§ 24. ZWINGLI'S CONFLICT WITH RADICALISM. 71
mate and inevitable result of the Reformation ; but historyhas proved the difference. Liberty is possible without license, and differs as widely from it as from despotism.
The Swiss Reformation, like the German, was disturbed and checked by the radical excesses. It was placed between the two fires of Romanism and Ultraprotestantism. It was attacked in the front and rear, from without and within, — by the Romanists on the ground of tradition, by the Radicals on the ground of the Bible. In some respects the danger from the latter was greater. Liberty has more to fear from the abuses of its friends than from the opposition of its foes. The Reformation would have failed if it had identified itself with the revolution. Zwingli applied to the Radicals the words of St. John to the antichristian teachers : " They went out from us, but the}'- were not of us " (1 John 2 : 19). He considered the controversy with the Papists as mere child's play when compared to that with the Ultraprotestants.^
The Reformers aimed to reform the old Church by the Bible ; the Radicals attempted to build a new Church from the Bible. The former maintained the historic continuity ; the latter went directly to the apostolic age, and ignored the intervening centuries as an apostasy. The Reformers founded a popular state-church, including all citizens with their families; the Anabaptists organized on the voluntary principle select congregations of baptized believers, separated from the world and from the State. Nothing is more characteristic of radicalism and sectarianism than an utter want of historical sense and respect for the past. In its extreme form it rejects even the Bible as an external authority, and relies on inward inspiration. This was the case with the Zwickau Prophets who threatened to break up Luther's work at Wittenberg.
1 He wrote to Vadian, May 28, 1525 {Opera, VII. 398): "omnes pugna priores lusus fuerunt prce ista."
72 THE SWISS REFORMATION.
The Radicals made use of the right of protest against the Reformation, which the Reformers so effectually exercised against popery. They raised a protest against Protestantism. They charged the Reformers with inconsistency and semipopery ; yea, Avith the worst kind of popery. They denounced the state-church as worldly and corrupt, and its ministers as mercenaries. They were charged in turn with Pharisaical pride, Avith revolutionary and socialistic tendencies. They were cruelly persecuted by imprisonment, exile, torture, fire and sword, and almost totally suppressed 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.^
Zwingli took essentially, but quite independently, the same position towards the Radicals as Luther did in his controversy with Carlstadt, Miinzer, and Hiibmaier.^ 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 pui'ification 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 sac-
^ Luther called them martyrs of the devil ; but Leonhard Kaser, to whom he wrote a letter of comfort, and whom he held up as a model martyr to the heretical martyrs (see Letters, ed. De Wette, III. 179), was not a Lutheran, as he thought, but the pastor of an Anabaptist congregation at Scherding. He was burnt Aug. 18, 1527, by order of the bishop of Passau. See Cornelius, II. 56.
2 On Luther and the Radicals see vol. VI. 375 sqq. and 606 sqq.