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Cornell University Library 
 BR345 .C55 1858 
 
 Zwingll: or, The rise of the Reformation 
 
 olln 
 
 3 1924 029 225 443 
 
Z W I N G L I 
 
 THE RISE OF THE REFORMATION IN 
 SWITZERLAND. 
 
 A LIFE OF THE EBFOEMEK, 
 
 WITH SOME NOTICES OF HIS TIME AND CONTEMPORARIES, 
 
 BY 
 
 E. CHKI8T0FFEL, 
 
 PASTOR OF THE BEFOKMED CHURCH, WINTERSINGEN, SWITZERLAND. 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN, 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN COCHEAN, Esq. 
 
 EDINBURGH: 
 T. & T. CLAEK, 38 GEOEGE STEEET. 
 
 LONDON; HAMILTON, ADAMS, & CO. DUBLIN: JOHN ROBERTSON. 
 PHILADELPHIA: SMITH, ENGLISH, & Cp. 
 
 MDCOCLVIII. 
 
EDINBUEGH : 
 
 PKINTED BY TURNBULL AND SPEARS, HASOVBB STREET. 
 
PREFACE, 
 
 The object of the present work is to set Zwingli before us as he 
 lived, and as he wrought. The Author has adopted the plan 
 likely to be most successful in conveying an accurate impression 
 of his subject; — ^he has made his work, as far as the materials at 
 his command would admit of autobiographical. We have 
 extracts from the Eeformer's correspondence — we are introduced 
 to the circle of his friends — we are thrown into the arena of his 
 mighty contests — we are conducted through the vineyard in 
 which he laboured — we are admitted to view the interior of his 
 domestic life. But in the communication of this information it 
 is chiefly the hero himself who speaks, and tells us the story of 
 his life. The portraiture of the Eeformer thus drawn may be 
 accepted as faithful; it can hardly be otherwise; the plan taken 
 by the Author is certainly that best adapted for producing what 
 may be called a photogeaphic delineation of character. But it 
 is not only the Eeformer himself who is here sketched to the life, 
 much light is thrown upon his coadjutors in the work of Eefor- 
 mation, upon the rise and history of the great movement itself, 
 and upon the manners and modes of thinking of the times in 
 which it took place. We believe the work will be generally 
 acceptable to the English public, as a faithful record of the 
 doings and sayings of one of the noblest characters of an eventful 
 epoch. 
 
 THE TRANSLATOE. 
 
 April, 1858. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 FIRST SECTION. 
 IIULDIIEICH ZWINGU'S BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL-TJMB. 
 
 rAGK 
 
 I. Zwiiigli's Parentage and Birthplace ... 1 
 
 •2. Zwingli at the Schools of Basle and Berne ... 4 
 
 3. Zwingli at the High Schools of Vienna and Basle 6 
 
 SECOND SECTION. 
 
 ZWINGLI PARSON IN GLAEUS AND EINSIEDELN. 1506-1518. 
 
 1 . Zwingli's Entrance on his Cnracy, and First Field of Labour . 10 
 
 2. The Great Temptations and Trials of the Young Priest of Glarus 12 
 
 3. Glance at Zwingli's Spiritual Development about the Year 1516 . 19 
 
 4. Zwingli at Einsiedeln ... 22 
 
 THIRD SECTION. 
 
 /WlNGLl's ENTRANCE ON HIS OFFICIAL DUTIES AT ZURICH — STYLE 
 
 OF PREACHING — -HIS DIFFICULTIES AND CONFLICTS HIS JOYS 
 
 AND SORROWS HIS STUDIES AND FRIENDS FROM 1619-1523, 
 
 OR TILL THE FIRST DISPUTATION ON RELIGION. 
 
 1 . Entrance on Official Duties, and Style of Preaching . . 34 
 
 2. Z\\ingli's Labours as a Patriot, especiallj' in regard to the Evils of 
 
 Foreign Military Service . . .42 
 
 3. Zwingli's Labours in the Reformation of Ecclesiastical Alniscs 52 
 
 4. Zwingli's First Relation to Luther .... 73 
 
 5. Zwingli in the School of the Cross — Increasing Numbers of tlie 
 
 Friends of Evangelical Truth .... 76 
 
 6. How Zwingli regarded his I.,abours nnd Trials, ns shewn in Letters 
 
 to his Brothers and Friends ... 88 
 
 FOURTH SECTION. 
 THE REFORMATION EFFECTED BY ZWINGLI. — 1523-1526. 
 
 1. The Fermentation Continues— A New Position Gained . 94 
 
 2. The First Religious Conference in Zurirh, held on the 29th Janiiary 
 
 1.523 . . , .100 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I'AGE 
 
 3. Eesults of the Disputation— Principles observed by Zwingli in tbe 
 
 worlc of Reformation ... 
 
 4. The Catliedral Foundation at the Great Minster ■ ^^^ 
 .5. The Cloisters . . . • 115 
 
 6. Celibacy ...... 1^1 
 
 7. Images and the Mass— Second Disputation, and its Consequences 125 
 
 8. Zwingli's Laws and Regulations for Maintaining Christian Morality 
 
 and Exercising Discipline on Laity and Clergy ■ 151 
 
 FIFTH SECTION. 
 
 zwingli's laboues foe the extension and support of the 
 repoemation which emanated peom him, in the othbe 
 cantons op switzerland, as well as in germany, france, 
 and italy. 
 
 1. Zwingli's Relation to the New Evangelical Movement, as this Mani- 
 
 fested itself in some of the Swiss Cloisters . . 167 
 
 2. Zwingli's Zealous Labours for the Extension and Establishment of 
 
 Evangelical Truth and Doctrine in the Cantons of East Switzer- 
 land ...... 173 
 
 3. Zwingli's Influence on the Victory of the Reformation in the Canton 
 
 of Berne, and in the other Cantons of Western Switzerland — His 
 Relations to Farel . . . . .186 
 
 4. Zwingli's Apostolic Cares and Labours for the Extension and Con- 
 
 firmation of Evangelical Truth in Germany . . 193 
 
 5. Zwingli's Circular Letter to Peter Sebilla — His zeal for the Exten- 
 
 sion of the Gospel in France .... 203 
 
 6. Zwingli's Correspondence with the Augustine Monk of Como — His 
 
 Measures for the Extension of the Gospel in Italy . . 206 
 
 SIXTH SECTION. 
 
 REACTIONARY MEASURES OF THE PAPAL PARTY FOR CHECKING AND 
 SUPPEESSING THE EEFORMATION. 
 
 1 . The Overtures of the Pope and the Intrigues of Faber are alike flHable 
 
 to shake Zwingli's Faith . . 209 
 
 2. The Papistically Disposed Miajority of the Diet gives the Signal for 
 
 the Persecution of the Evangelical Party — Nicolas Hottinger is 
 Imprisoned and Executed — OSchsli's Imprisonment — Hans Wirth 
 and his Sons— Burkhardt Ruetimann— Zurich's Dangerous State 212 
 
 3. Faber employs the ill-humour of the Swiss Papal Party at the Defeat 
 
 of Pavia to form a closer Alliance with the Emperor— Baden's 
 Religious Disputation— Thomas Murner— The Insults offered to 
 the Zurichers— The Formal Alliance of the Papal Cantons with 
 Austria ••.... 22'' 
 
CONTENTS. vii 
 
 SEVENTH SECTION. 
 
 OBSTACLES TO THE PROGRESS OP THE REFORMATION, ARISING FROM 
 DIFFERENCES OF OPINION UPON THE SACRAMENTS OF BAPTISM 
 AND THE lord's SUPPER. 
 
 PATJE 
 
 1. Introduction — Zwingli's Standing-Point . . . 237 
 
 2. The Anabaptists of Zurich — Their Overtures to Zwingli, and Factious 
 
 Spirit . . ... 247 
 
 3. Public Disputation with the Anabaptists, 6th November 1525 . 254 
 
 4. The Riotous Proceedings of the Anabaptists in. the Canton of Zurich 
 
 — Their Course and End .... 280 
 
 5. The Doctrine of Zwingli and of Luther in regard to the Lord's Sup- 
 
 per — ^The Idiosyncrasies and Different Development of their Minds 
 
 — Origin of the Strife about the Lord's Supper . 286 
 
 6. How%xe Contest regarding the Supper broke out, and with what 
 
 Reasons Zwingli rebutted the Objections of Luther against his 
 Doctrine of the Supper .... 305 
 
 7. The Different Manner in which Zwingli and Luther conducted the 
 
 Contest— The EesiUt of it . 320 
 
 8. The Attempts at Union ..... 335 
 
 EIGHTH SECTION. 
 ZWINGLI IN HIS PRIVATE LIFE. 
 
 1. Zwingli's Character — Wise employment of Time for the Despatch of 
 
 Multifarious Business — His Domestic Life . 373 
 
 2. Zwingli among his Friends . . 379 
 
 3. Zwingli's Search after Truth, or his Intellectual Converse with the 
 
 Holy and the Great Men of Antiquity . . 383 
 
 4 Zwingli's Communion with God— The Lofty Reach and Unshaken 
 
 Constancy of his Faith .... 390 
 
 NINTH SECTION.. 
 
 zwingli's LAST LABOURS HE DIES THE DEATH OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 
 HEEO AT CAPPEL, IITH OCTOBER 1531. 
 
 1. Christian Civil Rights . . • • .401 
 
 2. Rupture between the Protestant and Roman Catholic Parties in 
 
 Switzerland, and First Cappel War . . .412 
 
 3. Zwingli's Reforming Labours in the latter years of his Life . 432 
 
 4. Origin and Close of the Second Cappel War— Zwingli's Death . 437 
 
FIRST SECTION. 
 
 HULDREICH ZWINGLI'S BOYHOOD AND SCHOOL-TIME. 
 
 'Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love; therefore with loving kindness 
 have I drawn thee." — Jer. xxxi. 3. 
 
 1. ZwiNGLi's Parentage and Biethplace. 
 
 At the Eastern extremity of the pleasant valley of Toggenburg, 
 at an almost Alpine height, lies the village of Wildhaus. A 
 simple dwelling, that stands on a green meadow to the right of 
 the highway, recalls to the mind of the traveller, as he passes 
 through this mountain vaUey, the memory of a great man. For in 
 this plain but cheerful-looking house stood the cradle of Zwingli, 
 the Eeformer, a man by whose agency God caused the light of 
 His glorious gospel once more to arise in new splendour over 
 a world darkened by human invention and by sin. In the latter 
 half of the fifteenth century, there lived here, begirt by a numer- 
 ous flock of children, a respectable and pious couple, Huldreich 
 Zwingli and Margaritha, whose maiden name was Meili. The 
 confidence and esteem which Zwingli, the father, enjoyed among 
 his feUow-villagers had raised him to the office of head or am- 
 mann of the community. This mark of their confidence they 
 conferred upon him as soon as, in the gradual development of a 
 freer constitution, they had wrung from the manor of the land, 
 the Abbot of St. GaU, the right of choosing their judges, their 
 ammann, and even the parson himself In its ecclesiastical rela- 
 tions, Wildhaus had formerly stood in filial dependence on Gams ; 
 but, at the expressed wish of the inhabitants, it had been raised 
 to the position of an independent community, and the first par- 
 son they elected, in the exercise of their new rights, was the bro- 
 ther of the ammann, Bartholomseus ZwingK. He was afterwards, 
 from 1487 till 1513, parson and dean at Wesen, at the outlet of 
 the Wallen Lake. The mother of Zwingli had also a brother an 
 
 A 
 
2 PARENTAGE AND BIETHPLACE. 
 
 ecclesiastic, John MeiU, from 1510 tiU 1523 abbot of the cloister 
 of rischiQgen, in the canton of Thurgau. The inhabitants of 
 Wndhaus had been from time immemorial known as a cheerful, 
 merry, song-loving people. The natural character of their coun- 
 try made them shepherds. In the first days of May, as soon as 
 the mountains put on their coats of green, the cattle is driven up 
 with the harmonious clangour of bells, to the higher pastures, 
 and ever higher and higher a part of the inhabitants continue to 
 ascend, till, at the end of July, the loftiest Alp is reached. The 
 youngsters, who are left at home during this summer time, to 
 attend to the affairs of the house, and to gather in the hay for 
 provender to the cattle during winter, haste on the Sundays 
 up the steep sides of the mountain to celebrate with their com- 
 panions, who are tending the flocks, gladsome pastoral sports, in 
 which the joyous note of song mixes itself with the simple tone 
 of the Alpine horn. When winter extends its domain from the 
 icy summits, the shepherds drive their flocks downwards in the 
 direction of the winter stalls. This simple-hearted peasantry 
 spend the winter evenings in rude hamlets, dinily lit by a tal- 
 low candle, but the dreary time is lightened by the joyous voice 
 of song or the pleasant tone of some musical instrument, for rare 
 it is to find a cottage in which some of the inmates at least can- 
 not handle an instrument. The Ammann Zwingli had meadows 
 and alps, and he and his family shared the calling and the joys 
 of his feUow-vUlagers. On the 1st of January 1484, his spouse 
 presented him with a son, who received from his paternal uncle. 
 Parson Bartholomseus, the rite of baptism, and the name of his 
 father. Young Huldreich had seven brothers and two sisters. 
 He appears to have been from an early age distinguished for the 
 liveliness of his disposition, and the quickness of his parts, so 
 that the eyes of his parents and his two spiritual uncles rested 
 on him with sajiisfaction and fuU of hope. It was the desire of 
 their hearts that he should be a priest, as his father's brother and 
 his mother's brother were. The mind of the boy Zwingli received 
 its first intellectual nourishment in his father's house, and in the 
 long winter evenings, when his father related, in the circle of his 
 family and more intimate associates, stories from Swiss history, 
 shewing his attentive auditors how their native valley of Toggen- 
 burg had acquired greater and yet greater freedom, and how its 
 
PAEENTAGE AND BIETHPLACE. 3 
 
 inhabitants had -secured themselves in the possession of it, by 
 allying themselves with the bold confederates who rolled back 
 from their mountain steeps the hosts of Charles the Bold. Tales 
 of this sort feU like sparks of Hviug fire on the soul of young 
 Huldreich, and in the age of his manhood they burst forth into an 
 ardent love of home and native country. The boy often, too, 
 himg on the lips of his pious grandmother, as she stirred his piety 
 by the relation of legendary tales and biblical stories. But, most 
 of aU, the language in which God speaks to the inhabitants of 
 the mountain regions moved his young spirit. " I have often 
 thought, in my simplicity," writes his friend Oswald Myconius, 
 " that from these sublime heights, which stretch up towards 
 heaven, h^ has taken something heavenly and divine." When 
 the thunder rolls through the gorges of the mountains, and leaps 
 from crag to crag with crashing roar, then it is as if we heard 
 anew the voice of the Lord God proclaiming, " I am the Almighty 
 God, walk before me, and be thou perfect." When in the dawn ' 
 of morning the icy mountains glow in light divine, so that a sea 
 of fire seems to surround all their tops, it is as if " the Lord God 
 of Hosts treadeth upon the high places of the earth,"* and as if 
 the border of His garment of light had transfigured the hills. It 
 is then that, with reverential awe, we feel as if the cry came to 
 us also which pierced to the ear of Isaiah, " Holy, holy, holy, is 
 the Lord of Hosts ; the whole earth is fuU of his glory." -f- Here, 
 under the magnificent impressions of a mountain world and their 
 wonders, there awoke iu the breast of young Zwiagli the first 
 awful sense of the grandeur and majesty of God, which after- 
 wards filled his whole soul, and armed him with intrepidity in 
 the great conflict with the powers of darkness. In the solitude 
 of the mountaiQS, broken only by the bells of his pasturing flocks, 
 the reflective boy mused on the wisdom of God which reveals 
 itself in all creatures. An echo of this deep contemplation of 
 nature, which occupied his harmless youth,- we find in a work 
 which, in the ripeness of manhood, he composed on " The Pro- 
 vidence of God."j "Do not," says he in this treatise, "even the 
 animals which belong to the genus of mice proclaim the wisdom 
 and providence of God ? When, for example, the hedgehog car- 
 ries so dexterously into his hole a quantity of fruit on his prickles, 
 
 * Amos iy. 13. t Isaiah yi. 3. t De Providentia Dei. 
 
4 AT THE SCHOOLS OP BASLE AND BEENE. 
 
 rolling liiinself round on it, and forking it — or when the marmot 
 sets one of his number as a watch on an -eminence, that by its 
 whistle it may give warning at the right time of the approach of 
 danger, to those who are running about and working, gathering 
 together the softest hay, one making a waggon of the other, this 
 one lying on its back, allowing itself to be loaded on belly and 
 breast with hay, which it catches with its feet, and holds fast, 
 that seizing his fellow, which has let himself be made a hurdle 
 of, by the tail, and carrying him with the booty to the store- 
 house, which work the animals perform that they may pass the 
 winter in gleep — or when the squirrel draws a piece of wood to 
 the bank with its mouth, and ferries across a river as if in a 
 canoe, its upright tail serving it instead of a sail — what voice, 
 what language can so highly exalt the divine wisdom as the acts 
 of these animals do which belong to the lowest order of intelli- 
 gence ? Nay, do not even the things without sense and intelli- 
 gence manifest that the power, goodness, the renewing and sus- 
 taining energy of God is present with them ? The earth, for ex- 
 ample, the mother of all, shuts never ruthlessly her rich treasiires 
 within herself; she heeds not the wounds made on her by spade 
 and share. The dew, the rain, the rivers moisten, restore, quicken 
 within her that which had been brought to a still-stand in growth 
 by drought, and its after-thriving testifies wondrously of the divine 
 power. The mountaias, too, these awkward, rude, inert masses, 
 that give to the earth, as the bones to the flesh, solidity, form, and 
 consistency, that render impossible, or at least difficult, the passage 
 from one place to another, which, although heavier than .the earth 
 itself, yet soar far above it, and never sink, do they not pro- 
 claim the imperishable might of Jehovah, and speak forth the 
 whole volume of His majesty ? In these works of God we be- 
 hold proofs of the existence of that divine power which sustains 
 them all in being, not less than in Man himself" 
 
 2. ZWINGLI AT THE SCHOOLS OP BaSLE AND BEENE. 
 
 On young Huldreich's reaching his eighth or ninth year, his 
 father resolved to take him to his uncle at Wesen, and commit 
 the boy to the charge of this relative. The way to Wesen led 
 
AT THE SCHOOLS OF BASLE AND BERNE. 5 
 
 father and son over the green heights of the Ammon, from whose 
 summit young Zwingli for the first time looked abroad upon the 
 wide world, now, as it were, unrolled before his eye. Well 
 might the glance of the future apostle of the truth from this 
 summit sweep full of boding meaning to the valley of Glarus, to 
 the woody heights of Einsiedeln, and to the lovely shores of the 
 lake of Zurich, at each and all of which places, he afterwards, 
 in fuU trust in the God who laid the foundation of the hills, 
 waged the glorious war for the faith once delivered to the saints. 
 The dean of Wesen loved his brother's child as his own son, and 
 sent him to the pubKc school to receive the first rudiments of 
 his education. AVhen the knowledge of his master at this semi- 
 nary, as soon happened, no longer met the demands of the 
 ready-witted pupil, his uncle took care to have him sent to Basle, 
 and placed there under the charge of his friend, George Binzli. 
 Binzfi was a learned man, who, at the same time, possessed a 
 mild disposition and a warm heart. Here, too, the rapid pro- 
 gress of the boy speedily outran the capabilities of the master. 
 Young Huldreich was especially clever in the disputations which 
 were then common as well in the lower as in the higher schools, 
 excelling in these all his class-fellows. His musical talents, 
 too, began to develope themselves in an extraordinary degree, 
 and to excite universal admiratioa The faithful teacher, per- 
 ceiving that his school would no longer avail for his precocious 
 scholflx, sent him home, with a recommendation that he might 
 be sent to a seminary better correspondent with the attainments 
 he had made. At that time, Henry Woelflin (Lupulus), at Berne, 
 taught the dead languages with great applause. The Ammann of 
 Wildhaus and the Dean of Wesen resolved to send the boy thither. 
 Lupulus was deeply read in the Greek and Eoman classics, 
 and in ancient history; he had also made a journey to the Holy 
 Sepulchre, and, by personal observation, had gained a knowledge 
 of Italy, Greece, and Palestine. The history of his native country, 
 too, he had investigated with diligence, and he had sung with 
 enthusiasm the life of the pious hermit Mcolaus von der Fluee. 
 Under his tuition Zwingli was introduced to an acquaintance 
 with the Eoman orators and poets, and at the direction of this 
 teacher he began to exercise his poetic talent in attempts in 
 verse, after the models of the great Latin poets. The Dominican 
 
6 AT THE HIGH SCHOOLS 0¥ VIENNA AND BASLE. 
 
 monks, who in Berne as well as in other places, strove in rivalry, 
 by means lawful as well as unlawful, with the Franciscans, for 
 the superior veneration of the people, had their attention turned 
 to the sharp-witted boy with the surprising musical talents, and 
 sought to win him for their order. With this design, they in- 
 duced him to enter their cloister, and live in it, till he should 
 reach the age that might permit him to become a member of 
 their order. But the eye of God watched over the lad, and pre- 
 served him from the snares of these corrupted monks. His 
 father and uncle heard of the danger which impended over young 
 Huldreich, and they recalled him home, to send him elsewhere. 
 
 3. ZWINGLI AT THE HiGH SCHOOLS OF VIENNA AND BASLE. 
 
 Zwingli had now attained a development of understanding, 
 and an extent of learning which fitted him to attend the High 
 School. At the advice of his uncle, the celebrated High School 
 of Vienna, which had obtained, under the Emperor Maximilian 
 I., an increase of renown, was selected. Here he formed the 
 acquaintance of two intelligent youths from his own country, 
 both of whom, at a later period, had their brows encircled with 
 the poetic wreath, by the hand of the Emperor, and acquired 
 great fame as men of learning. Joachim von Watt, called Va- 
 dian, son of a rich merchant of St. Gall, was the one; Henry 
 Loreti, called Glareanus, a peasant's son from Mollis, in the 
 canton of Glarus, was the other. The three Swiss youths, united 
 to each other ia the bonds of a close friendship, devoted them- 
 selves with unwearied assiduity, and distinguished success, to 
 the investigation of the sciences, then dignified with the name of 
 philosophy; but above aU, and with especial predilection, to the 
 study of the Eoman classics. Two Suabian youths studied along 
 with them at Vienna, who were also closely connected with the 
 young Swiss, John Heigerlin, the son of a smith at Leutkirch, 
 hence called Smith or Faber, and John Mayer von Enk, gene- 
 rally surnamed Eck. Both of these ranked afterwards amongst 
 the most virulent enemies of the Reformation. 
 
 ZwingU, after having laid in, during about two years study at 
 Vienna, rich stores of intellectual wealth, was called home by 
 
AT THE HIGH SCHOOLS OF VIENNA AND BASLE. 7 
 
 his father ahout the year 1502. The desire to prosecute his 
 studies, and also to apply the results of his industry, impelled 
 him, shortly after, to proceed to Basle. Arrived there, he became 
 teacher in the school of St. Martin, and, with the best success, 
 introduced the youth who attended the school to the knowledge 
 of Latin. At the same time, he attended himself the prelections 
 of the High SchooL Myconius writes, in reference to his studies 
 at this period: — "He studied philosophy here with more ex- 
 actness than ever, and pursued into all their refinements the 
 idle, hair-spHtting sophistries of the schoolmen (sophists), with 
 no other intention than that, if ever he should come to close 
 quarters with him, he might know his enemy, and beat him with 
 his own weapons. He diversified his more serious studies by 
 indulging in pleasantry and wit among his friends, for he had 
 indeed great gaiety of spirit, and his discourse overflowed with 
 wit and learning." To the number of his friends also at this 
 period, belonged Wolfgang Fabricius Capito, a native of Hage- 
 nau, in Alsace, of whom we shall afterwards hear more. But in 
 regard to a teacher here, the Lord, whose eye had watched over 
 his youth so faithfully, and whose hand had led liim thus far so 
 wisely, ordered things well for him in this respect also. He here 
 found an instructor suited to his necessities, one who, instead of 
 conducting him to the barren steppes of school-wisdom, which 
 only feeds the coromon mind with vanity, while it incites the 
 ingenious to ridicule the folly of its lessons, led him to the ever- 
 green pastures of heavenly wisdom, as they are revealed in the 
 Word of God. Thomas Wittenbach, a native of Bil, in Switzer- 
 land, had studied at Tuebingen, where he delivered, afterwards, 
 prelections in the High School, and came in 1505 to Basle. To 
 a profound knowledge of the Latin and Greek languages, and the 
 works contained in them, this eminent man added that of a deep 
 acquaintance with Holy Scripture. Out of the barren deserts of 
 school-wisdom, destitute of all water, it was the delight of this 
 excellent man to lead his pupils to the living sources of God's 
 Word, and teach them to draw water from thence for themselves 
 and their flocks. It was in the light of God's Word that he saw 
 and felt beforehand what at a later period, was loudly proclaimed 
 by others, " The time is not far distant," said he, with prophetic- 
 wisdom, "when the scholastic theology will he swept away, and 
 
8 AT THE HIGH SCHOOLS OF VIENNA AND BASLE. 
 
 the old doctrine of the Church established in its room, on the 
 foimdation of God's Word. Absolution is a Romish cheat; the 
 death of Christ is the only payment for our sms." Such a seed- 
 corn as this, found in the heart of Zwingli, so receptive of the 
 true, a soil in which it struck its roots vigorously, shot up strongly, 
 and bore noble fruit at an after day. 
 
 It was at the feet of Wittenbach that Zwingli met with a youth, 
 just then entering his twenty-third year, with whom he formed 
 a covenant of friendship that lasted till death. Leo Jud, son of 
 a priest of Eappoldswyl, in Alsace, was the diminutive, sickly, 
 mild, but bold and intrepid youth who shared with Zwingli a like 
 love for truth and for music. After hard study, the recreation of 
 the two friends was vocal and instrumental music. Leo poured 
 forth a fine treble, at the same time that he struck the tymbal, 
 while Zwingli, who had so well cultivated his musical talents 
 that he could handle any of the then known instruments with 
 equal skill and ease, played an accompaniment. Their sojourn 
 together, however, was not long now. Soon the hour struck 
 which parted the friends from each other tiU they should meet 
 again with ripened powers, and with chosen armour from God's 
 Word, to wage together God's battle in Zurich. Leo Jud be- 
 came, soon after, parson at St. Pilt, in Alsace. 
 
 Zwingli, who remained at Basle, was honoured with the de- 
 gree of Magister, a title which he accepted more out of deference 
 to the prejudices of men, who weigh the learning by the title, 
 than from any sense of its intrinsic worth. He at no period 
 made use of the degree, being wont to say, " One is our Master, 
 even Christ." The period of his studies had now reached its 
 termination. He received this year a call to be parson at 
 Glarus, being elected by the free votes of the community, and he 
 accepted it. He entered on his new sphere of usefulness with 
 the glad consciousness within him that he had well employed 
 the season of preparation. God had preserved him against gross 
 declensions, despite the general wickedness and corruptions of 
 the time. " I acknowledge myself," are his words, " to be a great 
 sinner before God, but I have not lived immorally, and on no 
 occasion has discipline been exercised upon me." With a heart 
 overflowing with gratitude for the divine guidance, he exclaimed, 
 " God has granted me, from the age of boyhood, to devote myself 
 
AT THE HIGH SCHOOLS OP VIENNA AND BASLE. 9 
 
 to the acquirement of knowledge, human and divine." Not yet 
 being consecrated to the priesthood, he went to Constance to 
 receive the consecration. On his return he preached at Eapper- 
 schwyl, on the Lake of Zurich, his first sermon, and he for the 
 first time performed mass at Wildhaus, his native town. The 
 community of Glarus had, in the free exercise of their right of 
 election, chosen the young magister as their parson. Before, 
 however, Zwingli could enter on his sacred office, he was des- 
 tined to have a painful personal experience of the system of cor- 
 ruption under which his native country groaned. Heniy Gceldli, 
 the descendant of an aristocratical house, at this time Master of 
 the Horse to the Pope, and a boon-companion of his HoUness, 
 appeared with a papal letter of investiture for the place, although 
 he was already in the possession of several livings. The com- 
 munity of Glarus maintained their right of election with success ; 
 yet Zwingli was obliged to indemnify the papal intruder with a 
 sum of money, for renouncing claims that were totally groundless. 
 
SECOND SECTION. 
 
 ZWINGLI PARSON IN GLAKUS AND EINSIEDELN. 
 1506—1518. 
 
 'And whatsoeTer ye do, do it heartily." — Col. iil. 23. 
 
 1. ZWINGLI'S EnTEANCE ON HIS CUEACY, AND PlEST FlELD OF 
 
 Labour 
 
 About the end of the year 1506, our young priest, who had now 
 reached his twenty-second year, set out again from Wildhaus, 
 and crossed the Ammon to Wesen, where he visited his paternal 
 uncle. From Wesen he pursued his way along the hanks of the 
 Linth, by a path which here winds between high and rocky moun- 
 tains, to the chief town of the canton of Glarus. One noble resolve 
 filled the soul of the ardent youth as he journeyed on: " I will he 
 true and upright before God in every situation of life in which 
 the hand of the Lord may place me." " Hypocrisy and lying," 
 he writes, as the result of his early reflections, " are worse than 
 stealing. Man is by nothing brought so. much to resemble God 
 as by truth. Lying is the beginning of all evil. Glorious is the 
 truth, fall of majesty, commanding even the respect of the wicked." 
 Zwingli was profoundly sensible that the servant of God in the 
 cure of souls must apply himself unremittingly to serious study, 
 if he would guard his soul against the inroads of a low worldly- 
 miudedness, and if he would proclaim the truth to his hearers 
 with living conviction. " He became priest," writes his friend 
 Myconius, " and devoted himself with his whole soul to the 
 search after divine truth, for he was well aware how much he 
 must know to whom the flock of Christ is entrusted." The 
 Eoman classics he continued to read with diligence, chiefly that 
 they might be useful to him in his acquisition of truth, and in 
 the development of his oratorical powers. As for truth itself, he 
 went for it, and drew it with untiring industrj-, out of the peren- 
 
ENTRANCE ON HIS CUEACY, &C. 11 
 
 nial stream of God's Word, where it flows in unmixed purity and 
 fresBness. Although he only knew holy Scripture as yet in the 
 Latin version, he passed among his fellow priests for one who 
 had a profound knowledge of the Bible. He well knew, however, 
 and felt deeply, how small was the title he had to such a distinc- 
 tion. The efforts of Zwingli were directed, in the first years 
 of his priesthood, along with the investigation of truth, to the 
 development of his powers as a public speaker. The great orators 
 of antiquity, those masters of eloquence, whom he regarded as 
 unrivalled, were ever present to him, and the desire burned 
 within him to work, with the power of oratory, in Switzerland, 
 ■ and in the cause of divine truth, yet greater wonders than these 
 had ever wrought by their spirit-stirring harangues in Greece or 
 Eome. In his parochial labours he directed his first attention to 
 the young and their training. Under his influence, a Latin' 
 school was founded at Glarus, the guidance of which, in his 
 ardent love, as well for youth as for learning, he took into his 
 own hands. A band of young men, from the first families of the 
 land, who, but for Zwiagli, had probably sunk into a state of 
 intellectual and moral degradation, were won over to the cause of 
 science and nobler aims. He took to himseK his younger bro- 
 ther James, whose education he superintended with brotherly 
 affection. As soon as his Latin pupils were ripe for the High 
 School, he sent them away either to Vienna, where, at the uni- 
 versity of that city, the friend of his youth, Vadian, had risen to 
 the rank of professor and rector, or to Basle, where Glarean, his 
 friend, taught the High School, the excellent man boarding the 
 students himself, that he might the better watch over their edu- 
 cation and morals. But wherever his pupils went, they bore 
 engraved on their hearts the memory of their first master, and 
 maintained with him an unbroken correspondence. " Thou art 
 to us like a guardian angel," so wrote Peter Tschudi from Paris 
 to Zwingli, while his brother, iEgedius Tschudi, wrote to him, 
 " Help, help me, that I may be recalled to thee, for nowhere do 
 I like so wen to dwell as near thyseE" But with a still warmer 
 affection, Valentine Tschudi, the- cousin of these two young men, 
 and ZwingU's successor at Glarus, clove to Zwingli "Can I 
 ever cease," thus wrote he, " to be grateful to thee for thy great 
 benefits? On every occasion that I returned to my home, and 
 
12 TEMPTATIONS AND TKIALS. 
 
 lately, in an especial manner, when I was four days suffering 
 under fever, and again, when I left my books behind me in 
 Basle, and when in timidity I feared to be burdensome to thee, 
 thou sentest to me to come to thee, gavest me thy books, thy 
 help, thy services. Ah ! the whole benevolence of thy soul over- 
 flowed to me, and it was not in any general way that the rich 
 treasures of thy learning were placed at my disposal, but with a 
 special regard to my peculiar circumstances and necessities." 
 
 In this manner Zwingh wrought, counteracting the baleful 
 influences of the time, by raising the standard of education, and 
 it was in reference to his labours in this direction that one who 
 at that period occupied the position of a monarch in the world of 
 letters, Erasmus of Eotterdam, wrote to him : " All hail ! say I, to 
 the Swiss people, whom I have always admired, whose intel- 
 lectual and moral qualities yourself, and men such as yourself, are 
 training." 
 
 But his other duties were not neglected. ZwingK, while thus 
 engaged in fostering education and learning, filled the of&ce of 
 preacher and watcher of the souls of men with a conscientious 
 fidelity, which awakened in the bosoms of many pious fathers in 
 the Church, who were witnesses of the zeal and ability with 
 which he discharged the duties of his curacy, sanguine, hopes 
 that an age of piety and virtue was about to dawn once more 
 upon Switzerland. He himself writes afterwards, in reference 
 to the feelings with which he discharged these duties, "Young 
 as I was," says he, " the office of the priesthood filled me with 
 greater fear than joy, for this was ever present to me, that the 
 blood of the sheep who perished through any neglect or guilt of 
 mine would be required at my hands." 
 
 2. The Geeat Temptations and Trials of the Young Priest 
 
 OF Glaeus. 
 
 Having made ourselves acquainted with the disposition, studies, 
 and aims of the youthful priest, we shall now cast a glance at 
 the field of labour in which the providence of God had placed 
 him, and where great dangers threatened him. His parish em- 
 braced nearly a third of the canton of Glarus. A gross licentious- 
 
TEMPTATIONS AND TRIALS. 13 
 
 ness of manners, with that fiery, martial spirit and heroic cour- 
 age which had well proved themselves in the Burgundian and 
 Suabian wars, characterised his parishioners, as indeed almost the 
 whole Swiss population of the time. The sexual relations were 
 in such a state of disorder that infringements of the seventh com- 
 mandment ceased any longer to be visited with ecclesiastical 
 censure, a circumstance the less to be wondered at since the 
 clergy themselves led the way in the almost universal depravity 
 of manners. The priest, who held in respect the marriage vows, 
 who shunned to seduce unsuspecting innocence, or to violate the 
 chastity of the consecrated nun, could hold up his head even as 
 a man of honour and virtue, although stained with the grossest 
 sensuality; for, verily, had he not sworn to the bishop, at his 
 consecration, to preserve his chastity only so far as this were 
 possible to human weakness. " It is a dangerous thing," says 
 ZwingH, " for a young priest to have access, through the sanctity 
 of his office, to young women, be they married or virgins. Let 
 straw be kept from fire. Give the priest a wife ; he would then, 
 like any other honest man, concern himself with the care of his 
 household, his wife, his child, and other affairs, whereby he would 
 be freed from many trials and temptations." Zwingli himself, 
 as he writes to his friend Utinger, with the greatest candour, had 
 formed the resolution to live in this regard, as well as in every 
 other, a holy life before God; but, alas, not finding one feUow- 
 priest to share his sentiments and his resolve, much less to serve 
 to him as an example and a beacon, he fell too before the inroad 
 of fleshly lusts, as he himself, with deep pain and remorse, con- 
 fessed, for he would not appear better than he really was. Yet 
 his faU neither violated the sanctity of the marriage bed, which 
 was always sacred in his eyes, nor ensnared virgin innocence, 
 nor created any other source of bitterness. By prayer and dili- 
 gent study he succeeded in subduing this enemy too, after in 
 faith he had laid hold on Him who is mighty to save even in the 
 weakest. 
 
 Yet from another quarter the tempter neared him, and sought 
 to turn him from the high and holy walk he had set before him. 
 Matthaeus Schinner, from Wallis, a man of extraordinary powers^ 
 who had raised himself from the condition of herd-boy to be 
 Bishop-prince of the land, and a Cardinal of the Eomish Church, 
 
14, TEMPTATIONS AND TRIALS. 
 
 acted then a part in Switzerland, as Papal emissary, most im- 
 portant indeed; but, at the same time, most pernicious. He had 
 succeeded, by his arts, in attaching the Swiss to the interests of 
 the papacy, so that these hardy mountaineers, for absolution; 
 some deceitful promises, and but a scanty pay, lent themselves 
 as tools to forward the ambitious plans of the Popes, Julius II. 
 and Leo X. There was scarcely a man of weight in the country^ 
 whom the legate had not gained over to the papacy, by the gUt' 
 tering bait of some post of honour, or stipendiary payment. The 
 noble form of the zealous and talented parson of Glarus, standing 
 high 'in the esteem of his parishioners, caught the eye of the 
 cunning legate. Zwingli, on account of his poverty, had not 
 been able to purchase books sufficient to quench his keen thirst 
 of knowledge. Schinner informed him the Pope had set apart 
 an annual sum of fifty florins, in order that he might freely pur- 
 sue his studies. In return, ZwingU's talents and energies were 
 to be devoted to the Pope. Had he accepted this condition, the 
 herd-boy of Toggenburg might well have climbed the ladder of 
 papal promotion as high as the herd-boy of Wallis, the Bishop- 
 prince and Cardinal, had done ; and might, indeed, one day have 
 boldly stretched out his hand to seize the triple crown. Let us 
 hear from Zwingli in what spirit he received the Pope's liber- 
 ality : — " I confess here, before God and all the world, my sin, (in 
 drawing the above annual sum, which he did accept, and con* 
 tinned for some time to draw,) for before the year 1516 I hung 
 mightily on the Eoman power, and thought it highly becoming 
 in me to take money from it, although I told the Eomish ambas- 
 sadors, in clear and express terms, when they exhorted me to 
 preach nothing against the Pope, they were not to fancy that I, 
 for their money, should withhold one iota of the truth, so they 
 might take back, or give it, as they pleased." The Popes, how- 
 ever, and their Cardinals, had more at heart the supremacy of 
 their policy than the victory of the truth, and they left Zwingli 
 for the present in the undisturbed receipt of the above sum. 
 
 In the early part of 1513, a body of 20,000 men was raised 
 by Schinner, in Switzerland, and led across the Alps, to drive 
 the French out of Lombardy, of which they had taken possession 
 under Louis XII. As the banner of Glarus was unfurled in this 
 expedition, Zwingli was appointed, by an order of the magis- 
 
TEMPTATIONS AND TEIALS. 15 
 
 tracy, and in conformity witli the old Swiss custom, to follow the 
 ai'my as field-preacher. At one sweep Lombardy was cleared of 
 the invaders, and the Duke Maximilian Sforza reinstated in his 
 hereditary dominions, the duchy of Milan. After the fortunate 
 issue of this campaign, a papal embassy presented, by the hand 
 of Zwingli, the proud victors in the war with a richly gilt sword 
 and a ducal hat, emblazoned with pearls and gold, over which the 
 Holy Spirit hovered, in the form of a dove. At the same time, 
 the honorary title was bestowed upon them of " Deliverers of the 
 Church." The present was right welcome to the victorious Con- 
 federates, as well as the words which accompanied it — "they 
 may ask what they will; the holiest shall not be denied them." 
 The greater part begged they might be permitted to carry the 
 image of the crucified Eedeemer on their banners : the men of 
 Glarus desired to carry that of the risen Saviour. 
 
 A second time Zwingli accompanied the Swiss army across 
 the Alps. Francis, who followed Louis XII. on the throne of 
 France, made a strong effort in 1515 to recover the lost province 
 of Upper Italy to the French arms. As " defenders and deliv- 
 erers of the Church," the Swiss marched against him at the sum- 
 mons of the Pope, and Zwingli appeared among his compatriots 
 again as field-preacher. But on this occasion it became the 
 policy of the King of France to cast the seeds of disunion in the 
 Swiss ranks, by bribing some of the leaders. He succeeded in 
 dividing the Swiss host, and in inducing a part of it, by a treaty 
 struck between them and the king at Galera, the terms of which 
 were in the highest degree disgraceful to the Swiss, to return 
 home. Zwingli, who penetrated the false game that was playing, 
 and perceived the mischief that brooded over his country, raised 
 his voice loudly against the -treaty, in a sermon which he preached 
 to the army, in the square at Monza, on the 7th of September. 
 He exhorted the assembled warriors to be true to each other — ^to 
 tinion and watchfulness in the presence of their dangerous foe. 
 " Had they followed him," says his friend Steiner, who shared 
 the dangers of the campaign with him, " much mischief would 
 have been prevented," But the warning voice of Zwingli was 
 forgotten, and the treaty was signed, according to the terms of 
 which, a part of the Swiss withdrew. A short time afterwards, 
 the Swiss, who were much weakened by the loss of part of their 
 
] 6 TEMPTATIONS AND TRIALS. 
 
 force, incited by the fiery Cardinal Schinner, imprudently joined 
 in a skirmish with the French. In this skirmish the battle of 
 Marignano took its origin, in which the Swiss on the first day 
 maintained the field with a tremendous loss ; but on the second 
 day, being attacked by the French with fresh forces, they were 
 beaten after a desperate stand, and forced to retire on Milan. 
 Zwingli, according to the reports of eye-witnesses, displayed 
 during the engagement striking proofs of personal courage, both 
 by word and deed. His intrepid but serious behaviour, as well 
 as his sermons, breathing at once zeal in behalf of the truth, and 
 love for his native country, won for him the hearts of aU the 
 better Confederates. But while in the camp the preacher was 
 fighting for the degenerate Church of Rome, a struggle was going 
 forward in his own bosom which brought salvation both to Zwin- 
 gli himself, and to Christ's blood-bought invisible Church. 
 
