . . . Neither the 
 Pope nor Bishop nor any man has the right to 
 command a Christian even by a syllable with- 
 out his consent. ' ' ^ After his experience with 
 God, he knew how divine a thing a Christian 
 was. It was to him a blasphemy that any one 
 who, through the will of God, had obtained the 
 freedom of a Christian should be controlled 
 
 2 Von der Babvlonische7i Gefangenschaft der Kirche. See Rade's Luther, 
 Vol. I, pp. 689, 692. 
 
 71 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 even by so holy an institution as the Churcli. 
 A man who, free from sin and care and death, 
 could commune with God as a child with a 
 father, had escaped from the Babylonish Cap- 
 tivity of Rome. When Luther summarized the 
 two parts of the gladdest Christian book ever 
 written thus: *'A Christian is an absolutely 
 free lord of all things and subject to no man. 
 A Christian is an absolutely bounden servant 
 of all things and subject to every man,"* he 
 laid grounds deep enough and revolutionary 
 enough to make inevitable the establishment 
 of a new Christian fellowship in the world. If 
 any human words are worthy to be set along- 
 side of the two commandments of Jesus, those 
 words of Luther must be chosen. What God 
 wrought in the soul of a miner's son rent the 
 Christian Church in twain and made inevitable 
 the freedom and fellowship in which we stand. 
 
 By no means so important as this experience 
 of Martin Luther with God, but more deter- 
 minative of the form of the organization which 
 this experience produced than the experience 
 itself, was the last of the four causes of the 
 Papacy's fall. It is the most important for 
 our purpose and therefore upon it we must now 
 concentrate our attention ; I refer to the growth 
 of national consciousness. 
 
 Even the noble ideal of the Papacy had never 
 been able to repress the consciousness of dif- 
 
 * Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen. See Rade's Luther, Vol. I, p. 
 721. 
 
 72 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 ference of racial temperament, racial needs and 
 racial aspirations in its wide domain. Schism 
 was always dreaded and often met by it. And 
 yet at times it seemed as if the world were but 
 a body for the Roman soul. The Latin lan- 
 guage became the universal language of schol- 
 arship, of inter-communication between all 
 classes of divers races, of worship. Men really 
 began to do their thinking in a medium which 
 required no translation; it looked as if the 
 world of thought were really to be one. Peas- 
 ants everywhere began to be accustomed to its 
 sound in worship and to regard it as the lan- 
 guage of devotion and of the angels. Their 
 rulers used the language and relied upon the 
 authority of Rome. These rulers were not 
 kings but satraps ; they each kept order for the 
 viceregent of Christ and for the strengthening 
 of His kingdom against the infidels. Usually 
 they ruled only over small areas, lived without 
 pomp, and divided their time pretty equally 
 between the chase of beasts and the repression 
 of brigands. Everywhere the presence of the 
 priest told of a higher power and often the 
 presence of monks that of greater luxury. Eu- 
 rope seemed indeed to be, if not a common- 
 wealth of man, at least a federation of the 
 world. Rome, as a court of last resort, ante- 
 dates the Hague Tribunal. It promulgated de- 
 cisions, even if they were but rarely enforced. 
 
 But gradually this state of affairs became 
 threatened by clashing interests of large num- 
 
 73 
 
Some Turning-points in Church History 
 
 bers of people. Loyalties arose which came 
 into conflict with the loyalty to the head of the 
 Church. The growth of a kind of dawning 
 nationalism is hard to trace; there is appar- 
 ently no adequate treatment of this subject ex- 
 tant; we must simply indicate some factors in 
 its rise. 
 
 And certainly a most important factor in the 
 growth of national consciousness is the enlarg- 
 ing of the areas of secular control. In order 
 to keep the peace, the knights or barons of a 
 neighborhood combined together. After a long 
 time, there came to be a federation or confed- 
 eration or principality or kingdom in place of 
 a smaller unit of territory. Or an elected king 
 would really make his power felt in the terri- 
 tory over which he held only theoretic rights 
 before. Then the prince or king would become 
 a sufficiently great figure to appeal to the imag- 
 inations of men, and he would deliberately em- 
 phasize the peculiar need of his own territory 
 over against the interests of territories near by 
 and over against the advantage of Christendom 
 as a whole. The Pope began to be regarded in 
 Germany and England and even in France not 
 as the Father of the people but as a foreign 
 monarch, ruling over a distant realm and intent 
 on the interests of the region near his papal 
 seat. The Bishops seemed much more con- 
 cerned with their own personal standing at 
 Eome than with the condition of their own 
 peoples. The prince, at least, strengthened the 
 
 74 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 section over which he ruled and expended his 
 wealth among his own people; the bishop for- 
 warded the taxes of the church in great part 
 to Eome and frowned upon the growing feel- 
 ing of independence among the subjects and at 
 the court of great princes. The common man 
 began to feel that his interests were not identi- 
 cal with the interests of Christendom and that 
 his interests must first be met. The ideal of 
 the Papacy was too vast and vague for men; 
 though still far from even dreaming of HegePs 
 conception of the National State as the king- 
 dom of heaven upon earth, they began to feel 
 that the needs of localities differed and that 
 the needs must be met by the people of the 
 localities themselves. 
 
 The rise of the Mohammedan power and its 
 conquest of Constantinople and the discovery 
 of America and its colonization served to em- 
 phasize the divergent interests and powers of 
 the nations and to destroy that unity of feeling 
 upon which, and out of which, the Papacy grew. 
 Roughly speaking, the statement of Drury may 
 be accepted as true: ^^ Europe was no longer 
 capable of uniting, as at the eleventh century, 
 in one great religious thought, nor was she yet 
 in condition to act in concert for a grand politi- 
 cal idea. At the middle of the fifteenth century 
 there was not a single general question which 
 could rally all the governments ; there was not 
 even any great force to rally the peoples about 
 a principle. However this force existed and in 
 
 75 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 France, always the vanguard of Europe, it was 
 already acting. It was royalty which was to 
 draw each state from feudal chaos, to secure 
 internal order, to prepare equality, and through 
 the encouragement given to commerce, manu- 
 factures, letters and arts, to aid in the develop- 
 ment of a new civilization. ' ' ^ If we take 
 ^'royalty'' in a broad sense, to include the sov- 
 ereignty of cities in Switzerland and of princi- 
 palities in Germany, reinforced by the ideal of 
 the Empire, the statement may stand at about 
 its face value. The secular power grew in 
 extent and in its appeal to the imagination; it 
 became virtually coincident with the conception 
 of a nation; it was helped by the furtherance 
 of literatures in the languages of the peoples ; 
 out of the anarchy, which the weakening of the 
 Papacy left, grew the compact and fighting 
 nations. It was just as this national conscious- 
 ness was forming that Luther had that personal 
 experience with God out of which grew the 
 great Protestant revolution in religion. 
 
 It now becomes our duty to show, if we may, 
 how the freedom of the Christian man, which 
 Luther experienced and for which he so greatly 
 suffered and contended, became the means by 
 which the Church, once the acknowledged queen 
 of the state, became its humble subject. 
 
 For this sorry plight, Luther himself cannot 
 be altogether acquitted of blame. He had no 
 desire that the freedom of the Christian man 
 
 5 History of Modern Times {Grosvenor's edition), p. 7. 
 
 76 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 should weaken the authority of the Christian 
 prince. National impulses mixed themselves 
 with purely religious ones in Luther's mind, 
 from the beginning. The same year which saw 
 the publication of ' ' The Freedom of the Chris- 
 tian Man'' and ^^The Babylonish Captivity of 
 the Church" saw also his address to the Ger- 
 man Nobility summoning them to come to the 
 aid of the captive Church. In that famous 
 appeal occur many words of a distinctly patri- 
 otic brand, like these : ' ' Now that the cardinals 
 have sucked Wales dry, they enter German ter- 
 ritory. They begin most politely but, observe, 
 German land will soon be like the Welsh. We 
 already have some cardinals ; what the Eomans 
 are after they think that the drunken Germans 
 will not understand, until they have no bish- 
 opric, monastery, manse, heller or pfennig 
 left ; the mad gluttons of Germans must stand 
 it. Some people believe that more than three 
 hundred thousand gulden leave Germany every 
 year for Rome in vain, for which we get nothing 
 but scorn and mocking. We keep wondering 
 why our princes, our nobles, our cities and in- 
 stitutions, our land and people are so poor; 
 we ought rather to wonder that we still have 
 anything to eat. It is time that the German 
 nation, its bishops and princes, should regard 
 itself also as a Christian people and should 
 guard from such devouring wolves the multi- 
 tude that is committed to it to rule and defend 
 in good things, bodily and spiritual. noble 
 
 77 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 princes and gentlemen, how long will you leave 
 your land and people at the mercy of these 
 devouring wolves! Every prince, nobleman, 
 city, should at once prohibit their subjects from 
 sending the annates to Eome.^ As though 
 among all the Christians on earth, the Ger- 
 mans should be the clowns of the Pope and 
 suffer what no other folk will stand. We have 
 the name, the title and the coat of arms of Em- 
 pire, but the Pope has its treasure and power. 
 The Pope has the kernel and we play with the 
 shells. Let the Pope give up Eome and all that 
 he has taken from the empire, give our land a 
 rest from tax and oppression, give back to us 
 our freedom, power, honor, bodies and souls, 
 and let it be an empire indeed. Has not our 
 noble nation been led by the nose long 
 enough f ^ There is much of the secular mixed 
 with the religious in the appeal of this great 
 spiritual revolutionist. 
 
 Through the years which followed this ap- 
 peal, Luther steered a course which is rather 
 difficult to follow. When some of the nobles 
 took up arms to free the country, Luther, of 
 whose sympathy they felt assured, strenuously 
 besought them to lay them down. He insisted 
 that the Word of God should be free to win 
 its own victories. When, inspired in part at 
 least by a new sense of spiritual worth, the 
 peasants took up arms against the oppression 
 
 • The first year's revenue of a new clerical appointee. 
 
 7 Printed in Rade's Luther, Vol. I, pp. 597-673. For these quotations see 
 pp. 612, 613, 614, 617, 623, 629, 667. 
 
 78 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 of their rulers, fully as tyrannical as the Pope, 
 Luther denounced them as reckless anarchists. 
 The Word must have free course. When im- 
 prisoned in the Wartburg, his followers in 
 Wittenberg, now in a great majority in the 
 place, sought to conform public worship to the 
 new teachings by force, Luther left his seclu- 
 sion and at the risk of life insisted that the old 
 Roman practices should be tolerated for the 
 sake of brotherly love. The Word had not yet 
 won its own way. For most of their respective 
 lives his prince, Frederick the Wise, and he 
 thoroughly agreed. The Word was to have free 
 course and the prince was to give it liberty. But 
 after some years had gone by, there came a time 
 when Luther thought the Word had won its way 
 sufficiently to be given entire control of public 
 worship and of church institutions. Hence he 
 demanded that, for the sake of public peace, 
 Roman masses should be suppressed by secular 
 force both in the monastery and in the court 
 church. He claimed that public order was en- 
 dangered by allowing the few stubborn Stifts- 
 herren who resisted the Word to continue in 
 their practises. Frederick refused to inter- 
 vene, on Luther's own ground that a Prince 
 must not interfere with religion, lest he should 
 be figliting spiritual battles with carnal 
 weapons. This incensed Luther, who was now 
 emphasizing the duty of the prince to public 
 order. When Frederick died and was suc- 
 ceeded by the Elector John, Luther had his 
 
 79 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 way. John believed that it was his duty as a 
 Prince to preserve public order and that it 
 was his duty as a Christian Prince to see 
 that the Lord was not blasphemed in the 
 mass. Luther and he agreed that while the 
 conscience was to be ruled only by the Lord, 
 and while a man should be free to worship in 
 private as he pleased, public worship, public 
 religious instruction, public religious funds 
 from monasteries, etc., and even the nomination 
 of evangelical bishops lay in the hands of the 
 prince. In holding this position, Luther was 
 really falling back on a general custom of his 
 Province of Saxony which was in vogue before 
 his time. In the breakdown of ecclesiastical 
 authority, Luther, w^ho hated anarchy, had re- 
 course to the only authority there was. The 
 Christian congregation was to give its assent 
 to the call of a minister and should normally 
 take the initiative in all changes of church 
 practise, but the Christian, that is, the Evan- 
 gelical, Prince was the Protector, a kind of 
 forced bishop, indeed, of the Church, and must 
 see to its welfare. From his standpoint, Luther 
 claimed that a Catholic prince should give the 
 Word an opportunity to reform the community, 
 though not being a Christian prince, he was in 
 no position to put a stop to the blasphemy of 
 the Catholic — or rather, devilish — mass. But 
 this position was not practical; Catholic and 
 Evangelical had to come to some agreement 
 that would go on all fours and soon Luther 
 
 80 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 found himself forced to agree to the position 
 that there should be but one mode of public 
 worship in each principality/ Public order, in 
 other words, had triumphed over individual 
 freedom and eventually the religion of the sub- 
 jects was determined by the religion of the 
 prince. Here, therefore, began that aristo- 
 cratic tinge in the church founded by the great 
 democrat, Luther. The power of the Pope was 
 destroyed, but each individual prince became j 
 a little Protestant Pope instead. The main / 
 object of Lutheran ministers became the con- 
 version of Princes, in order that they might 
 later convert their subjects. The fate and regu- 
 lation of religion, in other words, passed from 
 an official representative of its own to the 
 representative of the secular power. This 
 change can only be regarded by religious men , 
 as a necessary visitation of Providence for the 
 purifying of religion, a new Babylonish exile 
 from its promised land. A Church state is a 
 perfectly possible ideal; a State church is the 
 renunciation of the ideal. It is putting the 
 Church under the heels of the State. 
 
