to-day, and their ideal of the total separation between the spiritual and the temporal is inwrought into the texture of American institutions. The time is rapidly approaching when the Anabaptists will be as abundantly honoured as, in the past four centuries, they have been unjustly contemned.
If this is true of the Anabaptists as a whole, what shall be said of their leaders? These have not escaped the general fate of the party. They were burned, they were drowned, they were beheaded, they were tortured, they were beaten with rods; while they lived they wandered as outcasts from city to city, or dwelt in caves of the earth; and after they had sealed their testimony to the truth with their blood, men whom the world calls great in piety and good works often conspired to cover their names with undeserved infamy.[1] Not a few of these leaders were men of the highest culture, the broadest learning of their times—scholars not
- ↑ A case in point is that of Ludwig Hätzer, beheaded at Constance in 1529. The Anabaptist chroniclers are unanimous in saying that he "was condemned for the gospel, and witnessed in knightly fashion for the truth with his blood." Nevertheless, the Archives of Constance say that he was condemned for bigamy, which he had confessed. Everything in his life and writings gives the lie to this record, which is open to suspicion from the fact that Anabaptism
