Apostolici, and went barefooted healing the sick, they must have at least absorbed into themselves a sect of whom we hear in the 12th century in the north of Europe as deferring baptism to the age of 30, and rejecting oaths, prayers for the dead, relics and invocation of saints. The Moravian Anabaptists, says Rost, went bare-footed, washed each other’s feet (like the Fraticelli), had all goods in common, worked everyone at a handicraft, had a spiritual father who prayed with them every morning and taught them, dressed in black and had long graces before and after meals. Zeiler also in his German Itinerary (1618) describes their way of life. The Lord’s Supper, or bread-breaking, was a commemoration of the Passion, held once a year. They sat at long tables, the elders read the words of institution and prayed, and passed a loaf round from which each broke off a bit and ate, the wine being handed round in flagons. Children in their colonies were separated from the parents, and lived in the school, each having his bed and blanket. They were taught reading, writing and summing, cleanliness, truthfulness and industry, and the girls married the men chosen for them. In the following points Anabaptists resembled the medieval dissenters:—(1) They taught that Jesus did not take the flesh from his mother, but either brought his body from heaven or had one made for him by the Word. Some even said that he passed through his mother, as water through a pipe, into the world. In pictures and sculptures of the 15th century and earlier, we often find represented this idea, originated by Marcion in the 2nd century. The Anabaptists were accused of denying the Incarnation of Christ: they did, but not in the sense that he was not divine; they rather denied him to be human. (2) They condemned oaths, and also the reference of disputes between believers to law-courts. (3) The believer must not bear arms or offer forcible resistance to wrongdoers, nor wield the sword. No Christian has the jus gladii. (4) Civil government belongs to the world, is Caesar. The believer who belongs to God’s kingdom must not fill any office, nor hold any rank under government, which is to be passively obeyed. (5) Sinners or unfaithful ones are to be excommunicated, and excluded from the sacraments and from intercourse with believers unless they repent, according to Matt. xviii. 15 seq. But no force is to be used towards them.
Some sects calling themselves Spirituales or Perfecti also held that the baptized cannot sin, a very ancient tenet.
They seem to have preserved among them the primitive manual called the Teaching of the Apostles, for Bishop Longland in England condemned an Anabaptist for repeating one of its maxims “that alms should not be given before they did sweat in a man’s hand.” This was between 1518 and 1521.
On the 12th of April 1549, certain London Anabaptists brought before a commission of bishops asserted.—
“That a man regenerate could not sin; that though the outward man sinned, the inward man sinned not; that there was no Trinity of Persons; that Christ was only a holy prophet and not at all God; that all we had by Christ was that he taught us the way to heaven; that he took no flesh of the Virgin, and that the baptism of infants was not profitable.”
The Anabaptists were great readers of Revelation and of the Epistle of James, the latter perhaps by way of counteracting Luther’s one-sided teaching of justification by faith alone. Luther feebly rejected this scripture as “a right strawy epistle.” English Anabaptists often knew it by heart. Excessive reading of Revelation seems to have been the chief cause of the aberrations of the Münster fanatics.
In Poland and Holland certain of the Baptists denied the Trinity, hence the saying that a Socinian was a learned Baptist (see Socinus). With these Menno and his followers refused to hold communion.
One of the most notable features of the early Anabaptists is that they regarded any true religious reform as involving social amelioration. The socialism of the 16th century was necessarily Christian and Anabaptist. Lutheranism was more attractive to grand-ducal patriots and well-to-do burghers than to the poor and oppressed and disinherited. The Lutherans and Zwinglians never converted the Anabaptists. Those who yielded to stress of persecution fell back into Papalism and went to swell the tide of the Catholic reaction.