 Nor do we find a very different state of affairs 
 in Ziirich, the only other spot in Europe that 
 can lay claim to being an independent center of 
 Protestant faith. The chapter in the Cam- 
 bridge Modern History which deals with the 
 Swiss Eeformation opens with this clear state- 
 ment: '^The Helvetic Eeformation, like the 
 
 8 Cf. Rade's Luther, Vol. Ill, Book 5. 
 
 81 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 German, Was the outcome of both the national 
 history and the Eenaissance. ' ' ° Zwingli found 
 Ziirich a city independent of all foreign con- 
 trol in secular affairs and granted by the Pope 
 no mean control of its clergy. Zwingli, as a 
 matter of course, appealed to the magistracy 
 of the city as to the last authority in all re- 
 ligious and ecclesiastical questions. Disputa- 
 tions between him and the bishop of Constance 
 were heard by the city council as a court of 
 last resort ; the question of the mass, of images, 
 of tithes, of the partaking of meat in Lent, were 
 all decided by this body. The decrees of the 
 burgomaster and the magistracy decided all 
 matters concerning the state, its religious prac- 
 tises and military practises alike. In the 
 famous confession of faith which Zwingli sent 
 to Charles V, he declares: ^^I know the magis- 
 trate, when properly inaugurated, holds God's 
 place no less than the prophet. ''^° With 
 Luther, Zwingli distinguished between the true 
 and the external church, and believed that the 
 external church is guided in the Providence of 
 God by the real church embosomed within it, 
 but he himself asserted that for legislative pur- 
 poses, the local church of any city is repre- 
 sented by the board of magistrates of the city. 
 One of his earliest theses, at the basis of all his 
 work, ran thus : '' All that the so-called spiritual 
 order claims to belong to it of right and for the 
 
 9 Cambridge History, Vol. II, p. 305. 
 " Printed in Appendix to S. M. Jnrl-.'son's Huldreich Zwingli, p. 479. 
 
 82 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 protection of the right, belongs to the secular 
 arm, when it is Christian/'" There can be 
 therefore little wonder about Zwingli's absorp- 
 tion in statesmanship, about his eagerness for 
 war, about his endeavors to form a large inter- 
 national confederacy with Ziirich as its center. 
 The State was the Church and the Kingdom of 
 God was to come through uniting Christian 
 States. Zwingli's republicanism saves his 
 church from being a creature of the prince, as 
 it became under Luther, but its authority was 
 lodged in the secular government and exercised 
 by men who were chosen not for their com- 
 petency for its affairs alone. It was strictly 
 national, although perhaps we may say that it 
 was more nearly the State itself than an ap- 
 pendage of the State. There was little room 
 for divergent types of belief and piety; Ana- 
 baptists in Zurich were dealt with as enemies 
 of the government; to think for oneself about 
 religion tended to lead one into crime against 
 the state. 
 
 When we turn our eyes to England, we come 
 on a far sorrier picture. There are few more 
 disgraceful performances in history than the 
 secession of the English Church from Rome. 
 
 Exhausted by the long civil strife of the 
 Wars of the Roses, the weakened barons and 
 the impoverished country were more than con- 
 tent to allow the rough and ready Edward lY 
 to rule without the counsel of Parliament and 
 
 " Given in Jackson's Zwingli, p. 184- 
 
 83 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 to establish unquestioned authority in the land. 
 Plenry VII, uniting in his own person the line- 
 age of both Lancaster and York, continued to 
 increase the power and prestige of the mon- 
 archy. At the accession of Henry VIII, a well- 
 filled treasury, the possession of the single train 
 of artillery in the kingdom and the good will 
 and confidence of the conspicuous scholars of 
 the Eenaissance made the King the one com- 
 manding figure of the Kingdom. The creation 
 of his adoring minister, Wolsey, as Papal 
 Legate, accustomed even churchmen to look to 
 the Court of the King instead of to Rome for 
 ecclesiastical decisions. Adored at home, 
 Henry wished to be mightier abroad. His wife, 
 Catharine, was the aunt of the Emperor 
 Charles, and Henry had expected to share in 
 his conquests. Charles however treated Henry 
 with disdain, and Wolsey thought a French 
 alliance would be better than the Spanish one. 
 Hence he sought to induce the Pope to allow 
 Henry to divorce his Spanish wife. The Pope 
 temporized, but finally refused. Meanwhile 
 Henry, unaccustomed to restraint, grew infatu- 
 ated with a lady of his court, and pressed the 
 demand for a divorce no longer to strengthen 
 his kingdom but to satisfy his own heart. It 
 seemed to him monstrous that a Pope at Rome 
 should interfere with the will of the King. His 
 lady-love grew impatient with Wolsey, the 
 Papal legate, and he fell. Cromwell, one of Wol- 
 sey 's friends, suggested to the King that he take 
 
 84 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 the reins into Ms own hand and cut loose from 
 the only power that presumed to dictate to him. 
 Thus, on the desire of a profligate and able 
 King for a divorce, the Church of England as a 
 separated church was founded. The entire 
 church, it is true, seceded. It still maintained 
 its ancient rites and customs and orders. But 
 it was a ditferent church, because it recognized 
 a different supreme authority. The Pope was 
 no longer its supreme head. And there can 
 be no doubt that Henry caused the convocation 
 of clergy to pronounce him supreme head of 
 the Church, in order that he might divorce 
 Catherine and wed Anne Boleyn. There were 
 no doubt causes which contributed to this seces- 
 sion from the Papal institution. Colet had not 
 discovered and preached the simplicity of Jesus 
 in vain. The impoverishment of the land by 
 the monasteries and of the monasteries by the 
 Pope stirred discontent with what came to be 
 regarded as foreign domination of the church 
 by the Pope. But the real foundation of the 
 Church of England was the new conception of 
 the majesty and authority of the King of the 
 Nation and the chance desire of that Nation ^s 
 king to do something prohibited by the church. 
 The maxims which More mentions in the 
 Utopia as prevalent in the land are symptoms 
 of the satisfaction in the new national strength 
 and sovereignty, to wit, to use his language, 
 ^^the maxim that the king can do no wrong, 
 however much he may wish to do it; that not 
 
 85 
 
Some Turning-points in Church History 
 
 only the property but the persons of his sub- 
 jects are his own; and that a man has a right 
 to no more than the King's goodness thinks fit 
 not to take from him. ' ' ^^ It was this temper 
 that led to the definite humiliation and plunder 
 of the church which had been enriched by the 
 humiliation and plunder of the barons. As 
 Green says : * ' To reduce the great ecclesiastical 
 body to a mere department of state, in which 
 all authority should flow from the sovereign 
 alone and in which his will should be the only 
 law, his decision the only test of truth, was a 
 change hardly to be wrought without a strug- 
 gle, ' ' ^^ but it was wrought and the Act of Su- 
 premacy was duly and unanimously passed that 
 ^Hhe King shall be taken, accepted and reputed 
 the only supreme Head in earth of the Church 
 of England and shall have annexed and united 
 to the Imperial Crown of this realm as well the 
 title and style thereof as all the honors, juris- 
 dictions, authorities, immunities, profits and 
 commodities to the said dignity belonging, with 
 full power to visit, redress, reform and amend 
 all such errors, heresies, abuses, contempts, and 
 enormities, which by any manner of spiritual 
 authority or jurisdiction, might or may law- 
 fully be reformed. ' ' ^* There can be no doubt 
 that as in Germany and Switzerland, the so- 
 called Protestant Church of England was a 
 product in its outward form of the national 
 
 '2 Cited in Green's Short History of the English People, p. 333. 
 
 ^^ Green's Short History, p. 344- 
 
 ^* Green: History of the English People. Vol. II, p. 159. 
 
 86 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 development of the times. And even when in 
 the reign of Edward VI and of Elizabeth the 
 real spirit of Protestantism began to make it- 
 self felt in England, there was no suggestion 
 of any save a State Church, regulated by Par- 
 liament and demanding uniformity throughout 
 the nation. Had we time to examine the church 
 in Geneva from which these later religious in- 
 fluences reached England and Scotland, we 
 should find the case no different. Toleration 
 was a sign of looseness of faith and courage. 
 The State decided the belief and the religious 
 practises of its subjects. If a man rendered 
 unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's, then 
 he could render to God what was God's, but 
 only then. God still, to all intents and purposes, 
 had a vicar on earth. It was not the Pope ; he 
 was Anti-Christ; but it was Caesar. It is true 
 there were many Caesars and their rule was 
 limited by definite geographical lines, but 
 within those lines, they were supreme in estab- 
 lishing and maintaining the outward tests and 
 ordinances of religion. Everywhere in Protes- 
 tantism, religion became the subservient and 
 generally the obsequious servant of the State. 
 Lord Acton has thus expressed the desperate 
 situation: ^* Nations eagerly invested their 
 rulers with every prerogative needed to pre- 
 serve their faith and all the care to keep church 
 and state asunder and to prevent the confusion 
 of their powers, which had been the work of 
 ages, were renounced in the intensity of the 
 
 87 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 crisis. . . . When the last of the Eeformers 
 died, religion, instead of emancipating the na- 
 tions, had become an excuse for the criminal 
 acts of despots/' ^^ 
 
 And I hardly think it an exaggeration to say- 
 that everywhere on Protestant territory the 
 church became an arm of the state. It was 
 forced into a subservient and often into an 
 obsequious attitude. It hardened and even 
 sanctified national divisions; it vastly aided 
 racial prejudice ; it helped to produce centuries 
 of war. The present catastrophe in Europe is an 
 outcome of governmental greed and suspicion, 
 but most of the men in control of the policies 
 of the governments now at war are devout and 
 conscientious members of national churches 
 and the deep distrust at the foundation of this 
 carnage is not purely the distrust of one gov- 
 ernment for another but of one nation for an- 
 other. And it seems to me quite impossible to 
 acquit organized Christianity of aiding and 
 abetting the greatest crime of the century. 
 Unless we deny Christianity any influence over 
 men's minds at all, we must reluctantly hold 
 it, as organized under the suzerainty of the 
 States, a guilty accomplice of wholesale mur- 
 der. For in England and Germany the 
 churches have been under the unquestioned 
 guidance, control and support of the secular 
 power. In Russia the Holy Orthodox Church, 
 although, originally, not devoid of pretensions 
 
 ^^ History of Freedom and other Essays, pp. 43-44- 
 
 88 
 
The Beginnings of the National Churches 
 
 to Catholicity, is to all intents and purposes a 
 national church. Since 1700 there has been no 
 Muscovite patriarch and the Czar has presided 
 over the Holy Synod. The new Constitution of 
 the Eussian Church builds upon the absolute 
 supremacy of the Czar, and the Holy Synod is 
 simply a department of the national govern- 
 ment. In these countries all the holy impulses 
 of religion have magnified the nation and have 
 often substituted patriotism for the brother- 
 hood of man. It is true that Catholicism has 
 done but little better in assuaging race hatred 
 and that Austria, Italy and France are en- 
 tangled in this fratricidal conflict. But it is 
 only fair to point out that it is a divided and 
 disrupted Catholic Church to which they have 
 belonged. Protestantism split the ecclesiastical 
 unity of mankind and substituted for it a 
 system of organized public worship which has 
 glorified those national divisions and concep- 
 tions which are among the greatest enemies of 
 the essential spirit of Christianity. If there 
 were anything needed to condemn the principle 
 of a national church and of religious establish- 
 ment under the control of a delimited state, 
 this European War has supplied the need. The 
 world cries out to-day either for a world-wide, 
 a genuinely catholic organization of Christian- 
 ity, on the one hand, or for a Church in which 
 the catholic spirit of Jesus reigns and in which 
 all national lines are ignored and obliterated 
 on the other. 
 
 89 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 The Papacy must indeed have been corrupt 
 to have fallen before so secular a conception of 
 the Church as that which resulted in these na- 
 tional organizations. Had there not been hid- 
 den at the heart of the nations the principle of 
 religious freedom, the Eeformation of Luther 
 might well have been termed the most sinister ^ 
 event in the history of Christianity. 
 
 Fortunately, there were men who held re- 
 ligion too high to allow it to be controlled by 
 secular powers. And the remaining lectures in 
 this course are devoted to a portrayal of their 
 tragic personal fate and of their high and 
 enduring accomplishments. 
 
