TRACING OUR SPIRITUAL ROOTS
C H SPURGEONFROM SWORD & TROWEL 2006 NO
2
With characteristic vigour C H Spurgeon presents a brisk review of the
evidence to show that baptistic independents kept the true faith in these islands long
before the Reformation.
We are convinced that the historic Baptist position, more than any other,
preserves the ordinances of the Lord Jesus as they were ‘delivered unto the saints’. Those
belonging to this body of believers have never been exalted into temporal power, or decorated
with worldly rank, but have dwelt for the most part, as it were, in dens and caves of the earth,
even being found ‘destitute, afflicted, tormented’, and have thus proved themselves to be of
the house and lineage of the Crucified.
Their very existence under the insults and persecutions which they have
endured in the past is a standing marvel, while their unflinching fidelity to the Scriptures as
the sole rule of faith, and their adherence to the simplicity of Gospel ordinances, is a sure
indication that the Lord was with them.
It would not be impossible to show that the first Christians who dwelt in this
land were of this faith and order. The evidence supplied by ancient monuments and
baptisteries still surviving would be conclusive in their favour. We are content for present
purposes to begin with a quotation from an adversary.
That Baptists are no novelty in England is admitted by those least likely to
manufacture ancient history for them. That rampant ritualist, W J E Bennett of Frome, in his
book upon The Unity of the Church Broken, says:-
‘The historian Lingard tells us that there was a sect of fanatics who infested the
north of Germany, called Puritans. Usher calls them Waldenses; Spelman, Paulicians (the
same as Waldenses). They gained ground and spread all over England; they rejected all
Romish ceremonies, denied the authority of the Pope, and more particularly refused to
baptise infants.
‘Thirty of them were put to death for their heretical doctrines near Oxford; but
the remainder still held on to their opinions in private, until the time of Henry II (1158), and
the historian Collier tells us that wherever this heresy prevailed the churches were either
scandalously neglected or pulled down, and infants left unbaptised.’
We are obliged to Mr Bennett for this history which is in all respects authentic,
and we take liberty to remark that if Baptists could trace their pedigree no further, the church
of Thomas Cranmer could not afford to sneer at them as a modern sect.
Concerning the poor persecuted people who are referred to in this extract, it
seems that under Henry II they were treated with those tender mercies of the wicked which are
so notoriously cruel.
‘They were apprehended and brought before a council of the clergy at Oxford.
Being interrogated about their religion, their teacher, named Gerard, a man of learning,
answered in their name that they were Christians, and believed the doctrines of the apostles.
Upon a more particular inquiry it was found that they denied several of the received doctrines
of the Church, such as purgatory, prayers for the dead, and the invocation of saints; and
refusing to abandon these damnable heresies, as they were called, they were condemned as
incorrigible heretics, and delivered to the secular arm to be punished.
‘The king [Henry II] at the instigation of the clergy, commanded
them to be branded with a red-hot iron on the forehead, to be whipped through the streets of
Oxford, and, having their clothes cut short by their girdles, to be turned into the open fields,
all persons being forbidden to afford them any shelter or relief, under the severest penalties.
‘This cruel sentence was executed with its utmost rigour; and it being the depth
of winter, all these unhappy persons perished with cold and hunger.’
Induced, no doubt, to flee to this country from the Continent by the
rumoured favour of Henry II to the Lollards, they found none of the hospitality which they
expected, but for Jesus’ sake were accounted the off-scouring of all things. Little did their
enemies dream that, instead of being stamped out, the so-called heresy of the Baptists would
survive and increase till it should command a company of faithful adherents to be numbered
by millions.
All along our history from Henry II to Henry VIII there are traces of such
Baptists, who are usually mentioned either in connection with the Lollards, or as coming from
Holland. Special mention is made of their being more conspicuous when Anne of Cleves came
to this country as the unhappy spouse of that choice defender of the faith, the eighth Harry.
All along there must have been a great hive on the Continent of these
‘Reformers before the Reformation’, for despite their being doomed to die almost as soon as
they landed, they continued to invade this country to the annoyance of the priesthood and
hierarchy, who always seemed to know by instinct the people who are their enemies, and
whose tenets are diametrically opposed to their sway.
It may not be known to our readers that the Baptists have their own
martyrology, and are in no way behind the very first of the churches of Christ in sufferings
endured for the Truth’s sake. A fine old volume in the Dutch language, illuminated with the
most marvellous engravings, is in our possession. It is full of harrowing details of brutal
cruelty and heroic endurance. From it we have taken the story of Simon the Pedlar, as a
specimen of the firmness and endurance of the baptised believers in Flanders: one instance
out of thousands:-
‘About the year 1553 at Bergen op Zoom in Brabant, there was a pedlar named
Simon, standing in the market selling his wares. The priests with their idol - the host -
passing by, the said Simon dared not show the counterfeit god any divine honour; but
following the testimony of God in the Holy Scriptures, he worshipped the Lord his God only,
and Him alone served.
