A History of the Reformation Volume II Part 22

They clearly wished for some doctrinal standard, and Archbishop Parker had prepared and laid before Convocation a revised edition of the _Forty-two Articles_ which had defined the theology of the Church of England in the last year of King Edward VI.[581] The way had been prepared for the issue of some authoritative exposition of the doctrinal position of the Elizabethan Church by the _Declaration of the Princ.i.p.al Articles of Religion_--a series of eleven articles framed by the Bishops and published in 1561 (March), which repudiates strongly the Romanist doctrines of the Papacy, private Ma.s.ses, and the propitiatory sacrifice in the Holy Supper. The Spanish Amba.s.sador, who had heard of the meetings of the Bishops for this purpose, imagined that they were preparing articles to be presented to the Council of Trent on behalf of the Church of England.[582] The Archbishop's draft was revised by Convocation, and was "diligently read and sifted" by the Queen herself before she gave her consent to the authoritative publication of the Articles.

These _Thirty-nine Articles_ expressed the doctrine of the Reformed or Calvinist as distinguished from the Evangelical or Lutheran form of Protestant doctrine, and the distinction lay mainly in the views which the respective Confessions of the two Churches held about the Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Holy Supper. By this time (1562) Zwinglianism, as a doctrinal system, not as an ecclesiastical policy, had disappeared;[583] and the three theories of the Presence of Christ in the Sacrament had all to do with the Presence of the Body of Christ and not with a spiritual Presence simply. The Romanist theory, transubstantiation, was based on the mediaeval conception of a substance existing apart from all accidents of smell, shape, colour, etc., and declared that the "substance" of the Bread and of the Wine was changed into the "substance" of the Body and Blood of Christ, while the accidents or qualities remained the same--the change being miraculously effected by the priest in consecrating the communion elements. The Lutheran explanation was based upon a mediaeval theory also--on that of the ubiquity or natural omnipresence of the "glorified" Body of Christ.

The Body of Christ, in virtue of its ubiquity, was present everywhere, in chairs, tables, stones flung through the air (to use Luther's ill.u.s.trations), and therefore in the Bread and in the Wine as everywhere else. This ordinary presence became an efficacious sacramental Presence owing to the promise of G.o.d. Calvin had discarded both mediaeval theories, and started by asking what was meant by _substance_ and what by _presence_; he answered that the substance of anything is its power (_vis_), and its presence is the immediate application of its power.

Thus the substance of the crucified Body of Christ is its power, and the Presence of the crucified Body of Christ is the immediate application of its power; and the guarantee of the application of the power is the promise of G.o.d received by the believing communicant. By discarding the Lutheran thought that the substance of the Body of Christ is something extended in s.p.a.ce, and accepting the thought that the main thing in substance is power, Calvin was able to think of the substance of the Body of Christ in a way somewhat similar to the mediaeval conception of "substance without accidents," and was able to show that the Presence of Christ's Body in the sacrament could be accepted and understood without the priestly miracle, which he and all Protestants rejected. Hence it came to pa.s.s that Calvin could teach the Real Presence of Christ's Body in the Sacrament of the Supper without having recourse to the mediaeval doctrine of "ubiquity," which was the basis of the Lutheran theory. They both (Calvin and Luther) insisted on the Presence of the Body of Christ; but the one (Luther) needed the theory of "ubiquity" to explain the Presence, while the other (Calvin) did not need it. But as both discarded the priestly miracle while insisting on the Presence of the Body, the two doctrines might be stated in almost the same words, provided all mention of "ubiquity" was omitted. Calvin could and did sign the Augsburg Confession; but he did not read into it what a Lutheran would have done, the theory of "ubiquity"; and a Calvinist statement of the doctrine, provided only "ubiquity" was not denied, might be accepted by a Lutheran as not differing greatly from his own.

Bishop Jewel a.s.serts again and again in his correspondence, that the Elizabethan divines did not believe in the theory of "ubiquity,"[584]

and many of them probably desired to say so in their articles of religion. Hence in the first draft of the Thirty-nine Articles presented to Convocation by Archbishop Parker, Article XXVIII. contained a strong repudiation of the doctrine of "ubiquity," which, if retained, would have made the Articles of the Church of England more anti-Lutheran than even the second Helvetic Confession. The clause was struck out in Convocation, probably because it was thought to be needlessly offensive to the German Protestants.[585] The Queen, however, was not satisfied with what her divines had done, and two important interferences with the Articles as they came from Convocation are attributed to her. The first was the addition of the words: _and authoritie in controversies of fayth_, in Article XX., which deals with the authority possessed by the Church. The second was the complete suppression for the time being of Article XXIX., which is ent.i.tled, _Of the wicked which do not eate the Body of Christe in the use of the Lordes Supper_, and is expressed in terms which most Lutherans would have been loath to use.