 110 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE FREE 
 CHURCHES 
 
LECTUEE IV 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF THE FEEE 
 CHUKCHES 
 
 The free church is no Protestant creation; 
 the first church was free. The Jewish followers 
 of the Nazarene, driven from the synagogue of 
 the ancients, were not bound by the chains of 
 the State. Free were they to worship and to 
 fellowship as was revealed to them from their 
 risen Lord. As they grew stronger, they be- 
 gan to be ferreted out by the imperial authori- 
 ties for persecution. They had no thought of 
 obeying the dictates of the State, no dream that 
 it would ever carry out theirs. The State and 
 they were scarcely enemies, but they were not 
 friends. Yet in the course of time the State 
 and Church captured each other — and weakened 
 each other. Under Theodosius, at the close of 
 the fourth century, the Empire and the Church 
 began to coalesce and the fatal process cul- 
 minated in the year 425, when Valentinian III 
 decreed that all citizens of the Koman Empire 
 should become Christians. The Pope did not 
 decree that all Christians should be citizens of 
 Rome; the Emperor decreed that all citizens 
 should be followers of Christ. As outward 
 force was the cause of unity, the world moulded 
 
 93 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 the church more than the church moulded the 
 world. But since that fatal coalition, consider- 
 able groups of earnest Christians have not only 
 expressed, but organized, their dissatisfaction 
 at the conformity of the church to the world. 
 Even before the Church made its surrender to 
 the Empire, the Montanists broke away from 
 its growing inflexibility and respectability in 
 the interests of freedom for the Spirit and sub- 
 jugation for the flesh. Just as their influence 
 waned the Novatians arose on the issue of the 
 laxity of the church, gathered into their fellow- 
 ship the struggling remnants of the Montanists, 
 and were dubbed the Catharoi (the pure) by 
 their cynical opponents. Scarcely had these 
 old Puritans grown weak under persecution 
 and ostracism, when the widespread Donatist 
 movement set in. This fellowship endured for 
 well over a hundred years, until the very time 
 in which Valentinian published his edict. It 
 was marked by a more well-defined opposition 
 to a worldly church than any of the earlier 
 sects. It insisted on re-ordination and re-bap- 
 tism of all who had been defiled by ecclesiastical 
 association with those church officials who had 
 proven faithless under the last great persecu- 
 tion to which the church was exposed. There 
 was scarcely ever a time when the Eoman 
 Church was the sole representative of religion 
 even in its own territory. Save perhaps in the 
 7th and 8th centuries, there were always earnest 
 souls who felt that religion was not identical 
 
 94 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 with the church, and who desired a purer fel- 
 lowship. It is hard, perhaps, to acquit them 
 of a touch of Pharisaism but their souls were 
 cramped by formalism and officialism. When 
 the hardening influences of a stereotyped eccle- 
 siasticism were reinforced by the authority of 
 the State, the religious life of the Church be- 
 came still further ossified ; there was more rea- 
 son for rebellion but a far graver risk in it. 
 When the Church controlled the machinery of 
 the State and when the State was insisting 
 upon unity throughout its heterogeneous do- 
 minions, it seemed necessary to submit. To 
 rebel meant to rob the inevitably victorious 
 church of the few who were in earnest about 
 their religion. In the words of an anonymous 
 Romance tract of the 12th century: ^^The elect 
 of God were captives in Babylon and served 
 as gold with which Antichrist covered his van- 
 ity. ' ' ^ But though for a while new sects were 
 not formed, the decreasing Donatists and the 
 Priscillians, a Pietistic sect, continued until 
 well into the latter half of the sixth century. 
 The spirit represented by them, however, did 
 not altogether die out, for in the beginning of 
 the ninth century, the Paulicians, denouncing 
 Sacramentalism and the worship of saints and 
 relics, arose and flourished until in the 11th 
 century they seem to have poured their 
 strength into a Slavic movement of consider- 
 
 1 Quoted in Neander's History of the Christian Religion and Church 
 {Torrey's translation). Vol. IV, p. 615. 
 
 95 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 able significance, known as the Friends of God. 
 Along the trade-lines from the East to the 
 West, this movement spread in force and grew 
 in power, until under the name of Catharists 
 it virtually possessed Southern France and 
 reached into Germany on the North and into 
 Spain on the South. Thoroughly dualistic in 
 its theology, it emphasized the necessity of the 
 most stringent ascetism at least for its Apos- 
 tles, who by a peculiar Sacrament received the 
 power to forgive the sins of their followers. 
 They denounced the worship and Sacraments 
 of the church, the reading of the Old Testa- 
 ment, the worship of saints and the cross, and 
 declared in unmistakable tones that all Catholic 
 priests had committed the unpardonable sin. 
 By the severity and abnegation of their lives 
 and the power of their preachers, they gained 
 the hearts of the people and maintained them- 
 selves well into the thirteenth century. Either 
 among them or at one side of them, Peter of 
 Bruis and Henry of Lausanne overwhelmed 
 the priests with their mighty eloquence, and 
 for the first time in history denounced not only 
 the mass but the baptism of infants, insisting 
 upon faith as necessary to church membership, 
 and to the high title of Christian." Before they 
 had spent their force, the sudden death of a 
 friend drove Peter Waldo to a study of the 
 scriptures and to so strong a desire to proclaim 
 
 '^ For a brief account of these Sects see Neander {Torrey): History of 
 the Christian Religion, Vol. IV, pp. 5S 3-604. 
 
 96 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 their good tidings that the inhibition and even 
 excommunication of the Pope had no weight 
 either with him or his followers. By no means 
 unhappy in the Eoman church, and maintaining 
 a close doctrinal resemblance to it, wonderfully 
 free from vagaries of every sort, appealing but 
 little to the imagination, with the instincts of 
 Bible-readers yet condemned to be heretics, it 
 seems indeed a freak of fate that of all these 
 schismatics that have been mentioned, they 
 alone have withstood all the violent persecu- 
 tions directed against them and have remained 
 unto this day. But, as we shall see, ^^come- 
 outers" fail where ^ ^ driven-outers ' ' succeed. 
 Perhaps the sanity of their communion pro- 
 tected them from extermination on the one 
 hand and from any determining influence on 
 the other. But this in all fairness we must say : 
 without intending to, and without appearing to 
 have the spiritual riches to justify it, it is to 
 them that the world owes the first enduring free 
 church of history. Of all communions on earth 
 to-day they have lived longest without being 
 tied to any secular power and without ever 
 having sacrificed their apparently unneeded 
 independence. It is difficult to correctly es- 
 timate the extent and quality of their influence. 
 It was exerted in various ways, some of which 
 we can trace, but it is probable that it is the 
 most important that we cannot trace. Through 
 Nicholas of Basle, Waldensian thought power- 
 fully influenced the mystic Tauler and through 
 
 97 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 his writings not only quickened the hearts of 
 many of the noblest Catholics but reached and 
 moulded Luther himself. How far it was re- 
 sponsible for the great Protestant Free-Church 
 movement, to which we are to turn in a moment, 
 is more doubtful, but so similar were the two 
 movements in their beliefs that these words of 
 David of Augsburg concerning the Walden- 
 sians, written only about fifty years after 
 Waldo's death in 1218, seem as if they must 
 have been written to describe the Anabaptists 
 three hundred years later. "Having been cast 
 out from the Catholic Church they affirm that 
 they alone are the Church of Christ and dis- 
 ciples of Christ. They say that they are the 
 successors of the apostles and have apostolic 
 authority and the keys of binding and loosing. 
 They say that the Eomish Church is the Baby- 
 lonish harlot and that all who obey her are 
 damned. They say that for the first time is a 
 man truly baptized who is inducted into their 
 heresy. But some say that baptism does not 
 avail for little children, because they cannot 
 yet actually believe. They repudiate all cleri- 
 cal orders, saying they would be rather a curse 
 than a sacrament. Every oath is unlawful. 
 They say it is not lawful to put malefactors to 
 death through secular judgment. ' ' ^ The 
 primacy of the Waldensians among free 
 churches caused many later similar movements 
 to be called by their name or at least to be 
 
 ^ See Newman: History of Anti-Ppdnhnpiism, p. 46. 
 
 98 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 regarded as their spiritual children. So it was 
 with the Bohemian brethren, for example, ac- 
 cording to the testimony of Prof. Newman. 
 I have unfortunately been unable to get at the 
 original authorities of this important move- 
 ment. Its originator, the saintly Peter Chel- 
 cicky, declares that the apostasy of the Church 
 began when the relation of Church and State 
 changed. He affirms that an insoluble contra- 
 diction is involved in the expression, ^Hhe 
 Christian State," since to the essence of the 
 state belongs compulsion, which is abhorrent to 
 the true Christian.* Yet curiously enough, if 
 Archivar Keller is correct, the Bohemian 
 brethren never separated themselves from the 
 state church.^ We know however that Nicholas 
 Storch, an important figure in the first stage of 
 the Anabaptist movement which we are about 
 to consider, was influenced by them both in 
 thought and in church organization, and it 
 seems not unlikely that he knew them as Wal- 
 densians.^ It may therefore well be that the 
 Waldensian movement was the channel through 
 which the new life in Bohemia poured itself into 
 the still newer life of Germany. And, once 
 again, in that later offspring of the Anabaptist 
 movement which we call the Mennonite con- 
 nection, which flourished in those parts of the 
 Netherlands in which considerable remnants of 
 the Waldensians were settled, we find the Men- 
 
 * Newman: History of Anti-Pedobaptism, pp. 450, 451. 
 ^Keller: Die Wiedert'aufer, p. 16. 
 ^Newman, op. cit., p. 68. 
 
 99 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 nonite leader, Cornelius van Huyzen, recogniz- 
 ing the Waldensians as the originators of their 
 creed and worship. Indeed later we find some 
 English sectaries asserting that through 
 Mennonite and Waldensian they had main- 
 tained an unbroken succession from the apos- 
 tles. But here again the Waldensian movement 
 is only an adopted father of children of quite a 
 different parentage. It is the sturdiest of a 
 long succession of free-church movements be- 
 fore the Reformation, but no more than they, 
 and far less than some of them, did it occupy 
 the center of the religious drama of the times. 
 It was only when Luther and Zwingli had made 
 possible to men a free connection with God that 
 the spiritual atmosphere was produced in which 
 a free church movement could become a perma- 
 nent and vital force in the world. 
 
 The great free church movement of Protes- 
 tant, of essentially non-conforming, Christians 
 was borne into the world by Anabaptists and 
 made vital by Congregationalists — ^^for the 
 base things of the world and the things that are 
 despised did God choose, yea, and the things 
 that are not to bring" not ^'to nought" in this 
 case but to completion, ''the things that are." 
 
 I wish that some great scholar might give his 
 strength to the sympathetic examination and 
 presentation of the Anabaptist storm of the 
 early sixteenth century, or rather of that storm 
 of which strict Anabaptism was the blackest 
 cloud. It is impossible to describe it; it is al- 
 
 100 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 most impossible even to hold it together. Bul- 
 linger, its fairest contemporary chronicler, dis- 
 tinguishes twelve different ^ ^sects'' among 
 them, and there were doubtless more, though 
 they were different from what he thought them. 
 They differed from each other on a thousand 
 minor points which the sympathetic Capito 
 justly said ^^ stand outside of any connection 
 with the honor of God'' ^ and they were ready 
 to endure persecution and death for each dif- 
 ference. They differed from each other, also, on 
 some most vital points, — on the authority of the 
 Old Testament and even on that of the New, 
 on the use and form of the sacraments and on 
 the constitution of the church, on the existence 
 of civil government, on the sufferance of oaths 
 and private property, on the duration of the 
 world, and on the use of force. Nearly all 
 primitive Anabaptists disbelieved in physical 
 resistance to evil ; long before the Quakers were 
 thought of hundreds of these convinced paci- 
 fists laid their lives do^\ai joyfully; yet the 
 movement also included those who mistook Jan 
 of Leyden for the Messiah and set up a polyg- 
 amous kingdom of God at Munster which they 
 defended with swords and strategy for well on 
 toward two years against some of the best sol- 
 diery of the time. All kinds of people belonged 
 to this wide-spread movement — the Zwickau- 
 prophets who terrorized and sterilized Luther 
 and the Huttites fleeing from well-ordered 
 
 ^ Newman, op. cit., p. 2^5. 
 
 101 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 homes because they would not allow their prince 
 to strike a blow in their defense, Hans Denck 
 and Schwengfeld, contemptuous of all outward 
 rites and organization and those who insisted 
 that only the immersed were open to salvation, 
 the scholarly Grebel and Hubmaier and the Lit- 
 tle Greek marched side by side with Blaurock 
 the peasant and Andy of the Crutches — but 
 upon this one point they all agreed, that over 
 the consciences to which God had spoken no 
 man nor state nor church had any poiver. The 
 Spirit had come to them and they were not to 
 be longer in subjection to the beggarly elements 
 of this world. It was for freedom that Christ 
 had set them free and they would far rather 
 part from the body than from this free Spirit. 
 They were often wild and they were usually un- 
 stable, but they were a noble army of martyrs. 
 There is little exaggeration in this bitter de- 
 scription of them by Zwingli ; ' ' They judge the 
 faults of others but see none of their own. To- 
 day they wish this; to-morrow its opposite; 
 to-day no government, a little later a govern- 
 ment indeed, but one in which no governor shall 
 be considered a Christian ; to-day they demand 
 a church of their own, afterwards they de- 
 nounce the state for protecting the preaching 
 of the gospel ; at one time the priests should be 
 slain, at another they should be allowed free 
 rein; when children are baptized they bellow 
 that there is no sin greater. They perform more 
 such monkey-tricks every day than the African 
 
 102 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 wild-beasts. They greet no one of whom they 
 disapprove. They quarrel at all corners of the 
 city; if that is forbidden them, they go into 
 their private quarrel-houses and sit in judg- 
 ment on all men. When they have finished 
 with that, they rinse each other out with such 
 bitterness that there is enough gall left to bathe 
 in. Such a poor, confused, bitter temper they 
 call Spirit, whereas it is a most melancholy 
 flesh. '^ In other words they were free men of 
 the spirit like their progenitors in Corinth, 
 prophets who had not learned to control their 
 prophetic spirits.^ But they counted not their 
 lives dear unto themselves and some of the 
 most moving scenes in Christian history are 
 their martydoms at the hands of their brethren 
 in the state churches, for whom they prayed 
 in all tenderness as the fire kindled about them. 
 It is only recently that justice has been shown 
 them at the hands of historians. Their name. 
 Anabaptists, second Baptizers,. has been not 
 only scornful but misleading. For most of us 
 to-day they are a rout of fanatical sacramen- 
 tarians. It is true that they bitterly denounced 
 infant baptism and that nearly all of them 
 recognized the validity of the baptism of be- 
 lievers only, but the great movement had some- 
 thing far more fundamental at stake than the 
 form of a Christian rite. Its deepest interest 
 and its originating motive lay outside the sacra- 
 mental realm. Egli, the great modern author- 
 
 8 1 Cor. 14 : 32. 
 
 103 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 ity on the Swiss Reformation,^ who was a care- 
 ful investigator of Anabaptist origins, has 
 brought enough original material to light to dis- 
 tinguish three distinct periods in their brief and 
 startling history. The first, beginning in the 
 summer of 1523, had to do with a separate 
 church, the second, beginning in the summer 
 of 1524, had to do with infant baptism, only the 
 third, beginning in January of 1525, had to do 
 with the public baptism of those who were com- 
 pelled to disoAvn the baptism administered to 
 them in their infancy.^*^ Separation from the 
 state church was their primary object; ques- 
 tions regarding baptism were quite secondary 
 to that. The witnesses against Felix Manz, 
 who was drowned by order of the court, garbled 
 a real truth when they affirmed that he told 
 them that ^* there was more behind baptism 
 than was yet declared'' and ^^that baptism 
 would at last overthrow the government. ' ' ^^ 
 Long ago Dorner correctly estimated the rela- 
 tive importance of these three leading convic- 
 tions of theirs, when he wrote: ^^Zwingli saw 
 that the setting aside of infant baptism was the 
 same as setting aside the National Church, ex- 
 changing a hitherto national reformation of the 
 church for one more or less Donatist. And if 
 infant baptism were given up, there remained 
 as the proper time for its administering only 
 
 9 The greatest work on this entire movement is his unfinished Geschichte 
 der Schweizerischen Reformation. 
 ^^Egli, op. cit., p. 323. 
 ^^Burrage: Anabaptists in Switzerland, p. 102. 
 