‘He was therefore seized by the advocates of the Romish Antichrist, and
examined as to his faith. This he boldly confessed. He rejected infant baptism as a mere
human invention, with all the commandments of men, holding fast the testimony of the
Word of God; he was therefore condemned to death by the enemies of the Truth.
‘They led him outside the town, and for the testimony of Jesus committed him
to the flames. The astonishment of the bystanders was greatly excited when they saw the
remarkable boldness and steadfastness of this pious witness of God, who, through grace, thus
obtained the crown of everlasting life.
‘The bailiff, who procured his condemnation, on his return home from the
execution, fell mortally sick, and was confined to his bed. In his suffering and sorrow he
continually exclaimed, "Simon, Simon!" The priests and monks sought to absolve him; but he
would not be comforted. He speedily expired in despair, an instructive and memorable
example to all tyrants and persecutors.’
During the Reformation and after it, the poor Baptists continued to be
victims. Excesses had been committed by certain fifth-monarchy men who happened also to
be Anabaptists, and under cover of putting down these wild extremists, Motley tells us that
thousands and tens of thousands of virtuous, well-disposed men and women, who had as little
sympathy with anabaptistical as with Roman depravity, were butchered in cold blood, under
the sanguinary rule of Charles, in the Netherlands.
The only restraint of persecution in the low countries was contained in a letter
of Queen Dowager Mary of Hungary: ‘care being only taken that the provinces were not
entirely depopulated’.
Luther and Zwingli, though themselves held to be heretics, were scarcely a whit
behind the Papists in their rage against the Anabaptists, Zwingli especially uttering that
pithy formula - Qui iterum mergit mergatur, thereby counselling the drowning
of all those who dared to immerse believers on profession of their faith.
The time will probably arrive when history will be rewritten, and the maligned
Baptists of Holland and Germany will be acquitted of all complicity with the ravings of the
fanatics, and it will be proved that they were the advance-guard of the army of religious
liberty, men who lived before their times, but whose influence might have saved the world
centuries of floundering in the bog of semi-popery if they had but been allowed fair play.
As it was, their views, like those of later Baptists, so completely laid the axe at
the root of all priestcraft and sacramentarianism, that violent opposition was aroused, and the
two-edged sword of defamation and extirpation was set to its cruel work, and kept to it with a
relentless perseverance never excelled, perhaps never equalled.
All other streams of Christians may be in some degree borne with, but Baptists
have proved utterly intolerable to priests and Popes.
We will leave the continental hive, to return to our brethren in England.
Latimer, who could not speak too badly of the Baptists, nevertheless bears witness to their
numbers and intrepidity:-
‘Here I have to tell you what I heard of late, by the relation of a credible person
and a worshipful man, of a town in this realm of England, that hath about five hundred of
heretics of this erroneous opinion in it.
‘The Anabaptists that were burnt here, in divers towns of England (as I have
heard of credible men, I saw them not myself), met their death even intrepid, as you will say,
without any fear in the world.
‘Well, let them go. There was, in the old times, another kind of poisoned
heretics, that were called Donatists, and those heretics went to their execution as they should
have gone to some jolly recreation and banquet.’
Latimer had, before long, to learn for himself where the power lay which
enabled men to die so cheerfully. We do not wonder that he discovered a likeness between the
Baptists and the Donatists, for quaint old Thomas Fuller draws at full length a parallel
between the two, and concludes that the Baptists are only ‘the old Donatists new dipped’. We
can survive even such a comparison as that.
Bishop Burnet says that in the time of Edward VI, Baptists became very
numerous, and openly preached this doctrine, that ‘children are Christ’s without
water’.
Protestantism nominally flourished in the reign of Edward VI, but there were
many unprotestant doings. The use of the reformed liturgy was enforced by the pains and
penalties of law. Bishop Ridley (himself a martyr in the next reign) was a member of a
commission with Gardiner (afterwards notorious as a persecutor of Protestants) to root out
Baptists. Among the ‘Articles of Visitation’, issued by Ridley in his own diocese, in 1550, was
the following matter to be investigated:-
‘Whether any of the Anabaptists’ sect, and others, use notoriously any
unlawful or private conventicles, wherein they do use doctrines or administration of
sacraments, separating themselves from the rest of the parish?’
It may be fairly gathered from this article of visitation that there were many
Baptist churches in the kingdom at that time.
This truth is also clear from the fact that the Duke of Northumberland advised
that Mr John Knox should be invited to England, and made a bishop, that he might aid in
putting down the Baptists in Kent.