The Queen's action was probably due to political reasons. It was important in international politics for a Protestant Queen not yet securely seated on her throne to shelter herself under the s.h.i.+eld which a profession of Lutheranism would give. The German Lutherans had won legal recognition within the Empire at the Diet of Augsburg in 1555; the votes of two Lutheran Electors had helped to place the Emperor on his throne; and the Pope dared not excommunicate Lutheran Princes save at the risk of offending the Emperor and invalidating all his acts. This had been somewhat sternly pointed out to him when he first threatened to excommunicate Elizabeth, and the Queen knew all the difficulties of the papal position. One has only to read an account of a long conversation with her, reported by the Spanish Amba.s.sador to his master (April 29th, 1559), to see what use the "wise Queen with the eyes that could flash"[586] made of the situation. The Amba.s.sador had not obscurely threatened her with a papal Bull declaring her a b.a.s.t.a.r.d and a heretic, and had brought home its effects by citing the case of the King of Navarre, whose kingdom was taken from him by Ferdinand of Spain acting as the Pope's agent, and Elizabeth had played with him in her usual way.

She had remarked casually "that she wished the Augsburg Confession to be maintained in her realm, whereat," says the Count de Feria, "I was much surprised, and found fault with it all I could, adducing the arguments I thought might dissuade her from it. She then told me it would not be the Augsburg Confession, but something else like it, and that she differed very little from us, as she believed that _G.o.d was in the Sacrament of the Eucharist_, and only dissented from three or four things in the Ma.s.s. After this she told me that she did not wish to argue about religious matters."[587] She did not need to argue; the hint had been enough for the baffled Amba.s.sador.

Article XXIX. was suppressed, and only _Thirty-eight Articles_ were acknowledged publicly. The papal Bull of excommunication was delayed until 1570, when its publication could harm no one but Elizabeth's own Romanist subjects, and the dangerous period was tided over safely. When it came at last, the Queen was not anathematised in terms which could apply to Lutherans, but because she personally acknowledged and observed "the impious const.i.tutions and atrocious mysteries of Calvin," and had commanded that they should be observed by her subjects.[588] Then, when the need for politic suppression was past, Article XXIX. was published, and the _Thirty-nine Articles_ became the recognised doctrinal standard of the Church of England (1571).

What the Queen's own doctrinal beliefs were no one can tell; and she herself gave the most contrary descriptions when it suited her policy.

The disappearance and reappearance of crosses and candles on the altar of the royal chapel were due as much to the wish to keep in touch with the Lutherans as to any desire to conciliate the Queen's Romanist subjects.

The Convocation of 1563 had other important matters before it. Its proceedings showed that the new Elizabethan clergy contained a large number who were in favour of some drastic changes in the Prayer-Book and in the Act of Uniformity. Many of them had become acquainted with and had come to like the simplicity of the Swiss wors.h.i.+p, thoroughly purified from what they called "the dregs of Popery"; and others envied the Scots, "who," wrote Parkhurst to Bullinger (Aug. 23rd, 1559), "have made greater progress in true religion in a few months than we have done in many years."[589]

Such men were dissatisfied with much in the Prayer-Book, or rather in its rubrics, and brought forward proposals for simplifying the wors.h.i.+p, which received a large measure of support. It was thought that all organs should be done away with; that the ceremony of "crossing" in baptism should be omitted; that all festival days save the Sundays and the "princ.i.p.al feasts of the Church" should be abolished;--this proposal was lost by a majority of one in the Lower House. Another motion, leaving it to the option of communicants to receive the Holy Supper either standing, sitting, or kneeling, as it pleased them, was lost by a very small majority. Many of the Bishops themselves were in favour of simplifying the rites of the Church; and five Deans and twelve Archdeacons pet.i.tioned against the use of the surplice. The movement was so strong that Convocation, if left to itself, would probably have purified the Church in the Puritan sense of the word. But the Queen had all the Tudor liking for a stately ceremonial, and she had political reasons, national and international, to prevent her allowing any drastic changes. She was bent on welding her nation together into one, and she had to capture for her Church the large ma.s.s of people who were either neutral or who had leanings to Romanism, or at least to the old mediaeval service. The Council of Trent was sitting; Papal excommunication was always threatened, and, as above explained, Lutheran protection and sympathy were useful. The ceremonies were retained, the crucifixes and lights on the altars were paraded in the chapel royal to show the Lutheran sympathies of the Queen and of the Church of England. The Reforming Bishops, with many an inward qualm,[590] had to give way; and gradually, as the Queen had hoped, a strong Conservative instinct gathered round the Prayer-Book and its rubrics. The Convocation of 1563 witnessed the last determined attempt to propose any substantial alteration in the public wors.h.i.+p of the English people.