 104 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 the moment when living faith and regeneration 
 were certain. ''^^ Sebastian Franck, a con- 
 temporary chronicler, saw into their hearts 
 when he wrote of them: ^^ Certain ones among 
 them wish a Christian to be so holy, simple, 
 innocent, dead to the world, so perfect, that he 
 should never live after the flesh nor seek that 
 which is upon the earth. Therefore a Chris- 
 tian does not desire to live in accordance with 
 the world, nor to value anything worldly. 
 Dying and living are the same to him; indeed 
 this life has become a monotony. ' ' ^^ And 
 though Nippold goes too far when he says that 
 the Anabaptists were the first to defend the 
 separation of Church and State," there can be 
 no doubt that the erection of a spiritual church 
 after the copy of the Apostolic church, freed 
 from the strangling alliance with the State, was 
 their initial as well as their highest hope. With 
 a cause so essential to religion we can well un- 
 derstand why Zwingli declared the destruction 
 of the Papal church to be ''child's play'' in 
 comparison with the annihilation of these sec- 
 taries.^^ 
 
 In the joy of seeing one tyranny overthrown, 
 these clear-thinking and high-spirited men were 
 horrified to see another being set up. A Papal 
 despotism was bad enough but it was at least 
 
 ^^Geschichte der Protestantischen Theologie, pp. 293-294, quoted in Burrage, 
 op. cit., p. 76. 
 
 13 Keller: Wiedertiiufer, p. I4. 
 
 ^*Berner Beitrage, quoted in Nitsche: Geschichte der Wiedert'dufer in der 
 Schweiz. 
 
 ^^Egli, op. cit., p. 332. 
 
 105 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 a spiritual despotism, whereas the new regime 
 in their city of Ziirich was a secular one. The 
 Spirit of Christ, Dweller within the individual 
 soul, was being enthralled by the state. Men 
 chosen for their business acumen and their 
 military capacity were to become the authori- 
 tative judges of a divine force which brooked 
 no judgment and to which most of them were 
 strangers. They were much truer than Luther 
 to those words of his: ^^From the beginning 
 the worldly and the spiritual offices have been 
 sundered by Christ. And experience shows but 
 too clearly that there can be no peace where 
 the city controls the preacher or where the 
 preacher controls the city. ' ' ^^ They feared 
 that true religion would fare worse under mer- 
 chants than under bishops. They could see 
 but little gain in substituting Zurich for Rome. 
 "These Baptists," said old Bullinger, "com- 
 plain that the evangelical preachers use the 
 government in matters of religion and that they 
 declare not only that it may, but that it should, 
 busy itself concerning matters of faith. But 
 they (the Baptists) hold the precise opposite 
 most stubbornly, — in which, indeed, they 
 agree in part with the Papists who would shut 
 out the Kaiser, the King, the Princes and all 
 lords from the affairs of faith and church." 
 ' Here the amazed Protestant historian reveals 
 to us the spiritual brotherhood of Papists 
 and Free Christians, standing shoulder to 
 
 16 Hast: Geschichte der Wiedertdufer, p. 147. 
 
 106 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 shoulder for the independence of religion 
 against the Protestant secularists. It is be- 
 cause of this horror at the secularization of 
 religion that in the old Anabaptist record, we 
 find these proud words: ^^Anno 1524 and 1525 
 is God's Word and the Gospel of Jesus Christ 
 come into all Germany after the Peasants' 
 War.'' We are fortunately in possession of 
 some of the earliest conversations which her- 
 alded that coming. The three men who may 
 be regarded as its discoverers are Stumpf, a 
 preacher, Grebel, a young humanist, and Felix 
 Manz, a citizen of learning and position. 
 These three, Bullinger tells us, thought first to 
 win Zwingli to their views. — ^^Over and over 
 they visited him and Jud (his colleague) and 
 reminded them that both of them should found 
 a separate people and church, in which Chris- 
 tians should live guiltlessly according to the 
 Gospel and should not be corrupted by interest 
 or other usury. They should kill all the priests, 
 Stumpf said; he had told his people that they 
 should not pay interest nor tithes. Stumpf 
 and Grebel insisted on having all things in 
 common. WJien Manz said once that no one 
 should be allowed in the new church that was 
 not without sin, Zwingli asked if he would lilce 
 to be one of them. At a meeting at Jud 's house, 
 the enthusiasts told Zwingli that he went too 
 slow and was lukewarm in the concerns of the 
 Church and God's Kingdom. The Spirit 
 spurred to greater seriousness. . . . The apos- 
 
 107 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 ties in Jerusalem separated themselves from 
 the wicked that they might establish a company 
 of the faithful. So in Ziirich it was necessary to 
 separate from the crowd and to gather a pure 
 church and a company of outspoken children 
 of God, who have His spirit and are ruled 
 thereby. Zwingli replied that the apostles had 
 separated only from the enemies of the Gospel, 
 not from those that were on the way to become 
 its friends. ^^Dear brethren,^' he said, ** don't 
 think too much of yourselves. Be patient with 
 the weak, sick flock that belong with you in 
 Christ's fold, and separate rather from the 
 works of darkness. You will not induce me to 
 favor such a separation as you desire, for I 
 cannot enter into it with God. ' ' ^^ Shortly after 
 these famous conversations, a great disputa- 
 tion was held in the city of Ziirich regarding 
 the mass and the destruction of images. When 
 Grebel, at the close of its second day, proposed 
 that the priests should be correctly instructed 
 in regard to the mass, Zwingli replied that the 
 members of the Council would decide that mat- 
 ter. At once Stumpf cried out : ^ ' You have no 
 right to leave the decision with them. The 
 decision is already given. The Spirit of God 
 decides. Should the gentlemen of the Council 
 give a decision contrary to the Word of God, 
 then imploring Christ for His Spirit, I will 
 teach and act against them.''^^ All this time 
 
 17 Nitsche, op. cit., p. 9. Egli, op. cit., pp. 89-90. 
 
 i^Burrage, Anabaptists in Switzerland, p. 69. Egli, op. cit., p. 106. 
 
 108 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 nothing seems to have been said regarding the 
 baptismal rite, because of which they have so 
 unjustly been dubbed Anabaptists. And even 
 after they had denounced Infant Baptism in a 
 public disputation as a creation of the Pope 
 and had begun to baptize their adherents, the 
 Council of Ziirich issued the following procla- 
 mation: ^'Moreover (in the same discussion) it 
 clearly appeared that the authors of Anabap- 
 tism, by whom these gatherings and sects were 
 first raised and for which they strive, were 
 actuated in this affair by a bold and shameless 
 mind and not by a good spirit, intending to 
 gather around them a separate people and sect, 
 contrary to God's commands, in contempt of 
 the civil magistrate, to the planting of every 
 kind of disobedience, and to the destruction of 
 Christian love to neighbors. For they regard 
 themselves as without sin and better than their 
 fellow-Christians, as their words, actions, and 
 life clearly testify. ''" The Council did not 
 allow a dispute about baptism to cover up their 
 initial — to them blasphemous — purpose of es- 
 tablishing a separated church. And two years 
 later still (1527), understanding the root 
 of all this turmoil and refusing to stress 
 the baptismal controversies, the Council 
 invited the other members of the Swiss Con- 
 federacy to take common measures against the 
 Anabaptists who were aiming at the destruc- 
 tion ^^not only of the true right faith of Chris- 
 
 ^^Burrage, op. cit., p. 146- 
 
 109 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 tian hearts but also of outward and human 
 ordinances and institutions of Christian and 
 ordinary government, against brotherly love 
 and good morals." ^° The leaders of the move- 
 ment, then, regarded the State Church and in- 
 cidentally the State itself, as then constituted, 
 as their prime foe. This fact alone accounts 
 for the fierceness and the persecution directed 
 against these free-churchmen by Catholics and 
 Evangelicals, by princes and Keichstag, by 
 cities and magistrates. They had no concep- 
 tion of the rights that men claim when they be- 
 lieve themselves to be liberated from human 
 tyrannies by the Spirit of God; it was simply 
 their clear duty to put down the beginnings of 
 anarchy. And though, after the movement 
 spread from Ziirich where it originated in its 
 noblest form, it became largely a Baptist prop- 
 aganda, we are reminded every once in a while 
 of its deeper meaning by the statements of — or 
 about — its individual converts. Thus Capito 
 bears witness to Michael Sattler martyred at 
 Rothenburg in 1527, saying that **he showed 
 great zeal for the honor of God and the Church 
 of Christ, which he wished to have pure and 
 irreproachable and free from offense to those 
 without.'^" Even as late as 1551, Ghirlandi, 
 an Italian priest, left the Eoman Church and 
 finally joined the Mennonite branch of this 
 movement, because he ** sought a people who 
 should be free from bondage of sin through 
 
 ^'^ Newman, op. cit., p. 147. 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 the gospel of truth, and should walk in newness 
 of life, a people that is God's holy, unspotted 
 church, separate from sinners, without wrinkle 
 and without blemish. ' ' ^^ And Menno Simon, 
 perhaps the noblest and most efficient of all 
 the Anabaptists, converted to them in spite of 
 the outrageous extravagances of Muenster, 
 which he loathed, whose work influenced Eng- 
 lish and future American dissenters, and whose 
 churches abide to this day, is proof that the 
 movement even in its later stages was never 
 without the high enthusiasm of its initial pro- 
 test against bondage to the world. **We must 
 be born from above," he says, ^^and transposed 
 out of the evil nature of Adam into the good 
 way of Christ from which a new life follows. 
 The poor ignorant people are vainly consoled 
 through external works and exercises. Let 
 each one ... no longer trust in the fact that he 
 is a baptized Christian, nor upon long usage, 
 nor upon papal decrees, nor upon imperial 
 edicts nor upon the wit of the learned, nor upon 
 human counsels and wisdom. No Scripture 
 says that a carnally-minded man without new 
 birth from God's Spirit has been save'd nor can 
 be, merely because he boasts his faith in Christ 
 or hears mass or goes to Church or makes pil- 
 grimages. For us a counsel has been made in 
 heaven, to which alone we listen and which 
 alone we must follow.'' ^^ 
 
 22 Newman, p. 331. 
 
 23 I.e., p. 300. 
 
 Ill 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 Freedom has always been regarded as a dan- 
 gerous word by those in authority; it is not 
 therefore to be wondered at that these obscure 
 men who contended so unequivocally for it as 
 a right, and not merely as a convenience, at the 
 gray dawn of the modern era, should have been 
 persecuted by States and princes and should 
 themselves have been bitter against the State. 
 Sebastian Franck estimated that more than 
 two thousand Anabaptists were executed in 
 the five years between 1525 and 1530.^* It is 
 somewhat strange that in the face of these 
 figures, the Christian world should throw its 
 hands quite so high in air over the blasphemous 
 Kingdom of God in Muenster. As a matter of 
 fact it should rather seem strange that the 
 main movement of the Anabaptists should have 
 been so slightly influenced by the Peasants^ 
 War at its beginning and should have been 
 blotted by only one Muenster at its height. 
 
 If our estimate of the dominant force behind 
 this movement be in the direction of the truth, 
 it is not strange that w^e should find so many 
 extreme opinions with regard to government 
 attributed to its leaders. As a matter of fact, 
 they disagreed about its function and its rights. 
 They may be said to be unanimous in their 
 belief that, as Bothman put it in the earlier 
 days of the development at Muenster, ' ' In mat- 
 ters of faith the assembled church and not the 
 magistracy has the authority.''-^ The Mora- 
 
 24 Newman, p. 151. 
 
 25 I.e., p. 281. 
 
 112 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 vians admitted that God had given the princes 
 authority over unbelievers.^® Hubmaier in- 
 sisted that the civil power has the right to ex- 
 ecute evil doers but that God alone should 
 punish the godless. ^^ They would have all sub- 
 scribed to the preface in which Castellio dedi- 
 cated his Latin Bible to Edward VI: ^^The 
 only enemies of our faith are vices and vices 
 can be conquered only by virtues. The Christ, 
 who said if they strike you on the one cheek, 
 turn the other also, has called us to the spiritual 
 task of instructing men in the truth, and that 
 work can never be put into the hands of an 
 executioner. ' ' ^^ 
 
 There were some among them who went 
 further than this. Manz, accused for having 
 denounced magistracy, asserted that he held 
 rather that no Christian might exercise it, 
 though no one should punish with the sword.^^ 
 Melanchthon names certain Anabaptists in 
 Jena who held that no Christian could be a 
 magistrate, because no Christian should punish 
 with the sword. ^° This view was widely held, 
 so widely that when Henry VIII, in far off Eng- 
 land, proclaimed religious toleration in 1540, 
 he expressly excepted those who held that it 
 was unlawful for Christians to bear office.^^ 
 There was a strong, though not quite unan- 
 
 26 Hast: Die Wiedertaufer, pp. 206-7. 
 
 27 Newman, op. cit., p. 97. 
 
 ^^ Jones: Spiritual Reformers in 16th and 17th centuries, p. 93. 
 ^^Cf. Burrage, op. cit., pp. 102, 106. 
 ^0 See Hast, op. cit., p. 2S7. 
 31 Newman, op. cit., p. 350. 
 