Marsden tells us that in the days of Elizabeth ‘the Anabaptists were the most
numerous and for some time by far the most formidable opponents of the church. They are
said to have existed in England since the early days of the Lollards.’
In the year 1575 a most severe persecution was raised against the ‘Anabaptists’
in London, ten of whom were condemned - eight ordered to be banished, and two to be
executed. Mr Foxe, the eminent martyrologist, wrote an excellent Latin letter to the Queen, in
which he observes:-
‘That to punish with the flames the bodies of those who err rather from ignorance
than obstinacy is cruel, and more like the Church of Rome than the mildness of the Gospel. I
do not write thus from any bias to the indulgence of error; but to save the lives of men, being
myself a man: and in hope that the offending parties may have an opportunity to repent and
retract their mistakes.’
He then earnestly entreats that the fires of Smithfield may not be rekindled,
but that some milder punishment might be inflicted upon them, to prevent, if possible, the
destruction of their souls as well as their bodies.
But his remonstrances were ineffectual. The Queen remained inflexible; and,
though she constantly called him Father Foxe, she gave him a flat denial as to
saving their lives, unless they would recant their dangerous errors. They, both refusing to
recant, were burnt in Smithfield, July 22, 1575, to the great and lasting disgrace of the reign
and character of Queen Elizabeth.
Neither from Elizabeth, James or Charles I did our brethren receive any
measure of favour. No treatment was thought too severe for them: even good men
condemned them as heretics for whom the harshest measures were too gentle. To destroy this
branch of the true vine, all available means were used without hesitation or scruple, and yet it
not only lives on, but continues to bear fruit a hundredfold.
When Charles I was unable to uphold episcopacy any longer, liberty of
thought and freedom of speech were somewhat more common than before, and Baptists
increased very rapidly. Many of them were in Cromwell’s army, and were the founders of not
a few of our village churches.
While these men were to the front doing such acceptable work for the
Parliament, their brethren could not be hunted down quite so freely as before. Accordingly we
find that contentious divine Daniel Featley groaning heavily, because they were permitted to
breathe, and between his pious groans recording for our information certain facts which are
peculiarly useful to us:-
‘This fire which in the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James, and our
gracious sovereign [Charles I] till now was covered in England under the ashes;
or if it brake out at any time, by the care of the ecclesiastical and civil magistrates, it was soon
put out.
‘But of late, since the unhappy distractions which our sins have brought upon
us, the temporal sword being otherways employed, and the spiritual locked up fast in the
scabbard, this sect among others has so far presumed upon the patience of the State, that it
hath held weekly conventicles, re-baptised hundreds of men and women together in the
twilight, in rivulets, and some arms of the Thames, and elsewhere, dipping them over head
and ears.
‘It hath printed divers pamphlets in defence of their heresy, yea, and
challenged some of our preachers to disputation. Now although my bent has always been
hitherto against the most dangerous enemy of our Church and State, the Jesuit, to extinguish
such balls of wildfire as they have cast into the bosom of our Church; yet seeing this strange
fire kindled in the neighbouring parishes, and many Nadabs and Abihus offering it on God’s
altar, I thought it my duty to cast the water of Siloam upon it to extinguish it.’
The waters of Siloam must have been strangely foul in Featley’s days if his
Dippers Dipped is to be regarded as a bucketful of the liquid.
The neighbouring region which was so sorely vexed with ‘strange fire’ was the
borough of Southwark, which is the region in which the church now meeting in the
Metropolitan Tabernacle was born.
The fortunes of war brought a Presbyterian parliament into power, but this
was very little more favourable to religious liberty than the dominancy of the episcopalians; at
least the Baptists did not find it so.
Mr Edwards, a precious brother of the stern ‘true blue’ school, told the
magistrates that ‘they should execute some exemplary punishment upon some of the most
notorious sectaries,’ and he charges the wicked Baptists with ‘dipping of persons in the cold
water in winter, whereby persons fall sick’.
He kindly recommends the magistrates to follow the example of the Zurichers
who drowned the dippers, and if this should not be feasible he urges that they should at least
be proceeded against as rogues and vagabonds. No party at that time understood religious
liberty to mean anything more than liberty for themselves.
The despised Baptists and Quakers and Independents alone perceived that
consciences are under no human rule, but owe allegiance to the Lord alone. Even the
Puritans considered universal toleration to be extremely dangerous. All the powerful churches
thought it right to repress heresy (so called) by the secular power.
Things have gloriously altered now. No Presbyterian would now endorse a
word of Edwards’ bitterness. Thank God, the light has come, and Christian men heartily
accord liberty to each other.