 Zwingli continued with increased zeal to study the Word of 
 God, and with redoubled ardour after 1613, in which year he 
 had acquired the knowledge of Greek. He acquired this lan- 
 guage in a short time, without the aid of a master. So well, 
 indeed, had he mastered its difficulties, that he could read not 
 only the New Testament, but any of the Greek authors, with 
 facility. He read the Fathers, and other interpreters of the Word 
 of God, in order to penetrate the deeper into its sense. " I read the 
 Doctors," he says himself, "as one asks a friend what he means." 
 Perceiving, however, that the Holy Spirit alone can give the true 
 meaning of the word which he himself has indited, he looked up to 
 heaven, as Myconius tells us, for direction, and sought the aids of 
 the Spirit; and as he wrestled with God in prayer, that He would 
 bestow upon him the inestimable blessing of His Holy Spirit, 
 it was granted to him ever more and more, to pierce into the 
 sense of the Word. That he might not, under the semblance of 
 the Spirit, take up what was false, he compared one passage with 
 another, and interpreted the darker by the plainer, so that it was 
 apparent to every one who heard him commenting on a difficult 
 passage, that not man, but the Spirit himself was his teacher. 
 One circumstance in itseK shews with what ea;rnest zeal he 
 studied the W^ord of God, especially as contained in the New 
 Testament. He copied, with his own hand, in Greek character, 
 all the Epistles of Paul, for the sole reason that he might carry 
 
TEMPTATIONS AND TRIALS. 17 
 
 lem about with liim in a portable shape, and learn them bj- 
 eart. Thus he became, as Bullinger writes, perfectly conversant 
 ith Holy Scripture. The more, however, that he sunt his shaft 
 ito this mine, the more his eyes opened upon the corruptions 
 hich prevailed in the Church, and which disfigured his native 
 juntry. The great ambition of the Church of Eome has been 
 ) pass off her splendid ritual, and her whole ceremonial worship, 
 3 a system of worship divinely revealed, which must remain for 
 ?-er unchangeable. ZwingH discovered historical indications 
 hich spoke a different language from this. One day he hap- 
 ened to be in the parsonage at Mollis, in the company of his 
 iend, parson Adam; the parson of Wesen, his former teacher at 
 ■asle, George BinzU, and parson Barschon, of Kerenzen, were 
 lere. Zvsdngli happened to light on an old Litm-gy, in which 
 ;ood the words : " Let the sacrament of the Eucharist, and the 
 ip, with the blood of the Lord, be given to the child after bap- 
 sm." "At this time," observed Zwingli, "the sacrament had 
 een given in both kinds:" the liturgy was abou.t 200 years old. 
 a his Italian campaigns he had discovered at Milan a mass-book 
 hich differed from the Eomaa This incident led our young 
 iquirer to the following train of reflection. Either, thought he, 
 ishop Ambrosius, from whom the mass-book emanated, has 
 lade changes on the existing one, without his being visited with 
 jnsure, or the Eomish ritual has taken its present shape since 
 16 time of Ambrosius. In both cases, it is evident that the 
 turgy of the mass is the work of man, and subject to change. 
 The Word of God alone is eternal and unchangeable," thought 
 wingli A journey which he undertook to Basle, in 1514, had 
 kewise a considerable influence on the intellectual and spiritual 
 3velopment of the future Eeformer. Here he found a circle of 
 amed and enlightened men assembled round Glarean, the friend 
 ■ his youth, and around Erasmus, animated with the same 
 ideavours, and breathing the same aspirations after truth as 
 imself These were struck with admiration at the ripeness of 
 iderstanding, and boldness of thought, which marked the curate 
 ' Glarus, and entertained sanguine hopes that he would one day 
 icome a chosen instrument in the hand of God for effecting 
 ime great work. Zwingli derived certainty to his views, and 
 ■mness to his convictions, from an interchange of ideas with 
 
 B 
 
18 , TEMPTATIONS AND TRIALS. 
 
 these distinguished individuals, to whom also his heart was knit 
 in the bonds of a strong friendship. Among the friends whom 
 Zwingli gained on this occasion, and who remained true to him 
 till death, were Beatus Ehenanus, of Schlettstadt, Nesen of Hes- 
 sen, and Oswald Gaisshausler (Myconius), of Lucerne, whose 
 fortunes soon after became united with his own. A poem of 
 Erasmus, a man for whom Zwingli, ever after this meeting, ex- 
 pressed the highest esteem and love, made a remarkable impres- 
 sion upon him. " I shall," thus writes Zwingli in reference to it, 
 in 1523, "not withhold from you, dear brethren in Christ, how 
 it was I arrived at the conviction and firm faith, that we require 
 no other mediator but Christ, and that none but Christ alone 
 can mediate between God and man. I read, eight or nine years 
 ago, a very comfortable poem of Erasmus, in which Jesus com- 
 plains, in very beautiful words, that one does not seek aU good 
 from Him, who is the source of all good, the Saviour, the Com- 
 forter, the Guardian of the soul. Thereon I reflected, why do we 
 seek help of the creature?" The more his heart was penetrated 
 with truth from the throne of the Eternal, the more earnest and 
 impassioned became his sermons. "He began now," writes My- 
 conius, " after the example of Christ, to denounce from the pulpit 
 certain base vices, which were then extremely prevalent, espe- 
 cially the taking of gifts from princes, and baleful mercenary 
 wars ; for he saw clearly that the doctrine of divine truth would 
 never find an entrance until these sources of iniquity were closed 
 He proclaimed evangelical truth, without making any allusion to 
 Eomish errors, or with a very slight reference to them. He 
 wished truth first to make its way to the hearts of his hearers, 
 for, thought he, if the true be once comprehended, the false wiU 
 be easily detected as suck" Notwithstanding this wise modera- 
 tion, he did not escape the charge of heresy; to which, indeed, 
 he laid himself in some measure open, by publicly expressing 
 his approval of several of the tenets of Picus of Mirandola, who 
 desired a disputation upon them at Eome, and this Zwingli fear- 
 lessly did, although they had already met with a condemnation 
 there. Many joined in this cry of heresy against the preacher of 
 Glarus, who otherwise troubled their heads very little upon the 
 subject of religion. These were such as had been bribed by the 
 King of France to co-operate in bringing about an alliance bfr' 
 
SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT. 19 
 
 tween Switzerland and France, according to the tei-ms of which 
 the Swiss youth were to enter the French service. This was a 
 new and most prolific source of conniption, against which ZwingU 
 likewise thundered with all the force of his eloquence. But the 
 animosity entertained by his enemies, and the calumnies which 
 they vented against him, made him now sigh for another field 
 on which to develope his activity. The then administrator of the 
 cloister of Einsiedeln heard of the state of things at Glarus, and 
 forthwith gave Zwii^li a call to be his helper. Zwingli accepted 
 this caU. for the two reasons, that the new charge would give him 
 more time for study, and because he hoped that at this famous 
 sanctuary, to which crowds of pUgrims repaired, from all parts of 
 Switzerland and the neighbouring countries, he would be placed 
 on a vantage-ground for proclaiming the words of life and of 
 evangelical truth. 
 
 Deep mourning filled the hearts of the larger and better por- 
 tion of the community of Glarus, when the resolution of ZwingK 
 to abandon them was made known. In the hope that he might 
 return to them, they appointed a vicar in his place, while they 
 compelled Zwingli to retain both the title and the income of the 
 charge. In the summer of 1516, Zwingli left Glarus, and came 
 to Einsiedeln, where a new and a more extended sphere of use- 
 fulness opened upon him. Before we follow him thither, let us 
 cast a glance at his spiritual development at this period of his 
 history, as it is described by himself. 
 
 3. Glance at Zwingli's Spieitual Development about the 
 YEAE 1516.* 
 
 He says, " The following considerations I continually revolved 
 in my mind, till at length the Holy Spirit confirmed in me that 
 which He wrought in me : — 
 
 ".We see, thought I, the whole of mankind striving, their lives 
 long, after the attainment of fixture bliss, not perhaps directed to 
 this pursuit so much from any natural impulse as from the in- 
 stinct of seK-preservation implanted in us by the Author of our 
 being at our creation; yet the opinions are very various as to 
 * From the Archeteles, i.e., the heginning and end of the struggle. 
 
20 SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 how this great end is to be obtained. If we go to the philoso- 
 phers, we find them disputing on this subject in a manner which 
 makes us turn away from them with a feeling of disgust. If we 
 seek for a solution of the problem from the Christians, we find 
 here even a greater diversity of opinions than prevails among the 
 heathen, for some are striving to reach the goal in the way of 
 human tradition, and by the elements of this world (Col. ii. 8), 
 i.e., by their own and human opinions, while others are reljdng 
 entirely on God's grace and promises; both the one and the 
 other, however, are equally urgent that those who come to them 
 for consolation should adopt their sentiments. Let us stand at 
 this point now, where two roads cross, that is, where the opinions 
 of Christians themselves cross. "Whither now, I ask, shaU I turn? 
 Is the answer given, to men? Then I ask, to whom? To those 
 who, at the origin of Christianity, were held wise, or to those 
 who, shortly before my own time, have given a much greater 
 exhibition of folly than wisdom? It will be said that I ought to 
 follow the old guides, those who deserve the preference as such, 
 as weU by their antiquity as by their holy lives. But it may be 
 said farther, even in these one finds much that is foreign to the 
 evangelists and apostles, or that in fact contradicts them. With 
 whom am I now to hold? Every one who is not altogether 
 brutish or a fool will answer, With them whom the Spirit of God 
 has enlightened; for whatever comes of human wisdom, be it 
 decked out in ever so brilliant colours, may deceive; but divine 
 wisdom can never deceive. /'Here is the true faith which man 
 needs. Where it fails, man withers, falls, dies. WTule I was 
 reflecting on this diversity of opinion in the earthen vessels, and 
 praying to God that He would shew me an outlet to the state of 
 uncertainty it produces. He says, Fool, dost not thou remember 
 ' the word of the Lord abideth for ever?' hold to this. And again, 
 ' heaven and earth shaU pass away, but my word shall not pass 
 away.' What is human, perishes; what is divine, is unchange- 
 able. And, ' in vain they honour me, teaching for doctrines the 
 commandments of men.' As if God should square His truth 
 according to our notions, and as if what at the first glance appears 
 to us beautiful, noble, nay, even holy, should please Him too, 
 and as if it were not much more our duty to hang on Him with 
 our whole hearts, and not to cleave to our own opinions or 
 
SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT. 21 
 
 notions. . 'For this cause I put every thrag aside, and came to the 
 point, that I would rely on no single thing, on no single word, so 
 firmly as on that which comes from the mouth of the Lord./ And 
 as I saw poor mortals so far forgetting themselves and God as to 
 make bold to give out their own as God's, nay, when I saw not 
 a few requiring, in all seriousness, from the simple, that they 
 should set their commands above God's, even although they 
 should be in manifest contradiction to them, I began to weigh 
 with myself, whether there were no means by which one might 
 recognise what was human and what divine. Then the passage 
 occurred to me, ' all is clear in the light,' in that light, to wit, 
 which says, ' I am the light of the world, that lightens every man 
 that Cometh into the world;' and again, ' believe not every spirit, 
 but try the spirits, whether they be of God.' Seeldng for the 
 touchstone of truth, I find none other but ' that stone which is a 
 stone of stumbling and the rock of offence' to all who, after the 
 manner of the Pharisees, set their own commandments in the 
 place of God's. I now began to test every doctrine by this test. 
 Did I see that the touchstone gave back the same colour, or 
 rather, that the doctrine could bear the brightness of the stone, 
 I accepted it ; if not, I cast it away. At length I brought it so 
 far, that at the first touch of the stone I could tell what was false 
 and adulterate, and from this time forward, no power, no threat- 
 enings, could bring me to place the like faith in the human, how- 
 ever it might puff itself up, or however admirable it might shew 
 itself, as in the divine. Nay, if on any occasion an opinion dif- 
 ferent from, or contrary to, the Divine Word, were arbitrarily 
 pressed upon me, I answered with the words of the apostle, ' We 
 must obey God rather than man.' /Thus those who valued highly 
 their own opinions, but valued &t a low rate, or not at all, the 
 cause of Christ, held me in great suspicion, and formed a very 
 low opinion of me. This, however, is the surest criterion that I 
 please God, and their disesteem is wholesome to me, for the 
 name of the Lord is never more glorified than when our name is 
 evil spoken of by men; and if the body perish, we have this con- 
 solation, that He endues the soul with life everlasting." 
 
22 AT EINSIBDELN. 
 
 4. ZWINGLI AT EiNSIEDELN. 
 
 Thus we have seen Zwingli after a hard contest with the 
 temptations of the flesh, and after a hard but prayerful striving 
 after truth, at length attain to the rock-fast conviction, " that the 
 Word of God is the alone sure directory for faith and practice" 
 and Christ is our only salvation. With this conviction, from 
 which the blessed work of the Eeformation itself has sprung; 
 firmly implanted in his bosom, he went, in the summer of 1516, 
 to Einsiedeln, where he commenced his career as a Eeformer. 
 The new society into which he was here introduced was, on the 
 one hand, well fitted to confirm his already obtained convictions, 
 and, on the other hand, to urge him to an activity proportioned 
 to their depth and intensity. The then Abbot of the Cloister 
 was Conrad of Eechberg, a pious, excellent, upright man, under 
 whose monk's cloak beat as warm and generous a heart as ever 
 throbbed under a coat of mail. In his youth he had been forced 
 to join the monks, by selfish relatives, who paid him visits, 
 now that he had risen to be Abbot-Prince of Einsiedeln. They 
 did this with the view of obtaining from his position advan- 
 tages to themselves. But the Abbot Conrad saw through 
 their selfishness, and thus addressed them on one occasion : — 
 "You have stuck a cowl upon my head to my soul's risk and 
 peril, and I must be monk, while you ride about as country 
 squires. Could not I have been Conry of Eechberg as well as 
 one of you Jack or George of Eechberg, what's the difference, 
 pray? But, my good people, since you have made a poor monk 
 of me, don't come here begging anything, but just return the road 
 by which you came." Once, when the visitators of his order waited 
 upon him, and reproached him for not reading mass, and, gene- 
 rally, that he stood in the suspicion of making no great account 
 of the mass, he answered, — " Although I am master here in my 
 own convent, and could send you away with a very short answer, 
 I shall, nevertheless, teU you plainly what I hold of the mass. 
 If the Lord Jesus Christ be really in the' host, I know not how 
 very highly you esteem yourselves ; one thing I know, that I, 
 a poor monk, am not worthy to look upon Him, not to speak of 
 offering Him up in sacrifice to the eternal God. If, however. He 
 
AT EINSIEDELN. 23 
 
 be not present there, woe's me if I hold up bread to the people 
 before the Lord our God, and call upon them to worship bread. 
 Therefore, let me alone. I shall, if God will, so act and so pre- 
 side over my God's house that I may be able to answer to myself 
 before Him and the world. As I have no need of you, please to 
 return the way you came: you are dismissed." When the 
 learned men at his board would sometimes go into the depths of 
 theological discussion, he would break in upon their discussions, 
 with the exclamation, " What care I for your disputations ? I say 
 now, and I shall say at my latter end, Kke David, ' Have mercy 
 upon me, Lord, according to thy goodness, and enter not into 
 judgment with thy servant.' I require to know 'nothing more 
 than this." In his old age, he had retired entirely from the admin- 
 istration of the cloister, and committed it to Dr. Theobald of 
 Geroldseck, a Suabian. This man, according to the statement of 
 Myconius, was equally the friend of learning and piety, and made 
 use of his position to gather round him a circle of learned and pious 
 men, as chaplains, assistant pastors, and teachers, to whom leisure 
 and means for pursuing their scientific studies were liberally 
 granted. Zwingli was joyfully hailed by this select company ; and 
 it was not long before Theobald of Geroldseck, Francis Zink, and 
 John Oechslin, became his firm friends, and were gained over by 
 him to evangelical convictions. Zwingli himself, meantime, pierced 
 deeper and deeper into the knowledge of the Word of God, and 
 experienced in his own heart how precious and dear that saying 
 is, " that Jesus Christ has come into the world to save sinners," and 
 thus he grew, day by day, in Christian knowledge, and in faith. 
 To his friends he gave the advice, they should study the Fathers 
 for the better understanding of holy Scripture, as he had done 
 himself ; yet he added, " with God's grace, the day will soon come; 
 that neither Jerome, nor any other, will be an authority in mat- 
 ters of faith," but holy Scripture alone. Soon the fruit appeared 
 of the evangelic spirit which Zwingli had fanned at Einsiedeln. 
 The " administrator of Geroldseck announced to the cloister of 
 Fahr, which stood under Einsiedeln, that, instead of daily drawl- 
 ing over the Latin mass-songs in their usual heedless manner, 
 they were to read the New Testament in the German tongue ; 
 at the same time, that those who felt themselves burdened by the 
 vows, had the liberty to return home to their relatives. The 
 
24 AT BINSIEDELN. 
 
 others were to lead, true to their vows, a virtuous and holy 
 
 life. 
 
 But it was chiefly as a preacher that ZwingK showed himself 
 the Eeformer at Einsiedehx He prepared himself with care for 
 the pulpit. He studied, first of all, in the original language, the 
 section which ecclesiastical order prescribed to be read in Latin. 
 He then commented upon the passage according to its sense, and 
 made the practical application of it without suffering himself to 
 be fettered in the least degree either by the dogmas or the preju- 
 dices of the Church. But with what holy indignation was the 
 soul of the zealous preacher moved, in whom, from youth up, the 
 fear of God had burned like a live coal from off God's holy altar, 
 when he saw the new species of idolatry which was carried on 
 under his very eyes. 
 
 Einsiedeln is the most frequented resort for pilgrims for the 
 whole of southern Germany, Switzerland, and the eastern part of 
 France. The cloister was built in the tenth century, to the 
 honour of the Virgia, upon the site where, a century earlier, 
 Meinrad of Hohenzollern is said to have inhabited, an Einsiedler 
 hut, where he is said to have died by a murderer's hand. At the 
 midnight, so tradition says, immediately preceding the consecra- 
 tion of the newly erected church, the bishop of Constance was 
 praying in it ; suddenly, a heavenly hymn, sung by invisible 
 spirits, resounded in the chapel. All kneeled and listened 
 entranced. The next day, when the bishop was about to complete 
 the consecration, three times a voice was heard proclaiming, 
 " Hold, hold, brother, it is consecrated by God." Christ himself, 
 so the legend inins, consecrated the Church during the night; 
 angels, apostles, and saints sung the strains that were heard; 
 while the Holy Virgin passed rapidly by the altar, like a flash of' 
 lightning. Leo VIIL forbade, in a bull, all doubt in the truth 
 of this legend. In memory of this extraordinary circumstance, 
 the festival of the Angel-Consecration is yearly celebrated with 
 great splendour, a festival to which thousands of pilgrims betake 
 themselves, in the vain dream they will here find complete abso- 
 lution from the guilt and punishment due to sin; for the special 
 bulls of several popes have added to, the old privileges of the 
 foundation the new one, that complete absolution is to be given 
 to the pilgi-ims. Hence, over the gateway of the magnificent 
 
AT EINSIEDELN. 25 
 
 abbey, stands, in legible characters, the blasphemous inscription, 
 " Here is complete absolution for the guilt and punishment of 
 sin." This, and the wonders which, according to public report, 
 the pictm'e of the Virgin, here carefuUy preserved, performs, 
 which once the holy Hildegard, Abbess of the Lady Minster in 
 Zurich, presented to the pious Meinrad, entice yearly a multi- 
 tude of pilgrims to Einsiedeln, that they may obtain the pardon 
 of their sins, and consolation and help in every time of need, 
 from the Holy Virgin. 
 
 If this idle delusion served admirably towards the enriching 
 of the cloister, and hence Avas carefully cherished and fostered 
 by ordinary preachers, who magnified the efficiency of the abso- 
 lution to be obtained, and the miraculous power of the adored 
 Mary-picture, yet ZwingU had learned from the Word of God, 
 and the Lord and IMaster whom he served, to proclaim a more 
 consoling message from consecrated ground, even although he 
 was to suffer for it. He writes, " Once for all, the spirit itself 
 must be so consecrated to God, that it may hang inseparably on 
 right, truth, and God, even to the loss of outward means, and life 
 itself — once for all the die must be cast, and death looked steadily 
 in the face, for the truth's sake, and the soul nerved against 
 every attack of the flesh, the world, and Satan." He accordingly 
 raised his voice against the delusions here practised under his 
 eyes. His soul, indeed, burned with a holy indignation at the 
 dishonour done to the name of God and the Saviour. He grieved 
 for a people who, instead of finding forgiveness for their sins, 
 entangled themselves faster and faster in the net of Satan 
 
 " God," the preacher cried, " is everywhere present, and wher- 
 ever we caU. upon Him in spirit and in truth, He answers us in 
 the words, ' Here I am.' Those, then, who bind the grace of God 
 to particular localities, are altogether foolish and perverse ; nay, it 
 is not only foolish and perverse so to do, but anti-Christian, for 
 they represent the grace of God as more easily to be obtained, 
 and cheaper, in one place than in another, which is nothing but 
 to limit the grace of God, and take it captive, not letting it be 
 known how free it is. God is in every part of the earth where 
 He is called upon, present and ready to hear our prayers, and 
 to help us. Wherefore Paul says, 'I will therefore that men 
 pray every\\^here, lUcewise also the M^omen' (1 Tim. ii. 8, 9). 
 
26 AT EINSIEDELN. 
 
 That is, we are to know that God is present and hears us when 
 He is called upon, and that He is not more gracious in one place 
 than in another. Finally, Christ calls such people as bind God 
 to this or that place false Christians, that is Antichrist. 'For 
 there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, &c. &c. Where- 
 fore, if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert, go 
 not forth; behold, he is in the secret chambers, believe it not' 
 (Matt. xxiv. 24-26). God, who else is a hypocritical Christian 
 but the pope, who exalts himself in the place of Christ, and says 
 he has His power, so he binds God to Eome and other sanctuaries. 
 Thus they bring money in enormous Quantities to enrich holy 
 places, which, in case of need, might well be applied to our tem- 
 poral advantage. And just in such places is more wantonness 
 and vice perpetrated than anywhere else. He who ascribes to 
 man the power to forgive sins blasphemes God. And great evil 
 has sprung from this source, so that some whose eyes the popes 
 have blinded, have imagined they had their sins forgiven by sin- 
 ftd men. In this manner God himself has been hid from them. 
 To ascribe to man the power to forgive sins is idolatry. What is 
 idolatry, but the ascription of the divine honour to man, or the 
 giving to the creature that which is God's ? 
 
 " We do not dishonour," he goes on to say, " the mother of 
 God, the Virgin Mary, when we teach that she ought not to be 
 worshipped ; but we dishonour her, indeed, when we ascribe to 
 her the power and the majesty of the Creator. She herself 
 would not suffer adoration to be paid to her. For piety is, in one 
 and all, of the like kind and nature, for it springs from one and 
 the same Spirit. Nor is it conceivable that any being can be at 
 once pious, and admit the reception of divine honour. So it ia 
 with Maiy, the mother of God ; the more exalted she is above aU 
 creatures, and the more profound her reverence towards God, her, 
 Son, the more abhorrent will it be from her to receive honour as 
 divine. Nay, verily, she will just as little suffer that we pay to 
 her the honour which is her Son's, as Paul and Barnabas at Lys- 
 tra. For if, in the heavens, there be the highest justice, then 
 certainly none of the heavenly host can be filled with joy but 
 with indignation, when the honour which is Christ's is ascribed 
 to them. For Paul and Barnabas, when the people in Lystra 
 held them as gods, and would do sacrifice to them, sprang in upon 
 
AT EINSIEDBLN. 27 
 
 tliem, crying out, ' ye men, why do ye this ? we are nothing 
 but weak, mortal men, lilce yourselves.' What think you she 
 would say, if she were witness this day that men sought from her 
 that which it is alone God's to give? Think you not that the 
 holy Maxy would say, ' ! senseless, deluded men, aU the honour 
 I have comes from God ? He has been gracious to me, and made 
 me the virgin and the mother among aU women. But I am no 
 goddess, nor any source of blessing ; God alone is that well, who 
 has ordained that all good should come to you through my Son. 
 By attributing to me that which alone is God's, ye poor mortals 
 attempt to change the power and government of God. For 
 verily, siuce the beginning of the world. He has given to no crea- 
 ture such a power as that any should flee to it for succour as if it 
 were God. I am no god, therefore seek not from me that which 
 is God's alone to give. When I was upon the earth my Son, 
 who indeed loved and honoured me, bestowed on me none of His 
 miraculous power. On the contraiy, when I exhorted him, say- 
 ing, the people have no wine, he gave me a strange answer, 
 "Woman," said he, "what have I to do with thee?" This was 
 done solely that the miracle might not be ascribed to me but to 
 him. Therefore let God abide in his government and authority 
 as it has been of old. Ye think ye honour me by worshipping 
 me. Ye do greatly dishonour me. Worship is to be paid to none 
 but the One living "and true God."' Such, and the like, Mary 
 would, without doubt, have said, and still say, if she were pre- 
 sent in the midst of us. Therefore, let every one know that 
 the highest honour we can show to Mary is to acknowledge the 
 saving work of her Son, which he has wrought for us, poor sin- 
 ners ; to honour this work aright, and to apply to him for aU 
 grace. For God has set him as a propitiation for our sins by his 
 blood, if so be we have faith in him as such. Yes, he who has 
 this faith and trust in the Son of Mary, honours Mary the highest, 
 for her honour is her Son's. And should I ask any one what 
 is greatest in Mary, I know he must give me the answer, ' that 
 she has bom to us the Son of God, who has redeemed us.' If, 
 then, her greatest honour is her Son, it is likewise her greatest 
 honour that we rightly know Him, that we love Him above all 
 things, and that we manifest our eternal gratitude to Him for the 
 great act of mercy He has done for us, by redeeming us. For 
 
28 AT EINSIEDELN. 
 
 the higher the honour and love of Christ rises among men, the 
 more the esteem and honour of Mary rises, in so far that she has 
 born to us so great and glorious a Eedeemer. But if ye will 
 especially honour the Virgia Mary, then follow her purity, her 
 innocence, her steadfast faith. And when ye have prayed an Ave 
 Maria, and pondered above aU on the great work of our redemp- 
 tion, then reflect that she, who was endowed with so great grace 
 and honour from God, was nevertheless poor, and subject to 
 persecutions, pain, and misery ; yet that in all these things she 
 triumphed. And then comfort yourselves in your poverty, and 
 low estate, and wretchedness, which you have in common with her, 
 with the thought that such misery must certainly be the destiny 
 of man, since even the holy mother of God was not exempt from 
 it. But if ye be rich and happy, then you will humble yourselves 
 when you look at her ; you will be fearful, though joyful, be it 
 your lot to give away or to suffer the loss of your wealth. For 
 you must often reflect, has then the mother of God suffered these 
 things ; then who am I to raise myself above her ? And by her 
 faith, all, both rich and poor, may have their own faith comforted, 
 considering. Has the heart of the Virgin had such faith that no 
 wretchedness, poverty, or rejection of her Son, which she daily 
 witnessed, were able to turn her from him, so as to make her 
 even once doubt in him ? Oh ! then may I call faithfully on the 
 Lord that he would be pleased never to abandon me, but to in- 
 crease my faith, so that I may never abandon him, but cleave to 
 him even though the whole world should be against him." 
 
 Such was the burden of ZwingU's preaching at the festival of 
 the Angel-Consecration, 1517, and at Pentecost, 1518, before 
 great crowds of pilgrims. Great was the impression which it 
 made upon the pilgrim's. Some fled in terror from the scene, 
 others hovered between the faith they had received from their 
 fathers, and the doctrine they had now first heard, and whick was 
 to bring a new peace to their souls, others turned to Christ with 
 their whole hearts, retaining the gifts they had brought to the 
 Virgin. On the way back to their several lands and homes they 
 proclaimed what they had heard at Einsiedeln — the grace of God 
 everywhere alike present ; Christ, and not Mary, the only salva- 
 tion. Pilgrims as they heard this announcement on the way 
 turned back without bringing their pilgrimage to a close. The 
 
AT EINSIEDELN. 29 
 
 fame of Zwingli, the bold and uncompromising advocate of the 
 truth, resounded through the towns and villages of Switzerland, 
 Suabia, and Alsace, and prepared the hearts of many in these 
 lands for the salvation-work to which the Lord his God had called 
 him. In the multitude who heard the sermon delivered by 
 Zwingli, in Pentecost 1518, on Luke v. 24 there was present, 
 Dr. Hedio, then preacher at Basle, who was so deeply affected 
 by the discourse of the preacher, that he begged of Zwingli to 
 receive him into the number of his friends, or at least to let him 
 be the shadow of one. Of the sermon he writes : — " It was beau- 
 tiful, fundamental, dignified, comprehensive, searching, truly 
 evangelical, reminding one, in force of language and of spirit, of 
 the old Fathers of the Church." Meanwhile, the Mary-devotees 
 decreased in number daily, and yet Zwingli was to live by their 
 gifts ; but the poverty of Christ was dearer to him in the service 
 of truth, than the riches of the world in the service of error. His 
 friend, Geroldseck, after he had, through Zwingli, come to know 
 Christ, was animated by the same spirit. " Never have you 
 drawn back," Zwingli wrote to him afterwards, " once that you 
 have laid your hand to the plough ; you are, indeed, the friend of 
 all the learned, but me you have loved like a father, you have 
 not only taken me into the number of your friends, but shared 
 with me your heart. Go on as you have begun ; stand fast at the 
 post in which God has placed you. God will finally lead you to 
 the goal None is crowned who has not first well fought." 
 
 But the eye of the Eeformer was not confined to Einsiedeln, 
 and the abuses there ; he looked abroad on the mighty tide of 
 corruption which overspread the whole Church of Christ. In 
 such terms as these he once addressed Cardinal Schinner : " Every 
 one knows," says he, " that the faith and practice of Christians 
 have, by a gradual declension, departed veiy widely from sound 
 evangelical doctrine, and that it has gone so far as to be unde- 
 niable, that some very great reformation 'of laws and inanners is 
 absolutely necessary. If we give not vent to the water, the 
 dam will be broken in by force." Again, the following was the 
 language he held to Antonius Puccius, the Papal Legate of Swit- 
 zerland, upon the subject of ecclesiastical reform : " I will openly 
 declare, and before men who are still living, that ere dissension 
 arose in the Church, I have both by word and deed witnessed to 
 
so AT EINSIEDELN. 
 
 miglity cardinals, prelates, and bishops, of the errors in doctrine 
 which are abroad, and warned and counselled them to remove 
 abuses, or that they themselves would perish in a more dreadful 
 revolution. I have told the Cardinal von Sitten, at Einsiedeln, 
 (in 1517), and afterwards many times at Zurich, in plain lan- 
 guage, that the Papacy has a false foundation, and maintained it 
 by plain unanswerable passages of Holy vmt. The said cardinal, 
 too, has often thus expressed himself to me : ' If God help me 
 on the plank again,' (for he had then fallen into disgrace with 
 the Pope,) ' I shall see to it that the arrogance and fraud of the 
 Bishop of Eome be brought to light, and put an end to.'" Zwingli 
 teUs us, too, th^t he often talked this matter over with the Legate 
 Puccius, who asked him what was to be done. "1 told him," 
 says Zwingli, " I was resolved from henceforward to preach the 
 pure gospel to the people, without regard to the statutes of men, 
 whereby, without doubt, the Papacy would not be a little shaken." 
 Zwingli's admonitions in the quarters above described were 
 without effect. The adherents of Eome, who knew not the 
 divine power of the gospel in the soul, still hoped to win over to 
 theirjnterests the talented and intrepid preacher of the truth. To 
 his free and outspoken language Zwingli received a courteous 
 and genuine Italian answer ; he was, with the most flattering ex- 
 pressions, created an Acolyte-chaplain of the papal chair, in the 
 following terms, " Distinguished by his virtues and great merits, 
 he is recommended to him (the legate), as well through his own 
 personal knowledge of him, as by the honourable report he has 
 of him ; he therefore deserves, in the eyes of the Pope and the 
 holy apostolic chair, a recognition of his great learning, and some 
 distinguished mark of paternal approbation." "Accordingly, he 
 raises him, by the authority received from the Pope, to the 
 honourable distinction of an Acolyte-chaplain of the Holy Father, 
 whereby he might perceive the favour he was held in." He was 
 counselled to go on advancing from good to better, and by his 
 merits to incline the Pope and him (the legate), to farther testi- 
 monies of favour. The ladder was thus planted at the feet of 
 the Eeformer, by which he might mount to the highest honours 
 the world had to bestow ; but Zwingli chose the crown of thorns 
 and the cross of Christ, before worldly glory. How little he 
 hoped from Eome he showed by resigning at this time the small 
 
AT EINSIEDELN. 31 
 
 annual salary he drew from the Pope, and it was only on the 
 most pressing entreaty that he continued to draw it for a year or 
 two after. 
 
 PinaUy, ZwLngli, as a last resort, turned to the Bishop of Con- 
 stance, Hugh von Landenherg, with the request he would stay 
 the corruption of the Church in his own diocese, and recommend 
 to his clergy the preaching of the pure gospel. This prelate had, 
 in a pastoral letter to the clergy of his bishopric, maintained 
 strong language on the subject of the degeneracy of the Church, 
 more particularly as this had its origin in the clergy themselves, so 
 that Zwingh was led to beheve he would go a step farther, and 
 resort to practical measures to arrest the growing tendency to 
 corruption. A circupistance encouraged him in the expectation 
 that his warning voice would not be unheeded by the bishop. 
 John Heigerhn, or Faber, who had studied with Zwingli at , 
 Vieima, and continued ever since to manifest the greatest esteem 
 for the Eeformer, had risen to be the bishop's general-vicar. But 
 the Bishop of Constance showed as little will or power in the 
 cause of church-reform as the Pope and his cardinals. God 
 would have it, that this wholesome work should be performed 
 by other instruments than by the lordly prelates of the degenerate 
 Eomish Church. Notwithstanding the failure of his efforts, 
 Zwingli did not suffer himself to be dismayed, or to be turned 
 aside from the path of reform on which he had entered. " The 
 papacy must fall," said he to his friend Capito, who visited him 
 at Einsiedeln, in 1517. 
 
 At this time Leo X. sat on the papal throne, a pope who re- 
 quired enormous sums of money to satiate at once his thirst for 
 glory and passion for the finearts. The Germans were to deliver 
 these against papal absolution from their sins. In August 1518, a 
 monk came bare-footed over the St. Gotthard, Samson by name, 
 into Switzerland, who, with the Uke impudence as Tetzel in 
 Saxony, offered his wares at a cheap rate. Schwyz was one of 
 the first cantons on which the impudent hawker of unsanctified 
 wares cast his eye. He began to proclaim: "I can forgive aU 
 sius; heaven and heU stand under my dominion; and I seU the 
 merits of Jesus Christ to each and every one who is wUling to 
 pay in ready money for an absolution." This blasphemous an- 
 nouncement aroused the indignation of our Eeformer, and he 
 
32 AT EINSIEDELN. 
 
 lifted up his voice in denouncement of it. "Jesus Christ, 
 the Son of God, hath said, ' Come to me all ye that labour and 
 are heavy laden'* (Matt. xi. 28). It is audacious folly and 
 shameless impudence to say, ' Eun to Eome, buy a ticket of 
 absolution, give this to the monks, that to the priests ; if you do 
 so, then I pronounce you free of all sin." No; Jesus Christ is 
 the only sacrifice, the only gift, the alone way." The sermon of 
 Zwingli had the effect that Samson was forced to quit the canton 
 Schwyz without having transacted any business, and with the 
 epithets of villain and rogue attached to his name. 
 
 But the hour had struck when Zwingli himself was to leave 
 Einsiedeln, and betake himself to another sphere of usefulness. 
 The faithful testimony that he had lifted up here and at Glarus 
 for the honour of God and the alone salvation in Christ Jesus, 
 found a warm recognition and admiration in the bosoms of all 
 his serious contemporaries, while without doubt it stands recorded 
 in the book of life. The number of his friends and admirers had 
 increased from day to day in all parts of Switzerland and South 
 Germany, whilst his older friends felt themselves more and more 
 endeared to the man whose heart beat so loftily for God and the 
 Saviour, and the weal of men. But not individuals alone, whole 
 towns turned their eyes upon the preacher of evangelical truth, 
 and desired to have him in their centre. First of all, the inhabi- 
 tants of Winterthur sent him a call to the vacant charge in 
 their town. But at the expressed desire of the people of Glarus, 
 who still hoped he might return to them, he sent a refusal, and 
 recommended in his place his friend Magister Dingauer, who 
 was chosen, and who accepted the call. In the meantime, the 
 office of Leul^priest, or parish priest, at the minster of Zurich, 
 had become vacajit, and there were not wanting those who, as 
 Myconius mentions, worked night and day that he might be chosen 
 to it. Without doubt, the authority for this statement himself, 
 who had for a year past been a teacher in the minster school, 
 belonged to the number of Zwingli's canvassers. " He," continues 
 Myconius, " knew nothing of the matter, when, happening to he 
 on a visit to Zurich, he was asked by one of the canons whether 
 he had any desire to be a preacher of the Word of God in Zurich. 
 
 * These words Zwingli employed as a watchword for the friends of truth, 
 and he prefixed them as a motto to all his writings. 
 
AT EINSIEDELN. 33 
 
 ' Yes,' replied Zwingli, ' I have the desire, for there is reason to 
 hope that if the grace of Christ be proclaimed from so renowned 
 a place, and accepted there, the rest of Switzerland will follow 
 the example.'" Many applied for the vacant office. Myconius 
 canvassed in the name of his friend for it, and finally Zwingli was 
 elected by the votes of seventeen out of the twenty-four canons, a 
 result which was hailed with hearty joy by aU the friends of truth. 
 "The whole youth of Switzerland," wrote Glarean from Paris, 
 "rejoice, throw their caps into the air, especially the Zurichers. 
 As for me, I have less cause to wish you joy than to express 
 grief for my friends of Glarus." Before entering on his new 
 duties, he went to Glarus, and there, in the town-hall, in the 
 presence of the assembled magistrates, he resigned the cure he 
 still held in this place, to the universal regret of all good men. 
 The community shewed the high esteem in which they held 
 him, by electing, at his recommendation, his scholar and friend, 
 Valenti Tschudi, as his successor. The Council of Schwyz gave 
 liim a mark of their regard at departing, presenting him with an 
 of&cial writing, in which, among other things, they said: "Al- 
 though we are in part grieved by your departure from the midst 
 of us at Einsiedeln, yet, on the other hand, we rejoice with you 
 in all that ministers to your honour and advantage." His friend 
 Leo Jud was, at his recommendation, appointed his successor 
 at Einsiedeln. Zwingli having thus, by these wise suggestions, 
 taken measures for the carrying on of the good work commenced 
 under his own immediate auspices in Glarus and Einsiedeln, bent 
 his steps to Zurich about the end of the year 1518. 
 
THIED SECTION. 
 
 ZWINGLI'S ENTRANCE ON HIS OFFICIAIi DUTIES AT ZURICH- 
 STYLE OP PREACHING— HIS DIFFICULTIES AND CONFLICTS— 
 HIS JOYS AND SORROWS— HIS STUDIES AST) FRIENDS— FROM 
 1519-1523, OE TILL THE FIRST DISPUTATION ON RELIGION. 
 
 ' Thy word is a light to my feet, and a lamp to my path." — Psalm cxix. 105. 
 
 1. Entrance on Official Duties, and Style of Peeaching. 
 
 A GEEY fog, one December morning, was lying on the lakes and 
 vales of Switzerland, while the icy mountain-summits were glow- 
 ing in the splendour of a sun just beginning to ascend a clear 
 cerulean sky. In calm majesty he was sending his rays deeper 
 and deeper into the abysses of the mountains, while the edges of 
 the sea of fog in which they were enveloped were hemmed with 
 a border of light ever expanding; at length his perpendicular 
 rays dispersed the fog before his meridian brightness, disclosing, . 
 first of all, the church-towers, like fingers of God in the grey 
 mist, pointing towards heaven; finally, every vestige of the fog 
 has cleared away, and all nature stands glowing in the beams of 
 the king of day. On such a morning as this ZwingH left the 
 heights of Eiusiedeln, to sail up the beautiful blue lake, towards 
 his new sphere of labour. In the struggles of the morning sun 
 with the cloudy vapours, he beheld an image of that conflict with 
 the powers of darkness, which he himself was now hastening to 
 wage. "As the heaven, peaceful and clear, encircles with its 
 blue canopy high over head the whole earth, though lightnings 
 and tempests be beneath; thus the truly wise man, the Chris- 
 tian, rises above aU storms and tempests. If you weigh aU you 
 will find that the principle of good is stronger than that of evil, 
 and that in the end virtue overcomes vice. True wisdom obtains 
 the mastery over iniquity; for at the moment when this has 
 
OFFICIAL DUTIES, AND STYLE OF PREACHING. 35 
 
 reached its culminating point, the divine power seizes it and 
 hurls it into the abyss. Herein God shews his power." 
 