 113 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 imous, feeling among the free-churchmen 
 against warfare of any kind, some refusing to 
 pay taxes for war, some refusing to engage in 
 war, though not unwilling to supply soldiers 
 with food (Jacob Gross of Strassburg), the 
 great majority insisting upon unqualified non- 
 resistance. Melchior Hoffman was indeed the 
 first prominent free-churchman (for Muenzer 
 was not a free-churchman) to abandon the 
 idea.^^ The Moravians, like Muenzer, insisted 
 on community of goods, which raised the wrath 
 of the nobles, who had been already roundly 
 denounced by such Anabaptist leaders as 
 Grebel, Kantius and Koubli.^^ Very many, too, 
 refused to take oaths. But biblical reasons 
 were operative at many of these points as well 
 as democratic ones. And it may well be 
 doubted whether any other leaders than Hut 
 and Tiziano opposed magistracy as an institu- 
 tion and wished to live without a State. John 
 Bruppacher of Zumikon, though on the rack, 
 declared that he had never heard that the Ana- 
 baptists teach that there should be no govern- 
 ment or that they sought to overthrow it.^* The 
 Eoman Catholic priest, Faber, claimed, it is 
 true, in a little brochure published soon after 
 the martyrdom of the scholarly Anabaptist, 
 Hubmaier, that he had confessed to him that 
 ^Hheir reason and object was to have no gov- 
 ernment but only from their own number to 
 
 I ^-^Cf." Newman,' op. cit.,''pp. 184, 185, 207, 235, 2^2, etc. 
 83 I.e., p. 235. 
 ^ Burrage, op. cit., p. 211. 
 
 114 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 draw out and elect one.'' ^^ But in Hubmaier's 
 treatise '^On the Sword," we read rather '^To 
 punish the wicked is not to hate the enemy; 
 the magistrate does not kill from wrath but 
 according to the commandment of God. ' ' ^^ 
 
 Curiously enough this fierce battle for re- 
 ligious freedom, the first costly skirmish for a 
 free church in a free state which may be said 
 to belong to the main campaign in which we 
 are still engaged, was fought for an outpost 
 apparently a good way from the base. For 
 though it was the relation of Church and State 
 that was at stake, the issue was joined concern- 
 ing the sacrament of baptism. And yet any one 
 who has transported himself sympathetically 
 to the times of the Reformation has no difficulty 
 in explaining that fact. The controversy con- 
 cerning the Lord's Supper was really the bat- 
 tle-field over which was waged the battle be- 
 tween the Papists on the one hand and the 
 Protestants on the other. Behind that conflict 
 indeed was the far deeper one regarding the 
 basis upon which sinful men might find accep- 
 tance with God, but the sacramental conception 
 of the Roman Church was the visible token of 
 its conquest over the hearts of the people. And 
 history has shown that Zwingli and Calvin es- 
 timated its importance and its inevitable effects 
 far more truly even than Luther. So the men 
 who fought for religious freedom, who groaned 
 
 " Vedder: Hubmaier, pp. 240-241. 
 
 34 Printed in Vedder' s Hubmaier. See particularly pp. 287, 296, SOI. 
 
 115 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 under the subjection of the church and the 
 Christian to a company of aldermen, saw that 
 it was again a sacrament that stood like ada- 
 mant in their path. What the mass was to the 
 reformers because of what it implied concern- 
 ing the basis of justification, infant baptism 
 was to the free-churchmen because of what it 
 implied with regard to membership in the 
 church. In those ritualistic times, what the eye 
 saw carried greater weight than what the ear 
 heard, and no matter what was decided about 
 the efficacy of the mass and about the impor- 
 tance of personal faith, if every one was bap- 
 tized in infancy and if every one who was so 
 baptized was regarded as a member of the 
 church, it was evidently hopeless to differenti- 
 ate a Christian and a citizen. The weightier 
 matters of religion would be buried under 
 tithes and taxes, and the Church would become 
 a branch of the police of the city councils. 
 Therefore it was that in Zwingli's phrase, the 
 people were ^^so hot about infant baptism, ^'^^ 
 therefore that disputation after disputation 
 was called to consider it in the various towns of 
 Switzerland and South Germany and therefore 
 that every town council agreed with the spirit 
 of the proclamation of the council of Zurich: 
 *^A11 children must be baptized as soon as they 
 are born and all parents ignoring this shall be 
 imprisoned." The agitation about baptism of 
 infants ended in transferring the rite from a 
 
 3' Cf. Nitsche: Geschichte der Wiederdtufer, p. 28. 
 
 116 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 law of the Church into a law of the State.^^ The 
 State and Church became thereby indistin- 
 guishable. 
 
 But fortunately the bold champions of spiri- 
 tual freedom took a further step, more daring, 
 more radical than any they had been called to 
 take hitherto. Surcharged with a conscious- 
 ness of its high import, the old Anabaptist 
 document, from which I have already quoted, 
 thus recounts it: ^^The Reformers have smit- 
 ten the vessel out of the hand of the Pope, but 
 left the fragments therein; for a new birth of 
 life hath one never seen with them. ... To this 
 wonderful work God hath called men in Swit- 
 zerland; amongst them have been Balthazar 
 Hubmeyer, Konrad Grebel, Felix Manz and 
 Georg von Chur. These men had recognized 
 that one must first learn the divine message, 
 the love of an active faith, and only after hav- 
 ing done so, should he receive Christian bap- 
 tism. But since, at that time, there was no 
 servant ordained to such work, Georg of the 
 house of Jacob, called Blaurock, rose up and 
 prayed Konrad Grebel in the name of God that 
 he should baptize him. After that was done, the 
 others there present did demand the same from 
 Georg, and began to hold and to teach the faith. 
 Therewith hath the separation from the world 
 originated and hath grown up. ^ ' 
 
 In this epoch-making transaction two things 
 are to be noted. The first is that no words are 
 
 ^^Burrage, op. cit., p. 99. 
 
 117 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 wasted regarding the form of baptism. Some 
 months after this, a man named Wolfgang Uli- 
 mann was immersed in the Ehine near Schaff- 
 hausen at his own request, but his example was 
 only partially followed. It was not immersion, 
 it was baptism, about which these high words 
 were written. And the second thing to be noted 
 is that baptism was regarded as initiation into 
 the church. It was not an initiation into fel- 
 lowship with God. As Hubmaier said at the 
 beginning: ^* Where water-baptism according 
 to the ordinance of Christ has not again been 
 instituted, there one knows not who is brother 
 and sister, there is no church, no fraternal dis- 
 cipline or correction, no exclusion, no sup- 
 per. '^ 39 Qj. ^g Konrad Grebel, the one who first 
 dared to baptize a Christian upon whose brows 
 magic holy water had been sprinkled in infancy, 
 wrote to the worldly Muenzer, ^'From the 
 Scriptures we learn that baptism signifies that 
 by faith and the blood of Christ our sins have 
 been washed away, that we have died to sin 
 and walk in newness of life, and that assurance 
 of salvation is through the inner baptism, — 
 faith, — so that water does not confirm and in- 
 crease the faith, as the Wittenberg theologians 
 say, neither does it save. * * *^ Certainly this is 
 a noble and a moderate statement to come from 
 the man who through baptism with water in- 
 stituted the new Church. And may I here in- 
 
 ^* Newman, op. cit., p. 179. 
 *°Burrage, op. cit., p. 87. 
 
 118 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 sert one of the most satisfying statements I 
 have ever found regarding the use of the sacra- 
 ments, even though it be a digression! It is 
 from Hubmaier and reads thus: ^'In baptism, 
 one pledges himself to God and in the supper 
 to his neighbor, to offer body and blood in his 
 stead as did Christ for us.''*^ 
 
 Now I do not affirm that the so-called Ana- 
 baptist movement had for its only impulse the 
 freeing of the church from the trammels of 
 the State. As with all men, the motives of the 
 Anabaptist leaders were mixed. There was 
 undoubtedly an element of Pharisaism in the 
 movement, of jealousy of Zwingli and the 
 preachers to the well-positioned, and a great 
 pinch of impatience. Besides these inevitable 
 dashes of evil, there was also a motive of great 
 importance to which only passing reference has 
 been made. It was a desire to reproduce the 
 life and the customs of the early church and 
 to follow literally the injunctions of Jesus and 
 the New Testament. Harnack has said that 
 there never has been a strong religious move- 
 ment without dependence upon outward author- 
 ity. That authority in the times of the 
 Eeformation was, of course, the Scripture. 
 Nowhere was it in as high and undisputed favor 
 as in Switzerland. After the Zwickauer 
 prophets appeared, Luther in a letter to 
 Melanchthon established a new canon: ''Quod 
 non est contra Scripturam pro Scriptura est et 
 
 <i Vedder: Hubmaier, p. 108. 
 
 119 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 Scriptura pro eo/' (That which is not opposed 
 to Scripture is in favor of Scripture and Scrip- 
 ture is in favor of it.) But Zwingli adhered to 
 Luther's earlier one: ''Eo ipso contra Beum 
 quod sino verho Dei.'' (That which has no sup- 
 port in God's word is thereby proven to be op- 
 posed to God.)^^ Hence the disputations 
 on infant baptism were apparently deter- 
 mined by the appeal to Scripture alone. 
 Zwingli 's assertion that infant baptism was 
 the divinely instituted substitute for circum- 
 cision and that circumcision was explicitly com- 
 manded in the Scripture, always carried the 
 city councils/^ who had other unexpressed rea- 
 sons for their decision, but it did not convince 
 the lay mind. Hence we find Sebastian Franck 
 declaring that the Anabaptists built upon the 
 letter of the Scripture, and it may well have 
 been true that many of the humbler classes 
 joined themselves to the sect not because of 
 their desire for a free church but because of 
 their desire for scriptural baptism. I think it 
 it is clear that the rank and file grew insistent 
 on adult baptism simply because it was in 
 accord with the obvious meaning of Scripture. 
 And yet there were always those among the 
 Anabaptists who saw deeper. Georg Schoferl 
 of Freistaedt, for example, asserted that 
 ^^ Christ taught the common people the gospel 
 by means of their own handicrafts, but for the 
 
 *2 Newman, op. cit., pp. 66, 73. Egli: Geschichte der Schweizerischen. 
 Reformation, p. 67. 
 
 " Cf. Jackson's Zwingli. Chapter XII. 
 
 120 
 
The Beginnings of the Free Churches 
 
 sake of the stiff-necked scribes he used Scrip- 
 ture, for which purpose also it must still be 
 used and not for the sake of the common man, 
 for he can be more successfully instructed by 
 means of the creatures.''^* Hans Denck, hav- 
 ing outgrown his Anabaptist faith, but one of 
 the most prominent men in the whole spiritual 
 movement, wrote in his dying statement: ^^I 
 value the holy Scripture above all human trea- 
 sures, but not so high as the Word of God, which 
 is living, powerful and eternal, for it is God 
 Himself, Spirit and no letter. ' ' ^^ And so while 
 Franck upbraided the Anabaptists for their 
 literalism, Melanchthon reported scornfully 
 that the Anabaptists in Jena claimed that the 
 Bible must be taken spiritually.*^ At Muenster, 
 before the extravagances had broken out, and 
 the Lutherans and the Anabaptists sought for 
 popular distinguishing watchwords, the shibbo- 
 leth of the orthodox evangelicals was ^ ' Christ ' ^ 
 while the significant shibboleth of the Anabap- 
 tist sectaries was ^ ^ Father. '' *^ With all their 
 loyalty to the New Testament there was a spir- 
 itual freedom and ecstasy about them that did 
 not allow exclusive emphasis upon the historical 
 and objective and that reproduced the charac- 
 teristics of the primitive Christians. More than 
 they, however, they emphasized the importance 
 and rigor of Church Discipline, and when a con- 
 
 « Newman, op. cit., p. 220. 
 
 *^ Jones: Spiritual Reformers, p. 28. Hast: Wiedertaufer, p. 225. 
 
 ^^Cf. Hast: Wiedertaufer, p. 237. 
 
 " E. S. Bax: Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists, p. 150. 
 
 121 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 siderable minority appeared in any local church 
 it was a sure signal for secession. They were 
 not strictly congregational in their organiza- 
 tion; their leaders took the place and the au- 
 thority of the apostles. But their authority 
 was not sufficient to be widely recognized, so 
 that in constant bickerings and divisions they 
 dissipated their spiritual strength.*^ Under 
 the stress of persecution without and bigotry 
 within and under the black stain of the *^ Messi- 
 anic reign '^ at Muenster, the name Anabaptist 
 became a byword and a hissing. But what they 
 did was not done in a corner. The idea of a 
 free-church became familiar to Europe and was 
 transplanted to the saner and yet stolider race 
 of the English. For underneath all jealousies 
 and deeper than spiritual pride, the instinctive 
 conviction that freedom is a necessary condi- 
 tion of religion created a type of spiritual life 
 which could not die out of Protestantism. 
 
 *8 Cf. for example the ancient book of Ubbo Philipps. 
 
 122 
 
LECTUEE V 
 
 CONTRIBUTION OF CONGREGATION- 
 ALISM TO CHURCH POLITY 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 CONTRIBUTION OF CONGREGATION- 
 ALISM TO CHURCH POLITY 
 
 The first Protestant protagonists of free- 
 dom, the Swiss and German Anabaptists, failed. 
 Many reasons contributed to that failure. 
 First of all, they were pioneers, and pioneers 
 usually succeed by failing; that is their lot; 
 they lay down their lives for their cause. The 
 continent of Europe was prepared for a revolt 
 against a religious tyranny with secular am- 
 bitions; it was not prepared for a weakening 
 of centralized government; freedom and an- 
 archy it could not differentiate. The apostles of 
 freedom expected to be hounded and they were 
 not disappointed. 
 
 But they contributed quite unnecessarily to 
 the realization of their expectation. Their 
 leaders were extremists and guilty of many 
 excesses. The orgy of Muenster was in itself 
 sufficient to unite the higher forces of civiliza- 
 tion against the movement out of which it 
 issued. If polygamy and the mistaking of a 
 cobbler for Elijah were the fruits of religious 
 freedom, then freedom was only another name 
 for insanity. 
 
