A HISTORY OF UNITARIANISM - Starr King School for the Ministry

persecution, cared little for speculative doctrines or outward ceremonies, and
nothing for creeds or councils except as those agreed with Scripture. As they
held aloof from the existing Lutheran or Reformed Churches, which were
trying to unite the forces of Protestantism against Catholic opposition, and were
often sharply critical of them, they incurred their bitter hatred, and were widely
persecuted, even unto death, as turbulents dangerous to the very existence of
Protestantism. In their relations to civil society their views varied according to
locality and to the leaders they followed; but they were in general non-
resistants, opposed military service, oaths, courts, capital punishment and
usury, and often advocated community of goods. Such views brought many of
them into collision with the State, and relentless persecution followed. At the
Diet of Speyer in 1529 death was decreed against all Anabaptists, and during
half a century large numbers of them were put to death with all imaginable
cruelty in all the countries of Europe.
Inasmuch as the Anabaptists rejected all external authority in religion save
Scripture, which each explained according to his own inner conviction, the way
was open for wide differences of opinion as to matters of belief; and these
depended upon whether they tended to fall in with current modes of thought, or
to think independently of inherited tradition and prevailing usage. Hence it is
not surprising that we find a tendency stronger among them than elsewhere to
call received dogmas in question, and to favor other views as more agreeable to
Scripture, more in accordance with reason, and more helpful to piety. Such
independent thinkers would naturally be in the minority, and the free spirit of
the movement, with its inclination to emphasize the conduct of life far more
than details of belief, would discourage organized effort to enforce this doctrine
or that. In tracing the progress of thought we shall therefore have to do not with
the whole body of Anabaptists, but with individual members of it. These