Baptism

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He argued that although infants were not capable of a personal faith, the faith
of the Church supplied it for them. Theology continued to strongly emphasize
that the sacrament removed the stain of original sin. By the fifteenth century
baptism was defined as the sacrament "through which an infant is rescued
from the devil's power and adopted as God's child." The theology thus
complicated the simple act of infant baptism into a magic and mystery.
Reformation and Revival
The period from 426 A.D. to 1628 A.D. is called the "Dark Ages."
With the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church a bloody persecution
began. All those who dissented even slightly from the official Magestirium
were hunted and hounded to the utmost limit and annihilated. Very often
honest preachers were given a bad name and stoned. An estimated fifty
million Christians were killed as heretics.
The Inquisition was instituted by Pope Innocent lII and was perfected under
Pope Gregory IX. Inquisition was a "Church Court" established by the popes
for the trying and punishing of "heretics" ... a heretic being anyone who did
not agree with Roman Catholicism. The conditions within the Catholic
Church had become so corrupt that many voices were raised within the church
in protest. Among these voices were that of John Wycliffe (1320- 1384), John
Huss (1373-1415), Savonarola (1452-1498), Zwingli (1484-1531), John Knox
(1505-1572), John Calvin (1509-1564), Martin Luther, (1483 to 1546 ) and
George Fox, (1624 to 1691) . The combined effort of these men, along with
many others, brought about the Reformation. A small group of earnest young
believers said that reformations of Luther and Zwingli had not gone far
enough. Conrad Grebel led this group in an attempt to emulate New
Testament Christianity. They baptized one another and verbalized their faith
in Jesus Christ at Zurich, Switzerland, in January 1525. This unleashed the
Protestant Inquisition, which used the same techniques and subtle tortures
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