Authorities.—Füssli, Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie der mittlern Zeit (contains Bullinger); Zwinglius, In catabaptistarum strophas elenchus (1527) (Opera iii. 351); Bullinger, Der Wiedertäufer Ursprung (1560); Gieseler, Ecclesiastical History, Engl. tr. v. 344; Spanbeim, De origine Anabapt. (Lugd. 1643); Ranke’s History of the Reformation; Melanchthon, Die Historie von Th. Müntzer (1525) (in Luthers Werke, ed. Walch, xvi. 199); Strobel, Leben Th. Müntzers (1795); C. A. Cornelius, Die niederländischen Wiedertäufer, in publications of Bavarian Academy (1869); J. G. Walch, Hist. u. theolog. Einleitung (Jena, 1733); Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History; Gerbert, Gesch. d. Strassb. Sektenbewegung (Strassburg, 1889); W. Moeller, History of the Christian Church, tr. by Freese, 1900; Jos. v. Beck, Die Geschichtsbücher der Wiedertäufer in Österr.-Ung. (Wien, 1883), (Fontes rerum Austr II. xliii., a valuable history of the sect from their own early documents); Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. i. (Bonn, 1880); Loserth, B. Hubmaier und die Anfänge der Wiedertäufer in Mähren (Brunn, 1893); Kolde, in Kirchengesch. Studien (Leipzig, 1888); Kessler, Sabbata; Leendertz and Zur Linden, M. Hofmann (Haarlem, 1883–1885); Erbkam, Gesch. der prot. Sekten der Reform. (1848); Justus Menius, Der Wiedertäufer Lehre (Wittenberg, 1534); Johann Cloppenburg and Fred. Spanheim, Gangraena theologiae Anabaptisticae (Franekerd, 1656); Balthasar Lydius, Waldensia, id est conservatio verae Ecclesiae (Rotterdam, 1616); Herman Schyn, Historiae Mennonitarum (Amsterdam, 1729); Joh. Henr. Ottius, Annales Anabaptistici (Basileae, 1772); Karl Rembert, Die Wiedertäufer in Herzogtum Julich (Münster, 1873); Universal Lexicon, art. “Wiedertäufer” (Leipzig. 1748); Tielmann Janssen van Bracht, Martyrologia Mennonitarum (Haarlem, 1615–1631); Joh. Gastii, Tractat. de Anabapt. Exordio (Basel, 1545); Jehring, History of the Baptists; Auss Bundt, or hymns written by and of the Baptist martyrs from 1526–1620, first printed without date or place, reprinted Basel, 1838. (F. C. C.)
ANABASIS (ἀνάβασις, a march up country), the title given by Xenophon (q.v.) to his narrative of the expedition of Cyrus the younger against his brother, Artaxerxes of Persia, 401 B.C., and adopted by Arrian for his history of the expedition of Alexander the Great.
ANABOLISM (Gr. ἀνά, up, βολή, a throw), the biological term for the building up in an organism of more complex from simpler substances, constructive metabolism. (See Physiology.)
ANACHARSIS, a Scythian philosopher, who lived about 600 B.C. He was the son of Gnurus, chief of a nomadic tribe of the Euxine shores, and a Greek woman. Instructed in the Greek language by his mother, he prevailed upon the king to entrust him with an embassy to Athens about 589 B.C. He became acquainted with Solon, from whom he rapidly acquired a knowledge of the wisdom and learning of Greece, and by whose influence he was introduced to the principal persons in Athens. He was the first stranger who received the privileges of citizenship. He was reckoned one of the Seven Sages, and it is said that he was initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. After he had resided several years at Athens, he travelled through different countries in quest of knowledge, and returned home filled with the desire of instructing his countrymen in the laws and the religion of the Greeks. According to Herodotus he was killed by his brother Saulius while he was performing sacrifice to the goddess Cybele. It was he who compared laws to spiders’ webs, which catch small flies and allow bigger ones to escape. His simple and forcible mode of expressing himself gave birth to the proverbial expression “Scythian eloquence,” but his epigrams are as unauthentic as the letters which are often attributed to him. According to Strabo he was the first to invent an anchor with two flukes. Barthélémy borrows his name as the title for his Anacharsis en Grèce.
Herodotus iv. 76; Lucian, Scytha; Cicero, Tusc. Disp. v. 32; Diog. Laert. i. 101.
ANACHRONISM (from ἀνά, back, and χρόνος, time), a neglect or falsification, whether wilful or undesigned, of chronological relation. Its commonest use restricts it to the ante-dating of events, circumstances or customs; in other words, to the introduction, especially in works of imagination that rest on a historical basis, of details borrowed from a later age. Anachronisms may be committed in many ways, originating, for instance, in disregard of the different modes of life and thought that characterize different periods, or in ignorance of the progress
