Schaff - History of the Christian Church Vol. 8 - Media Sabda Org

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in Protestant as well as in Roman Catholic countries. The age was not ripe
for unlimited religious liberty and congregational self-government. The
Anabaptists perished bravely as martyrs of conscience. f123
Zwingli took essentially, but quite independently, the same position
towards the Radicals as Luther did in his controversy with Carlstadt,
Münzer, and Hübmaier. f124 Luther, on the contrary, radically
misunderstood Zwingli by confounding him with Carlstadt and the
Radicals. Zwingli was in his way just as conservative and churchly as the
Saxon Reformer. He defended and preserved the state-church, or the
people’s church, against a small fraction of sectaries and separatists who
threatened its dissolution. But his position was more difficult. He was
much less influenced by tradition, and further removed from Romanism. He
himself aimed from the start at a thorough, practical purification of church
life, and so far agreed with the Radicals. Moreover, he doubted for a while
the expediency (not the right) of infant baptism, and deemed it better to put
off the sacrament to years of discretion. f125 He rejected the Roman
doctrine of the necessity of baptism for salvation and the damnation of
unbaptized infants dying in infancy. He understood the passage, Mark
16:16, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved,” as applying only
to adults who have heard the gospel and can believe, but not to children.
On maturer reflection he modified his views. He learned from experience
that it was impossible to realize an ideal church of believers, and stopped
with what was attainable. As to infant baptism, he became convinced of its
expediency in Christian families. He defended it with the analogy of
circumcision in the Old Testament (Col. 2:11), with the comprehensiveness
of the New Covenant, which embraces whole families and nations, and
with the command of Christ, “Suffer little children to come unto Me,” from
which he inferred that he who refuses children to be baptized prevents
them from coming to Christ. He also appealed to 1 Cor. 7:14, which
implies the church-membership of the children of Christian parents, and to
the examples of family baptisms in Acts 16:33, 18:8, and 1 Cor. 1:16.
The Radical movement began in Zurich in 1523, and lasted till 1532. The
leaders were Conrad Grebel, from one of the first families of Zurich, a
layman, educated in the universities of Vienna and Paris, whom Zwingli
calls the corypheus of the Anabaptists; Felix Manz, the illegitimate son of a
canon of the Great Minster, a good Hebrew scholar; Georg Blaurock, a
monk of Coire, called on account of his eloquence “the mighty Jörg,” or
“the second Paul;” and Ludwig Hätzer of Thurgau, chaplain at