 Zwingli entered Zurich on the day of John the Evangelist, the 
 27th Decemher, and took up his quarters at the hotel of the 
 Hermit, where he was honourably entertained, as Bullinger tells 
 us ; for many of Zurich's best sons rejoiced in his election. Others, 
 again, who had cause to fear his unbending firmness, and indom- 
 itable spirit, beheld with no great pleasure the bold preacher of 
 the truth enter their town ; for Zurich was, according to Bullin- 
 ger, before the preaching of the gospel, like Corinth of old, in 
 Greece. "There was," says he, "much immorality and licen- 
 tiousness among the inhabitants, principally owing to the Confe- 
 derate Diets being held there, to which many strangers came, 
 along with the servants of the princes and nobles, who slept in 
 the town." Immediately after his ariival, Zwingli proceeded to 
 the chapter, where the prebendaries, under the presidency of their 
 provost. Master Felix Frei, were assembled, to acquaint the new 
 parish priest with the duties of his office, and formally to install 
 him in it. Of the fourteen sections composing the address intro- 
 ductory to his installation, only the two shortest concerned that 
 which Zwingli regarded as his chief duty, his preaching. But at 
 great length, and in very urgent terms, the duty was impressed upon 
 him, of looking after the maintenance and increase of the funds 
 of the foundation. Zvidngli, on his part, humbly tendered his 
 thanks, in the first place, for the honour of his election to the 
 vacant office. He then gave them plainly to understand, that it 
 was his firm and decided intention to preach the history of Jesus 
 Christ, our Eedeemer, according to the Gospel of Matthew, that 
 the people might not, as hitherto, to the great dishonour of the 
 name of God, and Him after whom they were called, know Jesus 
 Christ by name only, while they were ignorant of the whole his- 
 tory of his life and redemption. He would, therefore, take up 
 the whole of the Gospel of Matthew, and preach upon it verse 
 by verse, and chapter by chapter, without regard to the commen- 
 taries of men, by which he would not be bound, but giving the 
 sense, according as a laborious and prayerful investigation of the 
 original Scriptures had enabled him to arrive at it. This he 
 would do to the praise and glory of God and his only Son, for 
 .the salvation of the souls of men, and their up-building in the 
 
36 OFFICIAL DUTIES, AND STYLE OP PEEACHING. 
 
 true faith. This avowal filled with joy the Canons Utinger, 
 Engelhard, Walder and others, while it excited alarm and grief 
 in the Provost Frei and the Canon Hoffmann : all felt them- 
 selves on the threshold of great events. Canon Hoffmann rose 
 and expressed a wish that the election they had made would 
 be followed by no bad results; such an exposition of Scripture 
 to the people would, in his opinion, do more harm than good. 
 Others warned the new priest against innovations which could 
 result in nothing but evil. But Zwingli answered: this manner 
 of preaching is not an tanovation ; it is the good old path, that 
 has been trod by the Fathers of the Church, as might be very 
 well seen in the HomiUes of Chrysostom on Matthew, and the 
 reflections of Augustine upon John. At the same time, he would 
 see to it, to act in such a Christian spirit that no friend of truth 
 should have any just ground of complaiat against ■ him. The 
 matter was thus allowed to rest. On Sunday, the New-year's 
 day of 1519, his thirty-sixth birth-day, Zwingli mounted the 
 pulpit of the venerable minster, and proclaimed to a crowded 
 congregation, " that he would lead them to Christ, the true well 
 of salvation, since His gospel was the power of God to salvation, 
 to all them that believe." In this, his inaugural discourse, he 
 repeated his resolution, which he had already expressed to the 
 canons, to expound the gospel of Matthew, as well as occasion- 
 ally another book of Holy Scripture in connection therewith. 
 His external appearance made a favourable impression ; for Zwin- 
 gli, according to Bullinger, was a fine-looking man in form and 
 figure, and he was now in the flower of manly age. " Let one," 
 says Hagenbach, " only look at his portrait ; let him observe this 
 energetic, well-compacted head, this marked physiognomy, as if 
 stone-carved, this expansive forehead, this full, clear eye, this 
 compressed mouth, with the well-rounded lips." Lavater reads 
 in this cast of countenance, " Earnestness, reflection, manly reso- 
 lution, concentrated energy, a far-seeing, penetrating understand- 
 ing." To a powerful frame of body, he added a well-modulated, 
 deep-toned voice. In preaching he had an agreeable delivery, 
 highly appropriate to the subject. His language was simple, 
 popular, and dignified ; in exposition it was clear and perspicuous, 
 in administering discipline serious and fatherly, in warning urgent, 
 coming home to the soul, in comforting warm and affectionate. 
 
OFFICIAL DUTIES, AND STYLE OF PREACHING. 37 
 
 His distinguislied oratorical powers, which had at their command 
 the whole fulness of gospel truth, as it flowed to him through 
 the channels of prayer and earnest application to God's Word, 
 with a rapid insight into the practical affairs of life and the 
 errors of the heart, he wielded with a manly resolution, and at 
 the same "time, with moderation and judgment. He magnified 
 the glory and majesty of God the Father, taught that He alone 
 was to be woi-shipped in spirit and in truth, and shewed that all 
 men, without distinction, could" obtain salvation in none other 
 but in Christ. At the same time, he warned against every kind 
 of superstition, of will-worship, and hypocrisy. With uplifted 
 voice he preached repentance and amendment of life, the exercise 
 of Christian charity and fidelity ; he attacked with resolution the 
 vices most spread amongst the people ; he preached earnestly 
 against inordinate expense in eating and drinking, and the wear- 
 ing of fine clothes, against oppression of the poor, against mer- 
 cenary wars, and the taking of gifts or bribes in the shape of pen- 
 sions. Herein he spared neither pope nor emperor, king nor 
 duke, princes nor nobles, not even the confederates themselves. 
 All his discourse rested on the foundation of God's Word, which 
 he explained and expounded, as he went along, and it was per- 
 vaded by the living conviction, that in the end, and by the help 
 of God, truth and righteousness would gain the day over lying, 
 error, hypocrisy, and vice. " AU his comfort," says a contemporary, 
 "was in God, in whom he trusted, and in whom he rejoiced; he 
 exhorted the town of Zurich to place their trust in Him alone."* 
 
 Fearless and intrepid as ZwingU. was in attacking with the 
 sword of the Spirit prevailing corruptions, he had, at the same 
 time, a tender and considerate regard for the intellectual and spi- 
 ritual deficiencies of his hearers. The following are the principles 
 which guided him in this respect. " Christ," says he, " praises very 
 highly the faithful steward, who gave to the household of his 
 lord their meat in due season (Matt. xxiv. 45). I set before me, 
 therefore, so to divide the Word of God, that the Lord may have 
 thereby the greatest fruit. Who is there who would not dismiss 
 a servant who would plough and sow a field in the midst of the 
 storms of winter ? Spring is the proper time for this work. Thus 
 
 * This account of Zwingli's preaching is taken nearly word for word from the 
 
38 OFFICIAL DUTIES, AND STYLE OF PEKACHING. 
 
 in what I announced, and what I withheld, I yielded much to 
 the weak, but all for edification. I would not give strong meat 
 at an unseasonable time, nor cast pearls before swine. I have 
 preached clearly and fully, and constantly and earnestly incul- 
 cated upon the minds of my hearers, the true salvation, Christ 
 Jesus himself, and taught them to expect all good from Him, to 
 apply to Him in every strait. Por if He hath suffered death for 
 us, when we were yet enemies to Him, how can he possibly be 
 angi-y with us now that we believe on Him. As Paul.says, 
 ' But God commeudeth his love towards us, in that, while we 
 were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more, then, being 
 now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through 
 him.' — (Rom. v. 8, 9). In this manner, I preached the free 
 grace of God to my fellow-men, seeking to make it attractive to 
 them, well knowing what God would work by his Word, if once 
 it found entrance into their minds. Oftentimes have I so far 
 given way to the weak and foolish-minded, that I have said to 
 them, when they began to shew their captiousness, well then, 
 bring your desires to the saints ; I will spread out my case before 
 God ; let us see who has taken the best way. Thus I fed them 
 with milk, till some of those who were most virulent against me, 
 in the end gave themselves wholly to the Lord. For they felt 
 in their own hearts how sweet the Lord is, and that every one 
 who knows Him aright, must cry out vtdth the disciples — ' Lord, 
 to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life,' 
 (John vi. 68.) ' I held him, and would not let liim go,' (Song of 
 Sol. iii. 4.) For he who has learned to know God aright, and 
 has been led home by his hand like a strayed child, can never 
 leave him; and though, by the force of bodily pains, the mouth 
 were brought to deny him, yet the heart would still adhere to 
 him; for it knows that God alone is its salvation, through Jesus 
 Christ. And I tell those this day who preach the Word of God, 
 and who preach it so as to draw salvation alone from it, that the 
 trust in the one living and true God will go on to increase, while 
 the trust in refuges of lies will decrease and decay ; and since 
 man must place his whole confidence in God, and in him alone, 
 I had rather yield somewhat to human weakness than that the 
 doctrine of Christ were altogether put aside. For, alas ! there 
 are some so ignorant of the truth, that they reject the doctrine nf 
 
OFFICIAL DUTIES, AND STYLE OF PBEACHING. 39 
 
 Clu-ist SO soon as one convinces them of error. 'Tis thus that a 
 hundred times I have often said to the more advanced Christians, 
 I conjure you by Jesus Christ, and our common faith, that ye be 
 not over hasty to propose any change, if for no other reason but 
 this, that ye may prove that ye are Christians indeed by the 
 patience with which ye bear, for the sake of the weak, that which, 
 according to the strict law of Christ, ye .ought not to bear." 
 
 This admirable union of heroic courage and indomitable reso- 
 lution with moderation of temper, and a tender delicacy of feeling 
 towards the weak, manifested in the preaching of Zwingli, and 
 traceable, indeed, through the whole of his career, sits with such 
 a grace on the ardent apostle of truth and righteousness, that we 
 cannot but at once admire and love him. The man who was so 
 firmly founded in the Word of God, that he could say, I am sure 
 that this is the mind of God ; and, though you threaten me with 
 aU the malice of Eome, with aU the fire of ^tna, or of hell 
 itself, I shall not budge from it, (See .Part II., Book I.,) could 
 yet admit to a boy, who recalled to his mind a false expression he 
 had made use of in the pulpit, that he was wrong, saying to the 
 critical youngster, " "We can learn much from boys when they are 
 sharp and attentive." In tliis manner, Zwingli gained all hearts 
 that were receptive of the tinith, refreshed them with heavenly 
 manna, .edified them with Christian wisdom, and trained them to 
 spiritual discipline. At the hearing of his very first sermon, there 
 were men who said, men namely who had entirely withdrawn 
 from the services of the Church, on the ground that the sermons 
 delivered there wanted the one thing needful, which the preacher 
 himself had not learned, " God be praised, here is a preacher of 
 the truth indeed ; he wiU be our Moses, and will lead us out of 
 Egypt." Another, Thomas Plater, reports, that once as he heard 
 a sermon of Zwingli's, on the text, " I am the good Shepherd," 
 (John X. II.) "It was as if some one had dragged him to the 
 preacher by the hair of his head." " Never," says Myconius," had 
 there been seen a priest in the pulpit with such an imposing 
 appearance and commanding power, so that you were irresistibly 
 led to believe that a man from the apostolic times was standing 
 before you." 
 
 The town-people flocked in crowds to listen to him, and even 
 
 flio r»mTn-f.-n7_r»on-nlo "wprp nvn'Tnfl+.prl Tvifli art innrpnRprl rlp.fiirp f,n "hp.a.r 
 
40 OFFICIAL DUTIES, AND STYLE OF PEEACHING. 
 
 the pure Word of God from his lips. To meet the desires of the 
 latter, Zwingli began, in 1520, to preach on the Psalms, each 
 Friday, the market-day in Zurich, when crowds came in from the 
 country, in a similar manner as he did on a book of the New Tes- 
 tament every Sabbath. In this manner the leaven of the gospel 
 was carefully hid in the hearts of the Christian people, both in 
 town and country, in joyful confidence in God that he would 
 cause it to penetrate and transform the mass. "With what success 
 the preaching of the gospel was accompanied, a letter of Zwingh's 
 to Myconius, under date 31st December 1519, clearly shews, in 
 which he reports to that friend, that at Zurich upwards of 2000 
 souls had been already so strengthened and nourished by the 
 milk of evangelic truth, that they could now bear stronger food, 
 and anxiously longed for it. Zwingli describes, in a very touch- 
 ing manner, the change wrought upon these people, both in their 
 modes of thinking, and in their whole walk and conversation, 
 (Part XL, Book II. 4.) Nay, the majority of the Town-CouncO. of 
 Zurich itself had made such an advance through the preaching of 
 Zwingli that, as early as 1520, they issued a mandate to the 
 parish priests, ciirates, and predicants, in town and country, 
 " that they should freely and everywhere preach the holy gos- 
 pels, and the epistles of the holy apostles, and that they should 
 all speak the same language as the Spirit of God should direct 
 them, and the inspired text of both Testaments, and that they 
 should only promulgate and teach that which they could prove 
 and establish by the said Word of God. But as for the doctrines 
 and commandments that were of man's institution, they should 
 let them alone." This ordinance was the first great victory which 
 the preaching of the gospel publicly celebrated in Zurich. 
 
 Yet it was easier to issue such orders than to find men who 
 were willing and able to obey them. Zwingh felt this too, and 
 hence his efforts were directed to draw men of evangelical faith 
 to Zurich, men both able and willing to undertake the preaching 
 of the true Word of God Zwingli, finding the curates, at his 
 arrival in Zurich, men who could be of little service to him, and 
 indeed who had no desire to assist liim, had they been able, took 
 into his own house two excellent youths, George Stacheli, from 
 the canton Schwyz, and Henry Luti, from -the Lake of Zurich, 
 M'hom he boarded at his own table. These young men shared 
 
OFFICIAL DUTIES, AND STYLE OF PREACHING. 41 
 
 his labours (for during the first two years he regularly read mass, 
 and sedulously performed aU his official duties), and enabled him 
 to overtake the laborious work of a parish which embraced the 
 greater half of the city, and the surrounding villages. With 
 their assistance he obtained leisure to bestow a greater degree 
 of caxe upon his sermons. The parson at St. Peter's in Zurich, 
 Balph Eoeschli, having received his dismissal in the course of 
 the year 1522, ZwingK induced his friend Leo Jud, to come 
 from Einsiedeln, and preach in St. Peter's. He gave such satis- 
 faction to the parishioners that they immediately elected him. 
 Thus the two friends, who sat together at the feet of their vener- 
 ated instructor. Dr. Wittenbach, in Basle, were again united, and 
 remained united in the service of their Lord and Master till the 
 rude hand of death parted them. 
 
 In the first four years of his labours at Zurich, Zwingli, as he 
 himself tells us, expounded the following books of the New Tes- 
 tament. " At my arrival at Zurich," said he, " I began with the 
 exposition of the Gospel of St. Matthew, and then passed to the 
 Acts of the Apostles, in order to make my hearers acquainted 
 with the extension and spread of the gospel in the first ages. 
 The first Epistle to Timothy then followed, to their great profit, 
 for this epistle sets forth to the true Christian the rules to 
 guide him in his walk and conversation. As the doctrine of 
 truth had been sadly disfigured by sophistical teachers, I post- 
 poned the second Epistle to Timothy till I had gone through that 
 to the Galatians, — and then I returned to the former — to shew to 
 the people Paul's great merits, and his high value as an apostle, 
 in opposition to the false doctors who depreciated him — false 
 doctors, who gave out for piety what no man could possibly take 
 offence at. Who then is this Paul ? say they. Is he not a man ? 
 An apostle, indeed, but of lesser magnitude; none of the twelve ; 
 he was never in the company of Christ, he has laid down no 
 articles of faith. I put no more faith in Paul than in Thomas, or 
 in Scotus ;* such is their language. I then let the two Epistles 
 of Peter follow the second Epistle to Timothy, to shew the despisers 
 
 * Thomas Aquino (bom 1224, died 1274), and Johannes Scotus, (died 804), 
 two schoolmen of the middle ages, who, more than all others, contributed to 
 develop and confirm the errors of a church that had departed from the simpli- 
 city of God's Word ; hence they were held in peculiar veneration by the Koman- 
 
42 LABOUES AS A PATEIOT. 
 
 of Paul that both apostles were inspired by the same Spirit, and 
 that both taught the same things. I then began the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews, to awaken the minds of my hearers to the mercy 
 displayed in the mission of Jesus Christ in aU its extent. Here 
 they were to learn that Chiist is our alone true High-priest, and 
 they learned this lesson weU. That was the seed I sowed ; Mat- 
 thew, Luke, Paul, Peter, have watered it ; but God caused it to 
 thrive nobly, and bear fruit, and this I declare, not as if I sought 
 mine own and not Christ's honour. Go, and maintain if you can, 
 that it has not been planted by the heavenly Father." 
 
 The above may suffice as a sketch of Zwingli's preaching 
 during the first years of his labours at Zurich ; for farther satis- 
 faction on this head, I refer to the 1st Book of the 2d Part, 
 which consists of a sermon that Zwingli delivered in the Church 
 of the Cloister, Selnau, in the summer of the year 1522. This 
 sermon affords a good example of his style, and at the same time 
 developes his ideas regarding the fundamental doctrine of the 
 Word of God, and his application of it to life and practice. 
 
 2. Zwingli's Laboues as a Pateiot, especially in eegaed to 
 THE Evils of Foeeign Militaey Seevice. 
 
 It has been already stated, that Zwingli's chief motive for 
 removing from Einseideln to Zurich, the capital of the Confe- 
 deracy, was his desire, from this central point, to work through 
 the preaching of the "Word towards the religious and moral refor- 
 mation of his country, for patriotism from his chUdhood fiUed his 
 whole soul, and gave him ever a ready and tangible object for 
 the exertion of his powers. "Next to my concern for the Word 
 of God," he writes, "the interests of the Confederacy lie nearest 
 my heart. For the longing desire of my heart, and the great 
 object of my teacliing, has been the preservation of the Confe- 
 deracy, that it might remain, as handed down to us from our 
 fathers, true to itself, and free from service under foreign masters, 
 and that the members of it might live together in peace and 
 friendship." At the period of his entrance into public hfe, his 
 country was groaning under the evils and disorders introduced 
 by mercenary warfare and its consequences. Zwingli lifted up 
 
LABOURS AS A PATRIOT. -tS 
 
 his voice . energetically against this crying evil. " Our fathers," 
 said he, " conquered their enemies, and won their freedom, rely- 
 ing on no other arm hut the arm of the Ahnighty,* and they 
 were ready at all times to recognise His intervention in their 
 behalf, in gratitude and praise, as the children of Israel did, who, 
 after their redemption out of the hand of Pharaoh, and their pas- 
 sage of the Eed Sea, sang praises to Jehovah. ' I will sing unto 
 the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously : the horse and his 
 rider hath he thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and 
 song, and he is become my salvation,' Exod. xv. 1, 2. Our 
 ancestors took no wages to slay their fellow-Christians, but they 
 fought alone for their independence, and the freedom of themselves, 
 their wives, and children, from the yoke of a haughty and wanton 
 aristocracy. Therefore, God gave the victory into their hands, 
 increased them in honour and wealth, so that there was no master 
 that could subdue them, however strong he might be. Such 
 glorious results, however, were accomplished by no human 
 agency, but alone through the power and grace of God. Now, 
 however, we have begun to please ourselves, and to esteem our- 
 selves wise in that which is God's, as, indeed, man often does. 
 Now, when they have got loaded with this world's riches -f and 
 glory, they rebel against God, and become arrogant. ' But 
 Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked,' Deut. xxxii 15. 'Lo, this is 
 the man that made not God his strength ; but trusted in the 
 abundance of his riches, and strengthened himself in his wicked- 
 ness,' Psalm Ui 7. Think ye not that loss and shame will be 
 our portion from the Lord if we thus magnify our own name, 
 saying, 'We have done this ! We shall do that ! No man may 
 withstand us!' As if we had ' made a covenant with death, and 
 with hell were at an agreement,' as Isaiah says, chap. xxviiL and 
 as if no man could harm us. Thus some amongst us, being 
 led away to forget themselves, and God himself, by the foree of 
 
 » The Swiss, in old times, began their battles with prayer ; and, when they 
 gained the victory, they fell upon their knees, and thanked God for his help. 
 The monuments with which they commemorated battle-fields were houses of 
 prayer, or chapels. 
 
 t By their victory over Charles the Bold, and the plundering of his camps, 
 the Swiss obtained vast riches. ' This begat a love of Inxuiy and pomp, which 
 drew farther nourishment from the pay and pensions they received in foreign 
 
44 LABOURS AS A PATEIOT. 
 
 evil passions, tlie devil, the great enemy of aU the good, like the 
 serpent at the creation, has stirred up foreign lords,* who have 
 spoken thus to us : Ye strong heroes ought not to remain in your 
 land and in your mountains. What -will you with this bleak 
 land? Serve us for gold, ye will thus gain a great name, and 
 much wealth, and your valour wiU be known to men, and be 
 feared. In a similar strain spake the devil to Eve by the serpent. 
 
 " Against aU such promises Solomon warns us, saying, ' An 
 hypocrite with his mouth destroyeth his neighbour' (Prov. xi. 9.) 
 In this manner, they, (the foreign lords,) have so wheedled and 
 enticed us, simple Confederates, seeking their own profit, that at 
 length they have brought us into such danger and disagree- 
 ment between ourselves, that we, not regarding our fatherland, 
 have more care how to maintain them in tljeir wealth and power, 
 than to defend our own houses, wives, and children. And this 
 were less, had we not shame and damage out of this pact. We 
 have at Naples, at Mvarre, and Milan, suffered greater loss in 
 •the service- of these masters than since we have been a Confede- 
 racy ; in our own wars we have been ever conquerors, in foreign 
 wars often vanquished ; such evils, it is to be feared, have, been 
 brought about by those who seek more their own private gain 
 than the true interests of their country. 
 
 " But now, from this cause, there arises to the community at 
 home the great misfortune, that avarice, wantonness, insolence, 
 and disobedience, more and more gain the ascendency, if we 
 shall not take other measures, and open our eyes, so as to prevent 
 the dangers that threaten us. The first and great danger is this, 
 that we thereby draw down upon us the wrath of God ; for his 
 Word says : — 'And they covet fields, and take them by violence; 
 and houses, and take them away : so they oppress a man and his 
 house, even a man and his heritage.' (Micah ii. 2.) Ye have 
 thrown a cloak over the eyes of the people, and led away the 
 simple to the war. Ye have drawn away the women from their 
 homes. Therefore the Lord speaks these words : — ' Behold, 
 against this family do I devise an evil, from which ye shall not 
 remove your necks ; neither shall ye go haughtily : for this time 
 
 * At that time, the Pope, the Emperor, the French, the Spanish, the English, 
 Venice, Milan, Savoy, canvassed the Swiss, through their ambassadors, for their 
 military service, and poured their gold into the country.— Bcllinger. 
 
LABOURS AS A PATRIOT. ' 45 
 
 is evil.' (Micali ii. 3.) These words are clear enough, in which 
 the prophet declares the iniquity of war, and the threatenings of 
 the wrath of God. Let each one for himself reflect on the evils 
 of war, and think how it would be with him if he were treated in 
 the manner in which we use our fellow Christians. Think, now 
 that a foreign mercenary came into thy land with violence, laid 
 waste thy meads, thy fields, thy vineyards, drove off thy cattle, 
 bound thy house-furniture together and carted it away, slew thy 
 son in the attack, who would defend himseK and thee, violated the 
 chastity of thy daughters, kicked with his feet the dear wife of 
 thy bosom, who went before thee, and fell down at the feet of 
 this foreign soldier, begging mercy for thee and herself, dragged 
 out thyself, pious, worthy, old man, even in thine own house and 
 home, from the place where thou wert crouching in fear, knocked 
 thee down in presence of thy wife, despite her cries, and despite 
 thine own trembling, venerable, pleading grey hairs, and then at 
 last set fire to thy dwelling, and burned it tp the ground ; wouldst 
 thou not think within thyself, if the heaven did not open and 
 spit fire on such villany, if the earth did not yawn and swallow 
 up such monsters, there were no God ? And yet thou doest all 
 this to another, and callest it, forsooth, the right of war ! 
 
 " Those who, for truth, religion, justice, and native country, 
 venture their lives in war, are true men, and their cause is sacred. 
 But as for those blood-thirsty, mercenary soldiers, who take the 
 field for gain, of whom the world is now full, and those wars 
 which princes carry on, from day to day, out of lust of power, 
 filling the earth with bloodshed, I, for my part, not only cannot 
 approve them, but I believe there is nothing more wicked and 
 criminal, and have the opinion that such men deserve to be 
 branded as highway robbers, and that they are unworthy of the 
 name of Christians. 
 
 "The second danger that threatens us from the foreign lords and 
 their wars is, that justice between man and man is stopped ; as an 
 old proverb says, 'When arms are up in the hands, laws are 
 under the feet.' The term ' right of war' means nothing but 
 violence, use it as you will, turn it over as you will. Yet it is 
 objected, — ^force must be employed to reduce the disobedient, 
 if they refuse to yield obedience to things lawful and right. 
 Yea, verily, it were good it went no farther, and that the thunder- 
 V.r.H- nt ttrar a+rniplr tTipsp filoTifi n.Tid tbnt each forced onlv the dis- 
 
46 LABOURS AS A PATRIOT. 
 
 obedient to obedience in things lawful. But what sayest thou of 
 the man who takes money and helps a foreign master to plunder, 
 lay waste, rob those who have done him no injury whatever, 
 nay, who carries his sword to such masters, whom it does not 
 become to go to war at all, bishops, popes, abbots, and this, too, 
 for vile money ? Farther, the foreign lords do prejudice to the 
 cause of justice, in so far that their gifts blind the eyes of every 
 man, be he as wise as you wiU, and deprive him of his reason as 
 Well as of his piety; as Moses teaches, 'A gift doth bhnd the eyes 
 of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous,' (Deut. xvi. 19.) 
 " The third danger is, that, with foreign money and foreign wars, 
 our manners will become corrupted and debased. This we see 
 very clearly, for our people have never returned from the foreign 
 wars without bringing something new in clothes for themselves 
 and their wives, or without inlporting home some new extrava- 
 gance in eating and drinking, some ne'wr oaths ; the bad they see 
 and learn with readiness, so that we have reason to fear if these 
 wars be not desisted from, we shall be inundated with still worse 
 evils. The morality of the women, too, is corrupted. A woman 
 is a weak creature, and desirous of new, handsome things, orna- 
 ments, fine clothes, jewels, (as we see in Dinah, who went to 
 Sechem out of curiosity, and was there humbled,) and when such 
 like things are made to flash in their- eyes, and offered to them, 
 think you that they will not be moved by these things, and that 
 the temptation will not be too strong for them? It is to he 
 feared, too, that, in time, the number of the males will be dimin- 
 ished, although, as yet, this has been less noticeable. But, at 
 least, they are unmanned by luxury. Now no one will work to 
 obtain a living, the lands are out of cultivation, and lie waste in 
 many places, because labourers are not to be got, although there 
 be people enough, and a land that could well nourish us all. If 
 it bear not cinnamon, ginger, malmsey, cloves, oranges, silk, and 
 other such dainties for the palate, it bears at least butter, milk, 
 horses, sheep, cattle, Unt, wine, and corn, and that to the fuU, so 
 that we can rear a fine strong race of men,, and as to what we 
 want in our own country we can obtain it elsewhere against our 
 own produce. That we do not hold to this, comes from the self- 
 ishness that has been introduced among us, and which leads us 
 off from labour to idleness. And yet, to work is noble ; it saves 
 from wantonness and vice, it yields good frait, so that a man 
 
LABOURS AS A PATRIOT. 47 
 
 can riclxly nourish his body without care, and- without the fear 
 that he sully himself with the blood of the innocent, and live by 
 it It makes the body, too, hale and strong, dissipates diseases, 
 engendered by idleness, and last of all, fruit and increase follow 
 the hand of the worker, as creation itself came from the hand of 
 the all-working God at the beginning, so that, in external things, 
 there is nothing in the universe so like God as the worker. It is 
 to selfishness we owe it, that all our strength and power, which 
 ought to defend our country, are consumed in the service of for- 
 eign masters. Behold how unlike we are to our ancestors ! These 
 would not suffer foreign masters in their land, but now we lead 
 them in amongst us by the hand, if they have but money, that 
 some may get hold of the money, while many get the stripes. 
 And when a pious man has brought up a well-doing son, then 
 come the captains and steal him away, and he must expose him- 
 self to the danger of dying of hunger, disease, murder, shot, or 
 wounds. And if he reckon up his bargained money, he will 
 • find he could have won more by thrashing, without speaking of 
 his being run through the body with a spear ere the account 
 comes to be paid ; and last of all, his poor old father that brought 
 him up, and whom he should have maintained in his old age, is 
 reduced to carry the beggar's staff. But those who get the money 
 want for nothing. They force us into alliances with foreign mas- 
 ters, but only after they themselves have been bought over by 
 heavy bribes. And, when it comes to loss, your neighbour or 
 your neighbour's son must bear it, while they come off scot free. 
 And although it stands in the conditions, that none is to be forced, 
 yet recruiting parties spread themselves over the whole land, and 
 then it is seen what young blood will do when it is up. And 
 with the remuneration, it is to be taken into account that those 
 who get the largest bribes conceal them, but these living in riot 
 and expense, another, who thinks he cannot be less than they, 
 goes to the like expense. And if he cannot afford this, then he 
 is at the mercy of the briber, who at last takes his vineyard, fields, 
 and meadows. Then he helps him to a small pension, on which 
 he cannot live, and so, having lost his all, he must in the end 
 face war and wounds for a wretched pay. In this manner we 
 lose our best sons, who, for vile money, are consumed in a foreign 
 land. But few, indeed, become rich, but these so rich that they 
 
 Tnicpbt bnv off the rest. 
 
48 LABOUES AS A PATRIOT. 
 
 " The fourth danger is, that the gifts of the foreign lords b 
 hatred and distrust among us. Tlie Almighty granted to 
 ancestors grace and favour in His sight, so that they freed tl 
 selves from a tyrannous nobility, and lived in concord with 
 another. They prospered ; while right and justice were so 
 administered in this land, that all who were oppressed in for 
 countries fled hither, as to an asylum of safety. Then fear se 
 the hearts of the princes, who would not themselves act ju 
 and who yet stood in awe of our bold and unflinching attit 
 But seeing that the Lord was strong on our side, so that 
 could not overcome us by force, they seduced us by the ba 
 bribes, and reduced us by enslaving us first to selfishness. 1 
 laid their schemes, and considered that if one of us were to s 
 friend or a neighbour suddenly growing rich, without any t 
 or profession, and living at his ease in riches, he too woul 
 stirred up, in order that he might dress finely, live in idle] 
 carousing, and wantonness, lite his neighbour, to hunt i 
 riches (for aU men incline naturally against work and tow 
 idleness), and that, if the like riches were not vouchsafed to '. 
 that he would join himself to the ranks of their oppone 
 that in this manner disunion would be created, so that fa 
 should be against son, brother against brother, friend ag£ 
 friend, neighbour against neighbour, and then that the kingc 
 as the Son of God himself says, thus divided against itself, w 
 not stand, and there would be an end of the Confederacy. ' 
 was what they calculated upon. Envy is the natural accomj 
 ment of prosperity, so that where there is good fortune the 
 also Ul-wilL How much, then, must envy and hatred be sti 
 up, when one member of the community is so far privileged al 
 the other as I have described? But when the hour of da 
 arrives, is not one true man as good as another? nay, do 
 the poor often fight for their country with more bravery 
 resolution than the rich ? Out of such envy, then, springs 
 disunion and ill-wiLl of those who say, ' Go thou forward, do 
 and that; thou hast taken more money, take also more bl( 
 Do ye not perceive that the counsel of these foreign masters 
 answered well the end they had in view, at least in part ? 
 seeds of selfishness have been sown in the land, and discoi 
 the crop. Therefore the great love that from childhood 1 1 
 
LABOURS AS A PATRIOT. 49 
 
 bome to my native country, compels me to make my cares in 
 regard to this its state known, lest greater mischief befall us, 
 and that we may return from our folly while this is possible, and 
 before the evil become altogether incurable. If not, there is 
 ground to fear that the lords whom we beat with iron and hal- 
 bert, will vanquish us with the touch of gold. 
 
 " And if any one should inquire, How are we to deliver our- 
 selves from these evils, and return again to union ? I answer, By 
 abstaining from selfishness. For, if this base passion did not 
 reign among us, the Confederacy were more a union of brothers 
 than of confederates. If one rejoins to this, Selfishness is im- 
 planted in the human heart, from whence it cannot be eradicated, 
 for God alone can know and change the heart; then I answer: 
 Do earnestly that which lies in your power. Where you find it 
 punishable, punish it, and let it not grow. And that it may be 
 extirpated out of the very hearts of men, give heed that the 
 divine word be faithfully preached. For where God is not in 
 the heart, there is nothing but the man himself. Where there is 
 nothing but the man himself, he cares for nothing bift that which 
 serves to his interests, pleasures, and lusts. But when God pos- 
 sesses the heart, then man has regard to that which pleases God, 
 seeks the honour of God, and the profit of his fellow man. Now, 
 the knowledge of .God can come to us in no way clearer than 
 from the Word of God. WUl you, then, have the knowledge of 
 God spread among you, so that you may live in peace, and in 
 the fear of God ? then see to it that the Word of God is purely 
 preached, according to its natural sense, unadulterated by the 
 glosses and inventions of man." 
 
 Thus Zwingli saw in the preaching of the Word the only 
 remedy for the distractions of his country. Manfully, with this 
 two-edged sword of the Spirit, he fought against the alliances with 
 foreign princes, and against those mercenary wars, from which all 
 the evils under which his native country groaned arose. Zwingli's 
 position and his labours in behalf of his native country at this 
 juncture, resemble those of the prophets under the Old Testament 
 dispensation, who lifted up their voices in great emergencies, and 
 thundered against declensions ia Israel Though his counsels 
 were not always followed, he yet accomplished great things by the 
 celestial weapon he wielded with such power. 
 
50 LABOUES AS A PATEIOT. 
 
 Shortly after he commenced his labours at Zurich, the impe- 
 rial throne of Germany feU to be filled up by election, through 
 the death of the emperor, Maximilian I. Two foreign potentates, 
 Charles I. of Spain and Francis I. of France, set all the machineiy 
 of bribery and intrigue at work to obtain for themselves this high 
 dignity. The Confederates, instigated by the untiring Cardinal 
 Schinner, mixed themselves up in the election, and sent a letter 
 to the electors, advising them to choose Charles. Zwingli, how- 
 ever, was opposed to any interference on the part of Switzerland 
 in this matter, and saw with prophetic glance the dangers to the 
 cause of the Gospel that must arise from the election of Charles I. 
 "Charles," said he, "is a young prince; the Spaniards a people 
 ambitious of conquest, restless, proud. The Germans have no 
 need to call from the distance so mighty a prince to reign over 
 them, and thus recklessly put their necks under a foreign yoke." 
 He believed that this prince would be bold enough to subject 
 the whole German people under some specious pretext or another, 
 and to deprive them of the Word of God. How rightly he fore- 
 saw the danger, the result shewed. 
 
 Just as determined was he against using any influence m 
 favour of Francis. This young warlike monarch sought to con- 
 clude a new treaty with the Swiss, according to which the Swiss 
 youth were to enter his service against the pope and emperor. 
 This treaty was presented to the acceptance of the Swiss people 
 in the usual corrupt fashion, namely, by the bribing of influen- 
 tial individuals in a canton, which process was so successful 
 that canton after canton joined the French alliance. Only Zurich 
 this time made an exception. In this canton a new power had 
 arisen, the preaching of the Word of God, which baffled French 
 intrigue, and disappointed French bribery. Zwingli's sermons, 
 among the majority of the council and the people generally, had 
 awakened the conscience, and roused a new description of 
 patriotism, a patriotism that drew its nourishment and strength 
 from the Word of God, and now celebrated a glorious victory 
 over a selfishness and a profligacy that leant themselves on the 
 arm of foreign power. The Council, in a letter which they 
 addressed to the peasantry, and which whoUy breathed the mind ' 
 of Zwingli, and probably came from his pen, inquired what their 
 views were on the subject. One voice answered from the whole 
 
LABOURS AS A PATEIOT. 51 
 
 canton ; the government should, according to the principles of 
 their forefathers, have nothing to do with foreign lords. 
 
 Putting their whole confidence in God, the government of 
 Zurich resolved to abstain from entering into the alliance with 
 France, and they thereby drew upon themselves, and especially on 
 Zwingli, who was with justice looked upon as the prime author 
 of this resolution, the hatred and vituperation of the other can- 
 tons, and of all the venal who were inchned to the foreign mili- 
 tary service, both in and out of Zurich. This enmity was 
 increased by the following circumstance. In the summer of 
 1521, the Pope desired, through Cardinal Schinner, the aid of 
 Swiss troops, ostensibly for the defence of the States of the Church, 
 (to which the Confederates had bound themselves by the papal 
 alliance of 1515), but reaUy in combination with the Emperor, to 
 drive the French out of Upper Italy. The other cantons refused 
 to accede to the papal request ; Zurich, however, after receiving 
 from the Cardinal the assurance that the troops would only be 
 employed in the defence of the States of the Church, believed 
 itself bound to grant the required aid, although Zwingli spoke 
 strongly against it. " What," said he, " a people have once pro- 
 mised to do, they are bound to perform ; but if God shows a way 
 of escape from an alliance, they are at liberty to avaQ themselves 
 of it, and take care not to enter into such again." Zwingli 
 believed this way of escape existed, because the Cardinal had em- 
 ployed intriguing and bribery to gain his end, which in the treaty 
 were expressly forbidden.. "I would," said he, "that the papal 
 treaty had had a hole burnt in it, and the papal legate were bound 
 on a board with his back to it, and carried home. If a wolf 
 comes into a land, every one is up to kiU the beast, or to drive 
 it away; but against the wolves that devour the" people no man 
 will fight." "They (the Eomish Cardinals), are very properly 
 dressed in red caps and mantles ; for, if be they shaken, then out 
 drop ducats and crowns ; but if they be wrung, then out flows 
 the blood of thy son, brother, father, and friend." Zwingh's 
 warning was this time baulked of its effect through the cunning 
 of the legate. The latter was of opinion; the affair must be 
 precipitated before the parson (Zwingli) came again into the 
 pulpit. The Zurichers marched to the assistance of the Pope, 
 the other Confederates marched to that of the King of France. 
 
52 EEFOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 
 
 The Trench and the Confederates were beaten by the united 
 papal and imperial army, but without the co-operation of the 
 Zurichers. In this defeat there was a new ground of animosity 
 against Zurich and against Zwingli, although he had spoken 
 against the expedition. At the instance of Zwingli, clergy and 
 "aity, magistrates and citizens, were brought to take an oath 
 irom henceforward to accept no longer presents, gifts, or annui- 
 ties, from foreign princes. He himself, in 1520, in a letter under 
 his own hand, resigned his yearly sum he had been in the habit 
 of drawing, although at that very time he was in very straitened 
 circumstances, owing to the smallness of the income he derived 
 from his living. 
 
 Thus Zwingli succeeded, by the power of the "Word of God, 
 in freeing Zurich from the fetters of selfishness and foreign influ- 
 ence, which pressed on the energies of the people, and in reviving 
 that confidence in God which had once animated Switzerland. 
 What zeal inspired him in this work, the following words shew: 
 " After I had seen that God prevailed by His Word, and disposed 
 the minds of men to peace, I would indeed have acted foully by 
 the good people, had I not perseveringly pressed for peace, and a 
 Christian life and walk, seeing so clearly as I did, the good work 
 daily increasing before my 'eyes. Whatever lies may be told, the ' 
 sole cause of the abolition of mercenary service under foreign 
 princes in the canton of Zurich, in town and country, was the 
 Word of God." 
 
 _ 3. ZwiNGLi's Laboites in the Eefoemation of Ecclesiastical 
 
 Abuses. 
 
 The like manly zeal and resolution, restraiiied by moderation, 
 and softened by tenderness, which Zwingli manifested in the 
 preaching of the gospel, he shewed also in his labours to reforHi 
 the abuses that prevailed in the Church. He regarded himself, 
 from a very early period, as an instrument in the hand of God, 
 who was never, except at an intimation or call from Htm, to step 
 in, and who must not prematurely, according to his own ideas, 
 precipitate the work of God. " God knows," are his words, " what 
 time is the fittest for every affair and for every undertaking. 
 He demands from thee labour and industry. He himself working, 
 
REFORMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 53 
 
 and bringing all to pass. Seek thou only to advance His glory, 
 and thou wilt not fail in thy object. God humbles us, and exer- 
 cises us, accomplislung aU things, according to His own, and not 
 according to our will." 
 