At the same Convocation a good deal of time was spent upon a proposed Book of Discipline, or an authoritative statement of the English canon law. It is probable that its contents are to be found in certain "_Articles for government and order in the Church, exhibited to be permitted by authority; but not allowed_," which are printed by Strype[591] from Archbishop Parker's MSS. Such a book would have required parliamentary authority, and the Parliament of 1563 was too much occupied with the vanis.h.i.+ng protection of Spain and with the threatening aspect of France and Scotland. The marriage of the Queen of Scots with Darnley had given additional weight to her claims on the English throne; and it was feared that the English Romanists might rise in support of the legitimate heir. Parliament almost in a panic pa.s.sed severe laws against all recusants, and increased the penalties against all who refused the oath of allegiance or who spoke in support of the authority of the Bishop of Rome. The discipline of the Church was left to be regulated by the old statute of Henry VIII., which declared that as much of the mediaeval canon law as was not at variance with the Scriptures and the Acts of the English Parliament was to form the basis of law for the ecclesiastical courts. This gave the Bishop's officials who presided over the ecclesiastical courts a very free hand; and under their manipulation there was soon very little left of the canon law--less, in fact, than in the ecclesiastical courts of any other Protestant Churches. For these officials were lawyers trained in civil law and imbued with its principles, and predisposed to apply them whenever it was possible to do so.

The formulation of the _Thirty-nine Articles_ in the Convocation of 1563 may be taken as marking the time when the "alteration of religion" was completed. The result, arrived at during a period of exceptional storm and strain, has had the qualities of endurance, and the Church of England is at present what the Queen made it. It was the Royal Supremacy which secured for High Church Anglicans the position they have to-day.

The chief features of the settlement of religion were:

1. The complete repudiation within the realm and Church of England of the authority of the Bishop of Rome. All the clergy and everyone holding office under the Crown had to swear to this repudiation. If they refused, or were recusants in the language of the day, they lost their offices and benefices; if they persisted in their refusal, they were liable to forfeit all their personal property; if they declined to take the oath for a third time, they could be proclaimed traitors, and were liable to the hideous punishments which the age inflicted for that crime. But Elizabeth, with all her sternness, was never cruel, and no religious revolution was effected with less bloodshed.

2. The sovereign was made the supreme Governor of the Church of England; and that the t.i.tle differed in name only from that a.s.sumed by Henry VIII. was made plain in the following ways:

(_a_) Convocation was stript of all independent legislative action, and its power to make ecclesiastical laws and regulations was placed under strict royal control.[592]

(_b_) Appeals from all ecclesiastical courts, which were themselves actually, if not nominally, under the presidency of civil lawyers, could be made to royal delegates who might be laymen; and these delegates were given very full powers, and could inflict civil punishments in a way which had not been permitted to the old mediaeval ecclesiastical courts.

These powers raised a grave const.i.tutional question in the following reigns. The royal delegates became a Court of High Commission, which may have been modelled on the Consistories of the German Princes, and had somewhat the same powers.

3. One uniform ritual of public wors.h.i.+p was prescribed for all Englishmen in the Book of Common Prayer with its rubrics, enforced by the Act of Uniformity. No liberty of wors.h.i.+p was permitted. Any clergyman who deviated from this prescribed form of wors.h.i.+p was liable to be treated as a criminal, and so also were all those who abetted him.

No one could, under penalties, seek to avoid this public wors.h.i.+p. Every subject was bound to attend church on Sunday, and to bide the prayers and the preaching, or else forfeit the sum of twelvepence to the poor.

Obstinate recusants or nonconformists might be excommunicated, and all excommunicated persons were liable to imprisonment.

