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

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encourage the scattered sheep of Christ ready for the slaughter, in imitation
of their divine Shepherd.
NOTES.
The Anabaptist hymns appeared in a collection under the title “Aussbund
Etlicher schöner Christlicher Geseng wie die in der Gefengniss zu Passau
im Schloss von den Schweitzern und auch von anderen rechtgläubigen
Christen hin und her gedicht worden,” 1583, and often. Also in other
collections of the sixteenth century. They are reprinted in Wackernagel,
Das Deutsche Kirchenlied, vol. III. (1870), pp. 440–491, and vol. V.
(1877), pp. 677–887. He embodies them in this monumental corpus
hymnologicum, as he does the Schwenkfeldian and the Roman Catholic
hymns of the fifteenth century, but under express reservation of his high-
Lutheran orthodoxy. He refuses to acknowledge the Anabaptists as
martyrs any longer (as he had done in his former work on German
hymnology), because they stand, he says (III. 439), “ausserhalb der
Wahrheit, ausserhalb der heiligen lutherischen Kirche!” Hymnology is the
last place for sectarian exclusiveness. It furnishes one of the strongest
evidences of Christian union in the sanctuary of worship, where theological
quarrels are forgotten in the adoration of a common Lord and Saviour.
Luther himself, as Wackernagel informs us, received unwittingly in his
hymn book of 1545 a hymn of the Anabaptist Grünwald, and another of the
Schwenkfeldian Reusner. Wackernagel is happily inconsistent when he
admits (p. 440) that much may be learned from the Anabaptist hymns, and
that a noble heart will not easily condemn those victims of Rome and of the
house of Habsburg. He gives first the hymns of Thomas Münzer, who can
hardly be called an Anabaptist and was disowned by the better portion.
Burrage, in Baptist Hymn Writers, Portland, 1888, p. 1 sqq., gives some
extracts of Anabaptist hymns. The following stanza, from a hymn of
Schiemer or Schöner, characterizes the condition and spirit of this
persecuted people:—
We are, alas, like scattered sheep,
The shepherd not in sight,
Each far away from home and hearth,
And, like the birds of night
That hide away in rocky clefts,
We have our rocky hold,