 Mjrod had endowed Zwingli with all the gifts that were neces- 
 sary to successful operation. He was a true Christian, and a true 
 Eepublican. The equality of all men was not with him an empty 
 sound ; it was indelibly engraved on the tablets of his heart, and 
 from thence transcribed into his life. He had neither the phari- 
 saical hauteur, nor the monkish acerbity, equally distasteful to 
 poor and rich. One felt himseK drawn to him and eagerly en- 
 joyed his conversation. He was powerful in the pulpit, friendly 
 towards all whom he met in the streets or the market-place ; 
 often he sat down in the inns in which the guilds assembled, 
 where he might be seen explaining to the citizens the chief points 
 of Christian doctrine, or entering into familiar conversation with 
 them. Peasants and patricians were alike to him./^One of his bit- 
 terest enemies reports of him : " He invited the country folk to his 
 table, went about walking with them, spoke to them of God, made 
 the devil go into their hearts, and his writings into their pockets. 
 He even induced the Council itself to wait upon these peasants ; 
 they pledged them, went about the town with them and shewed 
 them attention. Thus Zwingli's popularity increased ; one day 
 found him at the poor man's -board, another at the banquet of the 
 rich, as was the practice of the Lord himself, and by such means 
 as these he succeeded in accomplishing the work to which God 
 had called him."* 
 
 An opportunity soon presented itself for his interference against 
 a dreadful abuse which was practised in name of the Head of the 
 Church. The notorious absolution-monger, Samson, after having 
 driven a prosperous trade on a journey through Lucerne, Berne, 
 and Baden, with his nefarious wares, came now to Zurich, in order 
 there to dispose of his letters of absolution with his accustomed 
 impudence. This shameless Italian monk already met at Brem- 
 garten with an opposition which he had not expected. The Dean, 
 Henry Bullinger, father of the celebrated historian, and Zwingli's 
 successor at Zurich, opposed the monk, and refused to allow him 
 to offer his wares in the church of Bremgarten, on the ground 
 
54 EEFOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 
 
 that the papal letter which granted him the full power to sell 
 indulgences, and which Samson, in the carrying on of his trade, 
 carried about with him, and by opportunity shewed, had not 
 been attested by the Bishop of Constance. Purious at this oppo- 
 sition, the monk called the Dean a beast, and excommunicated 
 him. Both now hastened to Zurich, the Dean to accuse before 
 the Diet there the monk, the monk to accuse the Dean, and at 
 the same time to carry on his sale of indulgences in the town. 
 Bullinger met with a friendly reception in Zurich, and especially 
 from Zwingli, who told him he had done quite right in resisting 
 the monk, and need not be the least uneasy as to the result. In- 
 the pulpit the Leut-priest of the Minster attacked without mercy 
 the degrading imposition and trick of indulgences, and he proved 
 that here the prediction of Peter in the second chapter of his second 
 epistle was fulfilled : "there shall be false teachers among you, who 
 privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that 
 bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction, (v. 1.) 
 And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make 
 merchandise of you : whose judgment now of a long time liugereth 
 not, and their damnation slumbereth not," (v. 3). Accordingly, 
 when Samson, in February 1519, was on the point of making his 
 entrance on horseback into the town, after boasting, that although 
 he well knew that Zwingli would preach against him, he would 
 yet soon stop his mouth, an order came to him from the deputies 
 of the Council, that he must not enter the town, nor sell there 
 his indulgences, for, says Bullinger, people in Zurich began now 
 to see through Eomish knavery. Nay, in the Council a motion 
 was made, in accordance with a law against Eomish intruders, 
 stni in force, to seize him by the collar, and throw him into the 
 water. Upon a pretence of Samson's, that he had a communica- 
 tion in name of the Pope to make to the assembled Diet, he was 
 admitted before them, but the Diet, perceiving his sole intention 
 was to speak on the sale of indulgences, commanded him silence. 
 Prom the same public servants he received injunctiohs, forthwith 
 and without recompence, to remove the excommunication which 
 he had pronounced on the Dean Bullinger, and having done so, 
 without a moment's delay to leave Switzerland. The monk 
 obeyed, and set off in a vehicle, drawn by three horses, on his 
 journey across the Alps, carrying with him the ill-gotten gains 
 
EEFOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 55 
 
 of wMch he had swindled the poor Swiss. Towards the obtain- 
 ing .of this victory over Eomish insolence, the General- Vicar 
 Faber of Constance had likewise used his influence, who saw 
 episcopal respect and dignity compromised by these Eomish in- 
 truders. He expressed his thanks to Zwingli for the vigour and 
 resolution he had shewn on this occasion, and begged of him that 
 he would be pleased to make greater claims on his friendship 
 than he had hitherto done. Zwingli employed these advances of 
 his university-friend to impress upon his heart the duty of recom- 
 mending, or at least of allowing, the free preaching of the Gospel 
 in the bishopric of Constance. But to such counsels and peti- 
 tions the dignitaries of the Church leant no willing ear. With 
 redoubled zeal Zwingli directed his efforts within Zurich itself, 
 that the pure word of God might be sounded from all the pulpits 
 of the land. 
 
 We have already seen that the Council, as early as the year 
 1520, had been induced, by Zwinglis faithful preaching, to issue 
 orders, in town and country, that the gospel be purely preached. 
 However, it was easier to issue such instructions than to get" them 
 carried into effect. A violent opposition was excited among the 
 numerous monks who inhabited the three monasteries in the^ 
 town. How were they to preach the Word of God who were 
 entirely ignorant of it, and, moreover, who held doctrines and 
 sentiments in diametrical opposition to it ? How could they give 
 up Thomas and Scotus, from whom they derived their whole 
 standing, as men of education and learning ; how the legends and 
 fables that were the sources of their greatest gain ? Small as was 
 the esteem which these moxdis, on account of their licentious 
 morals and gross ignorance, enjoyed in the eyes of all men of 
 true piety and sense, they were yet not destitute of powerful con- 
 nections and influence. Several members of the Council, who, as 
 supporters and friends of the foreign mercenary service, or who, 
 as men of loose morals, disliked the bold and faithful preacher at 
 the Minster, were wont, morning and evening, to visit the clois- 
 ters, and hold there their carousals. On such occasions, one 
 stirred up the other to opposition against the preaching of the 
 Word of God, and- rthey hatched the darkest designs against its 
 faithful preacher. The monks and their patrons caused it to be 
 widely published that disunion and strife would afilict the state 
 
56 EEFOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 
 
 if Zwingli were not forbidden to preach against them. Having, 
 as they thought, made themselves secure of the result, they 
 brought the matter before the Council, and it was determined by 
 a majority that, for the future, the monks were not to be preached 
 against. "Thereon," says BuUinger, "the Council-hall gave a 
 loud crash." Councillors were horror-struck, and the meeting 
 was suddenly dissolved. A violent contest was now carried on 
 from the pulpits between the proclaimers of the message of God 
 and the defenders of human traditions. The Council named a 
 committee, consisting of the clergy of the town, the reading-mas- 
 ters and preachers of the cloisters, to meet in the provost's house, 
 and here, after many high words had passed between the parties, 
 they were exhorted by the Burgomaster to preach nothing which 
 might cause any disturbance of peace and unity. " Zwingli," how- 
 ever, declared, "I cannot accept this command ; I will preach the 
 gospel, free and without limitation, as was formerly resolved 
 upon, I am bishop and parson -in Zurich; to me the cure of 
 souls is entrusted. I, not the monks, have taken the oath. They 
 must yield and not T. If they preach lies, I will come up to 
 the very pulpits of their own cloisters and contradict them. I, 
 for my part, if I preach anything contrary to the holy gospel, am 
 willing to subject myself to the censure of the Chapter, nay, of 
 every citizen, and let myseK be punished for it." This decided 
 tone was not without effect. The monks continued to claim for 
 themselves the right of preaching Thomas and Scotus, but the 
 committee of the Council decided that the gospel should bepreached, 
 for Thomas and Scotus, and the other doctors were of no weight. 
 Nay, the Council went farther, and granted permission to Zwin- 
 gli and his friends to preach the gospel likewise in the churches 
 of the nunneries, where hitherto only the monks of the order 
 were allowed to preach. Truth had thus again conquered. 
 
 But the enemies of the gospel in Zurich sought and found 
 support and encouragement without the bounds of the canton. 
 The friends of mercenary service leant on the Diet, where the 
 majority was devoted to the system of foreign service and pen- 
 sions ; the monks turned their eyes to the Bishop of Constance 
 and his General- Vicar Faber. This man began now to develop 
 his real character, and by the side of Eck to combat the preach- 
 ing of the Word of God, and to employ against it all the means 
 
EEPOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 57 
 
 of persecution within his power. To this change in his senti- 
 ments and course of procedure a journey to Eome had remarkably 
 contributed, which he made ostensibly in the commission of the 
 bishop. John Eck had formerly gone to Home to operate with 
 the Pope against Luther, and had received from his Holiness 700 
 ducats for travelling expenses. Faber at first ridiculed Eck for 
 the step he had taken, but soon he too coveted the wages of 
 unrighteousness, and also set off to Eome. Upon this Profes- 
 sor Egentius of Freiburg (in Breisgau) wrote, — " I begin to be 
 suspicious of Faber ; he is a man in his best years; and has great 
 wants. Accordingly, he is also gone to Eome, to dedicate, as it 
 is said, a book to the Pope against Luther, for he has received a 
 hint of his Holiness' liberality to Eck. If he should come back 
 from the seat of all evU, we shall all, doubtless, have to fall down 
 and worship the golden image." Zwingli wrote in reference to 
 the influence which this journey had on Faber, — " It appears to 
 me Faber has unlearned at Eome all that he formerly knew of 
 Christianity." The vicar's conversion infected also his bishop. 
 " Although the Bishop," says Voegeh, (a contemporary, and author 
 of the History of the Eeformation at Constance,) " was, at first, 
 not disinclined to the gospel, yet his vicar, after his return from 
 Eome, put other thoughts in his head, and made bi-m very averse 
 to it." Yet eagerly as they watched the development of events 
 at Zurich, and willingly as . they lent an ear to the reports and 
 complaints of the monks there, they durst not follow their own 
 counsel against the preacher of truth. They knew his wondrous 
 power over the minds of the people, the gi'eat esteem in which he 
 was held, and his amazing popularity. These things held them 
 in check. His temperate although firm demeanour, at the same 
 time afforded no ground to justify interference. He was faithful 
 in the discharge of aU the duties of his office, he precipitated 
 nothing, but awaited the sure operation of the Word of God, pro- 
 claimed with a full and living conviction, to produce through the 
 renovation of the heart that true reformation in things external 
 which he longed for. At length an event, in the beginning of 
 the year 1522, gave the bishop and his vicar the opportunity 
 they desired of openly interfering against Zwingli. 
 
 Zwingli took occasion to maintain, in expounding from the 
 4th chapter of the 1st Epistle to Timothy, verses 1-5, that fasts 
 
58 EEFOEMATION OP ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES.- 
 
 appointed by the Church, in which certain meats were forbidden 
 to be eaten at certain times, a release from which Could only be 
 obtained by donations to the Church, had no foundation in the 
 Word of God, but were directly contrary to it. Instructed by 
 these discourses of Zwingli, some of the citizens and inhabitants 
 of Zurich allowed themselves the liberty of eating butcher-meat 
 at the fast^season. These were in part sober, worthy men, such 
 as Christoffel Froschauer, the printer, a Bavarian, who partook of 
 this diet quietly without ostentation, and purely out of convic- 
 tion that it was no sin, and as a matter of necessity to strengthen 
 him for the duties of a rather laborious calling. Others, however, 
 such as the expelled priest from Basle, William Eoubli, did it in 
 sheer wantonness, and with much vaunting and boasting, and in 
 order to make an open break with ecclesiastical customs and 
 institutions. Zwingli approved of the conduct of the former 
 class of fast-transgressors, but severely blamed that of the latter. 
 Upon this the monks and the war-party raised a great outcry 
 against the faithful preacher of the Word, alleging that he was 
 undermining the established order in church and state. The 
 war-party were deeply offended by the following passage in 
 Zwingli's discourse, — " Many think that to eat flesh is improper, 
 nay, a sin, although God has nowhere forbidden it ; but to sell 
 human flesh for slaughter and carnage they hold to be no sin at 
 all." The Council of Zurich made an inquiry into the infraction 
 of the fast-laws, and called the delinquents before them. Chris- 
 toffel Froschauer defended himself with propriety of demeanour, 
 and, along with his associates, was dismissed with an exhortation 
 and a reproof This result gave no satisfaction to the enemies of 
 Zwingli, whose object was to silence the preacher of the truth. 
 
 On the 7th of April 1522 there came a delegation to Zurich 
 from the Bishop of Constance, consisting of his suffragan Mel- 
 chior Bottli, Dr. Brendli, and the cathedral-preacher John Wan- 
 ner, a man of evangelical opinions, to act in this affair in the 
 name of the bishop. The whole clergy of Zurich were summoned 
 the next morning into the hall of the chapter. Here the suffra- 
 gan-bishop spoke in a very excited, violent, and haughty man- 
 ner, but without mentioning Zwingli's name in his speech, 
 although the whole of it had reference to him alone. As soon 
 as he had ended Zwingli arose, conceiving it to be unworthy of 
 
REFORMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 59 
 
 liim and pusillanimous not to answer a speech whicli might 
 have pernicious consequences, and the more so, from the evident 
 impression it made upon part of the audience, which impression 
 manifested itself in the sighs and pale cheeks of certain priests 
 who had been lately won over to the Gospel, but were not very 
 securely anchored in it. " Pithily and bluntly I answered the 
 suffragan," he relates himself, " in what sense and spirit let those 
 worthy men judge who heard me that day. The suffragan let 
 go this wing, as if he had been beaten and put to flight, and 
 hastened to another battle-field, to the town-haU namely, where 
 he, as I heard from some of the councillors themselves, gave vent 
 to the very same language against me, without, however, naming 
 me, saying, and this he said that I might not be called before them, 
 he had nothing to do with me." The majority of the Little Council 
 of Zurich then was composed of the enemies of the Gospel; that 
 of the Great Council consisted of its friends. Zwingh's friends 
 prevailed in getting the matter brought before the Great Council 
 on the following day, but his enemies, in giving their consent to 
 this, annexed the condition that the Leut-priests should not be 
 admitted, as the matter did not concern them, and an incaptious 
 address, void of all personality, did not require either answer or 
 contradiction. It was in vain that Zwingli, during the whole 
 day, employed every means in his power to obtain admission. 
 The burgomasters refused it, appealing to the decision of the 
 Little Council " I was obhged to give up," he writes, " and lay 
 the matter before Him who hears the groaning of the prisoner, 
 and pray Him to defend His own Gospel. Patient waiting has 
 never disappointed the servants of the Lord." It was on the 9th 
 that the Great Council met. " It is unfair," said many, " that 
 the Leut-priests are not allowed to appear." But the little 
 Council maintained their opposition, and pointed to their resolu- 
 tion. The vote was taken upon their objection, and the majority 
 decided that the Leut-priests should be present, and should also 
 have the right of answering, if they found it necessary to do so. 
 After the Constantian deputies had been introduced, " the Zurich- 
 ian bishops" were called, Huldreich Zwingli, Henry Engelhard, 
 Leut-priests ia the Frauen Minster, and Rudolf Eoeschli of St. 
 Peter's. The Suifragan began his speech in a voice so soft and 
 winning that a sweeter never was heard, and one might have 
 
60 EEFOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 
 
 fancied, had heart and head been in unison, he was about to sur- 
 pass the greatest poets and orators in smooth and gracious elo^ 
 quence. " It is much to be lamented," said he, " that some con- 
 tentious and dangerous men teach that human institutions and 
 rites are no more to be jegarded. In this manner, not only civil 
 laws, but Christianity itself, is threatened with ruin. Are not 
 ceremonies a manduction" — (this Latin word the suffragan em- 
 ■ ployed, instead of the corresponding German one, to men quite 
 ignorant of Latin) — "a manduction," he said, "to virtue? Nay, 
 might they not with propriety be called the origin of the virtues? 
 Now, however, it is taught that fasting is superfluous, because, 
 forsooth, some had dared to separate themselves, by the eating 
 of flesh, from other Christians, and from the Church. An appeal 
 is made by these people to holy Scripture, although Scripture 
 gives no express opinion on the subject, while they act against 
 the decrees and councils of the holy fathers of the Church, and 
 against venerated customs, which, without the aid of the Holy 
 Ghost, had never endured so long as they have done, for Gamaliel 
 himself said, 'If it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it.'" He 
 then reminded the Council, that out of the Church none could be 
 saved. He concluded with an ornate peroration, and having done 
 so, arose with hife friends to depart. " My lord," said Zwingli, 
 " may it please your lordship and your friends to remain till, 
 in the name of myself and colleagues, I have justified myself." 
 Suffragan : " We have no commission to commence a disputation 
 with any one." Zwingli: "Nor is such my wish. All that I 
 desire is, that I may now have the pleasure of delivering, before 
 you learned men and representatives of our ecclesiastical supe- 
 riors, that which I have preached to the honourable citizens who 
 are here present, that you may be enabled to give a trustworthy 
 report as to whether you have found my doctrine true or false." 
 Suffragan : " We have not spoken against you, you are therefore 
 under no necessity to justify yourself" Zwingli: " Without 
 doubt you have abstained from mentioning my name, but your 
 invectives were directed against me. You speak to me hke the 
 sea-fighter, who said, ' Not thee I strike, but the fish.'* It appears 
 you have not mentioned my name, that you might, in a very 
 smooth and polished manner, lay to the charge of one called 
 * Non te Galle peto, piscem peto. 
 
KEFOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 61 
 
 Zwingli, the greatest crimes." The burgomaster Eoist begged 
 the Constantian deputies to remara, and to hear the Leut-priest. 
 The Suffragan replied : " I know well to what this will lead. 
 Huldreich Zwingli is too uimieasured and violent in his language 
 for any one to commit himself in dispute with him." Zwingli : 
 " In what, pray, have I at any time given offence to you, and 
 how shall I characterize your conduct, you, who accuse in vehe- 
 ment langTiage an innocent man, who has done good service to 
 the cause of Christianity, and who yet refuse to hear him in his 
 own defence ? What would you do, think you, if in your absence 
 I appealed to the Council, avoided you, would no more of you 
 for judges ? Now that I do nothing of this sort, that I even 
 desire your presence to give an account of my faith and my doc- 
 trine, how can you be so unreasonable as to refuse to hear me ? 
 But if reason will not induce you to grant me this, then I entreat 
 you, in the name of our common faith, our common baptism, for 
 the sake of our common Eedeemer, that ye do it to oblige me, 
 and if, as episcopal deputies, ye caimot sit still, yet do it as 
 Christians." A general murmur of disapprobation arose in the 
 Council at the demeanour of the suffragan. This general dis- 
 satisfaction, and an appeal from the burgomaster, compelled the 
 deputies to resume their places. Zwingli began his defence: 
 "My lord sufitagan has said that certain individuals advance 
 erroneous and seditious doctrines. Although he did not mention 
 me by name, it is yet clear he designed me as much as if he had 
 named me, who have been here in Zurich for about four years, 
 preaching the Gospel of Jesus, and the doctrine of the apostles, 
 with the sweat of my brow. It is no matter of surprise to me 
 that those who bind themselves to human traditions do not agree 
 with those who reject them. Christ has plainly prophesied this. 
 (Matt. X. 34.) Yet Zurich is more quiet and peaceful than any 
 other town in the Confederacy, and this all good citizens ascribe 
 to the GospeL In respect of the second reproach, namely, that 
 we teach, institutions and ceremonies are not to be observed, I 
 candidly confess that I wish a great part of them abolished. Many 
 of these institutions are like those of which Peter himself speaks 
 in the Acts of the Apostles, that they are burdens which can- 
 not be borne. However, I have never held the opiaion that 
 we are neither to make nor to keep human institutions. Who 
 
62 KEFOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 
 
 will not submit with joy to that which is accepted by the uni- 
 versal consent of the whole of Christendom? Who, on the contrary, 
 will not reject with abhorrence the traditions of certain belly- 
 servers who, like the Pharisees, lay intolerable burdens on the 
 people which they themselves will not touch with one of their 
 fingers? To excite the Council against me, the Suffragan has 
 farther said it will soon come to pass that civil laws wdl not be 
 obeyed. This is contradicted by the whole doctrine of Christ 
 and, the Apostles. Christ has said, ' Eender to Caesar that which 
 is Cajsar's ;' and the Apostles, ' Give every man that which is due, 
 and be subject to your superiors, not only to the good and gentle 
 but also to the froward.' Is not then Christianity the best safe- 
 guard of the general security? Let it be admitted, however, that 
 ceremonies were all abolished, would Christianity thereby cease 
 to exist? The people can be led by another path than by cere- 
 monies to the knowledge of the truth, even by the path which 
 Christ and the Apostles pursued. Nor is there any ground at all 
 to fear that the people cannot comprehend the Gospel. He who 
 believes understands it. The people can believe, they can also 
 understand. This is a work of the Holy Spirit, not of human 
 reason, as Christ says, Matt. xi. 25 ; and Paul, 1 Cor. i. 27. Be- 
 sides, I have at no time or place maintained that the forty days 
 fast should not be observed. For my part one may fast the wl^ole 
 year if he have not enough in the forty days ; oidy I hold that 
 fasts should not be imposed on any one by the threat of excom- 
 munication, but that every one should be left to use his own 
 liberty ia this matter." Zwingli then proved by Mark vii. 15, 
 and especially by 1 Tim. iv. 3, 4, that compulsory obligations 
 to fast were not founded in Holy Scripture, but, on the contrary, 
 were opposed to it. The Suffragan in reply, addressed the Coun- 
 cil in a speech fall of unction, exhorting them, as they valued 
 their salvation, not to separate themselves from the Church, 
 out of which there was no salvation. Zwingli replied: "Do not 
 let yourselves, dear brethren and fellow-citizens, be brought to 
 believe that ye have separated yourselves from the Church. Bear 
 in mind only that which I told you in my exposition of Matthew, 
 that even the same rock which gave the name of Peter to the 
 true disciple, who knew his Lord, is the corner-stone of the Church 
 Among every people and in every place, he who calls on the 
 
EEFOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. G3 
 
 nameiof the Lord, and in heart believes that God raised Christ from 
 the dead, will be saved. It is certain no man can be saved out 
 of that Church to whieh we all the more surely belong, the more 
 sujely we rejoice in the hope of a glorious inheritance among the 
 saints." The Suffragan remarked, it was the duty of the Leut- 
 priests to explain to the people the significance of the ceremonies. 
 Zwingli replied: " No, mine is the duty to preach Clirist faithfully 
 as I have done hitherto. As for the ceremonies, let them explain 
 them that live by them."* After a short debate, the Suffragan 
 deemed it advisable to be silent, and withdrew. The mission had 
 entirely faUed of its object. 
 
 Dr. "Wanner, a member of the deputation, was so convinced of 
 the soundness of Zwingli's doctrine, that out of a minion of the 
 bishop, he became a faithful preacher of the Gospel. Zwingli 
 not only was not put to sUence or defeated, but he had vigorously 
 repelled the attacks of his adversaries with the sword of the Spirit. 
 In reference to the result of this conflict, he wrote to his friend 
 Myconius ; "I so answered them, that it is generally said in Zurich, 
 they will never again bring together their routed forces, or lead 
 them with success into a new combat. Yet I hear they intend to 
 renew it. Let them come ; with God I fear them as little as the 
 beetling cliif fears the waves that thunder at its base." After the 
 above proceedings, the Council resolved to request the bishop, by 
 letter, that he would be pleased to employ his influence with the 
 pope and the cardinals, as also with the bishops, synods, and with 
 Christian men of learning generally, that they might give some 
 solution of the points in debate, so that the people might know 
 how they were to act. The Little Council, in whom lay the exe- 
 cutive, having punished in the meanwhile, by fine, some trans- 
 gressions of the fast>-laws, Zwingli feared the people might regard 
 this as a condenmation of his doctrine. To prevent this result, 
 he wrote and published through the printing-press, a small work 
 on " The Abstaining from and. Partaking of Meats, Offence-Giv- 
 ing, and Strife;" in which he endeavoured, on the one hand, to 
 prove that compxdsory fasting was contrary to reason and Scrip- 
 ture ; while on the other hand, he pressed on the hearts and con- 
 
 * With these words Zwingli purposely, but without being too plain in his allu- 
 sion, touched the Suffragan on a sore point. " For is it not notorious that the 
 Suffragans fill their purses by the mummeries performed at their consecrations? " 
 says he, in one of his writings. 
 
64 REFORMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 
 
 sciences of the more advanced in Christian knowledge the duty 
 of abstaining from giving to the weaker in the faith any offence 
 by an untimely transgression of the fast-laws. " The eating of 
 flesh has been," says he in his little work, " at no time forbidden 
 by any Divine commandment. But if thy neighbour feel him- 
 self hurt and offended thereby, thou oughtest not to do it without 
 necessity, until he be confirmed in the faith. Is he confirmed, 
 then thou mayest eat quietly even before him of all and every 
 sort of meats ; is he not, then thou oughtest to share his weakness, 
 so long as it is actually weakness. For Paul says: 'But if thy 
 brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou not charit- 
 ably. Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died.' 
 -Eom. xiv. 15, and, ' For meat destroy not the work of God,' v. 20. 
 Again, he says, ' Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I 
 will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother 
 to offend,' (1 Cor. viii. 13). As long as thy brother is weak, and 
 so to say a minor, he must be tenderly dealt with. Is he no 
 longer weak, yet must he be again spared if thy eating cause dis- 
 turbance. For thou art not, for the food's sake, to destroy the 
 work of God ; that is, we are not, for the sake of freedom in 
 meats, to cause that the Gospel should give offence. If, however, 
 in an enlightened community we can eat of the meats without 
 giving offence and causing dispeace, let it be done. For, surely, 
 it will never come to such a pass in this world, that what is right 
 and good will please all men ; there will always be some ready 
 to rise up in rebellion against it ; yet our duty is to dp the things 
 which make for peace." The influence which this admirable 
 treatise, written in a Christian spirit as mild as it was decided, 
 exercised on the minds of men, both far and near, was very great. 
 The enemies of the Gospel saw that they had not a moment to 
 lose, if they were to overcome the most dangerous opponent which 
 human doctrines and traditions had yet encountered. The plan 
 was forthwith devised of making an attack on him from four dif-* 
 ferent quarters at once, and it was confidently hoped he would 
 fall before a united onset. 
 
 The first who came forward in conformity with this design 
 was the aged Canon, Conrad Hoffmann, who handed to the 
 chapter a long accusatory writing against the reformer. " Even," 
 said he on this occasion, " should the parson be able to prove, by 
 
EEFOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTIC! AL ABUSES. Go 
 
 witnesses, what misdemeanoxirs or crimes are committed by the 
 clei^y in this or that cloister, in this or that street, or in this or 
 that tavern, it is no business of his to name any one. Why gives 
 he it to be understood, (I, for my part, have scarcely ever heard 
 him preach), that he alone draws his doctrine from the fountain- 
 head, the others only out of pools and ditches? The spirits 
 are different, and all preachers carmot preach the same things." 
 Zwingli justified himself at a meeting of the chapter with such 
 success that Hoffinann was obliged to draw off discomfited. " I 
 gave him," Zwingli writes to Myconius, " a shaking, such as an 
 ox, when, with its horns, it tosses a heap of chaff up in the air." 
 The other ships of war came out of the Episcopal harbour of 
 Constance itself 
 
 The bishop led the way, and issued, on the 2d of May, a pas- 
 toral letter to the clergy of his diocese, in which he complained, 
 without naming either Zurich or Zwingli, that designing men, 
 at the very time that the Turks were falling on the Christians 
 sword in hand, were spreading their damnable heresies over the 
 land, and that learned and unlearned men were everywhere con- 
 tending upon divine things,- — upon the holiest and sublimest mys- 
 teries, upon the honour to be shewn to God, and the rites and 
 ceremonies of the Church. The clergy were exhorted to be 
 instant in prayer to God, that His Almighty power would 
 put a stop to the "hardened iniquity of the perverse." This 
 document, which came from the pen of Faber, was framed for the 
 purpose of weakening, or indeed of altogether ruining Zwingli's 
 reputation among the people. That Zwingli and his friends, 
 however, might be annihilated at once, the Bishop of Lausanne 
 issued at the same time a like circular to the clergy of his diocese. 
 The monks in Berne announced, in consequence of this letter, that 
 to all who read the books of Zwingli or of Luther, or who either 
 in public or in secret spoke against the holy rites and customs 
 of the Church, they would, in the hour of death, refuse the holy 
 Sacraments, they would exclude them from Christian burial, and 
 the supplications of Christendom, and so on. But the poisoned 
 dart that was to strike Zwingli recoiled upon those who dis- 
 charged it, and wounded them in a manner the most acute. Dr. 
 Sebastian Meier, a Franciscan monk in Berne, annexed a com- 
 mentary to the pastoral letter, sentence for sentence, which be 
 
 D* 
 
66 EEFOEMATION OF ECCajESIASTICAL ABpSES. 
 
 published anonymously. ZwingU procured its publication in 
 Zurich just after he had issued from the press his own defence of 
 himself, and attack of his enemies, which is mentioned belov/. 
 In what spirit Meier's exposition of the episcopal letter was 
 drawn up, the following extract will shew : " Behold, dear reader, 
 the Turk is again at the door. Ye papists must needs sell indul- 
 gences, and drive him off. Ah ! for many a year he has been, to 
 you a good Turk ; has he not brought much into your larder, 
 given a great impetus to your luxury ? But, alas ! absolution 
 will now avail nothing, — ^the trick is discovered. What is to be 
 done ? How is the Turk to be driven off? Or rather. How are 
 the princes to be maintained ? For mark, this is the great point; 
 it is here the shoe pinches. But now they really tremble be/ore 
 the Turk. As long, however, as he lay like a stone on the neck 
 of the King of Hungary, they gave themselves no concern about 
 him. But now when he is marching into Italy, he comes too 
 near. Now they have for many long years cheated the world by 
 absolution, and a thousand other impostures, and without doubt 
 have heaped up an immense treasure, as also the Johannite order, 
 that for many a year has certainly carried on no war against the 
 Turk. Wliere is this treasure ? Of what use are troopers to the 
 bishops ? Is it to ride about the highways and terrify the mer- 
 chants, so that the money drops out of their purses, from sheer ter- 
 ror, into the hands of those to whom it does not rightfully belong? 
 Nay, let this aU as well as the rich abbeys be employed against 
 the Titrk ! The warhke bishops, cardinals, priests, and cowardly 
 monies, that are to be seen on every road with their long swords, 
 — off with them, — send them aU against the Turks. With these 
 you have money and men enough, and need not torment honest 
 folks, and empty their purses. This all, dear reader, I have been 
 forced to say, from seeing them braving us with the Turks, with 
 which enemy they have often already terrified simple Christians.; 
 dream not they mean it haK so earnestly as they appear to do 
 about these same Turks; their princely state is all they care 
 for." With a sharp eye and an unsparing weapon the ecclesias,-* 
 tical abuses, especially as connected with the episcopal courts, 
 were detected and laid bare, following the thread of the pastoral 
 letter, and illustrated with examples. This publication had the 
 greater effect from following closely on the one of Zwingli's, bear. 
 
EEFOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 07 
 
 iug the title of ' Archeteles,' (the Beginning and the End,) and 
 which he wrote to defend himself against his enemies. 
 
 On the 24ith of May the third attack was made upon Zwingli, 
 and again from the quarter of the Episcopal Court. A document, 
 drawn up at great length by Faber, w^as sent to the provost and 
 Chapter, and in it they were called upon by the Bishop " to be on 
 their guard against the poison of the new teachers, who complain 
 of the multitude of ceremonies, and with vigour to oppose those 
 who set themselves against the old customs of the Church." The 
 Bishop refers again to the circumstance that the heads of Chris- 
 tendom, the Pope and the Emperor, had publicly condemned the 
 new doctrines as dangerous and seditious.* " They are therefore 
 to take all measures that the same be not preached, and neither 
 in public nor in private disputed upon." The Chapter were here 
 pretty plainly called upon, as the electors and immediate supe- 
 riors of the Leut-priest, to proceed to his removal and dismissal. 
 It was expected this end would be the more easily reached, from 
 the known hostility of some of its members to him. Accordingly, 
 when the document came to be read in their meeting, all the 
 canons turned their eyes in silence upon Zwingli, who forthwith 
 rose and said: " I read in your looks you are of opinion this writ- 
 ing is directed against me. I am of the same opinion myself, 
 and have therefore to request that it be delivered to me. With 
 the help of God I shall so answer it, that the duplicity of these 
 men shall be laid bare and the truth made known." Zwingli 
 answered the document in the publication already mentioned, 
 consisting of nine and a half sheets of letter-press, and which 
 bore the title of 'the Beginning and the End,' because he hoped it 
 would be the first and last defence it would be necessary for him 
 to make against his enemies. He had the pastoral letter pub- 
 lished at the same time, and answered it sentence by sentence. -f- 
 Ascribing the evil counsels taken against the gospel to the 
 advisers of the bishop, he writes of the bishop himself in terms 
 of the greatest respect. "In conclusion," he says, "renounce 
 such counsellors, and all connection with them, else you will 
 
 * By the outlawry and excommunication of Luther. 
 
 t Zwingli's Archeteles had been written and printed before the answer of 
 Meier to the pastoral letter of the Bishop, and the latter had copied Zwingli's 
 plan. We have made reference to Meier's production first, because the Bishop's 
 letter appeared before the one to the Chapter. 
 
68 REFORMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 
 
 become a laughing-stock to the world. For what Scripture 
 teaches is no more to be learned only from the mouths of the 
 priests ; the people themselves know it. Not authority, hut 
 reason and a pious mind must lead us, else we shall effect as 
 little as Paul when he kicked against the pricks. Not to speak 
 of the almighty power of God, the zeal for the gospel has now 
 gained such strength that it can neither be put to sleep, nor sup- 
 pressed by the contemptible labours of a few isolated indivi- 
 duals ; and supposing malignity should succeed in smothering 
 for a time this flame of zeal, the fire would only break out with 
 greater violence at an after period. Be wise and cautious, and 
 entreat the Lord that he may guide your footsteps. Zwingli 
 himself prays : ' blessed Jesus, Thou seest that the ears of Thy 
 people are stopped by whisperers, traitors, self-seekers. Thou 
 knowest how T have, from childhood, shunned this conflict, and 
 that even yet Thou leadest me on to the fight. I call to Thee, 
 in trust that Thou wouldest accomplish what Thou hast begun. 
 If I have built up anything wrongly, then, Lord, overthrow it 
 with Thine Almighty hand. If I lay another foundation than 
 Thyself, tear it down. sweet Vine ! whose vine-dresser the 
 Father is, whose branches we are, leave not Thy supporters. For 
 Thou hast promised to be with us to the end of the world.'" 
 
 In this manner, this third attack of Faber's was so repulsed 
 that it redounded to the glory of the gospel. Hummelberger, 
 parson in Eevensburg, wrote to Zwingli, under date the 1st Sep- 
 tember : " Your Archeteles was right welcome. I was especially 
 pleased at the manner in which you handled that hypocritical 
 Caiaphas (Faber) according to his merits, and sketched him to 
 the life. Such people, who will not themselves cleanse out the 
 filth, must be subjected to the operation of a sharp ley. Well 
 satisfied with themselves, they must sometimes hear what is said 
 of them by others, that, if possible, they may amend their ways. 
 Henceforward the serpent, if wise, will no longer hiss, the frog 
 quack, or the idle gossip talk nonsense in the streets. As soon 
 as I received my copy and read it, I despatched it to Wittemberg, 
 to Melanchton and Blarer ; I sent another to our friends at 
 Augsburg, that they might see what new zeal has sprung up ia 
 Zurich for Christianity ; the grace of God again shaking its locks 
 out of its deep sleep." 
 
REFORMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 69 
 
 But we hasten to detail the incidents of the fourth attack, 
 which was made from Constance, simultaneously with the last. 
 Faber and Landenherg applied to the Diet, the highest temporal 
 power in the Confederacy. This body contained within itself an 
 overwhelming majority of the friends of foreign mercenary service 
 and pensions, and the enemies of the gospel. Zwingli especially, 
 on accormt of his patriotic labours above described, was an object 
 of their bitterest hostility. Accordingly, when delegates from 
 the bishop appeared at Lucerne, before the assembled Diet, on the 
 27th May 1522, lodging a complaint against the adherents of the 
 new doctrine and the preacher of Zurich, they found a very ready 
 hearing. The motion was immediately put and caiTied; "in 
 name of the Confederacy to instruct the priests, whose sermons 
 produced disunion and disturbance among the people, to desist 
 from such preaching." Sorely as this resolution annoyed Zwin- 
 gli, he did not aUow himself to be discouraged by it, or to relax 
 in his zeal in the cause of Christ. These combined attacks upon 
 the gospel and its preaching, by licentious monks, and a degene- 
 rate, selfish, and worldly-minded episcopate, backed by all the 
 venal members of the Diet in the pay and attached to the inter- 
 est of foreign powers, only animated him to fresh exertions. 
 
 He heard in the brewing storm the voice of God calling to him 
 more distinctly than ever, to uphold the sacred banner of the 
 truth, and display it not only from the pulpit of the Zurich 
 Minster, but to wave it before the whole Confederacy. The first 
 thing, in his opinion, to be done was to unite the friends of the 
 gospel against " the rulers taking counsel together against the Lord 
 and against his anointed" (Psalm ii. 2,) that so, in many places, and 
 by many witnesses, divine truth might be proclaimed, and its testi- 
 mony confirmed. Accordingly, he called together, at Einsiedeln, 
 a number of the evangelical clergy, on the 2d, and on the 13th 
 of June 1522, and laid before them for signature two petitions 
 which he had himself drawn up, one in the German language, 
 addressed to the Diet of the Confederacy, and another in Latin, 
 addressed to the Bishop of Constance. The petitions were different 
 in form, but in substance the same, and prayed, "that the preach- 
 ing of the gospel might not be forbidden, and that it might be 
 permitted to the priests to marry." 
 
 In the one to the Diet the wish was first of aU expressed that 
 
70 EEFOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 
 
 the like thing might happen to them as to the Council at 
 Athens under the preaching of Paul. (Acts, xvii.) At first they 
 wondered at the new things they heard, but afterwards many 
 being instructed believed on Christ. " We hear, too, how there 
 are some amongst you who have allowed yourselves to be per- 
 suaded that the preaching of the gospel is an innovation, else 
 certainly no one in the whole Confederacy had dared to set him- 
 self against the Word of God." A concise and clear exposition 
 of the principal doctrines of the gospel follows, as we find m 
 Part II., Book II., chap. i. " This evangelical doctrine, however, 
 must be drawn wholly from its fountains, from the writings of 
 the evangelists and apostles, the patriarchs and prophets, and not 
 from the inventions and traditions of men, which may be likened 
 to stagnant pools and ditches of impure water. As every one, 
 however, may not be able to judge which preacher draws from the 
 source, and which from the pools and ditches, we shall here pro- 
 duce a description of both. The preacher, whose continual aim 
 and labour it is that the will, the doctrine, and the mind of 
 God be made known, and His glory advanced ; whose care it is to 
 rouse sinners to repentance, and to quiet the awakened conscience; 
 who looks not to his own honour or advancement, or to any 
 worldly interest; who holds wholly to the Scriptures, he is with- 
 out doubt like-minded with Christ, who sought not His own but 
 ours. But he who litigates with his flock about this world's 
 goods, who preaches nothing but payment of tithes and dues to 
 the Church, who finds out daily new saints to make offerings to, 
 who recommends and extols the absolution, who fills his sermons 
 with exaltation of the spiritual power and dignity, above aU, 
 commends the Papal authority, the man who thus acts and 
 preaches, it is to be feared, has much more at heart the interests 
 of this world than the honour of God and the salvation of souls. 
 If there be among you those who cannot bear that their arrogance 
 be deprived of that which it feeds upon, and who would persuade 
 you to forbid the preaching of the gospel, or to command it to be 
 preached in such a way that it neither offends any one nor dis- 
 covers prevailing vices, lend these people, I beseech you, no ear, 
 for if you do, ye will fall under the displeasure of Almighty God. 
 It is sad and melancholy enough when the carnal man wiH not 
 let himself be put right by other men, but infinitely worse is it if 
 
EEFOEMATION OP ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 71 
 
 the man will not heax God, for he thereby proves clearly that he 
 is not of God. Certain it is, the Word of God has never been 
 rejected and disregarded with impunity. For the rest, we must 
 foUow the example of the apostles of the Lord, when the High 
 Council forbade them to preach Christ ; we, too, are justified 
 in saying, we ought to obey God rather than men" (Acts 
 V. 29.) In the second part of the petition, ZwinglL avows, with 
 the greatest candour, that nothing has more hindered the progress 
 of the gospel than " the immorality and unchastity of the clergy. 
 Your honours know the scandalous lives led by us in respect to 
 unlawful intercourse with women, by which we have roused the 
 indignation of the world ; the fiery blood of youth, which none, 
 without the special grace of God, might overcome, was partly the 
 cause ; principally, however, they are to blame for these excesses, 
 who, although they saw that no man could maintain his vows, 
 and they themselves, as God well knows, least of all, yet would 
 not have this hypocritical pretence of compulsory celibacy done 
 away with." He then proceeds to prove the propriety of priestly 
 marriage, by clear passages from Scripture, as well as by exam- 
 ples and precedents taken from the ancient ChurcL He con- 
 cludes : "We are all Swiss ; you are our fathers. Many of us have 
 shewn ourselves to be true men in battle, iu pestilence, and in 
 other public calamities. We speak in the name of true chastity ; 
 we might indulge the lusts of the flesh more by not subjecting 
 ourselves to the restraints of marriage. But the scandals in the 
 Christian Church must cease. If Eomish tyranny shoiild oppress 
 us, fear not, honourable and brave men, the Word of God and 
 Christian freedom are worth contending for, and Divine grace 
 will not fail us. AVe have one native country, one faith; we are 
 Swiss ; and the virtue of our illustrious ancestors ever displayed 
 itself iu the indomitable defence of all the oppressed. God 
 give you such a spirit ; for truly we swear to you, before God, 
 that such win be to your honour, and to our salvation. May 
 the Lord be with you. Amen." This petition was presented by 
 Zwingli, in the name of all the friends assembled at Einsiedeln. 
 
