THE BAPTISTS.[1]
The religious upheaval of the sixteenth century disclosed at the same time that it created. We tend to regard it as the rising of a new theology which strove to find adequate expression for a profounder view of the relations of man to God. But it was more than this. Besides expressing new conceptions, it brought to light a number of tendencies which throughout the Middle Ages had a secret but vigorous existence, which only now and then came to the surface and then were rigorously repressed, but which none the less affected the popular mind. One of these tendencies was a desire for a pure and strict form of the religious community—a desire which already in the fourth century troubled the Church by the schism of the Donatists. As the Church spread and its system grew more developed, the revolt against the claims of the hierarchy grew stronger, and adopted many strange forms which are hard to trace with clearness. I pass by many obscure manifestations of this spirit. But in the eleventh century we find a body who called themselves Cathari, or Purists, who founded their ideas on a mixture of Christianity with certain oriental beliefs. They solved the problem of the existence of evil by supposing that the world was created by an
- ↑ Lecture given in Great St. Mary's Church in November, 1890.