Moved by the feeling that it was the duty of the State to keep men’s
consciences in proper order, Parliament set to work to curb the wicked sectaries, and Dr
Stoughton tells us:-
‘By the Parliamentary ordinance of April, 1645, forbidding any person to
preach who was not an ordained minister, in the Presbyterian, or some other reformed church
- all Baptist ministers became exposed to molestation, they being accounted a sect, and not a
church.’
The Metropolitan Tabernacle took its rise from one of the many Baptist
assemblies which met in the borough of Southwark. Crosby says:-
‘This people had formerly belonged to one of the most ancient congregations
of the Baptists in London, but separated from them in the year 1652, for some practices which
they judged disorderly, and kept together from that time as a distinct body.’
They appear to have met in private houses, or in such other buildings as were
open to them. The first pastor was William Rider, whom Crosby mentions as a sufferer for
conscience sake. Oliver Cromwell was just at that time in the ascendance, and Blake’s cannon
were sweeping the Dutch from the seas, but the Presbyterian establishment ruled with a heavy
hand and Baptists were under a cloud.
When Cromwell was made Protector the old parliament was sent about its
business and England enjoyed a large measure of liberty of conscience.
Mr Henry Jessey was at that time minister of St George’s Church, Southwark,
and being a man of great weight, both as to character and learning, and also a Baptist, there is
no doubt that Baptist views had much influence throughout the borough of Southwark and
adjacent places.
If it is asked how a parish minister became a Baptist, we reply that Jessey first
preached against immersion, and by his own arguments converted himself
to the views which he had opposed, practising for some time the dipping of children.
Finding that many of his people went to Baptist meetings he studied the
subject still further in order to be prepared to face these robbers of churches, and the result
was that he was convinced of the scriptural nature of their opinions and was immersed by Mr
Hanserd Knollys.
This event greatly strengthened the hands of the many Baptist churches on the
south side of the river, and, no doubt, Mr Rider’s congregation felt the benefit. This would
seem to have been a period of much religious heart-searching in which the ordinances of
churches were tried by the Word of God, and men were determined to retain nothing which
was not sanctioned by divine authority.
Thus there were many public disputes upon baptism, and, as the result, many
became adherents of believers’ immersion, and Baptist churches sprang up on all sides.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FROM BOTH
EARLY AND RECENT HISTORIANS
Daniel Neal in his History of the Puritans or Protestant Nonconformists from the
Reformation in 1517 to the Revolution in 1688 (1738 edition) declares of Baptists:-
‘It is beyond all reasonable doubt that individuals were to be found
maintaining those principles in every subsequent age from the days of Wycliffe.’
Affirming that Wycliffe held Baptist views (in principle), Neal quotes
Thomas Walden, who described Wycliffe as -
‘One of the seven heads that rose up out of the bottomless pit for denying
infant baptism, that heresy of the Lollards, of whom he was so great a ringleader.’
Neal provides evidence of Baptist printed books in 1539 and goes on to
say:-
‘That the Baptists were very numerous at this period is unquestionable,
and that many of those who were led to the stake in the reign of Queen Mary were of
that persuasion is equally clear.’
Joseph Ivimey went out of his way to prove that the early Christians in
England before the arrival of the Roman monks did not baptise infants, and that the
Roman instruction to their missionary priests laid particular stress on the need to
introduce and implement this practice.
The followers of Wycliffe were on several occasions charged with allowing
(by their teaching) infants to die in an unbaptised and therefore unsaved state.
It is maintained that both the first and the last martyrs to die in England
by burning at the stake (the last being Edward Wightman in 1612) were Baptists.
Various historical sources list the ‘heresies’ of the Baptists in the days of
Elizabeth I as including the following errors: Infants not to be baptised, only believers;
no oath-taking lawful; ministers should be maintained by the voluntary giving of the
people; the civil magistrates have no right over individual conscience in religious
matters; congregations must choose their own ministers; preachers appointed by
congregations should not be fettered in their preaching by laws or parish boundaries; no
liturgical prayers; church discipline is essential within congregations.
In his recent work on Anabaptists The Radical Brethren (1972), Dr Irvin B
Horst asserts that ‘Anabaptists were indistinguishable from Lollards except in name.’
He goes on to say that, ‘Anabaptism was so alive in England [in the 1550s]
that men of the highest rank in the Church took steps to crush it, and furnished
evidence of its strength by the fierce way they fought it.’
Dr Horst seeks to show that the martyrologist Foxe had a blind spot as far
as Nonconformists of his own age were concerned, and alas, ‘How much did he fail to
record about anabaptism, especially under Mary?’
Dr Horst also maintains that ‘the great majority’ (or at least two-thirds)
of those who died at the hands of Mary were Baptists.
In an interesting comment he also points out that ‘Tyndale stands alone
among the leading Protestant reformers as one who did not compose a diatribe against
the Anabaptists.’
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