 Moreover, these apostles of freedom, like 
 125 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 most of those who range themselves under its 
 banner, were not altogether free. They were 
 bound to reproduce the forms as well as the 
 spirit of the Apostolic Age, as that age was 
 revealed in the Scriptures. Unlike the Congre- 
 gationalists and Presbyterians of a later dec- 
 ade, they did not overlook the apostles; they 
 went so far as to consider them the leading 
 figures in the apostolic age. Unable to regard 
 them as extraordinary and as unrepeatable as 
 the miracles, they allowed freedom and author- 
 ity to their own apostles. They thus blocked 
 their path to democracy, but they were kept 
 nearer to the temper and the forms of the New 
 Testament. But this imitative polity gave to 
 ill-balanced and unbalanced leaders opportuni- 
 ties for carnage which their fanaticism used 
 only too well. Splits and counter-splits at the 
 dictates of leaders reduced the ship of freedom 
 to splinters; it foundered on mines which its 
 own crew had sown. 
 
 Then, too, the word ^^ Anabaptist'' was not 
 a mere nickname. The cause of freedom never 
 gets clear of entangling alliances, nor did it in 
 this case. It was obscured by a debate about 
 a sacrament. It is true that to the Anabaptists 
 the rite was only a sign of an inner reality, but 
 the world was slow to believe that men would 
 lay down their lives for anything which they 
 did not deem of ultimate importance. It could 
 not understand — even in those days — how a rite 
 in itself unessential could become essential by 
 
 126 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 being commanded in the Bible. The issue 
 seemed to many who thought more than they 
 spoke a question of baptism rather than of 
 freedom of faith. 
 
 And not only that, but the word '^Ana^' in 
 this compound nickname Anabaptist was not 
 altogether out of place. Here again, the noble 
 men who were thus dubbed protested earnestly. 
 They did not believe in being baptized over 
 again; they had never been baptized. But 
 there could be no question that they renounced 
 communion with the great body of Christian 
 people. If they did so because of an unessen- 
 tial rite, then they were fanatics beyond the 
 sacred pale of common sense; if they did so 
 because they did not believe in the Christianity 
 of Christendom, then they were Pharisees, 
 Donatists, Novatians, Perfectionists, judgers 
 of their brethren, bigots. When Eoger Wil- 
 liams later accused King Charles of blasphemy 
 for calling Europe Christendom,^ he spoke the 
 truth, as to-day we know only too well, but he 
 became unendurable even to the Pilgrim 
 Fathers. If Separatists cannot convert the 
 world to their view, so that they are Separatists 
 no more, they are bound to go under. Non- 
 Conformists who are too weak to be more than 
 that are bound to be regarded as moral prigs, 
 bound to be an eddy in the great stream of 
 social and political life. 
 
 And so, for these reasons among others, the 
 
 1 Winthrop: History of New England {Savage's edition). Vol. II, p. I45. 
 
 127 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 noble movement for real freedom in religion 
 on the continent of Europe failed. It was over- 
 borne by its revolutionary significance, by the 
 fanaticism of its leaders, by the inadequacy of 
 its chosen sign, by the uncertainty of its polity 
 and the elusiveness of its authority, and by its 
 unescapable tendency to Pharisaic exclusive- 
 ness. It failed. And from its failure Europe 
 has never recovered. The present war may be 
 more wrapped up with that failure than any of 
 us are aware. Eeligion has been cramped into 
 national moulds; it has served and idealized 
 and emphasized the State, its benefactor and 
 subsidizes It has strengthened rather than 
 weakened the prejudices of race. It has fol- 
 lowed common sense, and common sense, always 
 intent on immediate good and unconcerned with 
 wider issues, quite untransformed by the uni- 
 versal impulses of real religion, has produced 
 a catastrophe in comparison with which Muen- 
 ster may again be mistaken for the New 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 It is the glory of Congregationalism to have! 
 taken up the struggle for religious freedom and I 
 to have succeeded where Anabaptism failed, j 
 To it does not belong the glory of conceiving a^ 
 free church, untrammeled by all connection 
 with the State. To that great idea the Baptists 
 have the prior claim and to it they have shown 
 the more abiding loyalty. But I do not think 
 it is too much to say that what Anabaptists 
 failed to do in Europe, Congregationalists ac- 
 
 128 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 complished in America. They were the chief 
 influence in bringing about a civilization which 
 is chiselled on the lines of freedom and in which 
 religion has, as nowhere else, its proper and 
 efficient place. 
 
 And this great service to religion and man- 
 kind, Congregationalists performed in their 
 own despite. There was that in their principles 
 and in their natures which forced them to a free 
 church in which at the outset they did not be- 
 lieve. The idea of a church utterly disassoci- 
 ated from the state was known in England 
 through the uproar occasioned by the proceed- 
 ings and the persecutions of the Anabaptists. 
 And it was well-nigh universally reprobated. 
 The Congregationalists held in England the 
 position on the extreme left which the Ana- 
 baptists held in Europe. They were equally 
 despised and three of their prominent leaders 
 were executed as enemies to the realm. But 
 the Congregationalists were at one with their 
 countrymen in upholding the idea of a state 
 church; they only insisted that the state au- 
 thorities execute the mandates of the Scrip- 
 tures on church polity. Of the first ridi- 
 culed and persecuted leaders, there is only one 
 who seems to call for a free church, — and he not 
 quite. He was the theorist among them, a man 
 of considerable more brain than character, who 
 had the advantage over his brethren of not be- 
 ing compelled by his conscience to persist in his 
 own theories, if they didn't work at the first 
 
 129 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 trial. His name was Eobert Browne. He is 
 called the Father of Congregationalism, not be- 
 cause he was the leader of the first autonomous 
 church — Fitz was that ^ — or because out of his 
 church grew the first enduring Congregational 
 society, for it died, but because not being both- 
 ered by experience, he drew up a program and 
 a constitution in which he set forth the abiding 
 characteristics of our polity. Concerning the 
 relation of church and state, Browne writes 
 thus: ^^Yet may they (the magistrates) doo 
 nothing concerning the Church, but onelie ciuile, 
 and as civile Magistrates they have not that 
 authoritie ouer the Church, as to be Prophetes 
 or Priestes or spiritual Kings, as they are Mag- 
 istrates ouer the same: but onelie to rule the 
 common wealth in all outwarde Justice, to 
 maintain the right w^elfare and honor thereof, 
 with outward power, bodily punishment, and 
 ciuil forcing of men. And therfore also be- 
 cause the church is in a common wealth, it is 
 of their charge : that is concerning the outward 
 prouision and outward iustice, they are to look 
 to it, but to compel religion, to plant churches 
 by power, and to force a submission by lawes 
 and penalties belongeth not to them, . . . 
 neither yet to the church. Let vs not therfore 
 tarie for the Magistrates. ... If they be not 
 christians should the welfare of the church or 
 the saluation of men hang on their courtesief ^ 
 
 2 Cf. Champlain Burr age: Early English Dissenters, Vol. I, 93. 
 8 I.e., Vol. I, p. 105. 
 
 130 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 Even Browne assigns to the State the outward 
 provision of the Church, but because of his gen- 
 eral drift toward Anabaptist freedom from sec- 
 ular control, his name was distasteful even to 
 his Congregational successors. Penry, for exam- 
 ple, himself a martyr, declares that ^^he hates 
 all schism, Donatist, Anabaptist or Brown- 
 ist. ' ^ * Jacob, the founder of the first explicitly 
 Congregational church in England that did not 
 go into exile, does not hesitate to say that ^^we 
 and all true visible churches ought to be kept 
 in order by the' stretching out of the magis- 
 trate 's arm. ' ' ^ Bradshaw in 1605 proclaims 
 that the Civil magistrate ^4s the only one on 
 earth that has power to punish a whole church 
 or congregation. " ^ The independent petition 
 to the Rump Parliament in 1650 desires com- 
 pulsory worship, a parliamentary commission 
 to regulate mimisters and the construing of 
 open speaking against the fundamentals of 
 Christianity as an offense against the State.'' 
 Cromwell established a church — the broadest 
 and most Congregational ever conceived — but 
 he established it. And when we come to our own 
 American forebears, we find them assuming the 
 same position. Of all Puritan emigrants to 
 America, the Pilgrim Fathers were the most 
 liberal and sensible, but even they had no 
 clearly held notion of separation between 
 
 * Cf. Champlain Burrage: Early English Dissenters, Vol. I, p. 160, note S. 
 5 Cf. I.e., Vol. I, pp. 3, 10. H. W. Clark: History of English Non- 
 Conformity, p. 200. 
 
 ^Burrage, op. cit.. Vol. I, p. 288. 
 1 Clark, op. cit., p. S56. 
 
 131 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 Church and State. Robinson and Brewster over 
 their own signatures agreed to take the oath 
 of supremacy, if thereby they could have their 
 form of polity written into their charter from 
 the King.* They even went to such lengths of 
 concession as to recognize the right of his Maj- 
 esty to appoint bishops **to oversee the 
 churches and governe them civilly unto whom 
 they are in all things to give an account and 
 by them to be ordered according to godliness. '^ ^ 
 They did not regard Church and State as two 
 independent powers before they set sail for 
 America. Nor did they later. From Salem, 
 Gov. Endicott sent back two worthy men to 
 England because they insisted on worshipping 
 according to the rites of the English church.^*^ 
 The Colonies of New Haven and Massachusetts 
 Bay limited both the office holders and voters to 
 members in Congregational churches, no other 
 church being allowed.^^ Massachusetts Bay, the 
 strongest of all these colonies, under the mas- 
 terful influence of Winthrop, spent no incon- 
 siderable part of its legislative activity in eccle- 
 siastical matters. Its first piece of legislation 
 was a mandate that ^'houses should be erected 
 for the ministers with convenient speed at the 
 public charge. ' ' ^^ One man was whipped and 
 banished for writing letters to England slander- 
 
 ^ Bradford's History of Plimouth Plantation, p. 44- 
 
 * Cf. Williston Walker: History of Congregationalism, p. 61; Creeds and 
 Platforms of Congregationalism, pp. 89-90. 
 
 ^° Walker: History of Congregationalism, p. 107. 
 
 " I.e., pp. 114, 120, 122, 123. 
 
 12 Winthrop, op. cit., Vol. I., p. 36, note. 
 
 132 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 ing the government and the orders of the 
 churches ;^^ another was banished for affirming 
 in a petition that the Court had condemned the 
 truth of Christ;^* another was banished for 
 claiming that he had not sinned for six months 
 and that he was free from original sin;^^ an- 
 other was fined for writing a book against taxa- 
 ation for the support of the ministers.^^ In 
 1638 a law was passed, which however was 
 repealed in the next year, giving the Court 
 power to fine, imprison or banish any one who 
 had remained in a State of Excommunication 
 from the church for six months. Further, ^^the 
 denial of the books of the old and new testa- 
 ment — which were all enumerated — to be the 
 written and infallible Word of God was punish- 
 able either by banishment or death for the sec- 
 ond otfence at the discretion of the Court, 
 and an inhabitant who was guilty of this 
 offence upon the high seas was made liable 
 to the penalty. ' ' ^^ Anabaptists were ban- 
 ished, a woman hung for witchcraft and 
 four Quakers executed — all in the very har- 
 bor of Boston.^^ Roger Williams and Mrs. 
 Hutchinson, enthusiasts and virtual perfec- 
 tionists, were banished, though they were 
 
 " Cf. Winthrop. Vol. I, pp. 68, 73. 
 
 14 I.e., Vol. I, p. 29. 
 
 " I.e., Vol. II, p. 22. 
 
 16 Cf. I.e., Vol. II, p. 112. 
 
 1^ Hutchinson: History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, Vol. I, pp. 
 423, 443. 
 
 18 Cf. Walker: History of Congregationalism, pp. 128, 147-148, 197. 
 Winthrop, op. cit.. Vol. II, pp. 149, 212, 307, 308, 332, 397. Bradford, 
 op. cit., p. 461. John Stetson Beary: History of Massachusetts. First 
 Period, pp. 363-372. Hutchinson, op. cit.. Vol. I, pp. 320-321. 
 
 133 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History 
 
 pious, clever and Congregational/^ A minister 
 was prohibited by the Court from preaching 
 at a wedding ;-° a minister was summoned for 
 daring to organize a second church in Saugus 
 without a council ;^^ the church was first ad- 
 vised and later commanded to undertake a 
 mission to the Indians.^^ The Court in 1646 
 distinctly stated that the magistrates were 
 bound to maintain the churches in purity and 
 truth and hence could summon them to councils 
 they deemed necessary.^^ And in 1648 the Cam- 
 bridge Synod thus summoned and attended by 
 all the New England Colonies, decreed that the 
 power of the Magistrate should be exercised 
 about such outward acts ^^as are commanded 
 or forbidden in the Word. ' ' ^ * Heresy, venting 
 corrupt and pernicious opinions, . . . are to be 
 restrained and punished by civil authority/'^* 
 At one point, it is true, our fathers were wise; 
 though the state could interfere with the 
 church, the church could not interfere with the 
 state.^^ Even at Plymouth the Governor 
 walked before the minister, though for pur- 
 poses of safety he walked behind Captain 
 Standish.^^ A church member could not be 
 called to account for his acts as magistrate nor 
 
 i» Winthrop, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 188, 194, 195, 198, 199, 204, 209-210, 
 293. Walker: History of Congregationalism,, p. 136. 
 
 20 Winthrop, op. cit.. Vol. II, p. 382. 
 
 21 I.e., Vol. J, pp. 187, 210, 220. Vol. II, p. 194. Walker: History, p. 
 137. 
 
 22 Walker: History, p. 165. 
 
 23 Winthrop, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 323. 
 
 24 Walker: Creeds and Platforms, pp. 236-237. 
 2B Winthrop, op. cit.. Vol. I, p. 300. 
 
 2« I regret not to he able at present to refer to the original authority for 
 this statement. 
 