4. Although it was said, and was largely true, that there was freedom of opinion, still obstinate heretics were liable to be held guilty of a capital offence. On the other hand, the Bishops had little power to force heretics to stand a trial, and, unless Parliament or Convocation ordered it otherwise, only the wilder sectaries were in any danger.[593]

Protestant England grew stronger year by year. The debased copper and bra.s.s coinage was replaced gradually by honest gold and silver.[594]

Manufactures were encouraged. Merchant adventurers, hiring the Queen's s.h.i.+ps, took an increasing share in the world-trade with Elizabeth as a partner.[595] Persecuted Huguenots and Flemings settled in great numbers in the country, and brought with them their thrift and knowledge of mechanical trades to enrich the land of their adoption;[596] and the oppressed Protestants of France and of the Low Countries learnt that there was a land beyond the sea ruled by a "wise young Queen" which might be their city of refuge, and which was ready to aid them, if not openly, at least stealthily. England, formerly unarmed, became supplied "more abundantly than any other country with arms, munitions, and artillery." Sound money, enlarged trade, growing wealth, and an increasing sense of security, were excellent allies to the cause of the Protestant Religion.

So long as Mary of Scotland was in Holyrood and able to command the sympathy, if not the allegiance, of the English Roman Catholics, the throne of Elizabeth was never perfectly secure; but the danger from Scotland was minimised by the jealousy between Catherine de' Medici and her daughter-in-law, and the Scottish Protestant Lords could always be secretly helped. When Philip II. of Spain, in his slow, hesitating way, which made him always miss the turn of the tide, at length resolved to aid Mary to crush her rebels at home and to prosecute her claims on England, his interference had no further consequences than to afford Elizabeth an honourable pretext for giving effectual a.s.sistance in the conflict which drove Mary from her throne, and made Scotland completely and permanently Protestant.[597]

BOOK V.

_ANABAPTISM AND SOCINIANISM_

CHAPTER I.

REVIVAL OF MEDIaeVAL ANTI-ECCLESIASTICAL MOVEMENTS.

The revolt of Luther was the occasion for the appearance--the outbreak, it might be called--of a large amount of irregular independent thinking upon religion and theology which had expressed itself sporadically during the whole course of the Middle Ages. The great difference between the thinkers and their intellectual ancestors who were at war with the mediaeval Church life and doctrine, did not consist in the expression of anything essentially new, but in the fact that the Renaissance had introduced a profound contempt for the intellectual structure of ecclesiastical dogma, and that the whole of the sixteenth century was instinct with the feeling of individuality and the pride of personal existence. The old thoughts were less careful to accommodate themselves to the recognised modes of theological statement, they took bolder forms of expression, presented sharper outlines, and appeared in more definite statements.

Part of this thinking scarcely belongs to ecclesiastical history at all.

It never became the intellectual basis of an inst.i.tution; it neither stirred nor moulded the lives of ma.s.ses of men. The leaders of thought remained solitary thinkers, surrounded by a loose fringe of followers.

But as there is always something immortal in the forcible expression of human thought, their opinions have not died altogether, but have affected powerfully all the various branches of the Christian Church at different periods and in divers ways. The old conceptions, somewhat disguised, perhaps, but still the same, reappear in most systems of speculative theology. It therefore demands a brief notice.

The greater portion of this intellectual effervescence, however, did not share the same fate. Menno Simons, aided, no doubt, by the winnowing fan of persecution, was able to introduce order into the wild fermenting elements of Anabaptism, and to form the Baptist Church which has had such an honourable history in Europe and America. Fausto Sozzini did the same for the heterogeneous ma.s.s of anti-Trinitarian thinking, and out of the confusion brought the orderly unity of an inst.i.tutional life.

This great ma.s.s of crude independent thought may be roughly cla.s.sified as Mystic, or perhaps Pantheist Mystic, Anabaptist, and anti-Trinitarian; but the division, so far as the earlier thinkers go, is very artificial. The groups continually overlap; many of the leaders of thought might be placed in two or in all three of these divisions.

What characterised them all was that they had little sense of historical continuity, cared nothing for it, and so broke with the past completely; that they despaired of seeing any good in the historical Church, and believed that it must be ended, as it was impossible to mend it; and that they all possessed a strong sense of individuality, believing the human soul to be imprisoned when it accepted the confinement of a common creed, inst.i.tution, or form of service unless of the very simplest kind.

