the Church was sufficient for the master, but the disciple was led by study of the Bible to the rejection of dogma and Fathers, and indeed to an entirely different estimation of the Scriptures themselves. As a Catholic he had always, in a vague and careless and ignorant way, regarded these as the foundation of the faith, but his personal acquaintance with them gave him a new apprehension alike of their spiritual value and of their religious authority. Thenceforth, the rejection of all human authority in religion, and of every usage of human origin as well, and the substitution therefor of the faith and order of the Scriptures, seemed to him the only possible and defensible course for Christian men to take.
"We should inquire of the Scriptures," he says in one of his Dialogues,[1] "and not of the Church, for God will have from us only his law, his will, not our wrong heads or what seems good to us. God is more concerned with obedience to his will than with all our offerings and self-invented church usages. … Thou knowest, Zwingli, that the Holy Scripture is such a complete, compacted, true, infallible, eternally immortal speech, that the least letter or tittle of it cannot pass away."
- ↑ A Conversation of Balthasar Hübmaier, Op. 10.