 134 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 could a minister be also a magistrate.^' On 
 important points of public as well as ecclesias- 
 tical policy the ministers Avere summoned by 
 the court to give advice, but only advice. ^^ Not 
 until 1684 was the franchise extended in Mas- 
 sachusetts to those who were not members of 
 churches. It was only in 1729 that Baptists 
 and Quakers were excused from taxation for 
 the support of Congregational clergy, and the 
 Episcopalians had to wait six years longer."^ 
 Taxation for church purposes was discontinued 
 only in 1818 in Connecticut and in 1834 
 in Massachusetts. There can be no pretense 
 that these Congregational champions of free- 
 dom grasped the great principle of freedom 
 from the state. And bitterly did they pay for 
 their error. It was through the act of the 
 Connecticut legislature that the Saybrook 
 Synod was called together to standardize 
 church practises in the colony. That Synod vir- 
 tually renounced the liberty for which their 
 fathers braved so many perils. It tied up the 
 churches to what the Hartford North Associa- 
 tion ninety 3^ears later proudly called ^^not Con- 
 gregationalism but essentially Presbyterian." ^° 
 This standardization, this tendency to con- 
 formity and consolidation, which legislatures 
 
 " Winthrop, op. cit., Vol. T, pp. 299-301. 
 
 ^^Cf. Winthrop, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 117, 133, 183. Hutchinson, op. 
 cit.. Vol. I, p. 434- 
 
 29 Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Vol. II, pp. 
 494-496, 714-715, 782-783. At first the support of the clergy seems to hare 
 been voluntary, but in 1654, o-s the country towns grew lax, a law providing for 
 ministerial support ivas passed. Hutchinson, op. cit.. Vol. I, p. 4^7. 
 
 3" Cf. Walker: History of Congregationalism, p. 207, for a milder judgment 
 of the Saybrook Synod. 
 
 135 
 
Some Tuvfiing -Points in Churcli History 
 
 so like and which this Connecticut legislature 
 caused, operated to create friendlier feelings 
 toward the Presbyterians of the Middle States 
 than to the Simon pure Congregationalism of 
 Massachusetts, and had not a little to do with 
 the * ^ Plan of Union, ' ' so fatal to the growth of 
 the independent churches. A still graver loss 
 may be directly traced to this interference of the 
 state in matters of church practise and support. 
 The Unitarian schism would have been much 
 less widespread and much less damaging in 
 material ways if members of the parishes — as 
 distinct from members of the churches — had 
 not felt a right to have a voice in the calling 
 of the pastor for whom they were taxed. This 
 feeling became aggressive and the famous 
 Dedham decision f ollow^ed, disallowing the right 
 of any church to exist apart from its parish. 
 In many churches that became known as Uni- 
 tarian, the votes of the Parish determined the 
 matter. They welcomed Unitarianism because 
 it seemed to them less insistent on the deeper 
 experience of religion. It was more humane and 
 therefore more to their liking. And so the 
 world, tied up to the church, wrecked it when 
 the chance came its way. For Unitarianism, 
 the representative of liberal-minded religion, 
 was swamped by the dominance of the unre- 
 ligious, and the mng that was more conserva- 
 tive and more religious — though perhaps more 
 mistaken doctrinally — lost much of its footing 
 in the community which it had founded. 
 
 130 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 Yet notwithstanding this colossal mistake 
 of tying Church and State together, Congrega- 
 tionalism succeeded eventually in establishing 
 a free church in America, which is more influ- 
 ential and more thoroughgoing in its freedom 
 than any other of the free churches of the 
 world. And it did more than that. For not 
 only are Church and State separated in Amer- 
 ica as in no other Christian nation) save per- 
 haps most recently in France), but no matter 
 how strict the connectionalism of some of the 
 denominations may be, the individual church 
 is regarded throughout the country as the real 
 seat of power. The courts of New York State 
 have recently ruled that a Presbytery, while 
 possessing the right to dissolve a Presbyterian 
 church without its consent, cannot thereby 
 procure the right to its building, inherent in the 
 Board of its Trustees as a civil corporation. 
 This heavy straw shows the direction of the 
 wind here in America. We are widely congre- 
 gationally organized — the Baptists, Disciples, 
 Congregationalists and smaller bodies make up 
 a very large per cent, of American Christianity 
 — but we are almost altogether congregation-| 
 ally spirited. T 
 
 That Congregationalism has had so large a 
 part in so vast a spiritual achievement is due I 
 think primarily to four factors, two of which 
 were formal and two of which were personal 
 and providential. Though there are many fas- 
 
 137 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 cinating by-ways into which I should like to 
 enter, we must confine our attention to these. 
 
 The first of these factors is, of course, the 
 fundamental Congregational conviction con- 
 cerning the nature of the church. There is 
 little difference here among the various notable 
 Congregational pronouncements. In 1606, for 
 example, the church at Amsterdam, antedating 
 the famous Pilgrim Church at Leyden, declared 
 itself as follows in the petition it presented at 
 the accession of King James : ^^ Every true visi- 
 ble Church is a company of people called and 
 separated from the world by the word of God 
 and joyned together by voluntarie profession of 
 the faith of Christ in the fellowship of the 
 Gospell. Being thus joyned, every Church hath 
 power in Christ to take unto themselves meet 
 and sufficient persons into the Offices and func- 
 tions of Pastors, Teachers, Elders, Deacons 
 and Helpers, as those which Christ hath ap- 
 pointed in his Testament. ' ' ^^ With this con- 
 curs the declaration of the famous Cambridge 
 Synod of 1648, called by the Massachusetts 
 Court: *^A Congregational-church, is by the 
 institution of Christ a part of the Militant- 
 visible-church, consisting of a company of 
 Saints by calling, united into one body, by a 
 holy covenant, for the publick worship of God, 
 and the mutuall edification one of another, in 
 the Fellowship of the Lord Jesus. . . . There 
 may be the essence and being of a church with- 
 
 51 Williston Walker: Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, pp. 78-79 . 
 
 138 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 out any officers. Nevertheless, though officers 
 be not absolutely necessary to the simple being 
 of churches . . . yet ordinarily they are to their 
 well-being. ^ ' ^- This insistence not only upon 
 the independence but complete autonomy of the 
 particular church was regarded by the fathers 
 as of the very essence of Congregationalism. 
 No ordaining councils, with ministers of neigh- 
 boring churches placing their hands upon the 
 head of the elected pastor, obscured the self- 
 completeness of the churches. In Browne's 
 primitive church in Middleburg, we find his 
 more substantial colleague Harrison writing in 
 1583: ^^ Whereas they tie the Ordination of 
 euerie Minister, as it were, vnto the girdle of 
 other Ministers — that is to laie a greater bond- 
 age vpon ye churches than they are able to bear. 
 For admitt there be onelie one church in a na- 
 tion, and they want a pastour : must they seeke 
 ouer Sea and lande, to gett a minister ordained 
 by other ministers 1 — And is it not a dishonour 
 to Christ Jesus, the head of euery congregation, 
 which is his bodie : to say that his body together 
 with the heade, is not able to be sustained and 
 preserued in it selfef^^ 
 
 The first ordination and election of a 
 minister upon American soil at the church of 
 Salem, ^^ which was ye 2. church erected in these 
 parts,'' conformed strictly to this conception. 
 One of the participants in that transaction on 
 
 32 WiUiston Walker: Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism, pp. 205, 210. 
 ^^Burrage: Early English Dissenters, Vol. I, p. 107. 
 
 139 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History ' 
 
 the 20th of July, 1629, writes thus only ten clays j 
 later : ' ^ So Mr. Skelton was chosen pastor, and ; 
 Mr. Higginson to be teacher; and they accept- ' 
 ing the choyce, Mr. Higginson, with 3. or 4. of | 
 the gravest members of ye church, laid their | 
 hands on Mr. Skelton, using prayer therewith, i 
 This being done, ther was imposission of hands | 
 on Mr. Higginson also. And now, good Sir (the | 
 letter was written to Governor Bradford at \ 
 Plymouth) I hope that you and ye rest of God's i 
 people with you will say that hear was a right ■ 
 foundation layed, and that these 2. blessed ser- \ 
 vants of ye Lojr d came in at ye dore, and not at ! 
 ye window. ' ' ^* And Winthrop, notwithstand- ' 
 ing his aristocratic leanings, is compelled to | 
 make the following entry in his fascinating i 
 journal under the date of Sept. 22, 1642: ^*The I 
 village at the end of Charlestown bounds was j 
 called Woburn, where they had gathered a ! 
 church, and this day Mr. Carter was ordained I 
 their pastor, with the assistance of the elders 
 of other churches. Some difference there was ■ 
 about his ordination; some advised (I suspect < 
 Winthrop himself of being the spokesman of ! 
 these some) in regard they had no elder of their : 
 own, nor any members very fit to solemnize such ' 
 an ordinance, they would desire some of the i 
 elders of the other churches to have performed I 
 it ; but others supposing it might be an occasion : 
 of introducing a dependency of churches, etc., j 
 and so a presbytery, would not allow it. So it I 
 
 ^Bradford: History of Plimouih Plantation, p. 317. \ 
 
 140 I 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 was performed by one of their own members, 
 but not so well and orderly as it ought. ' ' ^^ With 
 such a godly fear prevailing among the settlers 
 of the Bay, we can understand why it was that 
 sturdy objection was raised to fortnightly min- 
 isters^ meetings; but Winthrop writes that 
 * ^ this fear was without cause ; for they were all 
 clear in that point, that no church or person 
 can have power over another church. ' ' ^® Were 
 it well if that godly fear could again be stirred 
 into life to-day? 
 
 Historians have often wondered why the 
 New England churches were all gathered in the 
 Congregational way, when the Pilgrim Fathers 
 were the only outspoken Congregationalists 
 among the emigrants. But it would seem to me 
 that the Puritans of the Church of England, 
 who dominated the flourishing colony of Massa- 
 chusetts Bay, were better acquainted with 
 Congregationalism than with Presbyterianism. 
 Take away the bishops from the Church of Eng- 
 land, and you have left parish churches, one of 
 which, at least, in the 17th century had secured 
 the right of electing its own clergymen." In 
 1605, we find a non-separatist affirming: ^^A 
 true Visible or Ministeriall Church of Christ is 
 a particular Congregation being a spirituall 
 perfect Corporation of Believers, and having 
 power in its selfe immediately from Christ to 
 administer all Eeligious meanes of faith to the 
 
 38 Winthrop, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 109, 110. 
 
 36 I.e., Vol. I, p. 139. 
 
 3' Cf. Burrage: New Facts Concerning John Robinson, p. 21. 
 
 141 
 
Some Turning-Points in Church History j 
 
 members thereof. ' * ^^ And John Endecott of i 
 Salem assures Gov. Bradford that the Plym- | 
 outh form of God's worship is ^Hhe same ; 
 which I have professed and maintained, ever : 
 since the Lord in mercie revealed himself e unto : 
 me ; being f arr from the commone reporte that , 
 hath been spread of you touching that perticu- ' 
 ler.'' ^^ The astute John Eobinson was right in 
 assuring the daring adventurers of the deep ■ 
 ^^that many of those who both wrate and 
 preached against them, if they were in a place i 
 wher they might have libertie and live com- 
 fortably, they would then practise as they 
 did.*' ^° At any rate we have Bradford's word 
 for it ^^that there was no agreement by any ' 
 solemn or common consultation, but that it is j 
 true they did, as if they had agreed, by the i 
 same spirit of truth and unity, set up, by the 
 help of Christ, the same model of churches, one 
 like to another; and if they of Plimouth have 
 helped any of the first comers in their theory 
 by hearing and discerning their practises, j 
 therein the Scripture is fulfilled that the King- | 
 dom of heaven is like unto leaven which a i 
 woman took and hid in a measure of meal until 
 the whole was leavened. ' ' *^ 
 
 But fundamentally our forefathers were Con- 
 gregationalists not because of the habits of the 
 past, nor certainly because they believed our 
 
 ^^ Early English Dissenters, Vol. I, pp. 286. 
 ^^ Bradford, op. cit., p. 316. 
 
 <" Hutchinson: History of Massachusetts Bay, Vol. I, p. 4^8 (quoted from 
 Bradford) . 
 
 i^Burrage, op. cit.. Vol. I, p. 362. 
 
 142 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 polity conducive to religious growth and ex- 
 pressive of individual liberty, but because they 
 discovered it in the New Testament. Unlike the 
 more logical Anabaptists, they simply struck 
 out from the church organization all apostles, 
 prophets and evangelists as extraordinary and 
 proceeded to organize on ordinary ground. This 
 saving bit of arbitrary exegesis saved them 
 from that completely imitative polity of the 
 founders of the continental free churches, and 
 gave us Congregationalism. It was however a 
 long time after it had been practised that any 
 other reason was assigned for its erection than 
 that it was so ordained in the Word of God. 
 Only under the sting of the Saybrook platform 
 and its treason to fundamental principles of 
 church independency, did John Wise, ^^ Pastor 
 to a Church in Ipswich, ' ' dare to put Congrega- 
 tionalism on an independent basis. After of 
 course affirming unquestionable Biblical au- 
 thority for it, he proceeds as he says to **open 
 a new realm of thought'' by writing: ^^When 
 the aforesaid government or power, settled in 
 all, when they have Elected certain capable Per- 
 son^ to Minister in their affairs, and the said 
 Ministers remain accountable to the Assembly 
 . . . they will be more apt and inclined to steer 
 Right for the main Point, viz.. The peculiar 
 good, and benefit of the whole, and every par- 
 ticular member fairly and sincerely. And why 
 may not these stand for very Rational Pleas in 
 Church Order? For certainly if Christ has set- 
 
 143 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 tied any form of Power in his Church, he has 
 done it for his Churches safety, and for the 
 Benefit of every Member : Then he must needs 
 have been presumed to have made choice of 
 that Goverimient as should least Expose his 
 People to Hazard, either from the fraud, or 
 Arbitrary measures of particular Men. And 
 it is plain as day light, there is no Species of 
 Government like a Democracy to attain this 
 End.'' *^ Here, indeed, as far as was then pos- 
 sible, is Congregationalism made to stand upon 
 its own feet. It is the true Christian polity, 
 not merely because it is undoubtedly biblical 
 but because it is just as undoubtedly conducive 
 to the spiritual welfare of men. Yea, Wise goes 
 a step further forward when he proclaims Con- 
 gregationalism to be alone in harmony with 
 essential manhood. ^^He (God) sets the Will to 
 turn about itself without forcing it, that so 
 man's Eeligion may be the free and candid 
 Emanations of his Noble and Exalted Nature. 
 But when God has thus gained Man; may we 
 rationally imagine that in erecting his Trophies 
 he will assign and make him over to some Petty 
 and Arbitrary Potentates in matters of Ee- 
 ligion? or settle him under a Despotick Gov- 
 ernment as though he was the spoils of a spite- 
 ful War! No certainly, but Man must now be 
 considered as some high Allie invested with 
 more Power than ever."*^ Thus deeply and 
 
 « Wise: A Vindication of the Government of New England Churches, p. 62 
 " I.e., pp. 72-73. 
 