Pantheistic Mysticism was no new thing in Christianity. As early as the sixth century at least, schools of thought may be found which interpreted such doctrines as the Trinity and the Person of Christ in ways which led to what must be called Pantheism; and if such modes of dissolving Christian doctrines had not a continuous succession within the Christian Church, they were always appearing. They were generally accompanied with a theory of an "inner light" which claimed either to supersede the Scriptures as the Rule of Faith, or at least to interpret them. The Scriptures were the husk which might be thrown away when its kernel, discovered by the "inner light," was once revealed. The Schwenkfelds, Weigels, Giordano Brunos of the sixteenth century, who used what they called the "inner light" in somewhat the same way as the Council of Trent employed dogmatic tradition, had a long line of ancestry in the mediaeval Church, and their appearance at the time of the Reformation was only the recrudescence of certain phases of mediaeval thought. But, as has been said, such thinkers were never able, nor perhaps did they wish, to form their followers into a Church; and they belong much more to the history of philosophy than to an ecclesiastical narrative. They had no conception whatever of religion in the Reformation sense of the word. Their idea of faith was purely intellectual--something to be fed on metaphysics more or less refined.

By far the most numerous of those sixteenth century representatives of mediaeval nonconformists were cla.s.sed by contemporaries under the common name of Anabaptists or Katabaptists, because, from 1526 onwards, they all, or most of them, insisted on _re-_baptism as the sign of belonging to the brotherhood of believers. They were scattered over the greater part of Europe, from Sweden in the north to Venice in the south, from England in the west to Poland in the east. The Netherlands, Germany,--southern, north-western, and the Rhineland,--Switzerland, the Tyrol, Moravia, and Livonia were scenes of b.l.o.o.d.y persecution endured with heroic constancy. Their leaders flit across the pages of history, courageous, much-enduring men, to whom the world was nothing, whose eyes were fixed on the eternal throne of G.o.d, and who lived in the calm consciousness that in a few hours they might be fastened to the stake or called upon to endure more dreadful and more prolonged tortures,--men of every varying type of character, from the gentle and pious young Humanist Hans Denck to Jan Matthys the forerunner of the stern Camisard and Covenanter. No statement of doctrine can include the beliefs held in all their innumerable groups. Some maintained the distinctive doctrines of the mediaeval Church (the special conceptions of a priestly hierarchy, and of the Sacraments being always excluded); others were Lutherans, Calvinists, or Zwinglians; some were Unitarians, and denied the usual doctrine of the Person of Christ;[598] a few must be cla.s.sed among the Pantheists. All held some doctrine of an "inner light"; but while some sat very loose to the letter of Scripture, others insisted on the most literal reading and application of Biblical phraseology. They all united in maintaining that true Christians ought to live separate from the world (_i.e._ from those who were not rebaptized), in communities whose lives were to be modelled on the accounts given in the New Testament of the primitive Christians, and that the true Church had nothing whatever to do with the State.

Curiously enough, the leaders in the third group, the anti-Trinitarians, were almost all Italians.

The most outstanding man among them, distinguished alike by his learning, his pure moral life, a distinct vein of piety, and the calm courage with which he faced every danger to secure the propagation of his opinions, was the Spaniard Miguel Servede (Servetus),[599] who was burnt at Geneva in 1553. He was very much a man by himself. His whole line of thought separated him from the rest of the anti-Trinitarian group a.s.sociated with the names of the Sozzini. He reached his position through a mystical Pantheism--a course of thought which one might have expected from a Spaniard. He made few or no disciples, and did not exert any permanent influence.

The other anti-Trinitarians of the first rank were all cultured Italians, whom the spirit of the Renaissance prompted to criticise and reconstruct theology as they found it. They were all men who had been driven to reject the Roman Church because of its corruptions and immoralities, and who had no conception of any other universal Christian society. Men of pure lives, pious after their own fas.h.i.+on, they never had any idea of what lay at the root of the Reformation thought of what real religion was. It never dawned upon them that the sum of Christianity is the G.o.d of Grace, manifest in Christ, accessible to every believing soul, and unwavering trust on man's part. Their interest in religion was almost exclusively intellectual. The Reformers had defined the Church as the fellows.h.i.+p of believers, and they had said that the marks of that fellows.h.i.+p were the preaching of the Word and the right use of the sacraments--the means through which G.o.d manifests Himself to men, and men manifest their faith in G.o.d. These men never apprehended this; the only idea which they seemed able to have of the Church was a school of definite and correct opinions. Compelled to flee from their native land, they naturally took refuge in Switzerland or in the Grisons. It is almost pathetic to see how they utterly failed to understand the men among whom they found themselves. Reformation to them was a criticism and reconstruction of theology; they were simply carrying the criticism a little further than their new neighbours. They never perceived the real gulf fixed between them and the adherents of the Reformation.