 The petition to the Bishop of Constance was signed as well by 
 those present as by other friends of evangelical truth in Switzer- 
 land. In this document they tell the bishop : " The divine teach- 
 ing, the truth which God the Creator hath revealed through His 
 
72 EEFOEMATION OF ECCLESIASTICAL ABUSES. 
 
 Son to mankind, when they were sunk in misery, has been cor- 
 rupted and defaced at one time by the ignorance, at another by 
 the malignity of men. God has resolved to give it to mankind 
 in its original purity. Unite yourselves to those who desire that 
 the whole of Christendom may return to Christ, their common 
 Head. We have resolved to preach His Gospel unceasingly, and 
 so that no one can complain. Forward this strange but yet not 
 rash design. Advance like Moses in the exodus out of Egypt, 
 at the head of the people, and overthrow all obstacles which 
 oppose the victorious progress of the truth." In the second part 
 of the petition they say : " We pray thee for Christ's sake, by the 
 infirmities of many weak vacillating souls, by the wounds of many 
 sick consciences, by every consideration, human and divine, 
 grant the abolition of that which has rather been brought in by 
 stealth than by design. See to it, that the building which has 
 been erected, in contradiction of the will of God, do not tumble 
 in pieces with a terrible crash. The world is exposed to many 
 storms ; without wise measures the priesthood will be over- 
 whelmed." Little as was the influence which this petition 
 exerted on those to whom it was addressed, it still produced 
 great effects among the lower orders of clergy and the people. 
 It became a banner, round which the friends of divine truth and 
 of the rights of conscience leagued in one covenant, that disap- 
 pointed all the schemes of combined iniquity. On the 15th of 
 August of this year, the chapter of the canton of Zurich, which 
 comprised the clergy from the sources of the Linth to the junction 
 of the Limath with the Eeuss, met and made the great spiritual 
 movement of the times a chief topic of debate. By Zwingh's 
 influence, this ecclesiastical assembly unanimously adopted the 
 following resolution, " to preach nothing but what is contained 
 in the Word of God." 
 
 The Eeformer had thus won a glorious victory. He had, 
 through an honest proclamation of the divine message to fallen 
 man, of whose truth he had in his own heart felt the conviction, 
 emancipated the conscience from the fetters of human traditions, 
 and raised it to the joyful obedience of faith. " We must obey 
 God rather than men," became the watch-word in Zurich, and was 
 adopted by the greater part of the S\A'iss clergy. 
 
FIEST EELATION TO LUTHEK. 73 
 
 4. ZWINGLI'S FlKST EeLATION TO LUTHEB. 
 
 About the same time that God called Huldreich Zwingli, in 
 Switzerland, to be a chosen instrument in the reformation of His 
 Church according to its original purity and design, Martin 
 Luther, in Wittemberg, was stirred up by His Spirit to engage in 
 the same work. Both of these distinguished men stood upon the 
 same ground ; both recognising the alone way of salvation in faith 
 on Jesus Christ, and the alone directory of faith and practice in 
 the Word of God; yet the ray of divine truth reflected itself dif- 
 ferently in the minds of the two Eeformers, and shone with a dif- 
 ferent glory in each, -^n Luther's character, actions, and writings, 
 the Spirit of God manifests itself at one time impetuous and 
 vehement, like the awful tempest roaring in a forest of German 
 oaks, and shaking violently its lofty trees ; at another time, soft 
 and gentle like the zephyr, whispering mysteriously and sweetly, 
 and scarcely agitating the leaves. 'On the soul of Zwingli, the 
 Spirit of Truth arose in calm majesty like the sun, slowly and 
 majestically climbing the blue cerulean over some Swiss moun- 
 tain; he stood immovable in all the storms that surrounded him, 
 like one of his native mountains, when the tempest swathes it 
 round with its girdle of horrors, or the avalanche leaps from its 
 sides into the abysses. < In reply to the question, wliich of these 
 two men of God is the greater, the answer holds good, that great- 
 ness in the kingdom of God is not measured as we measure 
 worldly greatness. Both acknowledged themselves in humility 
 " only by grace to be what they were ;" both were prepared joy- 
 fully to drink of the cup of suffering which their Master had 
 drained to the dregs ; both to be baptised vsdth the baptism with 
 which He was baptised. (Matt. xx. 22.) After Luther had been 
 proclaimed a heretic by the Pope and excommunicated, it was 
 conceived that the speediest means of getting rid of Zwingli was 
 to caU him the scholar and imitator of Luther. This induced him 
 to speak out more plainly regarding his relations to the great 
 German Eeformer. " I began," says he, " before a single indivi- 
 dual in our part of the country even heard of the name of Luthev. 
 to preach the gospel; this was in the year 1-516. Who called me 
 
74 FIBST EBLATION TO LUTHEE. 
 
 then a Lutheran? When Luther's Exposition of the Lord's 
 Prayer appeared, it so happened that I had shortly before preached 
 from Matthew on the same prayer. Well, some good folks, who 
 everywhere found my thoughts ia Luther's work, would hardly 
 let themselves he made to believe that I had not written this 
 book myself ; they fancied that, being afraid to put my own name 
 to it, I had set that of Luther's iustead. Who called me then a 
 follower of Luther? Then, how comes it that the Eomish Car- 
 dinals and Legates, who were at that very time in Zurich, never 
 reproached me as Lutheran, until they had declared Luther a here- 
 tic, which however they could never make him ? When they had 
 branded him a heretic, it was then for the first tinie they exclaimed, 
 I was Lutheran ; although Luther's name was entirely unknown 
 to me during these two years that I kept to the Bible alone. But 
 it is part of their cunning policy to load me and others with this 
 name. Do they say: You must be Lutheran for you preach as 
 Luther ; I answer, I preach too as Paul writes, why not call me a 
 Paulean? Nay ; I preach the Word of Christ, why not much rather 
 call me a Christian? In my opinion Luther is one of God's 
 chosen heralds and combatants, who searches the Scriptures with 
 greater zeal than has been done by any man on earth for the last 
 thousand years. What care I that the Papists call me along with 
 him a heretic ? Not one, so long as the popedom has lasted, has 
 attacked it with the same manly immovable soul as he has done; 
 and this I say without offence to others. But whose act is this? 
 God's or Luther's? Ask Luther himself; without doubt he will 
 tell you God's. Why then do you ascribe the doctrine which 
 other men teach, to Luther, seeing that he himself ascribes it to 
 God ; that he advances nothing new, nothing but that which is 
 contained in the eternal unchangeable Word of God. It is this 
 that he richly forwards to the light of day; thereby he makes 
 known to poor wandering Christians their heavenly treasure, and 
 values as little what the enemies of God dare do against it, as he 
 does their malignant looks and angry threats. Yet I shall not 
 bear Luther's name, for I have read but little of his doctrine, and 
 have purposely abstained from a perusal of his books. What 
 however of his writings I have seen, ia so far as these concern 
 the doctrines and thoughts of Scripture, this, ta my opiaion, is so 
 well proved and established in them, that it will be no easy 
 
FmST BBLATION TO LUTHEE. 75 
 
 iask for any man to overthrow it. I know that in some things 
 he yields much to the weak ; for example, in his small work upon 
 the Ten Lepers he yields something, as I have been told, to the 
 confessional, giving it to be understood that one ought to present 
 himself before the priest, although this cannot be educed from 
 the narrative. But to those who obstinately close their imder- 
 standings against those views of Scripture, which he and others 
 at this day advance, to these he yields nothing, no, not a hairs- 
 breadth ; and of what use is it yielding to such? they are inveterate 
 imbelievers, condemned in their own consciences. Therefore, 
 dear Christians, let not the name of Christ be changed into the 
 name of Luther; for Luther has not died for us, but he teaches 
 us to know Him from whom alone our salvation comes. If Luther 
 preaches Christ, he does it as I do ; although, God be praised for it, 
 an innumerable mrdtitude, much more than by me and by others, 
 have been converted to God through him, for God metes out to 
 every man as He will. For my part, I shall bear no other name 
 but that of my Captain, Jesus Christ, whose soldier I am. No 
 man can esteem Luther higher than I do. Yet I testify before 
 God and all men, that I never, at any time, wrote to him, nor he 
 to me, nor has anjdihing been done to open up a correspondence 
 between us. I have purposely abstained from all correspondence 
 with him, not that I feared any man on this account, but because 
 I would have it appear how uidform the Spirit of God is, in so 
 far that we, who are far distant from each other, and have held 
 no communication, are yet of the same mind, and this without 
 the slightest concert. But I will not be so bold as 'to place 
 myself by the side of Luther, for each of us works according to 
 the ability given us of God." 
 
 Zwingli had understood, through his friendly relations with 
 Wilhehn de Falconibus, Secretary of the Swiss Papal Legate, 
 that the Pope intended to publish, in a special bull, the excom- 
 munication already pronounced on Luther. He resolved to 
 employ every means in his power to turn his Holiness from this 
 design. He communicated his intention to his friend Myconius 
 by letter. " I shall," says he, wait to-morrow upon the Papal 
 Commissioner, Wilhelm, (who, in the absence of the Legate, 
 transacted the business of the Holy See,) and shall give him the 
 advice, if he speak on the subject as he lately did, to warn the 
 
76 IN THE SCHOOL OF THE CROSS. 
 
 Pope against an excommunication of Luther, for I foresee that 
 the Germans will only despise the bull, as well as the Pope him- 
 self Let not your courage sink ; there will not fail in our days 
 people to preach Christ fully, and who will joyfully give their lives 
 a sacrifice to Him, even although they know beforehand that, as 
 has happened long ago, they will be blasphemed after their 
 death as heretics, traitors, and villains. As for me, I expect 
 for myseK, as a victim devoted to death, the worst from all, 
 clergy as well as laity, and I pray to Christ for the grace to meet 
 what may befall me with manly courage, and that He may either 
 uphold me, or break me in pieces, who am but His poor vessel, 
 as shall seem good unto Him. I will, if the bolt of excommimi- 
 cation strike me, think of the holy Hilarius,* who was expelled 
 from G-aul to Africa, and on Pope Lucius,-[" who was driven away, 
 but received back with honour. Verily, I do not liken myself 
 to these, yet the undeserved fate of so many worthy men must 
 console me; and if I held it allowable to boast, I should rejoice 
 to suffer shame for the name of Christ. Yet let him that standeth 
 take heed lest he fall." This step having met with no success, 
 Zwingli tried another; he sent his first anonymous publication 
 to the press, entitled, " Advice of one who desires to see the char- 
 acter of the Pope and of Christianity preserved." In this publi- 
 cation he earnestly warns the Pope against taking violent mea- 
 sures against Luther, and he closes by expressing his conviction 
 that in every case " truth and the doctrine of Christ will come off 
 victoriously." 
 
 5. Zwingli in the School of the Cross — Increasing Numbers 
 OF the Friends of Evangelical Truth. 
 
 Zwingli had scarcely been a year engaged in his reforming 
 labours in Zurich, when he was put under the cross, that he 
 might thus exercise and prove himself in " the imitation of 
 Christ." In August 1519 he visited, for the purpose of resusci- 
 tating his exhausted bodily powers, after his severe labours, the 
 
 " Hilarius became Bishop of Poitiers, a.d. 350, but was forced into banish- 
 ment on account of his zeal for orthodoxy. 
 
 t Lucius I., who occupied the Papal chair a.d. 252. 
 
IN THE SCHOOL OF THE CROSS. 77 
 
 mineral waters of Pfseffer, situated in a dreadful ravine of the 
 Galanda mountains. Here he formed a friendship with the poet 
 and professor, Egentius of Freiburg (in Breisgau), who visited 
 the springs with the same object in view. The days, however, 
 of relaxation and recreation were not to last long for the Eeformer. 
 From Zurich he received the harrowing intelligence that the 
 plague, which was traversing Europe from the eastward, and 
 which had not spared the highest valleys of Switzerland, had 
 invaded his own parish. The zealous pastor, mindful of the 
 duties of liis high calling, hasted homewards, to extend to the 
 afflicted members of his flock the consolations of the Gospel. 
 His brother Andrew, whom he had living with him in his own 
 house to guide his studies, he sent off to Wildhaus, that he might 
 thereby the better escape infection. Zwingli himself, with heroi- 
 cal courage, visited the sick and the dying without intermission, 
 and supplied them, in this the hour of their extremest need, with 
 the rich consolations of the Gospel. In his sermons he raised 
 the sinking hearts of his terrified congi'egation with the promises 
 of the Word of Life, and pointed them to Christ, who quickens 
 the weary and heavy laden. Many among his people trembled 
 for the life of their faithful pastor, as they saw him moving about 
 amidst the thickly flying darts of death, himself bearing round the 
 cup of salvation ; for " the great death," as the name of this pesti- 
 lence is, in the mouths of the common people, cut down in Zurich 
 alone, from August 1.519 to Candlemas 1520, two thousand five 
 hundred. " I rejoice greatly," wrote Conrad Brunner (of Wesen), 
 from Basle, that thou standest untouched and unharmed by the 
 arrows of death which are flying around. But my joy wiH not be 
 free of anxiety so long as thou daily exposest thyself to great peril 
 by visiting the sick of the plague. Forget not, while bringing conso- 
 lation to others, to take care for thine own life." The anxiety of 
 Zwingli's friends was but too well-founded, for, at the end of Sep- 
 tember, he himself became a victim to the disease. What a grief 
 to his flock, when they saw their faithful pastor chained to a sick, 
 it might be a dying bed. The feelings which oppressed the 
 friends of evangelical truth at a distance by the intelligence of 
 his sickness are thus expressed in a letter which Dv Hedio wrote 
 to Zwingli : " We were deeply afflicted when we heard that this 
 murderous disease had seized you also, for who would not grieve 
 
78 IN THE SCHOOL OF THE CEOSS. 
 
 if the saviour of his country, if the trumpet of the gospel, if the 
 courageous herald of the truth should be struck down in the 
 prime of life, high in hope, and in the midst of his usefulness. 
 The feelings of his own soul on his being seized, the Eeformer 
 poured forth in the following Hymn : — 
 
 On the Commencement of his Sickness. 
 
 My humble prayer, O Father, hear, 
 
 O help me in this strait; 
 With heavy foot grim Death draws near. 
 
 And thunders at my gate. 
 
 O Thou, who in the stormy fight, 
 
 Did'st hold in check his power ; 
 Stand, Christ, I pray Thee, by my side, 
 
 And help me in this hour. 
 
 My Father, if it be Thy will. 
 
 Do Thou ordain once more, 
 That the destroying angel still 
 
 Pass me in safety o'er. 
 
 O cause mine agony to cease, 
 
 Pull out the dart that burns, 
 That grants me not an hour of peace. 
 
 And rest to unrest turns. 
 
 But if my sun is to descend, 
 
 At mid-day to the tomb, 
 O! do Thou resignation send — 
 
 Prepare me for my doom. 
 
 What doom ? Thou shalt me from this earth 
 
 Withdraw me in Thy love. 
 And death itself shall be my birth 
 
 Into the bliss above. 
 
 As in the potter's forming hand 
 
 The clay is at the wheel ; 
 Thus life or death's at Thy command — 
 
 'Tis Thine to kill or heal. 
 
 . My soul in resignation 
 
 " Do all Thy pleasure" saith, 
 Thy will shall be salvation, 
 Be it in life or death. 
 
IN THE SCHOOL OF THE CROSS. 79 
 
 His complaint increased, his strength left him, but his heart 
 sought and found consolation in God through Jesus Christ, and 
 he again sings, in the midst of his calamity : — 
 
 On his Sickness Increasing. 
 
 Comfort, O Lord, I seek by Thee, 
 
 The pains they are increasing. 
 The might of sickness presses me, 
 
 And woe my heart is seizing ; 
 O Thou, Consoler, Thee I seek. 
 Confirm and cheer Thy creature weak, 
 With comfort from Christ's wounds. 
 
 Yes, Great Redeemer ! at death's gates 
 
 Thou giv'st to him assistance, 
 Who faithfully upon Thee waits 
 
 With undismayed persistence. 
 Who finds delight in Thee alone, 
 And for Thyself without a moan. 
 Would gladly quit the world. 
 
 My tongue is withered and dumb, 
 
 Each sense in torpor lying, 
 Is, then, the end of all things come, 
 
 And am I now a-dying ? 
 Then, Mighty Champion ! stretch Thy hand, 
 'Tis time Thyself the contest grand 
 To end which I've begun. 
 
 I see, indeed, with dreadful rage, 
 
 That Satan on me presses. 
 While me, too weak the war to wage. 
 
 He more and more abases ; 
 But he'll Thy servant conquer never, 
 Because his faith rests on Thee ever. 
 So then let hell stiU storm. 
 
 The faithful, as Bullinger mentions, were deeply distressed at 
 the sickness of their dear pastor, and called to God in earnest 
 prayer that He would be pleased to raise him up again. The Lord 
 heard the prayers of His people, and raised His servant from his 
 bed of sickness, that he might farther contend for the honour of 
 God and the salvation in Christ Jesus. The joyous feeling of 
 gratitude which filled his bosom on his recovery he gives expres- 
 sion to in the following Hymn of grateful praise :— 
 
80 IN THE SCHOOL OF THE CEOSS. 
 
 On his Recovery to Health. 
 
 I'm sound, — through Thy great goodness ; 
 
 My God Thou'st made me whole, 
 My speech, although in rudeness, 
 
 Will loudly Thee extol; 
 To Thee, who me once more, 
 
 Hast raised, to death devoted, 
 
 My soul shall he devoted 
 More than it was hefore. 
 
 But had death in his fetter . 
 
 Securely captured me, 
 I were now where 'tis better 
 
 I were, O Lord, by Thee ; 
 Now it remains again 
 
 The bands of life to sever, 
 
 When none is to deliver. 
 Perhaps in gi-eater pain. 
 
 Yet on I go with gladness. 
 
 Since 'tis Thy holy will, 
 With joy yet mixed with sadness. 
 
 My journey to fulfil ; 
 To wage 'gainst sin the stiife. 
 
 And when life's toils are ended, 
 
 There will at length b' extended 
 To me the crown of life. 
 
 The inteUigence of his recovery fiUed his friends far and near 
 with the greater rapture, because they had shortly before received 
 the report that he liad sunk under the virulence of the malady. 
 Hedio wrote from Basle : " Like a suddenly appearing angel of 
 consolation came Eudolph Collin to us, assuring us that we had 
 no cause to be cast down on your account, for you were now safe." 
 Wilibald Pirkheimer, of Nurnberg, says, in a letter to Zwingli : 
 " If my mourning over your sickness was great, my joy at your 
 recovery was greater. Let us sing praises to God, who strikes 
 the wounds and who heals them again, who kills and makes 
 alive, and who has called back your soul from the grave. His 
 name be praised for evermore." William de Falconibus, the 
 legate's secretary, writes : " If the gratification of a wish ever filled 
 me with pleasure, it was far exceeded by what I felt when I 
 heard of the return of one from the gates of death, for whom I 
 have so great a longing, that I feel as if a part of my soul would 
 
IN THE SCHOOL OF THE CROSS. 81 
 
 tear itself away from me to go to you." The General- Vicar, 
 Jolm Faber, also, who afterwards became one of Zwingli's most 
 \drulent enemies, joined himself to the crowd of congratulating 
 friends. "I heartily rejoice," dearest Huldreich, " that you have 
 been delivered out of the jaws of the murderous plague, for I 
 entertain towards you so lively a friendship that nothing in this 
 world would pain me more than the intelligence that any cala- 
 mity had befallen you, which God in his mercy avert. And this 
 love you -well deserve, for you work with such zeal in the 
 vineyard of the Lord that when you are in danger a calamity 
 impends the community. The Lord himself knows, however, 
 whom He will stir up by bitter trials to a more earnest striving 
 after a better and a more enduring inheritance. Such a trial 
 you have experienced from your heavenly Father." Zwingli 
 received many other congratulations on his restitution to health, 
 even from the distant Netherlands and from Poland. These abun- 
 dantly prove to us what an important position he had already 
 obtained in the Christian Church, bothi at home and abroad. But 
 his joy, in which so many others participated, Zwingli was not 
 permitted to taste unalloyed; for the pestilence dealt him severe 
 wounds. In Basle there died two of his best friends, Conrad 
 Brunner, who had counselled him to spare his health, and also 
 John Amerbach. Hedio mentions their deaths to him in the 
 words, " whom the Lord loves. He takes early to himseK." His 
 brother Andrew, whom Zwingli had sent to Wildhaus on the 
 breaking out of the plague in Zurich, was seized by the destroy- 
 ing angel and carried away. Zwingli wept "the tears of a 
 woman" over his beloved brother. In his own person, also, he 
 for a long time felt the bad effects of the malady. " The plague," 
 he wrote to his friend Myconius, " has so weakened my memory 
 and intellect, that I sometimes in preaching altogether lose the 
 thread of my discourse ; all my members are oppressed with an 
 indescribable weakness." At the same time, he was annoyed by 
 pecuniary embarrassments. The receipts from his living were so 
 small that it was impossible for him longer to support himself 
 and his two assistants upon them. Yet he refused to accept the 
 presents which would have richly flowed in upon him from many 
 of his friends and admirers. He half resolved to return to Ein- 
 siedeln, to free himself from his financial difficulties. A noble 
 
82 IN THE SCHOOL OF THE CEOSS. 
 
 and friendly act on the part of Dr. Engelhard, preacher at the 
 Frauen Minster, and canon at the great Minster, alone preserved 
 the Eeformer to Zurich. He resigned his canonship at the great 
 Minster in Zwingli's favour, who thus entered into the number 
 of the canons, while he continued to hold his office as Leut-priest. 
 Thus ZwingK's income was not only raised, but a greater influ- 
 ence among the canons was secured to him, which was the more 
 necessary, as a part of these gentlemen already looked with an eye 
 by no means favourable on the Eeformer and his labours. They 
 had, in fact, already presented to the provost a complaint in writ- 
 ing against him, in which they loudly expressed their lamenta- 
 tions that he concerned himself so little about the funds of the 
 foundation. " Instead of inculcating on his hearers the payment 
 of tithes as a religious duty, he denies," said they, " their divine 
 origin altogether, and represents their strict exaction as a tyranny. 
 He thereby seeks to gain the confidence of the people in the same 
 measure in which he makes the monks hated and despised as 
 cap-divines." These canons, indeed, received no countenance to 
 their complaint from the provost, who felt ashamed even to com- 
 municate it to Zwingli; yet it shewed their dispositions towards 
 him. It was not, however, alone within the chapter that the 
 decidedly evangelical direction of Zwingli's labours excited dis- 
 like and enmity; these feelings exhibited ' themselves in a far 
 more repulsive manner beyond this circle. 
 
 Zwingli's worst enemies were the mercenaries and monks. 
 Little as these people dared to meet him in open fight, they were 
 yet not the less busy in circulating against him the most absurd 
 calumnies, and laying all manner of snares to entrap him, and 
 even take him, if possible, out of the way altogether 
 
 From all parts of Switzerland and Suabia Zwingli's friends 
 sent him accounts of the nefarious proceedings of these rancorous 
 enemies ; far and wide the closely bound association spread itself, 
 of licentious ^aonks and despicable mercenaries, against the cham- 
 pion of truth. " My bile," writes Myconius from Lucerne, " is 
 continually roused against these serpents, who spurt out their 
 venom against you. I can in truth say, that nothing annoys 
 me more than to hear you or the gospel maligned. For what do 
 you. teach but the gospel? They say the affairsof Switzerland 
 are none of your business. He has nothing else to do, say they. 
 
FRIENDS OF EVANGELICAL TEUTH. 83 
 
 but to expound and preach the gospel to the people, with 
 exhortation and reproof, and this in all brevity ; and he ought not 
 to repeat the same things in every sermon, as if his sole object 
 were to make himself hated through the whole of Switzerland. 
 What means this but in plain words, Zwingli ought not to be 
 pastor, priest, and ambassador for Christ?' Those who einploy 
 such language have great numbers of the clergy on their side, 
 who think that priests should be only priests, and ought not to 
 mix themselves up in worldly affairs ; our lords, say they, have so 
 much wisdom and experience among themselves, that they know 
 best what to do, and what to abstain from doing." James Salz- 
 mann, teacher and ecclesiastic iu Chur, writes : " It is my prayer, 
 which I put up with many others, dear Zwingli, beloved in 
 Christ, that the .Almighty may stand by you with his grace ; that 
 you may make the enemies of Christ your footstool. Lately, the 
 guild-master, Stapfer, senior, from Zurich, said at a feast here on 
 his passing through the town on a journey to Venice : " Zwingli 
 is the father of three children, is to be seen drunk at night on the 
 streets, and holds pensions not only from the Pope but from the 
 King of Prance too. You are said to have once exclaimed in a 
 sermon, ' Ave Maria is as much as, God bless thee, Peggy.'" John 
 Zwick, preacher in Constance,' wrote to him: "It is publicly 
 reported here you are married to the daughter of the Burgomaster. 
 The report goes, too, which comes from a certain priest, that yQU 
 maintained once in a sermon, that adultery is in certain circum- 
 stances lawful For my part, I am convinced that such an idea 
 as this never once entered your head, and have always defended 
 you, notwithstanding I have not been able to prevent this 
 result, namely, that many people begin to lose theix good opinion 
 of you. Several barons and noblemen, who formerly held you in 
 much estimation, from the time that they heard your sermons in 
 Einsiedebi, have now turned against you, and with aU my 
 efforts I cannot succeed in shaking their credence in the priest, 
 who, they maintain, with oaths and imprecations, teUs no Hes." 
 
 Such and the Kke calumnious reports were vented with aU 
 eagerness to blast the character of ZwingK, and to check the 
 preaching of the gospel. What were his own thoughts on the 
 subject we learn from the following passage : " I have for some 
 time past heard incredible lies told about me, but this has not 
 
S-t FRIENDS OP EVANGELICAL TRUTH. 
 
 grieved me, for I have always kept in mind, ' the disciple is not 
 greater than the Master.' If they lied against Christ, it is no 
 great wonder that they lie against thee, Huldreich ZwingLt." 
 
 His enemies perceiving that calumny recoiled upon themselves, 
 like an arrow turned back by some invisible hand upon him who 
 discharges it, determined to try more effective measures ; poison 
 or the poniard must free them from the hated witness of the 
 truth. Mycpnius writes : " After the temporary defeat of the 
 priests and monks in Zurich, and the passing of the 'resolution 
 against pensions, it was by artifice that they schemed to get rid 
 of their hated opponent. One day Zwingli received a letter, with- 
 out name, to the following effect, from Suabia, — (Michael Hum- 
 melberger of Ravensburg, as afterwards appeared, was the author) : 
 " If ever thou caredst for thy life care for it now, for traps and 
 snares are set for thee, and environ thee on every side ; deadly 
 poison lies ready to take thee out of the way. The perfidious 
 wretches, not daring to attack thee openly, have fallen upon this 
 means to remove thee frorn the earth, and will put poison, secretly 
 if they can, into thy food. Be on thy guard, then. If thou art 
 hungry, eat only of bread which thy own cook has baked ; out of 
 thy house, thou canst not with safety eat anything. There are 
 people within the walls of Zurich who will do aU their possible 
 to destroy thee. Be on thy guard, my dearest God-beloved Hul- 
 dreich ; be on thy guard as thou valuest thy life ; and once 
 again, I say, take care of the motions of these envenomed though 
 invisible serpents, and believe that all food presented thee and 
 not prepared in thine own house is poisoned, for nowhere art 
 thou safe ; every place is fraught with danger. How I came to 
 know of these foul designs, and what oracle discovered them to 
 me, thou requirest not to know ; but it is truer than that at Delphi. 
 But the priest dare neither assert plainly, nor write it with impu- 
 nity. Thy shrewd understanding will lead thee to guess whence 
 this warning comes, which good-will and brotherly love to thyself 
 have dictated to me. In haste, from Suabia. Whoever I am, I 
 am thine; thou shalt afterwards know me." 
 
 But not by poison alone, — ^by other means of secret murder 
 they followed after the Life of the hated Zwingli. " ISTot'an'hour 
 passed," says Myconius, "that did not give birth to some deep- 
 laid plot amongst the laity and priests against the life of the 
 
FRIENDS OF EVANGELICAL TRUTH. 85 
 
 apostle of tratli and righteousness. I pass over those not. known 
 to the world, though well known to myself ; I enumerate only those 
 well known to the public. Once there came a man at midnight 
 to call htm to the bed of a dying person. The assistant gave the 
 answer, that Zwingli could not be roused from his sleep, for he 
 was much fatigued by the previous day's labours ; he himself 
 woidd go for Mm. This the man would on no account permit, 
 and thereby awakened the suspicion of some secret plot. The 
 assistant shut the door on the man, pretending he would go and 
 acc[uaint Zwingli with his wish, and left him standing outside. 
 On the morrow they learnt that, by this opportunity, Zwingli was 
 to have been gagged, thrown into a ship, and carried away. Not 
 long afterwards, a horse was kept in readiness for the same pur- 
 pose. Again, an assassin was to be seen, (a Zuger, as was said,) 
 going about openly in the town, before the eyes of all, with a 
 long sword hanging at his girdle, with which he was to have cut 
 down Zwingli if he met him on the street by chance. The 
 assassin was betrayed and apprehended, but escaped out of 
 prison. Two drunken inhabitants of Zurich, 'whom I do not 
 name, once attacked Zwingh's house during the night with 
 stones, dashed in the windows, and made, what w;th oaths and 
 stones together, such an infernal noise, that not one of the neigh- 
 bours ventured to open a window. Nor did they desist until they 
 ran out of stones, voice and strength. The burgomaster was made 
 acquainted with the assault. In the morning the city-gates were 
 shut, and the disturbers of the peace were sought for by armed 
 men in every hole and corner, but in vain, till some women who 
 knew about the affair, in their garrulity, involuntarily betrayed 
 one, (the other had already escaped.) He was drawn out of the 
 wine cask of a certain priest, and with loud reproaches conducted 
 to prison. After a long consultation, he was condemned to 
 imprisonment for life, but he was liberated at the petition of the 
 Bernese, after an incarceration of a few weeks." 
 
 It was the habit of Zwingli at this time to sup at a friend's 
 house, or in the guUd-rooms. On such occasions, he was con- 
 ducted home by some of the respectable citizens, with the view 
 of defending him from harm on the way, without his knowing the 
 benevolent intention of the convoy thus given. The Council, too, 
 caused, in these dangerous times, his house to be guarded. Yet, 
 
88 FKIENDS OF EVANGELICAL TBUTH. 
 
 if the eye of God had not graciously watched over His faithful 
 servant, and if His almighty arm had not defended him, aU the 
 care and watchfulness of friends would have heen in vain. 
 
 In aU these trials and persecutions, Zwingli found a rich con- 
 solation in the growing numbers of his warm-hearted personal 
 friends, devoted, like himself, to the cause of the gospel. In 
 every town and canton of Switzerland men came forward, who, 
 animated by the heroic courage and surpassing joy which Zwin- 
 gli drew from the gospel, recognised it as a power of God to make 
 aU blessed who beheve it. They preached it according to 
 their several capacities. In St. GaU, there laboured in the cause 
 of the gospel the friend of ZwingU's youth, Vadian; in Chur, 
 Salzmann, already mentioned ; in Schaffhausen, Sebastian Wag- 
 ner, surnamed Hofmeister, and, at a later period, Erasmus 
 Eitter also ; in Lucerne, Oswald Myconius, and the canons 
 ' Zimmermann and Kirchmeier ; in Berne, Francis Kolb, Sebas- 
 tian Meier, and above all, Berchthold HaUer, who made a journey 
 from Berne to Zurich, for the express purpose of making Zwin- 
 gU's acquaintance, and of confirming his own faith in the vicinity 
 of the Lord's chosen vessel. From Schwyz, the state-clerk, Stap- 
 fer, who had. once had his own and his family's bodily wants 
 supplied by the kind hand of Zwingli, begged that he would now 
 extend to him the bread of life. In Art, (Canton Schwyz) Bal- 
 thasar Trachsler proclaimed the gospel. In Solothum, the 
 schoolmaster, Macrin or Duerr, was faithfully devoted to Zwingli. 
 From Freiburg, (Uechtland), the organist, Kotter, writes to him : 
 " all here praise with one voice thy undertaking to bring to light 
 the Word of God. It is to be hoped it wiU not want a blessing." 
 In Basle, Zwingli had also many friends devoted in like measure 
 to the cause of the Gospel. In 1620 he had revisited them in 
 the company of his former master George Binzli (now parson at 
 "Wesen) and on this occasion had gained new friends. After the 
 departure, first of Capito, then of Hedio, from Basle to Mayen(;e, 
 and from thence to Strasburg, John QScolampadius became the 
 principal herald of the truth at Basle. Soon after his arrival in 
 this city, he wrbte to Zwingli: "Whether I wiU or not, I cannot 
 refrain from seeking your friendship, that I may be quickened 
 by your ardent zeal. Who can resist loving him who advances 
 with such ardour and energy the cause of Christ?" &c. &c. In 
 
PEIBNDS OF EVANGELICAi TEUTH. 87 
 
 Strasburg Zwingli had, besides Capito and Hedio, Bucer as an 
 intimate personal friend. In Nurnberg there were his friends 
 Wilibald Pirkheimer and Albrecht Duerer, in Prankfort, Professor 
 Nesen of Hessen, whom Luther visited on his journey to Worms. 
 Suabia contained, in almost every town, personal friends of 
 Zwingli. 
 
 While aU these eyed ZwingH as a guiding star or beacon, it was 
 above all, in Germany that the friends of evangelical truth turned 
 their eyes in hope to the Swiss mountains, as Luther, under a 
 cloud of outlawry and excommunication, vanished so mysteri- 
 ously on his return journey from Worms (April, 1521). The 
 hopes of the Germans in the ultimate victory of truth lived anew 
 when they heard with what vigour and zeal Zwingli was pro- 
 claiming the truth in Switzerland, and with what intrepidity he 
 was there combatting the ravenous wolves in sheep's clothing 
 who ravaged the flock of Christ. All who were forced to flee 
 from Germany or France for the faith turned their footsteps to 
 Zurich. Thus, one day, there came from Mayence Otto von 
 Brunfels, with a recommendatory letter from Nesen to Zwingli 
 " I pray you, in the name of Christ, to receive those men who 
 are forced to flee before a corrupt clergy. If you help this man 
 with your fellow-citizens, who, as we well know, are freer than 
 all other Germans, you do a service not only to religion but to 
 learning." At Avignon a bare-footed monk leaves his cloister, 
 in conseq^uence of the persecutions to which he is subjected by 
 his brethren for iis inclination to evangelical doctrines, and rides 
 one evening on a she-ass through the gates of Zurich, that he 
 might see and converse with Zwingli, to whom he had been 
 recommended by HaUer of Berne. After being farther advanced 
 by him in the knowledge of evangelical truth, and especially 
 instructed as to the inadmissibility of the adoration of the saints, 
 the pilgrim thanked God, and proceeded to Germany. Who was 
 this? It was the afterwards famous Lambert of Avignon, who 
 became Professor of Theology at Strasburg and then at Marburg, 
 and who, in the latter position, contributed so materially to the 
 success of the Eeformation in Hessen. 
 
 Thus aU hearts that had a longing after evangelical truth 
 inclined in love and admiration towards Zwingli, just in the pro- 
 portion that the enemies of the truth hated him. 
 
88 HOW HE EEGAEDED HIS LABOUES AND TEIALS. 
 
 6. How ZwiNGLi Eegaeded his Laboues and Teials, as shewn 
 IN Lettees to his Beothees and Feiends. 
 
 Having tlius reviewed tlie multifarious labours and manifold 
 trials which chequered the life of the Eeformer within the above 
 space of time, (from 1519 to 1523,) we shall cast a glance at the 
 manner in which he himself regarded these, and see from what 
 source he derived courage to hazard, and fortitude to endure his 
 trials. He gives us on this point a solution, with the greatest 
 candour, in a letter addressed to his brothers, under date l7th 
 September 1522, and in some other letters to his friends. 
 
 " Dear brothers," he writes, " I hear how your hearts have been 
 disturbed by the infamous reports which, contrary to all truth, 
 have been spread abroad about me, but to which I know, in your 
 brotherly love towards me, you will lend no ear, as you know me 
 better. Yet you desired to hear from myself upon the subject, 
 and were displeased that I have not answered your wish sooner] 
 Know then, first, that I am well informed how it goes with you ; 
 for I often make inquiries about you. When I hear that ye live 
 by the labour of your hands, as your fathers before you, I rejoice, 
 because I see that you preserve the nobHity you derive from 
 Adam. As often, however, as I hear that some of you, at the 
 risk of body and soul, serve for pay in foreign wars, this grieves 
 me to the heart. I lament that out of honest peasants and field 
 labourers you make yourselves robbers and murderers, for the 
 mercenaries are nothing better. Of those who attend to their 
 domestic economy, and rule their servants well, I have the best 
 opinion ; but to those]who setoff to the wars I can prophesy nothing 
 else but misery and Qternal damnation. God grant you the 
 same mind in this matter as I have, so that ye may never do the 
 like agaia, as indeed you have promised to me. Ye should also 
 give heed that I do faithfully the work to which God has called 
 me, let it go with me as it may, without letting myself be daunted 
 by its Jinspeakable diiiiculties, and without regard to men who 
 will not bend and humble themselves to the wholesome work of 
 God. I know very well what my good friend, my lord of Fisch- 
 ingen,* our cousin, means. I should go cautiously to work, else 
 * The brother of Zwingli's mother, vide page 1. 
 
HOW HE EEGAEDED HIS LABOURS AND TEIALS. 89 
 
 great mischief may befall me. God reward the kind-hearted 
 man for his good-will He has ever loved me as his own child, 
 and I know that his warning flows from the purest affection. 
 But be assured no danger can approach me which I have not 
 well weighed. I know that my own strength is not sufficient, 
 and I know just as well how strong they are who contend against 
 the doctrine of God. I can, however, like Paul, do all through 
 Christ strengthening me. For what is my speech, how could it 
 avail to bring any sinner back to the way of life, if the power 
 and the Spirit of God did not work with it ? Suppose, also, that 
 I were to hold my peace, would not another do that which God 
 bids me do, while I should be severely punished by God, like 
 the lying son in Matthew (chap, xxi 38), who said to his father, 
 I will go into the vineyard, and yet went not. , God wiU. go on to 
 do as He has hitherto done, namely, to regenerate a corrupt world 
 by His Word. To the inhabitants of Sodom, to the Ninevites, 
 to the corrupt generation that lived at the times of Noah, to the 
 children of Israel when they were sunk the deepest in idolatry, 
 God sent His prophets to proclaim His truth. They who turned 
 from their evil ways were spared. They who despised His Word 
 were destroyed or taken captive. Now, do we not see in our own 
 times corruption gaining such a head in all lands, and in all 
 ranks, as to cause us to shudder at it ? Yet if in the midst of 
 all this corruption, a revelation is made of God's Word anew, is 
 not this a plain proof that such revelation comes from God, who 
 wills not that the creatures whom He has purchased with his own 
 blood should be lost in such multitudes, and should so miserably 
 perish. Now set the great human corruption, and the true Word 
 of God, the one against the other, you will find that the former 
 win not let itself be brought into contact with or touched by the 
 latter. If in these circumstances, he into whose mouth the Word 
 of the Lord is put yields or neglects his duty, he must account 
 for those who are lost, seeing that, as Isaiah says, he saw the 
 sword coming, and gave no warning. If, on the other hand, he 
 opposes a sinful and arrogant world, he is driven from it, he is 
 pursued with curses and maledictions, nay, kiUed. Which now, 
 think ye, is the better lot of the two ? Is it better that I should 
 keep silence, that the evil which I ought to ward off should get 
 the upper hand, and that against a short space of worldly honour 
 
90 sow HE EEGABDED HIS LABOUES AND TRIALS. 
 
 and repose, I should be the devil's servant ? I know that your 
 answer to this will he, No, hut that I ought to rebuke faults 
 with greater mildness. But teH me ; think ye the vices of the 
 present time to be so small that my words appear too rough ? If 
 you think so, you err greatly. They are so great that the sternest 
 words of the prophet are not enough to rebuke, nor the hottest 
 wrath of God enough to punish them. The menace of Jonah 
 would better suit our vices : ' Yet forty days and Nineveh will be 
 overthrown.' Therefore hold your peace. I fear God much more 
 in this respect, that I say too little than that I say too much. Or 
 do you desire rather that I lose mine honour, my means, my life, 
 for the salvation of many good and pious souls, and that mine own 
 soul be raised by His grace to eternal felicity ? You say. Yes ! but 
 it would be for us a great shame if you were put to death and 
 burnt, even although we knew that wrong was done you ; then I 
 answer, Christ, whose soldier I am, says, Luke vi. 22, 23 : 'Blessed 
 are ye when men shall hate you, and when they shaU separate 
 you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out 
 your name as evil, for .the Son of Man's sake : Eejoice ye in that 
 day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven.' 
 Behold, then, the more my name is evil spoken of before men 
 for the sake of God, the more it is esteemed by God. And so it 
 shall be. He that will come to God must look to that which He 
 will, not to that which men will, who cannot save him, but who 
 are quite competent to sink him in everlasting damnation. The 
 body they can kill, but not the soul, and all they who kill us in 
 the body for the Lord's sake slay their own souls, be they who 
 they may, — king, emperor, pope, bishop, or others. The gospel 
 of Christ (the good tidings which God hath spoken to man through 
 his Son), has the quality derived from the blood of Christ per- 
 petuated even to the present hour, that it is most effective in its 
 application and spreads itself most under persecution. Christ 
 has shed His blood for our salvation. Now, do you consider that 
 man to be a true-hearted soldier of the cross, who will not shed 
 his blood for his Lord and Captain, and who flinches where his Lord 
 before him, and for him, dared death; the true soldier of Christ 
 is ready to let his head be blown to atoms for His Master's sake. 
 For he who is ashamed of Christ and his name before men, of him 
 also will the Son of man be ashamed before His heavenly Father. 
 