 144 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 strongly does Wise found Congregationalism 
 on that reverence for man which is of the es- 
 sence of Christianity, with which it comports 
 and which it does so much to emphasize. 
 
 The other formal factor which I would em- 
 phasize is not fellowship, though it is very 
 abiding and important. But fellowship was 
 nothing novel; men had been fellowshipped to 
 death; it was the freedom of fellowship which 
 made it beneficial. I choose for brief remark 
 rather the definite bond of union which in Con- 
 gregational eyes, from the very beginning, 
 makes a group of men into a church, viz., the 
 Covenant.** The exiles in Frankfurt in Queen 
 Mary's time made use of such an instrument,*^ 
 and Burrage tells us that some of the Conti- 
 nental Anabapftists did likewise,**^ but in the 
 former case the covenant was an afterthought 
 introduced as the basis of discipline and in the 
 latter it was not the constituting element. But 
 from the very first, beginning with Robert 
 Browne and possibly even with Fitz, a Congre- 
 gational church was created by the covenant. 
 The precise importance of the covenant is no- 
 where better set forth than in a letter of a Vicar 
 of Cranf ord in 1640 : ' ^ The Brownists stick not 
 only at our Bishops, seruice and Ceremonies 
 but at our Church. They would haue euery 
 particular congregation to be independent. 
 
 ** Cf. Hutchinson: History of Massachusetts Bay, Vol. I, p. 4^0. Here 
 the covenant and not fellowship is mentioned as one of the fundamental Con- 
 gregational principles. 
 
 ^^ Burrage, op. cit.. Vol. I, p. 7A. 
 
 « I.e., Vol. I, p. 98. 
 
 145 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 They would haue none enter Communion but 
 by solmne Couenant. Not that made in Bap- 
 tisme, or renewed in the Supper of the Lord, 
 but another for reformation after theire owne 
 way : " ^^ The Covenant was precisely what the 
 scandalized Vicar thought and almost said. It 
 was in reality a third sacrament, far more im- 
 portant than the minimized baptism, adminis- 
 tered in infancy, and a prerequisite for the en- 
 joyment of the Supper. It is somewhat difficult 
 to see how they discovered this significance of 
 the Covenant in the Scripture; it looks almost 
 as if they installed the Covenant in this all- 
 important place by the compulsion of their 
 moral instincts. At any rate they thereby 
 made good a serious defect of the Anabap- 
 tists. They put an act of the will, com- 
 pelled by the Holy Spirit, at the foundation 
 of the Church and thus completely broke with 
 sacramentalism. The Baptists, as we have 
 seen, did not ascribe salvation to baptism, but 
 their insistence upon it as the bond of church 
 fellowship has confused their owti life and mis- 
 represented them before the world. From the 
 beginning, the Congregationalist has empha- 
 sized moral values in religious experience. The 
 autonomy of the church and the entrance into 
 its holy activities and privileges through a per- 
 sonal commitment of the life to its Creator has 
 made it an undeviating and effective witness to 
 the supreme worth of the individual will. It 
 
 " Burrage, op. cit.. Vol. I, p. 311. 
 
 146 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 has presented Christianity to men at its sim- 
 plest and most characteristic point, unmixed by 
 magic or pomp. It is a singularly pure exem- 
 plar of the voluntary principle in religion. 
 
 From the beginning Congregational covenants 
 have been of the simplest sort. Some good Prov- 
 idence guided the instinct of our fathers into 
 ways that led to liberty. John Robinson, the 
 pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, declared: 
 * ^ Euery true Church of God is ioyned with him 
 in holye covenant by voluntarye profession to 
 haue him the God therof and to be his peo- 
 ple. ''^^ In 1616 Henry Jacob ^ ^founded" a 
 Congregational church in London. We read: 
 *^They joyned both hands each with other 
 Brother and stood in a Ringwise: their intent 
 being declared, H. Jacob and each of the Eest 
 made some confession or Profession of their 
 Faith and Repentance, some were longer, some 
 were briefer. Then they covenanted together 
 to walk in all Gods Ways as he revealed or 
 should make known to them. ^ ' ^^ And to go ten 
 years further back to the sacred soil of 
 Norwich, where the Church arose which went 
 in part by way of alien Leyden to America, 
 Bradford makes this affecting note in his rather 
 matter-of-fact journal: ^'So many therfore of 
 these processors as saw the evil of these things, 
 in thes parts, and whose hearts ye Lord had 
 touched with heavenly zeale for his trueth, they 
 
 *^Burrage: New Facts Concerning John Robinson, p, 17. 
 i^Burrage: Early English Dissenters, Vol. II, p. 294. 
 
 147 
 
Some Turning -Points in Church History 
 
 shooke of this yoake of antichristian bondage, 
 and as ye Lord's free people, joyned themselves 
 (by a covenant of the Lord) into a Church 
 estate, in ye fellowship of ye gospell, to walke 
 in all his wayes, made known, or to be made 
 known unto them, according to their best en- 
 deavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the 
 Lord assisting them. And that it cost them 
 something this ensewing historic will de- 
 clare. * ' °° And this simplicity of the Covenant 
 declaration was preserved in the new country, 
 the noble confession of the first gathered 
 church, the church in Salem, leading the way. 
 The confession is still in use and reads as fol- 
 lows: *^We covenant with the Lord and one 
 with an other; and doe bynd ourselves in the 
 presence of God, to walke together in all his 
 waies, according as he is pleased to reveale 
 himself unto us in his Blessed word of truth.'' 
 In the Providence of God, the confessions of 
 faith usually adopted by the individual 
 churches have fallen away and the Covenant 
 as the sole basis of church membership and 
 Christian belief for both ministers and laymen 
 is becoming more and more the rule in our 
 churches. Is it any wonder that the differen- 
 tiating mark of Congregationalism is neither 
 conservatism nor liberalism but true Catholic- 
 ity of temper! For the ancient declaration of 
 Bradshaw in 1605 still stands: ^^They hould 
 that Christ Jesus hath not subiected any 
 
 ^^ Bradford: History of Plimouth Plantation, p. 13. 
 
 US 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 Church or Congregation of his, to any other 
 superior Ecclesiasticall luriscliction, then vnto 
 that which is within itself. So that yf a wholl 
 Churche or Congregation shall erre, in any 
 matters of faith or religion, noe other Churches 
 or Spirituall Church officers haue (by any war- 
 rant from the word of God) power to censure, 
 punish, or controule the same : but are onely to 
 counsell and aduise the same, and so leaue their 
 Soules to the immediate Judgment of Christ/' ^^ 
 Having thus won the proud distinction of pro- 
 viding the church of Christ with the only pos- 
 sible basis of Catholicity, the vast responsibil- 
 ity is upon us of demonstrating that Catholicity 
 and Holiness are not mutually exclusive terms. 
 We have rewritten the word Catholic before the 
 word Church; would that with as good con- 
 science we might point to our groups of Chris- 
 tian disciples and feel, if we did not say, '^Here 
 are holy catholic churches. '' 
 
 There is time for only the briefest refer- 
 ence to the two non-ecclesiastical factors 
 in the lasting triumph of our polity. The first 
 of these is the personal character of the Pil- 
 grim and Puritan Fathers; the second, a new 
 country in which to work our polity out. With- 
 out them our principles would not be written 
 so large in religious history, yet for them our 
 principles were not responsible. As in every 
 other crisis of church polity we have discov- 
 ered that the condition of the world at large 
 
 ^^Burrage, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 288. 
 
 149 
 
Some Turning-points in Church History 
 
 was partly responsible for the course and the 
 outcome of the development of Christian or- 
 ganization, so it is here. A thoroughgoing 
 study of Church Polity would be fascinating 
 in the extreme, because it would be an investi- 
 gation of those currents of human thought and 
 emotion sufficiently widespread and dominant 
 to express themselves in the activities of one of 
 the two abiding institutions of human society. 
 No Church polity was made from inner im- 
 pulses alone and each advance step has de- 
 pended upon a Providential interaction of in- 
 ternal and external forces. In observing the 
 mighty achievement of our ecclesiastical ideals, 
 we have to record our gratitude that it was at- 
 tained largely by the personal character of 
 their representatives and the unparalleled op- 
 portunity of an unoccupied land which their 
 daring and their patience utilized. 
 
 I am not so sure that Bacon was wrong when 
 he declared in 1592 that the Brownists in Eng- 
 land were ^^a very small number of very base 
 and silly people, ' * for at that time all who were 
 at all conspicuous were forced to flee to wide- 
 hearted Holland. And of the exiles, there were 
 not a few of a sort to justify Archbishop Ban- 
 croft's remark in 1593: ^^I know the nature of 
 schismatickes to bee of such giddinesse as that 
 no one thinge will content them longe. ' ' ^^ The 
 '^ancient church '' in Amsterdam was speedily 
 rent by dissensions that remind one of Ubbo 
 
 ^^Burrage, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 139. 
 
 150 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 Philipps' account of the Anabaptists and that 
 caused an onlooker to say of them : ^ ^ There are 
 none willing to bee feete or any other inferior 
 members, they would all bee heads/' But the 
 Pilgrim Fathers were of a differe(nt stripe. 
 When forced to leave Scrooby, they landed at 
 Amsterdam, but they purposely went further 
 on to Leyden with the express desire to avoid 
 mingling with the squabbles of their co-religion- 
 ists who had preceded them thither. Both they 
 and the Puritans who followed them to America 
 left the Church of England with extreme re- 
 luctance and only so far and for so long as 
 their consciences impelled them. They never 
 berated those who persecuted them and I have 
 no doubt that John Eobinson, at least, prayed 
 for them. William Brewster and William 
 Bradford were men of gentle though unwaver- 
 ing character, of measureless patience and of 
 sacrificing spirit. Of John Endecott we do not 
 get a clear picture, but John Winthrop was kept 
 both by his property and family interests from 
 reviling order, from despising tolerance and 
 from glorying in isolation. Roger Williams 
 was not well treated by these men; it may be 
 that he was too idealistic for them, it is certain 
 that he w^as too self-righteous. When a man 
 carries his separatism so far that he refuses 
 to commune with his own wife, there is some- 
 thing wrong with him. Williams became for a 
 short while an Anabaptist, and with good rea- 
 son, for that noble high-minded man is a splen- 
 
 151 
 
Some Turning-points in Church History 
 
 did embodiment of the deep insight mixed 
 with stubborn intolerance and ill-poised judg- 
 ment that characterized that movement. 
 Our progenitors succeeded just because they 
 disliked their separatism and sought to make 
 it as slight as might be. I do not know 
 of any more sane and moving writings 
 in the world than the respective journals 
 of Bradford and Winthrop, which, with 
 very necessary excisions, should be read by 
 every lover of his country and his church. Were 
 there time to quote the affecting but matter- 
 of-fact eulogies which Bradford writes of 
 Eobinson and Brewster, their worth and suc- 
 cess would be clearer to you. The leaders were 
 all men of experience with the world and the 
 ministers were, many of them, among the most 
 gifted graduates of Cambridge University. 
 The Anabaptists left the State churches of the 
 Continent with the three glad leaps which 
 Christian took when he saw his burden drop 
 into the sepulchre; the Congregationalists, on 
 the otiier hand, made the change with much 
 the same spirit with which the earliest Chris- 
 tians were forced out of the synagogues. 
 In religion it is only inevitable changes that are 
 permanent changes; intolerant revolutions are 
 short-lived. 
 
 But it was the new country which reinforced 
 the character of the Congregational separatists 
 and robbed their separatism of the inevitable 
 tinge of Pharisaism which must to the public 
 
 152 
 
Contribution to Church Polity 
 
 mind always inhere in a separatist fellowship 
 which exists side by side with an established 
 church. But with an ocean between you and 
 your established church, the tinge of self-right- 
 eousness disappears. Indeed, as we have seen, 
 the separatists became in a sense the establish- 
 ment ; only the freedom of their essential prin- 
 ciple saved them from a shipwreck on the Scylla 
 of governmental exclusiveness after having es- 
 caped by a wide margin the danger of the Cha- 
 rybdis of voluntary Pharisaism. It was the 
 ocean and the Indians and the hard work of con- 
 quering a new continent for the ways of civiliza- 
 tion that kept the Pilgrims from the disaster 
 that befell the Congregationalists of Middleburg 
 and Amsterdam and from the mediocre success 
 of English Independency. Governor Brad- 
 ford's journal has more to say about the state 
 of the beaver-trade than of the church. God 
 kept the spirit of the fathers pure and strong 
 by enforcing upon them, and finally by estab- 
 lishing upon them, the work of their hands. 
 The ocean is not only our best defence against 
 the barbarous jealousies and armies of Europe ; 
 it was the instrument of God for ridding a 
 necessary religious revolution from bitterness 
 and for fixing its attention upon its faith rather 
 than upon its protest. For to that ^^deep, un- 
 plumbed, estranging sea'' we owe not a little 
 of that great process by which Protestantism 
 has become transformed into spiritual 
 Catholicism. 
 
 153 
 
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