They were all highly educated and cultivated men--individual units from all parts of Italy. Camillo Renato, who proclaimed himself an Anabaptist, was a Sicilian. Gentili came from Calabria; Gribaldo from Padua; Bernardino Occhino, who in his later days joined the band, and the two Sozzini from Siena. Alciat was a Piedmontese. Blandrata (Biandrata), the most energetic member of the group save Fausto Sozzini, belonged to a n.o.ble family in Saluzzo which had long been noted for the protection it had afforded to poor people persecuted by the Church. They were physicians or lawyers; one, Gentili, was a schoolmaster.

The strong sense of individuality, which seems the birthright of every Italian, fostered by their life within their small city republics, had been accentuated by the Renaissance. The historical past of Italy, and its political and social condition in the sixteenth century, made it impossible for the impulse towards reform to take any other shape than that of individual action. The strength and the impetus which comes from the thought of fellow-man, fellow-believer, and which was so apparent in the Reformation movements beyond the Alps and in the Jesuit reaction, was entirely lacking among these Reformers in Italy. In that land the Empire had never regained its power lost under the great Popes, Gregory VII. and Innocent III. The Romish Church presented itself to all Italians as the only possible form under which a wide-spreading Christian _Society_ could be organised. If men rejected it, personal Christian life alone remained. The Church dominated the ma.s.ses unprepared by any such conception of ecclesiastical reform as influenced the people in Germany and Switzerland. Only men who had received some literary education were susceptible to the influences making for Reformation. They were always prevented by the unbroken power of the agencies of the Church from organising themselves publicly into congregations, and could only meet to exchange confidences privately and on rare occasions.[600] We hear of several such a.s.semblies, which invariably took the form of conferences, in which the members discussed and communicated to each other the criticisms of the mediaeval theology which solitary meditation had suggested to them. They were much more like debating societies than the beginnings of a Church. Thus we hear of one at Vincenza,[601] in 1546, where about forty friends met, among whom was Lelio Sozzini, where they debated such doctrines as the Satisfaction of Christ, the Trinity, etc., and expressed doubts about their truth. It was inevitable that such men could not hope to create a popular movement towards Reformation in their native land, and also that they should be compelled to seek safety beyond the bounds of Italy. They fled, one by one, across the Alps. In the Grisons and in Reformed Switzerland they found little communities of their countrymen who had sought shelter there, and their presence was always followed by dissensions and by difficulties with the native Protestants.

Their whole habits of life and thought were not of the kind calculated to produce a lasting Christian fellows.h.i.+p. Their theological opinions, which were not the outcome of a new and living Christian experience, but had been the result of an intellectual criticism of the mediaeval theology, had little stability, and did not tend to produce unity. The execution of Servede and the jealousy which all the Reformed cantons of Switzerland manifested towards opinions in any way similar to those of the learned Spaniard, made life in Switzerland as unsafe as it had been in Italy. They migrated to Poland and Transylvania, attracted by the freedom of thought existing in both lands.

Poland, besides, had special attractions for refugees from Italy. The two countries had long been in intimate relations.h.i.+p. Italian architects had designed the stately buildings in Crakau and other Polish cities, and the commercial intercourse between the two countries was great. The independence and the privileges of the Polish n.o.bles secured them from ecclesiastical interference, and both Calvinism and Lutheranism had found many adherents among the aristocracy. They, like the Roman patricians of the early centuries, gave the security of their halls to their co-religionists, and the heads of the Romanist Church chafed at their impotence to prevent the spread of opinions and usages which they deemed heretical. In Transylvania the absence of a strong central government permitted the same freedom to the expression of every variety of religious opinion.

The views held by the group of anti-Trinitarians were by no means the same. They reproduced in Poland the same medley of views we find existing in the end of the third century. Some were Sabellians, others Adoptianists, a few were Arians. Perhaps most of them believed in the miraculous birth of our Lord, and held as a consequence that He ought to be adored; but a strong minority, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Francis Davidis, repudiated the miraculous birth, and refused to wors.h.i.+p Christ (_non-adorantes_). For a time they seem to have lived in a certain amount of accord with the members of the Reformed communities. A crisis came at the Polish Diet of 1564, and the anti-Trinitarians were recognised then to be a separate religious community, or _ecclesia minor_. This was the field in which Fausto Sozzini exercised his commanding intellect, his genius for organisation, and his eminently strong will. He created out of these jarring elements the Socinian Church.

The Anabaptist and the Socinian movements require, however, a more detailed description.

CHAPTER II.

ANABAPTISM.[602]