HOW HE KEGAKDED HIS LABOUES AND TEIALS. 91 
 
 Therefore, dear brothers, if any man tell you that I sin in respect 
 of pride, intemperance, uncleanness, believe what they say ; for, 
 alas ! I am too much inclined by nature to these, and such like 
 vices. But if any teU you that, for money's sake, I can teach 
 fajse doctrine, then believe it not, not although it should be con- 
 firmed by oath, for I am under obligations to no master on earth, 
 not by a single heller. The pecuniary obligation I was under to 
 the Eomish Pope has been cancelled several years ago. I held 
 for a time that it was justifiable in me to take money from the 
 Pope, and that it was my duty to defend his doctrine. "When, 
 however, as Paul says, 'I came to the knowledge of sin,' I 
 renounced his money. His agents, out of rage at this renuncia- 
 tion, maliciously endeavoured to make that out to be a crime in 
 me which they impressed upon all men as a duty towards God ; 
 God forgive them, and ourselves too, all our sins. If any one 
 tell you I blaspheme God and the Virgin Mary, or that I falsify 
 God's Word, believe it not. For all my labour, care, and anxiety, 
 have no other object than to shew to men the great grace and 
 salvation which the Son of God, born of the holy Virgin, has 
 obtained for man, that he may flee for refuge to God through 
 the dear sacred sufferings of Christ; that Christ's doctrine may 
 be set in the foreground, the doctrine of men in the background ; 
 that God's "Word may remain pure and unadulterated. You are 
 my brothers by father and mother; but if you be not my bre- 
 thren in the mind of God, I am sorry for it, because then I must 
 needs renounce you, nay even leave father and mother unburied, 
 if peradventure ye should attempt to draw me away from God. 
 As to the revilings, attributed to me, of the Virgin Mary, be 
 assured they are false. I hold of the Blessed Virgin, what a 
 , Christian ought to hold, and have much too high an opinion of 
 her to regard the gossip and lies of every story-teller ; I for my 
 part may not lie, and say more of her than that which the Scrip- 
 tures of the holy Gospels tell me. The men who thus mali- 
 ciously calumniate me, do it not to promote the glory of God or 
 of Maiy, but solely because the Word of God, which I preach, 
 conflicts with their luxury, their avarice, their knavery, their 
 viHany. It drags these vices to the light of day, and this Hght 
 the vices cannot bear. But as the common man holds the Virgin 
 in high veneration, they hope in this manner to make me incur 
 
92 HOW HE EEGAEDED HISLABOUES AND TRIALS. 
 
 his hatred, that thus the Word of God may find less acceptance 
 with him. Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind. 
 Let not the talk of these people disturb you, and know that it 
 cannot change my opinion. I shall quietly await whatever issue 
 God may grant to this matter. Christ our Lord and Saviour has 
 himself been put to death. I commend you to God, who wUl 
 instruct and guide you. I remain ever your brother, provided 
 always you are brethren of Christ." 
 
 To Berchthold HaUer in Berne he wrote, in the following terms, 
 towards the close of the year 1521 : " I know well that sometimes 
 out of weakness a sense of disgust will come over us, when we 
 are reviled being innocent, and especially when we think we 
 "have, done all for the best. But repentance succeeds when 
 Christ excites the conscience by these stings and incitements 
 with which He awakens the indolent or rebellious spirit, now 
 by His threatenings, now by His promises, as for example when 
 he says : 'He who is ashamed of me before men, of him will I be 
 ashamed before my Father, and he who denies me, him will I also 
 deny;' or, 'He who loves his life in this world shall lose it;' or, 
 'Out of thine own mouth wiU I judge thee, thou wicked servant; 
 because thou hast not given out thy pound to interest;' or, 'The 
 salt that has lost its savour is henceforth good for nothing, but to be 
 cast out, that it may be trodden under foot of men;' or, ' Blessed 
 are ye when ye shaU. suffer persecution for righteousness' sake ;' or, 
 'Blessed are ye when men shall revile you,' &c. When I take to 
 heart the soul-strengthening words, and the glorious examples 
 set us by Christ and the Apostles, then the thought becomes 
 right lively within me, to suffer all for Christ's sake. If on the 
 other hand, I look to our uiihappy times, in which insolence and 
 ingratitude, I had almost said total insensibility to right and 
 wrong, have seized, penetrated, poisoned all hearts, I am filled 
 with sentiments of a contrary nature, and scarce know with cer- 
 tainty what to think. But when I collect my thoughts, it again 
 becomes clear to me that none of these things happen but by the 
 wiU of God ; and that He means thereby to cut off from those 
 who wiU not otherwise approach Him in faith, every place of 
 refuge and way of escape, and thus compel them to throw them- 
 selves unreservedly into His arms, that, deprived of all human 
 resources, we may betake ourselves to Him who is the living God." 
 
HOW HE EEGAEDED HIS LABOURS AND TEIALS. 93 
 
 In a letter to Myconius, of the 12th August 1522, Zwingli thus 
 expresses himself : " If I were not ' convinced that the Lord 
 guarded the town, I had long ago taken my hand from the helm ; 
 but seeing, as I do, that He makes fast the rope, hoists the yards, 
 spreads the canvass, and commands the winds, I were indeed 
 a coward, undeserving the name of a man, if I were to leave my 
 post, and after all, I should still in the end die a death of shame. 
 I wiU, therefore, trust myself entirely to His goodness ; He shall 
 lead and guide me; He shall accelerate or procrastinate; He shall 
 advance or delay the voyage; He shall send calm, or tempest 
 to overwhelm me in the sea. I wiU. not be impatient. I am 
 verily but a weak vessel; He can employ me to honour or to dis- 
 honour. I often indeed pray to Him that He would bring my 
 flesh under His government, and destroy its lazy wayward con- 
 tradictoriness, which is ever slow to obedience, and, like a woman, 
 will ever have the last word, and know the reason of everything. 
 T still hold the opinion that the Christian Church, originally pur- 
 chased by the blood of Christ, can be renewed alone by the blood 
 of the witnesses for the truth, and in no other way." 
 
 In this chapter we have restricted ourselves to the quotation 
 of Zwingli's own words, that we might thereby enable the reader 
 to obtain a deeper and a clearer insight into the Eeformer's 
 noble and heroic heart. 
 
FOUETH SECTION. 
 
 THE REFORMATION EFFECTED BY ZWINGLI. 
 1523—1526. 
 
 'Behold I I make all things new." — Rev. xxi. 5. 
 
 1. The Feementation Continues — A New Position G-ained. 
 
 ZwiNGLi had now, for the space of four years, proclaimed the 
 "Word of God in Zurich, and, at the same time, laid its doctrines 
 and claims before his spiritual and secular superiors in writing. 
 Fruitfully as the scattered seeds of the holy doctrine manifested 
 themselves in the minds of his hearers at Zurich, his representa^ 
 tions to the Bishop of Constance and to the Confederate Diet, 
 were unproductive of any good result. No abuses were abolished; 
 the petition of the magistracy of Zurich for illumination upon 
 the points in debate had been disregarded; bishop and Diet 
 maintained the prohibition of the preaching of the Word of God, 
 nay, they began to adopt violent measures against the preachers 
 of it, wherever they could. 
 
 Urban Weiss, parson at Pislisbach, in the county of Baden, 
 had announced to his hearers from the pulpit, upon his return 
 from the above-mentioned meeting of the Chapter at Eapper- 
 schwyl: "Christians must not call on the Virgin Mary or other 
 saints for help." "Farther," he, said, "he was betrothed to a virgin, 
 and, in the event of marriage being granted to the priests, he 
 would fulfil his vow." The bishop accused this priest before the 
 Diet in Baden, who made him prisoner, and had him brought to 
 Constance as a criminal, where he was kept for a time in close 
 confinement by the orders of the bishop. Other priests devoted 
 to evangelical doctrine were subjected to similar prosecutions. 
 This joint interference on the part of the bishop and the Diet 
 encouraged Zwingli's enemies to renewed hostility. The mer- 
 
THE FERMENTATION CONTINUES. 95 
 
 cenaries threatened ; the monks raged furiously from their pulpits 
 against the preacher of the Gospel, calling him heretic and 
 seducer of the souls of men ; their devotees offered to supply wood 
 free of cost to burn him. But firm and immovable stood Z\ringli, 
 ajid proclaimed only with increased earnestness and unction the 
 Word of God. " I am indeed harrassed on every side," he wrote to 
 CEcolampadius, "but I remain unshaken, leaning not on my own 
 strength but on the rock Christ, through whom I can do all 
 things. He it is who lends me strength and courage." His 
 numerous friends felt themselves strengthened and encouraged 
 on their part also to wage manfully the combat of truth against 
 falsehood. The gospel numbered in the ranks of its firmest sup- 
 porters many highly educated youths from the fijst families of 
 Zurich. With the ardour of youth, which often rises to presump- 
 tion, these youths began to break in upon and interrupt the 
 preaching of the monks, to contradict them or to challenge them 
 to prove by the Word of God the doctrine advanced. The Little 
 Council administered reproofs to the young zealots for their 
 audacious conduct, and commanded them to peace and silence ; 
 some of them they caused to be arrested. Once Leo Jud, who, at 
 the beginning of this year (1523), entered. on his cure at Zurich, 
 interrupted an Augustine jnonk in his sermon, who was maintain- 
 ing with great emphasis, "that man could satisfy divine justice 
 himseE" "Most worthy father," cried Leo Jud, interrupting him 
 in the friendliest manner possible, "hear me a moment, and ye 
 my dear fellow-citizens remain silent while I speak as becomes a 
 Christian." He then proved to the people by Scripture the false- 
 ness of the doctrine just preached to them. "The occurrence," 
 writes ZwingU, "which empowered the Little Council to call both 
 parties before them, and appoint them a hearing, led to the result 
 that not only the truth, but ultimately the malice of these people 
 came to light by the judicial investigation." 
 
 But the Eeformer proceeded to adopt more effective means to 
 display the enemies of the gospel in thefr true colours before the 
 world, and at the same time to carry the banner of truth to vic- 
 tory. In his sermons, as well as by special remonstrance, he 
 impressed upon the Little and Great Councils the necessity of 
 ordaining a public conference wpon matters connected with religion. 
 He did this, that he might be put in a position to give an account 
 
96 A NEW POSITION GAINED. 
 
 of his doctrine before the Bishop's agents, and indeed before 
 every one, let him be learned or unlearned. He proposed that if 
 it should be found by plain deductions from the Word of God 
 that he was in the wrong, he would then not only allow himself 
 to be corrected but also punished ; if, on the other hand, he should 
 be found to be right, then he would be entitled to protection, and 
 the truth must not be suppressed nor be evil spoken of The 
 ultimate decision, however, was to lie in the Word of Ood alone. 
 It was a matter of the greatest importance, that the Great Council 
 of Zurich was by this proposal to institute and conduct the Eeli- 
 gious Conference, for on the one hand the episcopal authority was 
 thereby transferred practically into their hands, and on the other 
 hand, the stream of the Eeformation, which by the iaterference of 
 head-strong men, who wanted the necessary Christian consecration 
 to the work, threatened to overflow its banlis with devastating 
 fury, was restrained within a regular and legal channel. Pro- 
 bably no one but the Eeformer himself saw in its whole extent 
 the important bearing of this condition annexed by him to his 
 proposal. 
 
 As the Swiss Eeformation took its peculiar course and peculiar 
 shape from this diversion which Zwingli gave it, it is necessary, 
 in order to follow accurately the whole course of the Eeformation 
 itself, to understand thoroughly the nature of this turn which 
 Zwingli gave it. Let us hear how Zwingli himself describes it: 
 "I shall now state," says he, "for what reason we avail ourselves 
 of the services of the Council of Two Hundred in Zurich, because 
 some reproach us with letting that be done by two hundred 
 which it is the business of the whole ecclesiastical community, 
 consisting of about seven thousand soids, to do. The matter 
 stands thus. We, the preachers of the Word of God in Zurich, 
 on the one hand, give the Council of Two Hundred plainly to 
 understand, that we commit to them the decision of that which 
 properly belongs to the whole Church to decide, only on the con- 
 dition that, in their consultations and conclusions, they hold 
 themselves to the Word of God alone ; and, on the other hand, 
 that they only act so far in the name of the Church, as the 
 Church tacitly and voluntarily adopts their conclusions and ordi- 
 nances. We have also published this our opinion to the whole 
 Church, and at the same time signified to them that, at the pre- 
 
A NEW POSITION GAINED. 97 
 
 sent time, when some are impelled, by the most foolish ideas, 
 which they give out as inspirations of the Holy Spirit, it is not 
 expedient to vest the decision of certain points in the whole 
 people. Not as though we feared that God would not stand by 
 and govern and direct his Church, but because at these first 
 beginnings of our ecclesiastical polity we must avoid all occasions 
 of strife. Therefore we have advised the people that they commit 
 the decision of external things and of rites to the Council of Two 
 Hundred, under the condition that all be regulated according to 
 the rule of God's Word, while we promise that, as soon as they, on 
 any point, do not recognise the authority of the Word of God, we 
 shall forthwith signify the same to them,, and exclaim against 
 their decision. With this arrangement the Church is agreed, 
 although she has not issued any public announcement upon the 
 subject; but she manifests her consent to it, by gratefully and 
 quietly submitting to it, from which it is clear that she will take 
 it ill if any one should be presumptuous enough to hinder the 
 progress of the Gospel by indulging in hair-splitting distinctions. 
 She knows well, too, that we must keep Christ and our own honour 
 in view alone, if we are to acquit ourselves of our task with a 
 regard to Christian unity. "What, however, respects the changes 
 to be proposed, the Council of Two Hundred aatU decide upon 
 these. Tor such a course of procedure we have examples in 
 Scripture. The Church at Antioch, as is well known, sent only 
 Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem, and passed no resolution them- 
 selves, which they could have done ; this they did that they might 
 avoid strife, of which there is ever the greater risk the greater 
 the multitude is with whom the ultimate decision rests. That 
 the Two Hundred, however, act in such matters in name of the 
 Church amd not in their own name, is evident from the circum- 
 stance, that what they have with us ordained in respect to the 
 venerating of images, the celebration of the Sacrament, and so on, 
 has been left free in the other communities of town and country, 
 because in these, where the numbers are smaller the spirit of 
 disunion is the less to be feared. This measure has had such 
 success that it is very plain it is in accordance with the will of 
 God. We first, above all things, instructed well the Christian 
 commonalty upon that which the Council had to decide, and 
 thus it came that all upon which the Two Hundred took order 
 
98 A NEW POSITION GAINED. 
 
 with the servants of the Word had already been accepted by the 
 faithful. Finally, we turned to the Council of Two Hupdred with 
 the petition that, in name of the whole Church, they would be 
 pleased to secure that aU should be done decently and ia order. 
 In this manner strife and disunion have been averted from our 
 Church, evils the presence of which was much to be apprehended, 
 from its great populousness, and the intemperance of some indi- 
 viduals in it; while to dissentients a hearing was given, and, 
 indeed, the ears of the magistrates and of the courts have been 
 pretty well accustomed to debates and squabbles. 'Tis thus in 
 Zurich that, instead of the Church, we avail ourselves in the 
 decision of religious questions, of the Council of Twp Hundred, 
 which is the highest civil power." 
 
 Such is the position which ZwingU from the first took up, after 
 he had convinced himself that the heads of the Church, so far 
 from advancing the work of Eeformation, would combat it to the 
 utmost of their power. By this sagacious measure it became pos- 
 sible for him to save the Eeformation from the horrors of revolu- 
 tion, and in a free state, too, where much less power is lodged in 
 the hands of the supreme authority than in a monarchy. Again, by 
 the operation of this measiire, the refining and sanctifying influence 
 of the gospel was made to pervade the whole of civil life, because 
 the magistracy were compelled to adapt their resolutions and ordi- 
 nations to God's Word, and to regulate their lives and conversation 
 by its rules ; the clergy were guardians and protectors of the 
 Divine rights, and the whole Christian community meanwhile 
 exercised a strict and faithful supervision over the measures of the 
 government, and over the morals of its members. The Christian 
 state, or the Christian magistracy, as the representative of God on 
 earth, thus became a reality, without the Church and her servants 
 being trammelled in the duties which they owed to the gospel. 
 
 After lengthened deliberation, the Great Council resolved, on 
 the Saturday following the Circumcision of Christ, the 3d Janu- 
 ary 1523, to accede to the desire of Zwiugli, and to appoint the 
 Conference on matters of religion to be held on the 29th January. 
 The circular calling the clergy is highly characteristic of the new 
 position in which the Council found itself placed. " We, Burgo- 
 masters, Little and Great Councils, to aU the clergy in our district, 
 salutations, and the expression of our favourable dispositions. 
 
A NEW POSITION GAINED. 99 
 
 Disunion Las manifested itself among us, and dissension exists 
 among our preachers. Some preachers believe that they have 
 faithfully proclaimed the gospel; whereas others maintain that 
 these promulgate error, mislead the people, and, in fact, are heretics, 
 although they are willing to maintain and defend, by proofs from 
 Holy Scripture, the doctrine which they teach. Therefore, animated 
 with the best intentions, and above all, to maintain the honour 
 of God, peace, and Christian unity, we declare it to be our plea- 
 sure that ye, parsons, priests, and preachers, jointly and severally, 
 or other priests, who are willing to speak, to reprove, or instruct 
 the other part, do present yourselves at our Town-hall at the early 
 hour of business on the first day after the Emperor Charles' day ; 
 and it is likewise our pleasure, if it do then and there come to a 
 disputation, that this be carried on in the German tongue and 
 language, and with proofs drawn from Holy Scripture. With aU 
 diligence, and with the assistance of some learned men, we shall 
 give attention, in the event of its appearing good to us so to do, 
 and according as the same shall be found to be agreeable to the 
 Word of God and truth, to send each and all of you home with 
 the orde'r either to continue or to desist from his kind of preach- 
 ing, that from henceforth each may not preach from the pulpit 
 what seems good to himself, and without fowndation. We shall 
 also intimate the same to our gracious lord the Bishop of Con- 
 stance, that his Grace, or his representatives, if they choose, may 
 be present. But if any be contrario-us, and bring not to his argu- 
 ment the true and genuine Word of God, we shall take such 
 measures with him as we might rather avoid. Finally, we trust 
 that God will illuminate our own souls with the light of His truth, 
 that we may walk as children of the light." In the meanwhile, 
 the magistracy, as the new depositary of episcopal power, was 
 induced by Zwingli to adopt proceedings which plainly displayed 
 the beneficial tendencies of the new order of things. The public- 
 houses were better looked after, riotous behaviour on the part of 
 the youth and students was restrained, women of ill fame were 
 ordered to leave the town, and four members of the Little Coun- 
 cil, living in open adultery, were excluded for half-a-year from 
 the sederunts. Zwingli himself prepared for the Eeligious Con- 
 ference, and wrote down sixty-seven propositions as theses to be 
 
100 THE FIRST RELIGIOUS CONPEEENCE IN ZURICH. 
 
 disputed upon, which he had printed. He concluded his little 
 work with the words : " In this disputation, let none contend 
 with the arms of subtle disquisition or sophistical cavilling, but let 
 him come with Holy Scripture, which is the alone standard for 
 the judges, that we may find the truth, and having found it, as I 
 hope we shall, may keep it." 
 
 Zwingli, when he heard that Faber was coming to the debate, 
 wrote to (Ecolompad in these words : " The Lord grant that he 
 be not hindered from coming, that neither Eome nor Constance 
 may be disappointed of their wonted jubilee." 
 
 2. The first Ebligious Conference in Zurich, held on the 
 29th January 1523. 
 
 On the 29th January, a Thursday, there assembled, at an early 
 hour of the morning, about six hundred persons, in the Great 
 Council's Hall at Zurich. There appeared in the Assembly, as 
 representatives of the Bishop, Knight James von Anwyl, High 
 Steward, John Faber, General Vicar, Dr. Martia Blansch, of 
 Tuebingen. Other men of rank and learning also gave their 
 attendance. The Diet of the Confederacy, which had met at 
 Baden a short time before, had been invited to send deputies, but 
 had not condescended to reply. From Berne there came unin- 
 vited Dr. Sebastian Meyer, from Schaffhausen, Sebastian Hofme- 
 ister, from Zurich itself, the canons, clergy, and men of learning, 
 as well as a vast number of citizens and country people; "for 
 with many," writes Bullinger, " there was a great wonderment 
 what would come out of this affair." In the centre of a vacant 
 circle sat Zwingli alone at a table, on which were spread out open 
 Bibles, in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages. All eyes were 
 turned upon the Eeformer. The burgomaster arose, Marx Eoist, 
 a hoary-headed warrior, who had fought with Zwingli in the 
 battle of Marignano, and addressed the Assembly as follows : 
 "Venerable and learned lords, — In Zurich, for sometime past, 
 considerable dissension has been created on account of the doctrine 
 of our predicant Magister Huldreich Zwingli; by some he has 
 been termed a corrupter of the people, by others a heretic. Among 
 
THE FIRST RELIGIOUS CONFERENCE IN ZURICH. ] 01 
 
 clergy and laity the discontent increases, and almost daily we 
 have complaints upon this subject. From the pulpit Magister 
 ZwingLi has offered to give an account of his doctrine if a public 
 disputation before clergy and laity were granted him. We have 
 conceded to hLm the liberty to hold the same before the Great 
 Council, and have summoned all the priests and curates of our 
 district, and have also invited our venerable lord and prince, the 
 Bishop of Constance. We have, in an especial manner, to express 
 our thanks that he has been pleased to send to us his highly 
 esteemed deputies. AVhoever, then, is dissatisfied or doubtful in 
 regard to that which Magister Huldreich has taught from the 
 pulpit, and whosoever can shew that his sermons and doctrines 
 have been seditious or heretical, let him now, at this opportunity 
 given, prove to him, with God's help, his error, that my lords of 
 the Council may be spared in future the complaints of disunion 
 and contention daily made both by clergj- and laity, of which my 
 lords are thoroughly tired." 
 
 The steward of the Bishop then rose and said : " My gracious 
 master well knows that in his bishopric dissensions and strife 
 have arisen, by reason of certain doctrines or preachings, although 
 he has ever had it at heart to promote peace ; and for this end 
 has sent his delegates hither. We are to hear the causes of such 
 disunion, and advise the best which may advantage an honourable 
 Council in Zurich, and a reverend clergy. Therefore we shall, for 
 the sake of peace and unity, seek to allay the fermentation and 
 dissension, until my lord, with his men of learning and prelates, 
 has considered and resolved farther upon it." Zwingli now 
 addressed the assembly: "From time immemorial," said he, 
 " God has revealed his will to the human race. His Word tells 
 us this. Pure and clear is this word in itself; but, by the additions 
 and doctrines of men, it has been in years gone by, and stiLL is 
 in our days, so darkened and defaced, that the greater part of 
 those who caU themselves Christians are wholly ignorant of the 
 Divine will, and know nothing but a worship invented by man, 
 and a pretended sanctity resting solely on external observances. 
 To such delusions they have been misled by those who ought to 
 have been their guides to the fountain of truth in the word of 
 Christ, as contained in His gospel and the writings of His apostles. 
 Now that some begin to point to this source, la! they are 
 
102 THE FIEST KELIGIOUS CONFEEENCE IN ZUEICH. 
 
 esteemed to be not Christians at all, but are scouted as corrupters 
 of the Church, nay, as heretics. For such an one I am regarded; 
 and although I now, in my fifth year in this town, proclaim 
 nothing but Christ's saving message to man, yet this has not 
 served to justify me as my lords here of the Council well know. 
 For this cause, and I thank them for it, they have granted me 
 this public disputation. I have drawn up propositions which 
 contain the sum of that which I have hitherto taught. That these 
 propositions are agreeable to the gospel, I hope to make clear to 
 every one, and also to our gracious lord the Bishop of Constance, 
 or his representatives. The Spirit of God hath compelled me to 
 speak ; He knows too why He hath chosen me, all unworthy as I 
 am, as His herald. Go on, then, in God's name. Here I am to 
 answer you." Upon this, the General-Vicar Faber said: "My 
 esteemed brother Zwingli assures us that he has always preached 
 the gospel in Zurich. Truly I do not doubt that : for what 
 preacher called of God would not preach the gospel. He means 
 to vindicate his doctrine ; I could have wished he had come to 
 Constance, where I would have testified my friendship for him. 
 I am not here to contend against evangelic or apostolic doctrine, 
 but to listen, in event of dispute to decide, and, in a word, to do 
 all that makes for peace, and, if possible, to prevent any public 
 disturbance; for this Paul and the gospel enjoin on us. But if 
 one will here lay his hand upon venerable rites and J.ong- established 
 usages, I declare here, as the ambassador of my lord the -Bishop 
 of Constance, that I have orders in that case not to interfere at 
 all Such affairs belong wholly to general councils of nations, 
 and of their bishops, for it would be highly injurious to pass some 
 resolution liere, which might not be accepted somewhere else. 
 Schisms would thus arise in the Church. I therefore advise to 
 forbear from constitutions which are a hundred years old, or 
 which are of Papal ox ecel'esiastical appointment; and the more 
 so, as my lord the Bishop is informed, that the States of the 
 empire have resolved to call a general council to meet at Num- 
 berg* within a year's time. Besides, who in such disputations is 
 to be the judge ? It is only at the high schools of learning, such 
 
 * To prevent the Diet, which had then met at Numberg, from adopting 
 measures of vigour in matters of religion, the prospect of the speedy calling of 
 a general council was held out by the papal ambassadors. 
 
THE FIEST RELIGIOUS CONFERENCE IN ZURICH. 103 
 
 as Paris, Cologne or Louvaine,* that men of the requisite capacity 
 for such an office are to be found." 
 
 " And why," said Zwingli, jeeringly, " not at Erfurt or Witten- 
 bei^?-f" Dear brethren, my lord Vicar employs against your 
 simplicity much art, and deals in the flowers of rhetoric to turn 
 you from your purpose. We do not inquire how long anything 
 has been the custom; we speak of truth as it is presented to us in 
 the Divine law. Use and wont must yield to this. Does one 
 speak of a Christian assembly? then I think there is one here in 
 this room: for the Lord himself hath said, 'Where two or three 
 are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of 
 them.' Bishops, too, are amongst us, not powerful mighty princes 
 as we have them at the present day, but overseers and teachers 
 of the Christian flock, called bishops by the apostle. And where- 
 fore do we require judges ? we who have here the Holy Scriptures 
 in the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin tongues, and learned men who 
 understand these languages as well as those in the so-caUed high 
 schools. And even if this were not the case, there are yet among 
 us so many Christian spirits, that, with God's assistance, it may 
 readily be made clear to us which party rightly, which party 
 wrongly, interprets Scripture. But, finally, as to what concerns 
 the Numberg business, I teU you, dear friends, that of late I have 
 received from thence three letters, which I could now lay before 
 you, none of which contains a single word in regard to any 
 resolution being passed to caU a Council; popes, bishops, and 
 prelates are represented, on the contrary, as most of all against 
 it. Let not the speech you have just heard cause you any alarm. 
 And ye of Zurich ought to look upon it as a distinguished 
 favour, and a special caU of God to do His work, that such an 
 assembly as this can take place among you." 
 
 A lengthened pause succeeded Zwingli's words, which was 
 broken by the Burgomaster's challenge : " If there be any one 
 present who has anything to object to Zwingli and his doctrine, 
 let him now do so." AU remained silent. Zwingli then said: 
 " In Christian love I entreat each and every man who holds the 
 doctrine I preach to be false or erroneous, to express his dissent 
 without hesitation. I know there are several here who have 
 
 * Three schools, particularly averse to the Eeformation, and which had con- 
 demned Luther's Theses, 
 t Luther had studied at Erfurt, and was now teaching at Wittenberg. 
 
104 THE FIEST EELIGIOUS CONFBEENCE IN ZUEICH. 
 
 accused me of heresy ; I do not wish to be forced to call upon 
 them by name." Tlie Abbot of Kappel, "Wolfgang Joner, who 
 held evangelical opinions, said : " Where are the men who would 
 burn us, and who have already provided wood for the purpose ? 
 Let them come forward; there stands the man who is ready to 
 give you answer." None entering the lists against Zwingli, James 
 Wagner, parson at Neftenbach, said : " Our gracious lord of 
 Constance has, within the last year, issued a mandate, in which 
 he commands that the traditions and doctrines of men be held 
 and observed until they shall be altered or abrogated by a General 
 Council. But as none comes forward now to speak against 
 Zwingli's articles, which are diametrically opposed to that which 
 the Bishop commands us to observe, I hope that from hence- 
 forward we shall be no longer bound by the said mandate, but 
 be free to preach the Word of God fully and purely, and to let 
 human traditions alone. We kijow, too, that parson Urban 
 Weiss of FiSlisbach, has been, in accordance with the said man- 
 date, imprisoned, and brought as a common malefactor to Con- 
 stance. If, however, we teach and preach according to the 
 mandate, the articles of Zwingli cannot be defended, and they 
 must be false. Nevertheless, as none here will adventure to 
 attack the same, and to prove their fallacy, it is much to be feared 
 that injustice has been done to the parson of Fislisbach. This 
 much I felt myself compelled, in my simplicity, to say, as Urban 
 Weiss is our brother, and I might willingly know how we are to 
 hold ourselves in respect of said mandate." 
 
 The General- Vicar could not remain longer silent " As this 
 speech concerns my gracious master, and in part also me, his 
 vicar (although I was out of the country when the said mandate 
 was issued), I declare that my gracious lord must have seen the 
 necessity for it, there being in his diocese so many foolish and 
 ill-instructed parsons, who utter great nonsense. The parson of 
 Fislisbach is an illiterate, unreasonable man, who gives utter- 
 ance to such indecent speeches, that one feels ashamed any- 
 where to repeat them. I have, out of compassion to him, con- 
 versed with him in regard to prayer and petition to the blessed 
 saints, and convinced him of his error, proving to him, out of the 
 first and second books of Moses, out of Ezekiel and Baruch, that 
 before the birth of Christ the blessed saints were worshipped 
 and invoked, that they might intercede for others, and I sue- 
 
THE FIKST RELIGIOUS CONFERENCE IN ZURICH. 10 
 
 ceeded in inducing tiim to acknowledge his errors. He is now 
 willing to recant all lie has tanght in respect of the Mother of 
 God and the blessed saints, so that I hope he will express his 
 great obligations to me for the trouble I have taken, and will 
 shortly receive his liberty." ZwingU hastily struck in at these 
 words : " God has, without doubt, disposed it that the General- 
 Vicar has touched upon the adoration of the saints, for it is made 
 to me the matter of greatest reproach that I do not teach the 
 duty of prayer to the saints, and that I shew that Jesus Christ 
 is the only Saviour and Intercessor between us and His heavenly 
 Father, as Holy Scripture clearly teaches us. My lord vicar 
 having now publicly boasted that he has converted the parson of 
 Fislisbach from his error by certain passages of Scripture, to 
 which he directed his attention, I shall ask nothing more of him 
 but that he kindly communicate to us the passages referred to." 
 The General- Vicar replied : " I see, dear sirs, that the tables are 
 turned against me. ' The fool is easily caught in liis words,' says 
 the proverb. I have my foolishness to blame for it that I allowed 
 myself to speak, having expressly said I should not dispute. 
 There have arisen, many hundred years ago, heretics who rejected 
 the adoration of the saints, purgatory, &c. The Fathers, however, 
 have condemned them in the Councils. Even in recent times, 
 the Bohemians and Picardians,* misled by Wickliff-j- and Huss.J 
 have brought in again heretical doctrines, and there are those at 
 the present day who would lead the people from ancient usages 
 which have lasted twelve centuries. If all that the Holy Fathers 
 have done is to go for nothing, we are come to a poor pass. Has 
 then Christendom been in error fourteen hundred years? The 
 adoration of the saints has lasted ever since the time of Gregory 
 (elected Pope a.d. 716)." ZwingH replied: "My lord vicar, such 
 
 » The Waldenses were called Picardians, from Picardy, a department in 
 France, where they were to be found in great numbers. Faber said, on his 
 return to Constance, " I believed myself in Picardy, it so swarmed with heretics 
 at Zurich." 
 
 t John Wickliff (born 1324), Professor of Divinity at Oxford, belongs to the 
 forerunners of the Kefonnation, inasmuch as he boldly attacked the corruptions 
 in the Church, and laid down the doctrine that " in matters of faith Scripture 
 alone must decide." 
 
 J John Huss (bom 1373, as martyr to the faith biimed at Constance 1415), 
 is also a forerunner of the Reformers. He was brought to the knowledge of 
 the truth chiefly by reading Wickliff's writings. 
 
106 THE FIEST EELIGIOUS CONFEEENCE IN ZUEICH. 
 
 digressions are out of place. Shew us, I pray you, the passages 
 of Holy Scripture with which you have convinced the parson of 
 Fishsbach of his error. Answer in simple distinct language, 
 Here and here it is so written; we shall then examine the pas- 
 sages, and illuminate the matter farther. Fathers and Councils 
 are no authority to us, except when they prove what they say by 
 Scripture. Every body knows that the Councils contradict each 
 other. What is set up in the one is thrown down in the other; 
 for proof of this I remind you of the question of the marriage of 
 priests. It is weU known that the Litany existed before the 
 time of Gregory; and that there certainly were Christians before 
 the introduction of the Litany. We too have enough in Christ, 
 and can dispense with human ordinances." At the mention of 
 the marriage of the priests, the Vicar conceived he had an oppor- 
 tunity to escape from the demands of his opponent, and he plunged 
 into a historical disquisition upon this subject. Zwingli did not 
 allow himself to be duped by this artifice, but, interrupting him, 
 said: "And although you were to maintain and prove that the 
 prohibition of marriage to the priests has existed since the times 
 of the apostles, yet such a prohibition is nowhere to be found in 
 God's Word, which, on the contrary, allows it, as I have already 
 proved. But what we desire from you now is, that you shew us 
 the passages of Holy Scripture in which adoration of the saints 
 is permitted and enjoined, for this is the point." The Vicar was 
 at length obliged to take up the unpleasant subject. " We have 
 in the Christian Church," said he, " the custom, of long-standing, 
 observed by the whole of Christendom, and confirmed by the 
 Litany and Mass-canon, to call on the Mother of God and the 
 blessed saints to intercede for us. The Mother of God herself 
 gives us instruction on this point, as in Luke she says, 'from 
 henceforth all generations shall call me blessed ;' and' again, 
 'blessed art thou among women;' and the woman in the gospel, 
 ' blessed is the womb that bare thee.'" Zwingli : "AR these places 
 of Holy Scripture prove the glory and excellence of Mary, with 
 regard to which there is no dispute, and which is not the matter 
 in hand You must prove to us the adoration by Holy Scrip- 
 ture; aU else is sheer trifling." Faber: " If then my words be 
 frivolous and idle talk, I shall willingly keep silence." Dr. Mar- 
 tin Blansch spoke next, whom Zwingli answered, and then Sebas- 
 
THE FIEST RELIGIOUS CONFERENCE IN ZURICH. 107 
 
 tian Hofmeister and Dr. Sebastian Meyer, the two honorary 
 guests, who exhorted the Zurichers to hold to the Word of God, 
 and to advance on the path which they had entered upon. The 
 Burgomaster, after calling on any who had the wish to speak, or 
 to make objections, and none appearing, dismissed the assembly 
 to dinner, with the remark, " The sword that wounded the par- 
 son of Fislisbach will not leave its scabbard to-day." The Coun- 
 cil remained sitting, and passed the following resolution, which 
 in the afternoon was published to the assembly : — " Magister 
 Huldreich Zwingli, canon and predicant in the Great Minster at 
 Zurich, having been ofttimes secretly calumniated, and publicly 
 accused on account of his doctrine, and having published the 
 articles of his faith, and called on any to disprove them on the 
 ground of Holy Scripture, and none having appeared with that 
 intent, although the said Magister Zwingli has more than once 
 challenged those to do so who have applied to him the oppro- 
 brious name of heretic — We, the Burgomaster, the Little and 
 Great Councils of the town of Zurich, to put an end to disturb- 
 ance and dissension, after due deliberation, have resolved, and it 
 is our opinion, that the said Magister Huldreich Zwingli con- 
 tinue, as hitherto, to preach Holy Scripture, according as the 
 Spirit of God may enable him. We also command aU other 
 Leut-priests, curates, and predicants in town and country to 
 teach and preach from the pulpit nothing else but that which 
 can be proved by the Gospel and the recognized Holy Scriptures. 
 Nor shall they for the future apply to each other abusive names, 
 as heretic and the like." 
 
 Upon this resolution being published, Zwingli said, greatly 
 rejoiced : " God be praised, who wiU. have His Holy Word rule 
 in heaven and on earth. He, the Almighty Everlasting God, wUl, 
 as I doubt not, my lords, grant you strength on other occasions 
 also to forward the cause of His Word and Holy Gospel, and to 
 protect the preaching of the same within your bounds. Doubt 
 not, my lords, the Omnipotent Eternal God will in another way 
 recompense and reward you. Amen." The General-Vicar sought 
 to save his honour by maintaining that the propositions of 
 Zwingli were erroneous and heretical, but he did not attempt to 
 prove his assertion. Zwingli, animated with the feeling of vic- 
 tory, no longer spared him, especially as the Vicar declared he 
 
108 THE FIRST EELIGIOUS COKEEEENCE IN ZURICH. 
 
 no longer spoke in an official capacity, but only as Johai 
 Faber forgot himself so far as to say : " Not all that is wron 
 against Christ stands in the gospel. For where do we find 
 example, that a "man shall not take his own or his sister's da 
 ter to wife? One can be friendly, peaceable, virtuous wit] 
 the gospel." Zwingli replied : " Nor does it stand anywhe: 
 the gospel that a cardinal should have thirty livings. Br 
 the third book of Moses, chap, xviii., you find farther remc 
 degrees of blood-relationship forbidden than that which you 1 
 named, from whence it is clear that nearer cannot be allo^ 
 although they are not specified. For the rest, I pity you 
 you make to the inhabitants of Zu.rich such foolish and st( 
 speeches, which are nothing but an insult to the understand 
 of the people. You had better held your peace than to have i 
 defended yourself." At these words all present stood up, indigi 
 at the disgraceful conduct of the Vicar, and his idle unmeai 
 harangues, and went home. Thus ended the first Conference 
 As a remarkable circumstance, highly characteristic of 
 economics of the times, it deserves to be mentioned, in com 
 tion with the Conference, that the parson of Schlieren, u 
 Zwingli's exhortation that every parson should read and st 
 the Holy Scriptures, especially the New testament, objecte( 
 these words : " How can one who has a small living buy a Te 
 ment? I have such a poor living, and therefore I must here 
 in my word." Zwiagli said : " There is, by God's grace, no pi 
 so poor that he cannot, if he go seriously about it, buy a Te 
 ment. He wUl find some pious citizen* who will buy him i 
 or advance him the money." 
 
 3. Eesults of the Disputation.— -Principles observed e 
 Zwingli in the work of Eefoemation. 
 
 Although Zwingli, in the religious disputation, had obtai 
 
 so decisive a victory, Faber nevertheless sought, by all the 
 
 * Burgomaster Diethelm Hoist, son and successor of Marx, took, along 
 others, this hint of Zwingli's, and presented the parson of Kirchberg, Eud 
 Muetz, with a New Testament, expressing his wish, " that you may read 
 Divine Word with all diligence and zeal, and put more faith in the Creata 
 all things than in the poor weak creature man." Henry Werthmueller, a fr 
 of Zwingli's, and a memher of the Great Council, distributed several New T( 
 ments among the poor. 
 
RESULTS OF THE DISPUTATION. 109 
 
 of deception, to preserve the appearance of it to himseE Erhard 
 Hegenwald, formerly schoolmaster in the cloister of Pfaeffers, 
 published as faithful and impartial an account as could possibly 
 have been given of the transactions and debates of the Confer- 
 ence. To weaken the effect of this narrative, which, in the 
 moderate tone that pervades it, unquestionably bears the stamp 
 of truth, and if possible, to maintain for himself the honour of 
 victory, Faber published a passionate report of the whole pro- 
 ceedings, teeming with odious attacks upon Zwingli and the 
 Zurichers, and full of palpable misrepresentations and untruths. 
 This libel was answered in a pithy manner by some of the youth 
 of Zurich, in a book entitled " Hawk-pluckings,"* so that out of 
 this after- fight Faber reaped as little honour as he did out of the 
 disputation itself. 
 
 The Eeformer, for his part, never for a moment lost sight of 
 the grand object in view — ^the restitution of the gospel to its 
 proper place in the worship of the sanctuary, and its reinstate- 
 ment in the affections of the heart, and this for the glory of God, 
 and the salvation of perishing souls. The opportunity not having 
 been presented him of fully establishing his propositions or theses 
 at the Conference, he resolved to do this in a separate publication. 
 "Night and day," he afterwards wrote to, a friend, "I laboured at 
 this work." In this way he succeeded, notwithstanding his daily 
 sermons, and attention to a mass of other business, in bringing it 
 to a close within five months, although it contains three hundred 
 pages closely printed. He published it immediately. Great was the 
 impression which it made on its appearance, both at home and 
 abroad.'f Every Christian who thirsted after salvation, was 
 enabled with it in his hand to prove all the ecclesiastical doc- 
 trines, ordinances, rites, and ceremonies in the light of God's Word. 
 In Zurich, no alterations had as yet taken place in public worship, 
 or in ecclesiastical institutions. ZwragU had directed his whole 
 attention to the preaching of the Word of God, and implanting 
 it in the hearts of his hearers. He left it with a wise moderation 
 and pious self-denial to God, to choose the period of time when 
 the renovation of His Church should be effected on the basis of 
 
 * A sharp polemic, full of biting wit. Its" title is borrowed from a round game, 
 called as above, 
 t At Numberg 300 copies were disposed of at once. 
 
110 RESULTS OF THE DISPUTATION. 
 
 His Word. The time for a practical reformation appeared now 
 to have arrived. After the decisive victory which evangelical 
 truth gained at the Conference, and after ZwingK in the exposition 
 and establishment of his propositions had set his evangelical 
 doctrine in so convincing a light before the eyes of the people, a 
 desire sprang up so strong and vigorous for the reorganisation of 
 ecclesiastical institutions and worship, according to the claims of 
 God's Word, that it was impossible to resist it. Zwingli, with 
 the most anxious and tender pastoral fidelity, took care, in co- 
 operation with the magistracy, that reform should be carried out 
 in the most orderly manner. He strove to effect it in a way the 
 least obnoxious and grating to the feelings. It was his desire 
 that the weak in the faith should not be offended; that the 
 broken reed might not be broken, nor the smoking flax of faith 
 quenched. " God knows my heart," said he on one of these 
 occasions, " and that I am more inclined to build up than to pull 
 down." With this amiable moderation, he combined a manly 
 resolution, which led him to the unsparing carrying out of par- 
 ticular reforms, when they were necessitated by the demands of 
 God's Word. " An ecclesiastical institution, or a ceremony of 
 public worship, may be differently viewed," said he, " but certain 
 it is that that which is contrary to the Word of God, cannot be 
 allowed to stand, 'for every plant which my heavenly Father hath 
 not planted shall be rooted up,' Matt. xv. 13. If now, in an 
 ordinance condemned by God, we make a slight alteration, what 
 follows — ^we must combat it stiU by the' weapons of God's Word, 
 whereby daily heart-burnings must arise. My 'plan is, to set up 
 in the Church of God a work that will preserve itself in the midst 
 of fire, and that has nothing to fear from fire itself Such a work 
 can only be erected on the foundation Christ, who also is 
 the foundation of the building of the apostles and prophets." 
 Such were the principles that guided Zwingli in the salutary work 
 of Church reform which he now undertook. 
 
 The stream of reformation, in the first instance, directed itself 
 against the institution of which he was himself a member. 
 
THE CATHEDEAL FOUNDATION. Ill 
 
 4. The Cathedeal Foundation at the Geeat Minster. 
 
 The members of this foundation, who were to be limited to 
 eighteen in number, were, in terms of Charles the Great's letter 
 of foundation, to serve God with prayer and praise, to furnish the 
 Christians, in hill and valley, with the means of public worship, 
 and finally, to preside over the Cathedral School, which, after the 
 name of the founder, was called the Charles' School Like 
 most other ecclesiastical institutions, that of the Great Minster 
 soon degenerated from the principles of its institution, and quickly 
 lost its original object entirely of sight. A Leut-priest, with a 
 very small salary attached to the office, but who was comforted 
 with the prospect of a speedy advancement to the canonship, 
 was appointed to discharge the functions of public worship. 
 The members of the foundation, for the most part, gave them- 
 selves up to lives of idleness, riot, and often of licentiousness.* 
 There were, indeed, at the time "when Zwingli was chosen to fill 
 the office of Leut-priest, canons in the foundation animated with 
 a different spirit, else his election had hardly taken place. The 
 decided and vigorous operations of the Eeformer, although they 
 often encountered a fierce opposition, were in general not with- 
 out fruit amongst them, and while the one party openly and with 
 joy embraced the gospel, and subjected themselves to the obe- 
 dience of faith, the other party felt themselves necessitated to lead 
 a life of at least decent morality. Meanwhile, however, as the 
 light of the gospel waxed stronger, the discontentment among the 
 citizens rose higher, with the vast numbers of useless ecclesias- 
 tics, who drew large rents, and pocketed heavy taxes, that were 
 paid with great unwillingness. The foundation at this time num- 
 bered twenty-four canons and thirty-six chaplains,^ besides the 
 
 * Felix Haemmerlin, precentor of this foundation, in the first h^lf of the 
 fifteenth century, says of these same ecclesiastics : " A blacksmith can, from a 
 number of old horse shoes, pick one out and make it useable, but I know no 
 smith who, out of all these canons, could make one good canon." 
 
 t Chaplain Widmer, a man of notoriously bad character, and a bitter enemy of 
 the Gospel and of Zwingli, wrote to the voracious pluralist, Henry Goeldli, (See 
 above, 2d Sect.), to Eome : " I hear that you intend to bring a falcon with yon. 
 My advice to you is, to let it rather alone, for there is here such a spirit prevalent, 
 that we priests can scarce walk safely about the town, not to speak of going a 
 
112 THE CATHEDRAL FOUNDATION. 
 
 Leut-priestand his assistants. ZwingU and his friends admitted 
 that the complaints made against the institution were well- 
 grounded, and moved the appointment of a committee, selected 
 out of the canons themselves and the Council, to deliberate on a 
 reform, now become absolutely necessary. This committee was 
 appointed in September 1523, and its suggestions were passed 
 into law by a resolution of the Council, in concurrence with-the 
 canons. In the first place, certain burdens were removed from 
 the laity. No one was any longer to be forced to pay for the 
 performance of baptism, or the last unction, for burials, or for 
 grave-stones, unless the same were expressly desired ; no one 
 was to be obliged to deliver burial-candles, while it stood open to 
 all to light them at their own cost ; no one was to be required to 
 pay for the tolling of the great bell in the Minster, while, if they 
 chose, they could pay for the tolling of the bell either there or at 
 the other churches. The Leut-priest and his assistants were to 
 be duly indemnified for the loss resulting to them from the adop- 
 tion of these measures, out of the tithes and rents. It was 
 resolved to reduce the number of the ecclesiastics, (those that 
 died off were not to be replaced,) but a sufficient number was to 
 be maintained for the due performance of public worship, and 
 the cure of souls in the Minster itself, and its filial dependencies. 
 Canons and chaplains, who were henceforth to bear the common 
 name of chaplains, might, on condition that they conducted them- 
 selves decently, and gave no offence either in their doctrine or 
 lives, remain in the undisturbed enjoyment of their benefices; 
 but the more capable of them were to be employed, with compe- 
 tent salaries, as the ministers of parishes, and in this office to 
 conduct themselves with all fidelity as evangelical pastors. The 
 amount of the benefices set free by the decease of canons was to 
 be applied to the better payment of the teachers in the founda- 
 tion school, or the Gymnasium, in order that better qualified men 
 might be obtained for these situations. Zwingli at the same time 
 called into life an altogether new institution of a higher order, 
 specially adapted for advancing the work of education among the 
 
 falcon-hunting, and springing over the boor's hedges. We are decried as use- 
 less, good-for-nothing parsons, that for three hundred years, till the time of 
 Luther and Zwingli, have deceived the people. The common man hopes that 
 the number of priests in Zurich will be reduced to six or ten at most." 
 
THE CATHEDEAL FOUNDATION. 113 
 
 candidates for the priesthood, for affording intellpctual and spiri- 
 tual exercise to the canons, and promoting edification also among 
 the people. In place of the choir-service in the morning, heed- 
 lessly mumbled over by canons and chaplains, a new service 
 came into existence on the 19th July 1525, " the prophesying," or 
 exposition of Scripture. At eight o'clock, all the town-parsons, 
 predicants, canons, and chaplains, and the more advanced scholars, 
 assembled in the choir of the Minster church. Zwingli having 
 delivered, in the Latin language, the prayer, a translation of which 
 we give below, the exposition was begun with the first chapter 
 of the First Book of Moses, in the following manner : A scholar 
 read a section of the Latin Translation of the Bible (the Vulgate), 
 and the teacher commented upon it. The same section was then 
 read in the Hebrew Text, then in the Greek Translation (the Sep- 
 tuagint), and critically, as well as doctrinally and practically, 
 explained in Latin. At first Zwingli himself expounded out of the 
 original text and the Greek Translation, but afterwards a special 
 master was appointed for the Hebrew, first, Oeporin,* and after 
 his early death, PellicaiL-f This exercise J lasted about an hour. 
 In the meantime, the congregation had assembled to hear the ser- 
 mon at nine. An ecclesiastic mounted the pulpit, and deKvered the 
 beautiftd prayer composed by Zwingli : " merciful God, heavenly 
 Father ! since Thy Word is alight to our feet and alamp to our path, 
 we pray Thee that Thou wouldest, through Christ, who is the true 
 light of the whole world, open and illuminate our minds, clearly 
 and purely to understand Thy truth, that so we may in no respect 
 offend Thy High Majesty, through our Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
 Christ. Amen." The section of Scripture which had been already 
 treated learnedly was then expounded in a manner level to the 
 capacities of the congregation, the doctrines and exhortations it 
 contained brought home to the heart, and the whole proceeding 
 closed with prayer. At the remaining hours the scholars of this 
 higher institution received instructions in the languages and the 
 
 * Ceporin or Weisendanger, of Dynhart, bom in a village of the Canton 
 Zurich, was a learned and well-meaning young man, but he filled the office only 
 a short time, from April till 20th December, when he died. 
 
 t Pellicanus or Kuersner, bom at Eufart, in Elsas, did the duties from 1526 
 till 1556, and rendered important Bervice to the cause of the Reformation. 
 
 t Zwingli called this scientific and didactic exercise "prophesying," in reference 
 to the proceedings alluded to in 1 Cor. xir. 
 
11 4 THE CATHEDRAL FOUNDATION. 
 
 sciences from the learned men who were appointed in the room 
 of the deceased canons. In respect of the idea present to the 
 mind of Zwingli in regard to this higher institution, Myconius 
 says : " Zwingli formed the plan of founding an institution spe- 
 cially intended for the study of profane learning and scientific 
 theology, and I doubt not that, had he survived the fuU execu- 
 tion of his plan, it would not have found its equal anywhere." 
 Yet the seed sown by Zwingli ra hope sprung up even after he 
 liimself had left the scene; the list of distinguished individuals 
 in science, in the Church and State, which Zurich cain claim as 
 her alumni up to the present day, is the rich fruit of the seed 
 sown by our Eeformer. 
 
 The secular authority and judicature which the Foundation 
 had hitherto possessed was now transferred to the Council and 
 burghers. The revenues, after deduction of the salaries to school- 
 masters and parsons, were applied in behalf of the Hospital for 
 the Poor. The change in this Foundation having been thus 
 accomplished in a marmer so salutary, the Foundation of the 
 Frauen Minster, in which Zwingli's friend, so often already men- 
 tioned. Dr. Engelhard, laboured as Leut-priest, became in its turn 
 animated with the breath of reform. This Abbey was founded, 
 as BuUinger states, in 833, by King Ludwig, the German, whose 
 daughter, the sainted Hildegard, was the first Abbess. At the 
 time of the Eeformation, Catherine vom Zimmern, (or Zimbern), 
 a Suabian, held this office. On the 4th December 1524, with 
 the consent of the other females of the Foundation, she handed 
 over to the Council all its lands, revenues, and privileges, on the 
 condition that " an honourable Council should apply the same to 
 the glory of God, the salvation of soids, and the comfort and help 
 of the poor." The females belonging to the Foundation were 
 secured in a provision for life, and the surplus of the income was 
 applied to the benefit of the churches, the schools, and the poor. 
 Myconius, who had been forcedby the enemies of the Gospel to 
 flee from Lucerne, and had laboured for some time at Einsiedeln, 
 with Geroldseck, received an appointment as master at the school 
 of the Frauen Minster. Geroldseck, when he saw this friend of 
 the truth also leaving Einsiedeln for Zurich, 1525, was oppressed 
 with a sad foreboding. " It seemed to him ominous," said he to his 
 departing friend, "that aU who acknowledge Christ gather together 
 
THE CLOISTERS. 115 
 
 in Zurich. God grant," said he, " it may not he to perish there toge- 
 ther." Myconius, besides attending his duties at the school, used 
 to deliver in the evening instructive and edifying addresses, 
 instead of the Vespers formerly read, on parts of the New Testa- 
 ment, in the German language, and at these meetings he had a 
 large attendance as well of the clergy as of the laity, men and 
 women; "for," says Leonhard Weiss, "he could instruct in a 
 manner very intelligible and entertaining." 
 
 Thus these two ancient ecclesiastical Foundations, renovated 
 by the breath of that evangelical spirit, fanned by God in the 
 breast of ZwingU, became institutions that have eminently pro- 
 moted the salvation of souls, the glory of Zurich, and the Church 
 of Christ, and they will continue to do so as long as genuine piety 
 and sterling truth preserve their sacred alliance. 
 
 But even those ecclesiastical institutions, which for ■ a time 
 obstinately resisted the influence of the gospel, could just as little 
 eventually withstand it as the snow and ice of the mountains can 
 resist the genial influences of spring, — we mean the cloisters. 
 
 5. The Cloisters. 
 
 We have already mentioned that ZwingU, and afterwards Leo 
 Jud, at the order of the Council, preached in the nunneries, and 
 discharged the duties of pastors there, and, on the other hand, 
 that the preaching-monks were forbidden to enter these institu- 
 tions. The preaching of the gospel bore here, too, its fruit. 
 Several nuns, especially from the Cloister Oetenbach, petitioned 
 the Council for permission to leave the cloister, and take with 
 them the Little property they brought to it. The Council, on the 
 17th June 1523, resolved to grant their petition. Many availed 
 themselves of the permission thus given; others wished to live 
 and die in the cloister. These latter were also allowed to follow 
 their own desires, on the condition that the women of the various 
 cloisters should lay aside the dress of their order, and dwell 
 together in one house, peaceably, and diligently attend the preach- 
 ing of the gospel; those who, at a later period, might wish to 
 change their mode of life, had the liberty to do so at any time, the 
 others maintaining their vows till death, with a suitable provision. 
 
116 THE CLOISTERS. 
 
 A sterner conflict had to be waged with the monks. Zwiugli 
 had proved, by the Word of God, that all monkish establishments 
 were condemned by it. " Christ says, Matt, xxiii 9 : ' And caU 
 no man your father upon the earth : for one is your Father, which 
 is in heaven.' In these words it was not the intention of Christ 
 to forbid us from calling our natural fathers by the name of 
 father, but simply that we should render submission to none as a 
 teacher or guide, except to the one heavenly Father, and the only 
 Master and Guide, Christ. It is hence clear that all who have 
 arrogated to themselves the title of Fathers, and that likewise all 
 who acknowledge them as such, and adhere to them as such, do 
 this against the express command of God, and diminish the glory 
 of Christ. They may say, 'Yes, we know well that God is our 
 Father; we have only adopted a pious and holy man as our 
 schoolmaster and guide.' They yet contravene the spirit of the 
 command already noticed : Ye shall have God alone for your 
 Master; you are to listen to His word, and not to the idle words 
 of man, however wise man may appear. This word is also 
 against it : ' Neither be ye called masters ; for one is your Master 
 even Christ,' after whom, indeed, ye ought to carry the cross, but 
 not after Dominicus, Benedictus, Franciscus, Antonius, or Bern- 
 hardus. If these were alive at the present day, they would, that 
 is, if they were true Christians, undoubtedly tell you, ' foolish 
 men, what are ye about, know ye not that ye ought to have no 
 other master, father, or guide, but God alone ? "Why hold to us, 
 who have all our lives long held ourselves on God alone ?' In 
 short, all distinction of one from another in the body of the faith- 
 ful, be it by name, order, or any title whatsoever, is wrong, is a 
 sin, a lie, and a deception. Many will think this a hard word, 
 for which I may be severely censured. You talk nonsense, it 
 will be said to me. How many saints in the orders of monkery- 
 have come to God and been saved ! Answer : Shew me the bonds 
 of their salvation. The Antichrist of Kome, indeed, has said, by 
 his fat-bellied parsons, they are saved ; I, for my part, trust the 
 simple word of Christ, who is the truth itself, more than that of 
 aU the Popes, who have followed another rule than the doctrine 
 of Christ. But have not the Fathers, sayest thou, the Popes and 
 Councils, confirmed the orders? Answer: Similar dishes have 
 similar handles. The Popes and Councils have but fairly enough 
 
THE CLOISTEES. 117 
 
 confirmed their flatterers and supporters. Why do they not 
 observe the word of Christ (Matt, xxiii. 9), from which they 
 might well see they ought to say : Follow the doctrine of Christ 
 alone, pay no regard to the Fathers, follow none but Christ? 
 Is it not evident from this very confirmation how the matter 
 stands? That which comes from God requires no confirmation at 
 all, for to the faithful it is enough that God teaches it? The anti- 
 christians, however, have been obliged to confirm this same 
 monkery, because it has no foundation in the Word of God ; on 
 the contrary, it is contradicted by it. Verily, what a fine foun- 
 dation the orders have ! I will not speak of the knavery of 
 praising poverty, while none are more avaricious and greedy of 
 wealth than the monks. They praise, too, obedience, and yet 
 they refuse all obedience to God and man. God they do not 
 obey; for when He commands us to call no man ' Father' except 
 himself, they set themselves up as mock -fathers, and when He 
 commands us to honour father and mother, and to stand by them, 
 they say, ' No ; thou shalt no more regard father and mother,' as if 
 their order were that for which I must leave father and mother. 
 impious falsifiers of the Divine Word \ Understand that Christ 
 then only commands us to leave father and mother when they 
 would make us apostates from the faith. Where, pray, has He 
 commanded this for any order's sake? Such authority it will be 
 difficult to find, as He nowhere allows an order at alL To the 
 magistracy they are as little obedient, and yet Peter and Paul 
 command us to obey it. Yes, they would rather stir up mur- 
 derous wars, as has often been done, than obey the words of the 
 apostles. Eeflect whether they love this world's goods or not. 
 With their neighbour they hold nothing in common, to which yet 
 the obedience of Christ binds us ; they suffer not with the suffer- 
 ing, they work not with the working, they sorrow not with the 
 sorrowing, and alms they distribute from the leavings of their 
 wealtL What shall I say ? The earth bears not a greater burden 
 upon it than these hooded fattening-hogs. (My words apply not 
 to those pious brethren of the orders who, having pure and upright 
 hearts, are conscientiously devoted to. the doctrine of Christ, and 
 would follow it if only they could.) In respect to chastity, which 
 they vow to observe, we know very well how little they observe 
 it. From all this it foUows, that all that all the monks on earth 
 
118 THE CLOISTEES. 
 
 with their cowls have invented is a base system of hypocrisy, and 
 an open assault on God and His Word. Here it may be objected ; 
 a priest must be distinguished from the common man, be it by a 
 a bald pate, or by clotliing. Answer: He who will distinguish 
 himself from his brother by badges or dress is a hypocrite; for 
 we have another way to make ourselves venerated. Christ 
 teaches us that we ought to excel each other in hvmility. He 
 says also, 'By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, 
 if ye have love one to another.' (John xiii. 35.) If we love all men 
 as ourselves, and zealously preach the word of salvation, take to 
 heart the ills of all, and help them to the utmost of our power, 
 then men will recognise us, yea, the children themselves will know 
 us without any external sign ; the devil, too, will not suffer us, 
 but will cry against us as the possessed daughter at Philippi 
 cried against Paul But when once we have lost our true dignity, 
 the real power of God, I mean an intrepid, joyous, upright soul, 
 then it is we assume a feigned character, with baldness, with 
 cowls and cloaks ; that when we are without use to God or the 
 world, men may admire at least our clothes, as the children stare 
 at the gold-bespangled mules of the Pope. What the people of 
 the orders ought principally to do is, to examine fundamentally 
 Divine truth, and to see that this glorious light arise in the 
 hearts of men ; they ought, at the same time, so to conduct them- 
 selves as to give no offence, and they ought to lay aside all hypo- 
 crisy, and wear no more cowls. Those who can work ought to 
 support themselves by the labour of their hands ; if any, in con- 
 sequence of poverty or destitution of means, are obliged to remaia 
 in the cloisters, they ought to follow there no other rule but the 
 rule of Christ, and bear no other name but the name of Christ ; 
 nay, they should rather die than do otherwise. 
 
 To snore behind the walls of a cloister is not to worship God. 
 But to visit widows and orphans, that is to say, the destitute in 
 their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world, 
 that is truly to worship God, (James i. 27.) The world in this 
 place does not mean hUl and valley, field and forest, water, lakes, 
 towns and villages, but the lusts of the world, as avarice, pride, 
 uncleanness, intemperance. These vices, however, are more com- 
 monly to be met with withui the walls of a cloister than in the 
 world abroad. I speak not of envy and hatred, which have their 
 
THE CLOISTERS. 119 
 
 habitation among this crew, and yet these are all greater sins 
 than those they would fain escape by fleeing to a cloister. Con- 
 sider, ye monks, your revels, and see how temperate you are ; 
 rich food along with idleness avails not the body, but ministers 
 only incentives to carnal lusts. Therefore, let the monks lay 
 aside all their badges, their cowls, and their regulations, and let 
 them put themselves on a level with the rest of Christendom, and 
 unite themselves to it, if they would truly obey the Word of God." 
 
 In accordance with these soundly evangelical principles and 
 doctrines laid down by Zwingli upon this subject, a resolution 
 was passed by the Council, in December 1524, to reform the 
 monasteries. The resolution was to the effect, that the monks 
 were to lay aside their monkish habiliments, and live together in 
 the monastery of the barefooted friars. At unawares, and without 
 previous announcement, on one Saturday afternoon a body of 
 delegates from the chief guilds, accompanied by members of the 
 Council and citizens, and followed by the town militia, proceeded 
 to the houses of the ministers of the Gospel, to take them with 
 them; from thence they repaired to the Augustine monastery, 
 assembled in this building all the friars, and announced the above 
 resolution of the Council, with the intimation they were forthwith 
 to follow them. The presence of the armed servants of the town 
 gave the necessary emphasis to the demand. The monks plainly 
 perceived that if they offered resistance, they would be forced to 
 yield obedience. In this quiet manner, the death-blow was given 
 to the monkish establishments of Zurich. 
 
 The younger, friars, who showed talent and inclination, were 
 made to study; the others had to learn a trade; the strangers 
 were furnished with the necessary travelling money to go to their 
 homes, or to re-enter a cloister in their own country; the frail 
 and aged had a competent settlement made upon them, with the 
 condition attached, that they were regularly to attend the evan- 
 gelical service, and give offence to none either by their doctrines 
 or lives. The wealth of the monasteries was for the most part 
 applied to the rehef of the poor and the sick,* since, forsooth, the 
 
 * A noWe fruit of the Reformation is to be seen in the institutions for sick 
 and poor, which the dissolution of the cloisters called into life. Every kind of 
 door and street-beggary was forbidden by an order issued in 1525, while at the 
 
120 CELIBACY. 
 
 cloisters called themselves the asylums of the poor ; and only a 
 smaU part was reserved for the churches and schools. By this 
 beneficent transformation of the cloisters into institutions for the 
 exercise, of Christian charity, and by the redemption of the monks 
 from monastic idleness to useful activity as members of the com- 
 munity, one great grievance which the Church inflicted on 
 Christianity was abolished. 
 
 But to restore to fuU apostolical dignity and efficiency the 
 ecclesiastical calling, it was necessary to strike off from it the 
 fetters of an ungodly celibacy. 
 
 same time a competent support was given to the home and stranger poor. 
 Thus, for example, the poor scholars were not allowed any longer to beg their 
 living hy singing beneath the windows, as was customary before the Reformation. 
 Instead of this, a certain number of them (sixteen from the Canton Zurich, four 
 strangers) received daily soup and bread, and two schillings weekly. Stranger 
 beggars and pilgrims were allowed only to pass through the town, and nowhere 
 to beg; if they came in the forenoon, they received at mid-day bread and soup, 
 and were obliged to depart in the afternoon ; if they arrived in the afternoon 
 they received bread and soup for supper, and were obliged to leave on the fol- 
 lowing morning, and not return within six months without special reason 
 assigned. The sick and aged were supported in the cloister of the barefoot 
 monks ; the stranger-sick in the hospital of St. Moritz, upon the Spanweit. The 
 domestic poor received daily, in the dissolved monastery of the Augustines, 
 strong broth andone-quarterpound of rye-bread. From the receipt of this aid, there 
 were excluded "all who wore gold and silver, silk," and such like ornaments and 
 jewels ; farther, all who housed bad characters, or lent their hand to embezzle- 
 ment; who without just cause neglected sermon and the holy sacrament; who 
 swore, cursed or lived in dispeace; who frequented the public-house, played 
 cards, &c. Those who foolishly squandered away their means received no alms, 
 till they were reduced to the utmost extremity. A respectable ecclesiastic 
 with a pious layman, had to seek them out in their own quarters, examine, take 
 notes who was destitute and worthy of receiving alms. What they found, they 
 had to report to the Alms-Office, and shew how the poor and sick were treated, 
 the children of poor parents educated and trained from beggary to earn their 
 livelihood by work. To carry out the above regulations, the Augustine monastery 
 was turned into a kitchen for the poor, the cloister of the barefoot friars into an 
 hospital for the sick, the old hospital to quarters for the vagrant poor. The 
 convent in Sellnau was made a Lazaret; the nunnery of ffitenbach, a convent 
 for these institutions ; and the Dominican church was transformed into a third 
 town-church. The country cloisters were applied principally to the benefit of 
 the poor. In this manner, the Government could say with perfect justice : " We 
 shall so act with cloister property that we can neither be reproached before God 
 nor the world. We might not have the sin upon our consciences of applying the 
 wealth of one single cloister to fill the coficrs of the State." 
 
CELIBACY. ] 21 
 
 6. Celibacy. 
 
 We have seen above that Zwingli, and those office-bearers in 
 Church and State who shared his sentiments, next to the full 
 liberty of preaching the Gospel, ardently desired the abrogation 
 of the law of celibacy. Conscientious priests, who felt that the 
 gift of continency was denied them, had been in the practice of 
 secretly entering into matrimonial relations, which were not 
 consummated by any public ceremony, which were, however, 
 faithfully observed, and which enjoyed the general approbation 
 of the people, as also the countenance of the magistrates. The 
 latter, on the expressed desire of the parties to that effect, declared 
 the children of such unions capable of inheriting. The bishops, 
 on their part, pennitted to the ecclesiastics any kind of concu- 
 binage, on the payment of four Ehenish florins, only no publicly 
 consummated marriage. On this, Zwingli said: "I know not a 
 greater scandal in the world than this, that priests are not allowed 
 to marry, but are allowed against a payment made to keep 
 whores. The teacher or the prophet, who will rebuke the vices 
 of men, must himself be obnoxious neither to punishment nor 
 censure, (Titus i. 6.,) that he may not have it said to him, 
 ' Physician heal thyself.' ' Why dost not thou first punish thy- 
 self, and draw out the beam from thine own eye that thou mayest 
 see clearly to pull out that which is in mine?' Therefore Paul, not 
 without good grounds, but to prevent such vices, has commanded 
 that the bishop or overseer be the husband of one wife, knowing 
 well that continence is not the gift of every man; and yet the 
 eyes of all men turn to the overseer, bishop, or minister, to see 
 how he demeans himself. Paul knew this; and therefore, to 
 prevent scandal being found upon him, he commanded him to 
 take a wife. Christ says. Matt. xix. 12, 'He that is able to 
 receive it, let him receive it.' But only those are able to whom 
 God has granted special grace. Paul teaches also, 1 Tim. iv. 1-3, 
 ' Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some 
 shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and 
 doctrines of devils ; speaking lies in hypocrisy ; having their 
 conscience seared with a hot iron ; forbidding to marry' &c. See 
 what an inventor the doctrine of hypocritical purity has, — the 
 
122 CELIBACY. 
 
 devil himself! The devil now being the author of the for- 
 bidding to marry, we know, on the other hand, that God has 
 appointed marriage, and hath blessed it. Those, then, act a 
 most wicked part who take from pious, inexperienced, young 
 priests the vow of celibacy. For they know well that such a 
 vow cannot be held, without the special grace of God, yet they 
 receive it and have it confirmed by oath. If they knew not such 
 things from the Scripture, they might learn them from their own 
 experience ; for they must recollect what trials they had to con- 
 tend with in their younger years, and how often their conscience 
 was lacerated ; and they may well conclude that it is no better 
 vidth others than it was with themselves. They act with the 
 poor men as perfidious carriers, who give not the warning of dan- 
 ger to those that follow them, but say, in a spirit of mischief, 
 ' Let him be overturned as well as I.' Thus they say, ' Since I 
 have been murdered myself, I will let the souls of others be mur- 
 dered also.' The real reason, however, why this vice is not 
 done away with, but that both spiritual and temporal authorities 
 look on the evils it entails with indifference, comes from hence, 
 that the great bishops look more to the money-bags than millers 
 to their meal-bags." 
 
 After the episcopal authority had practically passed into the 
 hands of the Council in Zurich, several ecclesiastics used the 
 liberty granted them in the Word of God, and married. The 
 first who openly ventured to take this step was William Ea-ubli,* 
 parson of Wytikon, a young man who very willingly made a parade 
 of his boldness in beiag the first to enter the ranks of matrimony. 
 On the 28th April 1523, he was married, in his own parish 
 church, to a young woman from the village Hirslanden, and very 
 soon his example was followed by others. Zwinglis friend, Leo 
 Jud, married, on the 19th December of the same year, a nun 
 from the cloister at Einsiedeln, Catherine Gmuender of St. Gall. 
 The marriage,-^ which had for some time been already secretly con- 
 summated between Zwiagli and Anna Eeinhard, widow of the 
 
 * He afterwards joined the Anabaptists, and became one of the heads of this 
 sect in Zurich. 
 
 t There is no doubt whatever that a private maniage existed so early as the 
 first half of the ye*r 1522 between Zwingli and Anna Eeinhard, which was no 
 secret, either to his friends or enemies, especially as he lived in the same house 
 with Anna. His intimate friend Myconius, in a letter of the 22d July 1 522, greets 
 
CELIBACY. 123 
 
 deceased John Meyer von Knonau, was publicly celebrated in 
 the Minster Church on the 2d April 1524, to the great joy of all 
 his friends, both at home and abroad: Bucer wrote to him from 
 Strasburg, " When I learned from your letter to Capito that you 
 had publicly celebrated your mamage, I was out of myself with 
 joy." Zwingli's faithful helpmate, when she gave him her hand, 
 had already passed through a school of severe suffering, which 
 enabled her fully to comprehend the mind of her dear husband, 
 well balanced as it was between heroic faith and patient forti- 
 tude, and to elevate herself to the joys which also gilded the spiri- 
 tual course of the great Eeformer, and she could afterwards bear 
 with submission the heaviest trial which can tear the heart of 
 ■wife or mother, to which she was at a later period subjected.* 
 
 Z^vingli with his wife; and, at the end of the same year, he writes again, " fare 
 thee well, with thy spouse in Christ." The highly estimable Merle d'Aubigne', in 
 his excellent " History of the Reformation," terms the delay of the ecclesiastical 
 proclamation and confirmation of these secret espousals, " a hlameable weakness 
 on the part of the otherwise so resolute man." We, for our part, are forced to 
 confess that we cannot at all agree in this censure. We conceire the conduct 
 of the Reformer must be judged by the standard of the then existing relations, 
 and the principles of morality which he drew from the Word of God. Such a 
 secret marriage on the part of an ecclesiastic was then generally regarded as an 
 essentially moral relation. The much-esteemed Dean Bullinger, in Bremgarten, 
 had, for example, such a connection, from which his afterwards famous son 
 sprang. Besides, Zwingli's marriage was on no occasion brought before the 
 Church-courts, nor once made the subject of reproach to him by his bitterest 
 enemies, who caught at the most absurd stories to TUify him — a proof that 
 nothing censurable could be drawn from it. Zwingli himself, after Matt, xviii., 
 regarded offence-giving as a heinous sin. That he might give his parishioners no 
 offence, he entered into wedlock, to which state he found himself, after serious 
 self-examination, appointed by God, and he entered it in a manner which was 
 in accordance with the moral conceptions of the times, and the principles then 
 generally recognized. Had he made a public celebration of his marriage, before 
 the judgment of his people had been strengthened and refined by the preaching 
 of the Word, he could hardly hare failed in giving offence, and estranging many 
 from the gospel. When he felt convinced that a public celebration of his mar- 
 riage not only would give to the- great majority of his people no offence, but 
 would he regarded by them as a confirmation of the principles of his evangelical 
 preaching, he delayed not an hour to implement it. In aU this I not only find 
 no " censurable weakness," but the same wise and temperate regard to the feel- 
 ings and religious development attained by his congregation which he mani- 
 fested in the carrying out of every other reform. His mind was naturally 
 inclined " to build up, and not to pull down," as he in all truth says himself. 
 
 * In the unhappy battle of Kappel she lost, besides her dear husband, Gerold 
 Meyer, her son, her son-in-law, and other relatives. 
 
124 GELIBACy. 
 
 As a maid of surpassing beauty, of tranquil soul, and spotless 
 character, she had won the affections of the young nobleman, 
 John Meyer von Knonau, who had been brought up at the court 
 of his relative, the Bishop of Constance. This young man, 
 according to his fathers wish, was to marry a noble damsel out 
 of the Thurgau, but the son followed the choice of his heart, and, 
 unknown to his father, had his union consummated with Anna 
 Eeinhard in a country parish church. At this step the old man 
 was so incensed that he forbade his son his house, refused him 
 the means of support, and, in so far as the laws of Zurich per- 
 mitted, disinherited him. John, compelled by the harshness of 
 his father to seek his maintenance in the rardcs of mercenary 
 warfare, died in 1515, leaving behind him his widow with three 
 children, a son and two daughters. The grandfather refused to 
 have anything to do with the family of his deceased son, tiU the 
 following occurrence brought about a reconciliation. One day 
 the widow's nursery-maid went with Gerald, a lively, sprightly 
 boy, to the fish-market. The grandfather, who sat in the com- 
 pany of some friends at the wiodow of an adjoining inn, saw the 
 boy sitting in a fish-basket, and demeaning himself with such 
 good humour that he attracted all eyes on him. " Whose hand- 
 some child is this?" the grandfather inquired, with an expression 
 of satisfaction in his face. He was told it was his grandson. 
 He immediately ordered the child to be brought to him, embraced 
 him, kissed him, and from that moment all his grudge against • 
 the mother was forgotten. Unhappily, the newly won grand- 
 father and benefactor died very shortly after this incident. 
 Zwiagli, in whose neighbourhood the young Widow Meyer 
 lived, got very fond of the Uvely and intelligent Gerald, whose 
 education he superintended with a fatherly care. On his return 
 from one of his tours to the baths, he made him a bath-present 
 of his Educational Treatise. 
 
 By this transformation of the cloisters into benevolent institu- 
 tions, and the dissolution of celibacy, a wholesome reform was 
 accomplished amongst the clergy, and great scandals were 
 removed. Zwingli now turned his eye upon the grand central 
 point of that corruption which prevailed in the service of the 
 sanctuary, the mass, with the intention of bringing it back to its 
 
IMAGES AND THE MASS. 125 
 
 original simplicity and significance, as ordained by Christ. The 
 course of affairs brought another question into connection with 
 it, that of " Images." We shall follow the thread of history, and 
 treat of both in the order in which it presents them to us. 
 
 7. Images and the Mass. — Second Disputation, and its 
 Consequences. 
 
 Zwingli had already, in the exposition and proof of his pro- 
 positions, expressed and developed the view that the mass is not 
 a sacrifice. In a farther treatise upon the subject, he exposed 
 the faults and errors of the mass-canon,* and threw out sugges- 
 tions for its amelioration. Shortly after this appeared, he was 
 obliged, in a defence of the views therein propounded, still far- 
 ther to develope and establish them, and in part also to correct 
 them. "I put this small apology in haste upon paper," says 
 he, " to make it plain to every one that I neither approve of 
 theatrical •}■ mass robes nor the chanting in a language unintel- 
 ligible to the people, be it of holy Scripture or anything else, and 
 also that no one may have ground to complain he has been mis- 
 led by any silence of mine upon this subject." While Zwingli 
 was thus preparing a reformation of the idolatrous worship of 
 the Church, from its central point outwards, a young priest, 
 Louis Hetzer| by name, in a small work, written in the German 
 language, and entitled, " The Judgment of God as to how the 
 Images are to be dealt with," cast a fire-brand among the people 
 which impelled some ardent spirits to acts of violence against 
 the images. There stood before the town-gate, at the Stadel- 
 hofen, a richly adorned crucifix, which enjoyed a high venera^ 
 tion. It sorely annoyed an honest burgher, well-versed in the 
 
 * On the mass-canon, September 1523. 
 
 t In his scheme of reform he had retained the mass-robe, on account of the 
 symbolic signification of some parts of it. 
 
 X A native of Bischofszell, or, according to others, u, Bavarian. He was a 
 learned, but hot-headed man, of an impetuous temper, which led him after- 
 wards into the ranks of the Anabaptists. He was beheaded at Constance for 
 proved adultery, in 1529. 
 
126 IMAGES AND THE MASS. 
 
 Scriptures, the shoemaker Mcolas Hottinger. One day, as the 
 shoemaker stood surveying it, he asked the miller of Stadelhofen, 
 to whom it belonged, when he intended to take that thing 
 away. The miller replied : " Nobody bids you worship it, Mcolas ;^ 
 but if you feel yourself empowered, you may take it away 
 whenever you please ; I give it up to you." Mcolas, on receiv- 
 ing this license, marched out one September morning, accom- 
 panied by a body of the citizens, took down the image, and sold 
 the wood for the benefit of the hospital poor. This act caused a 
 great sensation, and created a violent outcry on the part of the 
 Papists, who shouted, " Down with these men ; they are church 
 robbers, and deserving of death." The commotion was increased 
 by the following circumstance : — One day, Laurence Meyer, vicar 
 of St. Peter's, said to another vicar he had a great desire to knock 
 down the idols from the altars, when he thonght of the people 
 who sat shivering before the church, without clothes, and suffer- 
 ing hunger, whom the gold might help. On Lady-day, before 
 three o'clock in the morning, there had disappeared from the 
 church, plates, rolls, images of saints, and other symbols of idola- 
 trous worship. The Council brought up the vicar for examina- 
 tion, who admitted his having used the expressions above quoted, 
 and farther, his having said to some citizens whom he overheard 
 speaking in the street of the alleged sacrilege committed: "They 
 need not trouble their heads so much about it ; it was probable he 
 who did it would come forward and shew himself." Nothing 
 else, however, being proved against Meyer, he was set at liberty. 
 By these proceedings, Zwingli was necessitated, however inop- 
 portune he might deem the moment to be, to express his sentiments 
 with regard to images and their worship. He blamed the 
 unauthorised and irregular destruction which had been made of 
 a part of the images as wholly unnecessary, on the ground that 
 the abuse, after it had been exposed and sifted, must needs have 
 been quietly removed by the hand of the civil power. " The 
 child is not let down from the cradle," said he, with singular 
 delicacy of feeling, " till a stool has been presented to it on which 
 it may hold fast if it cannot walk alone. Nor ought we, with the 
 idols, to anticipate those who have not yet been fully instructed 
 in the gospel ; we ought rather to wait till the knowledge of the 
 one true God has been fully brought home to their hearts. Our 
 
IMAGES AND THE MASS. 1 27 
 
 iconoclasts, besides, understand certain passages in the Old 
 Testament all too literally, and, in truth, erroneously, when they 
 teach that by these all pictorial representation, consequently 
 trade-signs, way-marks, dials, and so forth, are forbidden. He, 
 for his part, was far from rejecting paintings and fine statuary, 
 provided they were not made to serve any superstitious ends, as 
 no one liked better to see them than himself ; nay, he regarded 
 the arts of painting and statuary in the light of special gifts of 
 God.* The tabernacle, too, and Solomon's temple, were adorned 
 with beautifully carved work, with palms, lilies, and other 
 flowers, but always with such as neither induced nor incited to 
 adoration. He was therefore in favour of the glass-paintings 
 remaining in the church-windows, on the ground that they, just 
 as little as the cock on the church steeple, or the statue of Charles 
 the Great at the Minster, misled the people to idolatry." " On 
 the other hand," said he, " aU images must be removed, which 
 serve the purposes of a superstitious veneration, because such 
 veneration is really idolatry. Now we see images put up for 
 veneration in the churches, and here and there in the streets. 
 We see them placed, first of all, before the eyes of men on the 
 altar. Why are they allowed to stand there where so high things 
 are transacted as the papists say are done in the mass ? Will 
 they let a man stand there during the mass ? Not they. They 
 then hold these images to be higher than men, and yet they have 
 been cut out of a wOlow-tree by the hands of men. Thus Isaiah, 
 (chap, xliv.) justly rebukes such men who worship the works 
 which their own hands have fashioned. Then one bows to them, 
 and bares the head before them, which God has forbidden. Con- 
 sider if this be not open idolatry. Again, we expend great cost 
 in gold, silver, diamonds, and pearls on them ; nay, some images 
 are formed of massive gold and sUver ; and, in others, the vesture 
 is so full of them, that, for that part, it might stand upright if 
 this were wanted. It is of no use to object : we present not this 
 wealth to idols, but to honour the blessed saints who are in 
 heaven ; for if we would do honour to the saints with the riches 
 of this world, we ought to do it in the way God has commanded 
 
 * Zwingli, on another occasion, said, he for his part found the less scandal in 
 the images, as in consequence of his short-sightednesff he never saw them in the 
 church. 
 
128 IMAGES AND THE MASS. 
 
 US, and as the saints themselves have done, viz., by bestowing it 
 on the poor. What we ought to give to the poor destitute images 
 of God, we give to the gold-bedizened images of men, for these 
 idols are but the images of men, while the living man is the 
 image of God. Is it not plain, then, that in thus giving to these 
 idols against the command of God, we give what we ought to 
 give to the poor ? Nor has there been any ring, precious stone 
 or jewel, so costly and dear that it repented an ambitious woman 
 to hang it on a wooden idol. And if we had exhorted her to 
 give the same to the poor, we verily should not have brought her 
 to it. And why ? It makes no show on the poor man, but it makes 
 a show on the idoL Since, then, these idols have been fashioned 
 and adorned out of a carnal ambition, how can we any longer 
 suffer them ? Are we not feai'ful the curse will come upon us ? 
 Ps. xcvii. 7 : ' Confounded be all they that serve graven images, 
 that boast themselves of idols.' We burn costly incense before 
 them as the heathen did. Here we commit a twofold sin. 
 Firstly, In that we think the elect of God are honoured by such 
 things as the heathen honoured their idols with, when we learn 
 from the Acts, chap, xiv., that Paul and Barnabas would not 
 suffer such adoration to be paid to them, but signified they were 
 sent by God to turn men from such folly. The servants of God 
 are not honoured with such fool's work, for they themselves never 
 honoured God himself therewith. We sin, secondly, in laying 
 that before an idol which should be given to the poor. Then, 
 lastly, like the heathen, we call them by the names of those 
 whose images they represent. Thus, we name one piece of carved 
 wood the mother of God, another St. Nicolas, and the third, the 
 Holy Hildegarde, and so on. This were in itself less, but we 
 hold this image in such veneration, that if one were to call it an 
 idol, which it is, he should be liable to punishment. Nay, we 
 have heard of those who have broken into the prisons, and actually 
 slain those who took away these idols. Why did they do this ? 
 ' Oh ! they have burnt or stolen our blessed Lord God and the 
 saints!' Whom do they call our Lord God ? The idol! So, then, 
 they had an idol for a god. If they had had the Father in 
 heaven for their God, who is tavisible to human eyes, they had 
 very little concerned themselves about what was done to a mere 
 image. An old man may remember the time when not the 
 
IMAGES AND THE MASS. 129 
 
 hundredth part of the images were in the churches that are now 
 to he found in them. Ho-^, then, have our forefathers honoured 
 God ; or, rather, how have they dishonoured Him in not possess- 
 ing so many images as we have ? Did it seem good to them to 
 have no images or few of them? then woe to us who would 
 increase them. For although it may be said, adoration is not paid 
 to the idol but to God and the blessed saints, this avails not, 
 because so far from honouring God and the saints by such a 
 species of adoration, superstition and idolatry are committed the 
 moment we set up an image and adore it. And these vain people 
 put innocent Christians to death, who remove that which turns 
 the soul away from God. Oh ! is it not evident from this that 
 they axe idolaters? Since, then, real danger exists, that faith 
 will be diminished where images are hung or set up in the 
 temples, they being, as experience teaches, easily worshipped and 
 adored, they must be removed from thence, since there is danger 
 of their being adored. We mean, however, images alone that are 
 hurtful to true piety, and which have a tendency to diminish our 
 faith in God himself, such as the images of men placed on the 
 altars and in the churches. The papists suppose they advance a 
 very weighty objection, when they say, images are the books of 
 the simple. Tell me, however, where has God commanded us 
 to learn out of such a book ? How comes it that we have all 
 had ' the cross' so many years before us, and yet have not learned 
 salvation in Clirist, or true faith in God ? Take a child and place 
 it before an image of the Saviour, and give it no instruction, and 
 let us see if it will learn from the image that Christ has suffered 
 for us. Is it said. Nay ; but it must be taught also by the Word ? 
 Then the admission is made that it must be instructed not by the 
 image but by the Word. I verily believe that the whole of papal 
 Christendom woxild rather have their images or idols than the 
 Word of God. For when the Word is presented it is immediately 
 seen as in a glass that the whole papacy is a lie. Therefore, they 
 let the sufferings of Clirist be sufficiently well painted on the 
 wall, and represented in statuary, and let poor fools hang silver 
 and gold thereon, and kiss the stone feet, provided only they do 
 not learn what the sufferings of Christ mean. For as soon as we 
 have learned this lesson, that he is our Eedeemer, our redemption- 
 price, and our only way to God, we no longer buy the kingdom 
 
130 IMAGES AND THE MASS. 
 
 of heaven from the papacy. It is next objected: The images 
 incite to devotion, which is proved by the following example — 
 a Christian man goes across a field, and seeing the sufferings of 
 Christ oftentimes painted, he bows himself, bares his head, and 
 puts up a prayer.' Where has God taught that we should do Him 
 such honour through idols, and by the performance of such 
 gestures before them ? Such arguments are sheer trifling ; God 
 everywhere rejects such adoration. He says: 'When ye come 
 to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to 
 tread my courts,' Isaiah i. 12. Mark well, here He forbids us 
 to bow to idols, or to bare the head to them; for He rejects and 
 prohibits honour being done to idols. Is it rejoined: ' The man 
 in the field kneels down — ^with his heart he says praise and 
 thanks to Him for His holy sufferings — ^he utters some prayer, 
 which reminds him of God ; but if he found no image on the 
 way, he would neither think of God nor the saints ; therefore, 
 the images are good and not evil? Answer : ' Know ye not, that 
 " not every one that saith unto me. Lord, Lord, shall enter into 
 the kingdom of heaven ; but he that doeth the will of my Father 
 which is in heaven ?" Matt. vii. 21. Perceive you not that God 
 puts little value on mouth-worship, and, on the contrary, the 
 highest value on doing His will ? But this the images teach us 
 not, nor do they incite us to it ; for they have never stirred up to 
 anything but a lazy-minded blind devotion. The true genuine 
 worship of God is to bear Him ever in our hearts. Such a heart 
 is not conferred by any external gazing at an image, but alone by 
 the illwrninating God.' But here some will say: 'It ought to 
 be taught that the idols are not to be held for anything, applied 
 to for nothing, ought not to be held as holy, and, in a word, all 
 erroneous doctrine in respect to them put away.' Answer: 
 ' Certainly this ought to be done, but they themselves ought also 
 at the same time to be removed. When you drive away the devil 
 you ought to stop up aU passages by which he may again enter. 
 While, therefore, the gospel is preached, and men are instructed 
 in pure doctrrae, the idols ought to be removed, that men may 
 not fall back into the same errors ; for as storks return to their 
 old nests, so men to their old errors, if the way to them be not 
 barred.'" 
 
 Upon such principles, Zwingli declared that the iconoclasts 
 
SECOND RELIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 131 
 
 might be punished for their unauthorised and disorderly proceed- 
 ings, but not for sacrilege. On the other hand, the magistracy 
 having once bound itself to act in conformity with the directory 
 of God's Word, must be held as virtually under an obligation to 
 remove aU images of superstitious worship from the churches. 
 
 The abolition of the mass being now desired by many mem- 
 bers of the community, instructed by Zwingli that it was no 
 sacrifice, and that sinful abuses were connected with it, the 
 Council resolved, in the month of October 1523, to institiite a 
 second Eeligious Disputation upon images and the mass. Invita- 
 tions were sent to the three Swiss Bishops of Chur, Constance, 
 and Basle, and to the governments of the different cantons, to 
 attend by deputies, and thus to assist in bringing truth to Hght. 
 The Bishop of Constance replied, he had read the invitation with 
 no small astonishment; he would neither appear himself nor 
 send deputies, as by so doing he would make himself amenable 
 to his superiors, (the Emperor and Pope,) and other Christian 
 powers. As Ordinarius and Curate of souls, he begged and' 
 exhorted the Council, in a friendly and paternal manner, not so 
 lightly to diverge from the footsteps of their forefathers, to forbear 
 the disputation, and to wait for the decision of an ecclesiastical 
 Council This would conduce most to the good of the Council 
 themselves, and of thefr subjects. The Bishop of Basle excused 
 himself for non-appearance, on the ground of advanced age. 
 Of the Confederate Cantons, Lucerne answered with bitterness : 
 " You tell us that strife and division are among you about church 
 matters. We are sorry for it ; we thought you had extirpated 
 long ago all these causes of strife, to do which you were fully 
 competent. Had you done this, we had in that case verj^ willingly, 
 as pious Christians, lent you our assistance." They declined 
 attending. The answer from Obwalden was rude: "We cannot 
 believe that our Lord God has granted to Zwingli more grace than 
 to the blessed saints and teachers, who have suffered martyrdom 
 and death for the faith. Nor do we hear that he leads a very 
 spiritual life ; on the contrary, we understand that he is more 
 bent, on fomenting discord than promoting peace and good will. 
 Nay, had we him here among us, and did we discover what is 
 said of him to be true, we would in verity give him that which 
 would cause him to cease from such courses." Deputies appeared 
 
132 SECOND EBLIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 
 
 only in name of the governments of St. Gall and Schaffhausen, 
 the latter having, as a wise precaution, selected, besides Dr. Sebas- 
 stian Hofmeister, two decided opponents of the Eeformation. 
 
 The Conference began on Monday, the 26th October 1523, in 
 the Town-HaU, in presence of more than nine hundred persons. 
 Dr. Vadian and Dr. Christoffel Schappeler of St. GaU, and Dr. 
 Sebastian Hofmeister of Schaffhausen, were elected by the Burgo- 
 master and Council, to be Presidents of the Conference. Zwinglj 
 and Leo Jud were to defend the propositions or theses proposed. 
 ZwiQgU, after the reading of the mandate, exhorted them all in 
 their hearts to call upon God, (as in consequence of the great 
 pressure a general kneeling was impossible,) that He would bring 
 all to the obedience of the faith, who oppose His Word, that He 
 would enlighten and teach all who do not understand it, that He 
 would instruct and correct all who misunderstand and misapply 
 it. He then developed his view of the Church, in order to shew 
 that the present assembly was justified in deciding on matters of 
 doctrine and faith ; and he proved from the Word of God that 
 the Church is the community of aU who believe on Christ, and 
 obey his Word. The present assembly, because it believes on 
 Christ, and recognises the Word of God as supreme Judge, was 
 a true church ; while, on the other hand, assemblies of cardinals 
 and bishops in Councils, because they pass resolutions opposed 
 to the Word of God and true faith, were no true churches at all. 
 There appeared to combat this statement the old canon, Conrad 
 Hofmann, who, amongst other things, said : " I have been ten or 
 thirteen years at Heidelberg, and have enjoyed intercourse with 
 the most learned and pious individuals, especially with Dr. 
 Jodocus,* a very learned and pious man, in whose house I lived, 
 and with whom I often eat and drank, but in all this intercourse 
 I heard but one language spoken, viz., that in matters of faith we 
 dare not dispute. Yes ! look at that ; it is true what I say. (It 
 was only with difficulty that the Burgomaster could repress 
 general laughter at the expense of the aged Canon.) Therefore, 
 dear sirs, I shall not dispute; I shall be obedient to the Bishop, 
 and after him to the Provost; yea, although they were knaves, 
 which God forbid." Hofmann advancing no proof from Scrip- 
 ture in defence of his opinion of the absolute authority of 
 * Dr. Jodocus Gallus was Professor and Rector of the University of Heidelberg. 
 
SECOND EELIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 133 
 
 ecclesiastical superiors, was enjoined to silence, and the first 
 proposition was taken up, wMcli was to the followuig effect: — 
 
 " The images are forbidden of God in the Holy Scripture. 
 Therefore, among Christians such ought not to be made nor 
 adored, and they ought to be done away with." 
 
 Leo Jud proved this proposition by passages from Holy Scrip- 
 ture in a clear and succinct manner. The principal opponents of 
 the Eeformation partly not being present, and partly not being 
 in a position to quote passages of Scripture in disproof of the pro- 
 position, and thus compelled to keep silence, some of their anta- 
 gonists undertook to advance the most plausible objections against 
 the proposition. In this spirit spoke Conrad Schmidt, Johanni- 
 ter-Comthur, from Kuessnacht, an intimate and beloved friend 
 of Zwingli, till death : " One should not take the staff out of the 
 hand of the weak Christian, on which he leans, or one should 
 give him another, else he falls to the ground. Granted it be an 
 unstable reed on which he leans, yet leave it rather in his hand, 
 shewing him at the same time ,a strong staff ; he wUl then of his 
 own accord let the reed fall, and will grasp the strong staff. 
 Therefore let the images remain on which the weak support 
 themselves, and, first of all, inculcate upon them that there is 
 neither life, holiness, nor grace in them. Let then a strong staff 
 be presented to them, Jesus Christ, the alone comforter and 
 helper of the affiicted, and they wiU immediately find they no 
 longer require the images ; they wUl let them go, and lay hold 
 upon Christ. Him who has the true image of Christ in his heart 
 the external image can no longer hurt even although he cling to 
 it. Paul, too, with the Athenians let image be image, that is, he 
 let the images stand, only he taught there is no grace or Divine 
 power in them." Zwingli replied : " When my esteemed brother, 
 the Comthur, maintains, that we should, first of all, instruct the 
 world in the Word of God, and zealously preach it, I perfectly 
 agree with him that this ought earnestly to be done. I hope, too, 
 that with my brother, Leo Jud, I have faithfaUy done this, and 
 spared nothing ; (Schmidt here observed he did not make his 
 observations to reprehend Magister Zwingli ;) but as to your 
 opinion," continued Zwingli, " that the images are staffs and sup- 
 ports for the weak, God forbid that it should be so. Had useless 
 parsons and bishops zealously preached the Word of God, as has 
 
13-t SECOND RELIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 
 
 been incalcated upon them, instead of busying themselves with 
 useless trumpery and mummery, it were not come to this, that 
 the poor ignorant people unacquainted with the Word must learn 
 Christ only through paintings on the waU, or wooden figures. 
 Since, however, God has forbidden images in His Word, they are 
 not to be suffered ; but that Paul allowed the idols to remain by 
 the Athenians was quite right ; for they were not yet Christians. 
 Had they been Christians, he would not have suffered them to 
 remain. Why should I, with heathens, overturn their images ? 
 As for offence-giving, there are two offences. Some are offended, 
 not because they are sick and weak in the faith, but from impiety, 
 and because they believe not at all. This, however, is not weak- 
 ness (infirmitas,) but wickedness (malignitas.) Others are really 
 weak in the faith, whom we must spare, until they are so strength- 
 ened that they no longer take offence. But that this indulgence 
 has its limit the example of Paul teaches us, who circumcised 
 Timothy, but would not let Titus be circumcised. Why? It was 
 time that the taking of offence should cease and have an end. 
 But if we are not to remove the outward idols tm the inward 
 idols of bad desires and passions are completely extirpated, the 
 former would never come to be abolished at all, for we shall never 
 be delivered from sinful desires and passions. If we were only 
 then to commence an undertaking when offence shall have ceased, 
 a good Christian work would never come to birth at all."* The 
 Comthur declared he entirely agreed with Zwingli The objec- 
 tions that were taken by the papists, partly that challenges by 
 name had not been given, were of so frivolous a nature that, as 
 Bullinger rightly observes, they are not worthy of being recorded. 
 Amongst other things, an individual remarked, " I have hitherto 
 believed the old doctors, I shall now believe the new." " Not 
 us," said Zwingli, with great indignation, " but the Word of God 
 
 * I hare given this speech and defence at greater length, hecanse they hare 
 heen in many quarters misunderstood, and have given occasion to mistaken com-, 
 ments. Zwingli and Comthur were agreed in the main point, which was, that 
 the images ought to be abolished. They also agreed that this abolition should 
 take place with the imparting of instruction, and the greatest possible sparing of 
 the weak; while, on the other hand, toleration was not to be carried so far as to 
 favour the sin of image-worship. From this standing-point, Comthur combats the ' 
 one extreme, the violent removal or destruction of the images ; Zwingli the other, 
 their too long remaining in deference to the prejudices of the weak, but to the 
 compromise or damage of truth. 
 
SECOND KELIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 135 
 
 ouglit ye to believe ; it alone cannot deceive." Dr. Sebastian 
 Hofmeister, as president, concluded the proceedings with the 
 words : " The Almighty and Everlasting God be praised, that 
 He rules in us, through His Holy "Word, whose servants and 
 instruments the holy Paul and the other apostles were, and by 
 God's grace we also are. Having now found, from the Word of 
 God, as has been most convincingly proved, that images and 
 all objects of worship dare not be suffered among a Christian 
 people, ye ought now, my gracious lords, to have no longer 
 scruples in removing them." In this manner, the Disputation 
 on Images on the first day closed. " Child's play," said Zwin- 
 gli, " this has been ; now comes a weightier and more important 
 matter." 
 
 On Tuesday, the 27th October, the Disputation on the Mass 
 took place. After the burgomaster had opened the sitting, Zwin- 
 gU arose and said : " In the name of God, Amen. Ye elect 
 brethren in Christ, ye have seen what a glorious victory the pure 
 Word of God obtaiaed yesterday in respect of the images. Now 
 in reference to the Mass let every one, in the first place, know 
 that the labours of myself and my esteemed brethren, Leo and 
 Dr. Engelhard, have not the object in view to depreciate the 
 Holy Supper of the body and blood of Christ, but to shew 
 that it is no sacrifice which one man can offer up for another, 
 just as little as one man can eat or drink for another. The 
 president. Dr. Vadian, then called upon the prelates and abbots, 
 and then in order all the parsons present, to state their objec- 
 tions. The greater number expressed their agreelnent with the 
 views already propounded, others brought forward some very 
 weak and silly arguments, which were immediately refuted. The 
 Comthur Schmidt delivered a pretty long speech, in which he 
 expressed his full concurrence with Zwingli In reference to the 
 iconoclasts,* he said : " One ought, however, in speaking of the 
 Mass, so to speak of it as not to offend any one, but to improve 
 the people. It appears to me a hard thing what some say, 
 namely, that the Mass comes from the devU, and that the devil 
 has invented monks and the religious orders." Zwingli felt him- 
 self compelled by these remarks to speak, although the Comthur 
 
 * Goebel and Manz, who would carry through their extravagant and fanatical 
 views. 
 
136 SECOND RELIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 
 
 had not liini at all in view in his remarks, but Zwingli feared 
 they might be applied to himself. " What my dear brother 
 has just said in reference to the monks," said he, "had better, as 
 not belonging to the matter in hand, have been let alone. As, 
 however, I have expressed myself in the manner described more 
 than once from the pulpit, I must here answer for it. That which 
 God has not taught, and which only comes from man, must ever 
 be regarded as bad in religion. Now I have taught that all good 
 comes from God, and all evil from the devil. Monkery is a 
 device of the flesh and of selfishness ; it is accordingly directly 
 opposed to God, and comes necessarily from the devil. I cer- 
 tainly cannot approve of persons be it in the country or the town 
 speaking either of the mass or the monks in unbecoming terms, 
 and have at all times censured such language. My desire has ever 
 been, that all priests would bestir themselves to preach solely 
 Christ ; that would in time extirpate all sects and orders, and 
 every other abuse. Many, however, retain nothing more of my 
 sermons but the sharp and stinging words. It fares the same 
 with that eminent and learned man, Martin Luther. Many will 
 learn nothing more from his books but the hard expressions* 
 which out of pure burning love he throws out. But his true and 
 pious heart, which beats ever for Divine truth, for the Word of 
 God, no one will imitate. I confess that in the pulpit I have 
 sometimes made use of strong language ; but out of the pulpit, I 
 have never, from a selfish motive, said a harsh word to any one. 
 You know how much I have yielded hitherto and designedly, in 
 the question of the intercession of the saints, saying, as I was 
 wont to do at aU times : " Lay your case in petition before whom 
 ye wOl, as for me I wiU pour out my complaint to God; my 
 prayer is certain, yours uncertain." Now, indeed, that I have 
 set the words of Scripture against prayer to the saints, I can no 
 longer use such language. Thus I have, after the exhortation of 
 Paul, (2 Tim. iv.,) in season and out of season, with gentle and 
 with sharp words, taught and exhorted. I wish from the bottom 
 of my heart that each would bestir himself not to pull down but 
 to build up, that each would unceasingly preach the Word of God, 
 
 * This unfortunately is still true; as an illustration, take the demeanour and 
 language of the New-Lutherans. 
 
SECOND KELIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 137 
 
 and so preach it as the Spirit teaches." With the expression of 
 these sentiments the Comthur expressed his fall concurrence. 
 
 The clergy from a distance who had come to the Conference 
 were also called upon to deliver their opinions. Parson Martin 
 Steinli, of Schaffhausen, sought, through the medium of some 
 misapprehended and misapplied passages of Scripture, especially 
 out of the Old Testament, to prove that the Mass is a sacrifice, 
 and concluded in the words : " K the Mass is no sacrifice, then 
 have all our fathers walked in error and been damned." Zwingh 
 made it plain that he had falsely understood and misapplied the 
 passages of Scripture on which he founded. "We must not," 
 said he, "take the passages of Scripture which appear to be 
 favourable to us out of their natural connection. It is necessary 
 to keep that which goes before and comes after well in view. In 
 regard to the last assertion which Steinli made, it is the language 
 of the impious, and all God's enemies. If our forefathers have 
 erred, what then ? Is not their salvation in the hands of God as 
 that of all men who likewise siu and err ? Who authorises us to 
 anticipate the judgment of God ? The authors of these abuses 
 will, without doubt, be punished by God; but who is damned, 
 and who not, is the prerogative of God alone to decide. Let us 
 not interfere wjth the judgments of God. It is sufficiently clear 
 to us that they have erred." Some frivolous objections were now 
 made, which ZwingU and his friends answered. More trouble 
 and annoyance was given by some friends of the Eeformation 
 itself, who threw themselves with a wild and fanatical zeal upon 
 " externalities." These, by calling fierce passions into play, sought 
 to disturb the clear stream of the Eeformation, and to turn it aside 
 from its onward and majestic course. We shall have afterwards 
 to consider more closely these wild and rank offshoots of the 
 Eeformation under the Anabaptists. 
 
 Of the calm and solemn tone of mind which pervaded the 
 evangehcal party the closing words of Comthur Schmidt and 
 Zwingli give evidence. The former turned to the Burgomaster 
 and Council with the words : " Since the ecclesiastical authority 
 will not lend its aid to the grand object of bringing Christian, 
 doctrine before the people in an unadulterated form, and since it 
 will not give a helping hand to the truth, it now rests on the civil 
 power to do this. For money's sake, Sirs, ye have often helped 
 
138 SECOND EELIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 
 
 a worldly man to land and men. For God's sake now help our 
 Lord Christ again to His sovfereignty, that He alone may he wor- 
 shipped, honoxired, and invoked within the bounds of your terri- 
 tories, as our only Mediator, Eedeemer, and Helper, in the time 
 of need. Take up the matter in a bold and Christian spirit. This 
 is the true honour of the saints, that we let Christ be King above 
 them, and above aU that is in heaven and in earth. Many com- 
 plain we would put away the saints altogether and make them 
 nothing. I much more complain that Jesus Christ is denied; 
 that He no more avails for that for which He was given to us by 
 the Father; that He hath died in vain; that the saints, against 
 their will, and against the Word of God, are raised above Him ; 
 that God's honour is taken from Him and given to the saints. 
 Let Christ be alone Lord and Master over all ; if He were allowed 
 to reign in peace and accomplish His work, then should we have 
 on earth brotherly love. Christian unity, God's favour and grace, 
 and in the world to come life everlasting." On Schmidt's finish- 
 ing this speech, the President, Dr. Sebastian Hofmeister, called 
 out, " Blessed be the words that thy mouth hath spoken." Zwin- 
 gli was deeply affected, and began next to speak, addressing his 
 words to the Council and citizens of Zurich : " I would strongly 
 impress upon you that ye would allow God to rule in the things 
 which His Spirit teaches and enjoins. For it is but just that 
 Christians should closely follow that which God, their only Con- 
 solation, and only Saviour, teaches. Let not yourselves be dis- 
 mayed, gracious Sirs. God stands by our side. He will protect 
 His own cause. I conceive that you will encounter much oppo- 
 sition. Give it no heed for the sake of the pure Word of God. 
 Now, in God's name, we will commit all to the Lord ; He will 
 not leave us in our extremity. I have, indeed, heard that last 
 night people have been running about and saying, we intend to 
 make the Supper of the Lord a drinking revel. But that no man 
 means to do." Here he was so overcome that for sobs he was 
 unable to speak. Leo Jud fell in; "I vrill, so help me God, 
 remain immovably by His Word, and give my life for it. Ye, 
 my lords of Zurich, ought, as becomes Christians, to stand firm 
 by the doctrine of God, and take it imder your protection, and 
 procure that it be faithfully preached to aU the subjects of your 
 government. If ye do this ye will be the elect of God, and His 
 
SECOND KELIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 189 
 
 help will not fail you." Finally, the grey-headed Burgomaster 
 Eoist said, after thanking the presidents for their mode of con- 
 ducting the business : " Ye, my lords of Zurich, ought to take up 
 the Word of God boldly, in a manly spirit, and without any fear. 
 God the Almighty will prosper you therein. I cannot speak of 
 the matters that have come under review ; if I were to speak of 
 them it would be as a bUnd man of colours ; however, what we have 
 to do is plain — uprightly to take the "Word of God as our guide. 
 Pray all of ye that it may be well with us." These simple straight- 
 forward words of the hoary-headed warrior, whose voice had nmg 
 high above the storm of many a battle, animating his countrymen to 
 deeds of valoiir and renown, made a deep impression on the assembly. 
 
 In the course of the proceedings the Council had been often 
 recommended to pardon the shoemaker, Hottinger, and his accom- 
 plices in the affair of the abduction of the crucifix, since he and 
 his companions had not acted against the truth, but only without 
 due consideration in the matter. Soon after the Disputation this 
 affair was brought before the Council, who resolved, principally 
 at the instigation of the stranger delegates, to set them all at 
 liberty with an admonition. Nicolas Hottinger, as the ringleader 
 in this illegal and unauthorised business, was banished for the 
 space of two years from the town and canton. 
 
 Through the Eeligious Conference, and by other channels, as 
 Bullinger mentions, it came to be known that the great majority 
 of country clergymen knew nothing of the Word of God at all, 
 although they maintained that they preached it. To put an end 
 to this state of things, ZwingU received the commission to bring 
 together, in a concise and condensed form, the chief points of 
 Christian doctrine in a small work, to be sent to all the parsons 
 for their instruction. In a few days the Eeformer had finished 
 this •" Christian Introduction," in which he explaiijed what sin 
 was, what the law, what the gospel, in how far the law had been 
 abrogated by the gospel, and how the case stood in respect of the 
 images and the mass. In this writing he made an exposure .of 
 the frightful abuses which arose out of the erroneous view that 
 the mass is a sacrifice. " Firstly, this false opinion has begot 
 and nourished every vice. For robbers, usurers, traitors, mur- 
 derers, adulterers have thought, if mass was once read for their 
 sin.q. it was all rieht with them. And resting on this, thev have 
 
14iO ITS CONSEQUENCES. 
 
 sinned shamelessly and enormously. This is weU seen in the bene- 
 fices, foundations, and mass-sales. If the mass had not been their 
 lazy, last resource, they had kept their property in their own 
 hands, which they loved so weU. The second iniquity consists 
 in this, that through the mass so much of this earth's goods has 
 been amassed and taken for the pretended sacrifice. And even 
 had the mass been a sacrifice, yet it was horrible to take money, 
 wages, this world's chattels for it. But this was not enough; 
 the wealth thus amassed was used at will, was stolen from the 
 poor in cases where it belonged to them, for under this pretext 
 of saying mass the greatest part of alms has been rapaciously 
 seized. Oppressions of all kinds have been practised through it." 
 The Council accompanied the transmission of this little work to 
 the country clergymen with a mandate, in which they say : " It 
 is our will and pleasure that your doctrine be in unison with the 
 gospel, which is to be preached everywhere and with one accord. 
 If, however, there be any amongst you neglectful or contrarious, 
 and acting in a manner opposed to the law of the divine Scrip- 
 tures, we shall take such measures against these individuals that 
 they shall be made to know how wrong it is to act against the 
 doctrine of Christ at the same time. We beg of each and- 
 aU of you, if so be that in any respect we be found to have erred 
 against God and His Word, that this, for the honour of God, for 
 the sake of truth and Christian love, be shewn to us out of the 
 Word of God and His Gospel. Such notification shall have our 
 best thanks." The same request was made to the Bishops of 
 Constance, Chur, and Basle, and the university there, as well as 
 to the governments of the Confederate cantons, to whom also 
 copies of the work of ^wingli were sent. A decree was then 
 passed, to the effect that approved preachers, as Zwingli, the 
 Comthur Schmidt, and the Abbot Jones of Kappel, should deliver 
 sermons in the different churches and districts of the canton where 
 it might appear to them necessary, in order to effect an opening 
 to the work of the Eeformation. 
 
 An immediate consequence of the Disputation was, that some 
 chaplains and assistants in the town refused any more to read 
 mass. On the other hand, there were priests and canons who 
 gave it very plainly to be understood that they would keep to 
 the mass as long as it was not abolished by law. The provost 
 
ITS CONSEQUENCES. 141 
 
 and chapter brought this matter before the Council, who appointed 
 the three town clergymen, Zwingli, Leo Jud, and Dr. Engelhard, to 
 draw up an opinion of what ought to be undertaken in reference to 
 the mass. In this document, which was delivered at the com- 
 mencement of December 1523, they say, among other things : " We 
 propose, on Christmas- day, 1523, to administer this sacrament, 
 (of the Lord's Supper,) simply, according to the institution of 
 Christ; for it is not our wish longer to deprive our people of the 
 right administration of this sacrament. And if permission be 
 not granted to dispense the whole ordinance, yet still we must 
 give the bread and wine, the body and blood of the Lord, to such 
 as desire it, or else appear before them as liars, and false to the 
 Word of God. As, however, the soul of man is daily attacked 
 by sin, there is a necessity that it should be daily strengthened 
 by the Word of God. Wi ^nerefore propose that every day, at 
 a convenient time of the day, there be preaching for a quarter or 
 half an hour on a part of Holy Scripture, and thereafter, upon 
 desire expressed, that the elements of bread and wine be given to 
 the people, according to the directory of God's Word." Hereon the 
 Council, on the 19th of December, caused the provost to announce 
 at the Great Minster : — " (1.) The priests of the town shall appear 
 on Childermas-day before the Little and Great Councils, in the 
 town-hall, and then and there hear my lord's pleasure upon the 
 matter of the Images and Mass. Whoever has anything to 
 object to the principles laid down and established by Holy Scrip- 
 ture at the late Eeligious Conference, may state such objec- 
 tions, with due proof advanced from Holy Scripture. (2.) The 
 images in the church shall in the meantiine be covered and veiled, 
 (as else was customary only at Fast-time,) and shall not be 
 exposed till farther resolution be taken. (3.) The silver, gilt, 
 and otherwise decorated images shall neither be carried on holy 
 days, nor at other times ; but the highest treasure, the Word of 
 God, shaU, instead of the worship of idols, be implanted in the 
 hearts of men" 
 
 On the appointed Childermas-day, Conrad Hofmann, with 
 four other priests, declared they recognized prayer to the saints, 
 the images, and the mass to be right. Hofmann added: "If I 
 have erred in the above articles of faith, I am wUling to be put 
 right by learned men, but not by such as are contaminated by 
 
14-2 ITS CONSEQUENCES. 
 
 heretical doctrines." The Council hereon resolved that a farther 
 opportunity should be granted to htm and his co-religionists to 
 defend their opinions before a commission of six men of learning, 
 and six members of the Council opposed to the three town clergy- 
 men. In the meantime, (according to a resolution of the Council, 
 of date the Sunday before Thomas'-day, 1523,) no change was to 
 be made till Pentecost in respect of the sacrament. By a resolu- 
 tion of the same meeting, ecclesiastics and citizens were exhorted 
 to peace, and forbearance from mutual recrimiaation. The three 
 Bishops and the University of Basle were earnestly requested to 
 send in their opinions upon " The Christian Introduction," which 
 had been sent to them. The Disputation of the 25th January 
 1524 fell out for Hofman and his party as unfavourably as the 
 former one. The Council, upon receiving the report of their com- 
 mittee, found and declared: " That Hofmann and his party shall 
 for the future neither speak nor act against the superior man- 
 date ; if they do so, they shall be dismissed the town, and 
 deprived of their benefices. In other respects they may hold 
 their own opinions." 
 
 The other cantons of the Confederacy sent a special embassy 
 to Zurich, which appeared before the Council on the 21st March, 
 to exhort them earnestly to abstain from the proposed innova^ 
 tions. The CouncU promised to give an answer in writing. In 
 this answer they made the following explicit declaration: "We 
 shall, dear Confederates, faithfully observe the league with you. , 
 But in what concerns the Word of God, the salvation of our souls, 
 and the peace of our consciences, here we cannot yield an inch. 
 We repeat the prayer we made to you, not only as our Con- 
 federates, but as members of the same family and brethren in 
 Christ, that you would, (for which we have prayed the Bishops 
 of Constance, Chur, and Basle, as well as the university in the 
 last named place,) send to us by Pentecost a deputation of your 
 pastors or other learned men, to teL. us, and prove to us by the 
 Word of God, in what respect we have not acted according to 
 that Word, and have not held ourselves to true evangelical doc- 
 trine. And in aU that shall be shewn and proved to us and our 
 preachers, we shall alway submit ourselves, in so far as it is 
 according to the wiH and true doctrine of God." In the mean- 
 while, Pentecost approached, the period fixed for a decision. 
 
ITS CONSEQUENCES. 143 
 
 The Council named a second time a larger commission, who were 
 to deliver an opinion as to how the magistracy were to proceed, 
 and how the matter was to be arranged. After a fuU proof that 
 the mass is no sacrifice, but the Supper of the Lord disfigured 
 and defaced, it was proposed to introduce, according to its ori- 
 ginal institution, the Supper of the Lord, and at once to abolish 
 the mass. Zwingli was for permitting the mass for a time to 
 remain, along with the Supper, for such as desired the former. 
 It was proposed to dispense the Supper on Sundays and holidays, 
 after sermon, to all who desired it, and, in the place of early mass, 
 to hold a daily sermon ; to remove the images in a manner the 
 most expedient where the people had been instructed and enlight- 
 ened with regard to them. This proposition* gave great satis- 
 faction to the magistracy; that part of it in reference to the 
 images was at once adopted, and ordered to be carried into effect. 
 It was resolved, however, in regard to the mass, to let it con- 
 tinue on its old foot until the hostility in reference to the images 
 had generally, and especially among the uninformed or preju- 
 diced Confederates, evaporated. The processions, the solemnity of 
 Corpus-Christi day, the blessing of the palms, with the palm-ass, 
 the consecration of water and salt, and other superstitious obser- 
 vances, such as the ringing of bells during a tempest, &c. were 
 set aside, and order was taken that the bones of the dead in the 
 bone-houses, as well as those preserved and adored as relics, 
 should be decently buried. 
 
 On the 20th June 1524, twelve councillors and the three 
 town parsons, with the town architect, smiths, lock-smiths, 
 joiners and masons proceeded to the different churches, locked 
 the doors fjom the inside, took down the crosses, removed the 
 images, — ^re-staining the walls. " The superstitious," says BuUin- 
 ger, "wept over such profanity ;-f- true believers regarded it as a 
 joyous act of worship done to God." The images were likewise 
 
 * This proposal, or properly, this opinion, from the circumstance of its being 
 cast in the form in which the magistracy were to issue it, has been taken for, and 
 published as, an Act of the Council, or as a Keformation Mandate. It remained 
 but an opinion, which, in the meantime,' was only carried into effect in respect 
 of the images. 
 
 t Superstitious persons hoped that "the images" would, of their own accord, 
 return to their vacant places, and thus astonishingly prove their miraculous 
 power. As the images did not do this, many were cured of their superstition. 
 
144 ITS CONSEQUENCES. 
 
 removed from the country churclies without farther noise and 
 disturbance, and in various places burnt, "to the honour and 
 glory of God," the ornaments being everywhere preserved, and 
 applied to the benefit of the poor, the images of God. 
 
 In the course of the summer, the Bishop of Constance sent, as 
 answer to "The Christian Introduction," a "Christian Instruction 
 in regard to Images and the Mass," to the Council of Zurich, with 
 an exhortation to them to act in the spirit of it, and to abstain 
 from all innovations. Zwingli, in name of the Council, undertook 
 to answer this very superficial production, which he did shortly 
 and conclusively in " A Christian Answer of the Burgomaster and 
 Council of Zurich." He closes : " We thank your Grace for your 
 work, which since it has so little foundation in the Word of God, 
 your Grace might have spared; for in truth, -had we had any 
 disposition to listen to human teaching contrary to God's Word, 
 such was abundantly at hand without your writing. We are, 
 however, firmly resolved, with God's help, to follow closely and 
 perseveringly the clear Word of God, and to piill down all that 
 has been put up in defiance of it, not as though we would do this 
 by our own power, but in the strength and counsel of God. We 
 place our trust in Him that He will accomplish that which He 
 has begun, to the praise and the glory of His name. To Him be 
 glory and praise for ever. Amen." 
 
 In the meantime, the Diet of the Confederacy, instigated by 
 the papal Deputy and the Bishop of Constance, resolved to 
 suppress the Reformation by force of arms. The unfortunate 
 Itinger affair (see section 6) seemed to offer a pretext for carry- 
 ing this resolution into effect. The Council of Zurich, under 
 these circumstances, deemed it expedient to request an expression 
 of opinion from the Christian people of the Canton, in reference 
 to the work of the Eeformation, the more so, since the Council, in 
 the affairs of religion, confessedly acted only as the representative 
 of the Christian community, which, according to the views pro- 
 pounded by Zwingli, is composed of all the faithfal. A plain and 
 lucid statement was made to the people of aU that had been done 
 in conformity with God's Word, and the threatening character of 
 the present relations were not concealed from them. "Our 
 Confederates have sent messengers with complaints to us. From 
 these we learn that in Lucerne they have pledged their word to 
 
ITS CONSEQUENCES. 145 
 
 suppress the new spirit, as they call it, by force, &c., &c. You 
 will reflect how many a pious honest man we have spared in life 
 to his wife and children, in these war times, by taking the Word 
 of God as our rule, and by refusing to join the French alliance, 
 and sell our bodies to foreign powers. In this and every- 
 thing else you have proved your piety and zeal. How much 
 more shall we not hold together in that which most deeply con- 
 cerns the honour of God, the peace of our -consciences, and the 
 salvation of our souls — ^we mean the dividing of the word of life ? 
 Take friendly counsel together, and let us know your minds." 
 The answer from Winterthur contains in the main the sense and 
 contents of aH the answers returned to this address. "We hereby 
 record, and have resolved, in as far as in our power lies, to keep 
 fidelity and truth with our gracious lords as we have sworn; 
 to place honour, body, property, and life at their disposal, to 
 defend God's Holy Word, and our own lives and liberties." In 
 every quarter, the desire was loudly expressed to preserve peace 
 with the Confederates, and with the unions as far as possible. 
 
 Placing their trust in God, and confiding in the affections of 
 enlightened and believing subjects, the Government of Zurich 
 now advanced farther, under the leading of Zwingli, on the path 
 of peaceful Reformation. The Mass, although the performance 
 and attendance on it were optional, had within the period since 
 the autumn of 1523, up till the winter of 1526, fallen greatly into 
 desuetude, while the celebration of the Supper, according to its 
 original institution, had not yet been introduced. This was a 
 state of things that Zwingli and his colleagues were resolved no 
 longer to endure. On the Tuesday preceding Palm-Sunday, they 
 appeared before the Council, to renew in an emphatic manner the 
 petition presented at Christmas; that now at length, on the 
 occasion of the Easter festival, the celebration of the Supper 
 according to its original institution might be ordered and 
 appointed. At this time, Zwingli again delivered his views on 
 the Supper.* The town-clerk, Am Gruet, combatted these views, 
 and maintained the words, " this is my body," to be a plain 
 expression, that the bread is the real body of Christ ; conse- 
 quently they establish the Eomish doctrine of transubstantiation. 
 Zwingli quoted in defence of his own statement several 
 
 * See Sections IV. and V. below. 
 K 
 
146 ITS CONSEQUENCES. 
 
 passages, as, " The seed is tlie Word;" " I am the vine;" "The 
 rock was Christ," in all which places the is has the force of 
 signifies. Am Gruet objected, that these passages were taken 
 from parables, and proved nothing. Zwingli, on the other hand, 
 shewed that most of the passages referred to were not con- 
 tained in the parables, but in the "expositions," consequently 
 the objection was without force. The Council passed the resolu- 
 tion : that the Mass be abolished, and the Lord's Supper, accord- 
 ing to its original institution, and with a Liturgy, prepared for it 
 by Zwingli, be celebrated on the following Thursday, being a 
 high day.* . The Eeformer, before going to bed, occupied himself 
 in looking for passages in which the copulative " is," incontestably, 
 and unconnectedly with parables, has the sense of " signifies." 
 The matter was present to him in his dreams. He seemed in 
 dispute with Am Gruet, and could not rebut his chief objection. 
 Suddenly a person appeared to him, and said : " Why don't you 
 cite second book of Moses, chap. xii. ver. 11, where it is said, ' And 
 ye shall eat it (the Lamb) in haste ; it is the Lord's Passover.'" 
 Zwingli awoke, looked up the passage in the Greek translation, 
 and chose it as his text for the sermon he was to preach the next 
 day. At an after period, he told this dream, making the observa- 
 tion, that he did not know whether the person who appeared to 
 him in the dream was white or black. His enemies made him 
 out to be black, and asserted that the devil himself had whis- 
 pered this doctrine into the Eeformer's ear. 
 
 On High Thursday 1525, the celebration of the Lord's Supper 
 was for the first time performed, accompanied by the Liturgy 
 prepared by the Eeformer, and already in print. The altars were 
 
 * It is plain that the Liturgy, in order to have been repeated by the congre- 
 gation, must have been in the hands of the communicauts before the celebration. 
 Previously to the year 1531, however, this co-operation of "the congregation 
 ceased, and deacons took their parts in the colloquies with the pastor. The 
 celebration of the Sacrament was, on the motion of Zwingli, appointed to be held 
 on the four existing high festivals (high-zylic), namely, Christmas, Easter, 
 Pentecost, All-Saints. After 1530, however, on the last named along with other 
 festivals being abolished, which had no reference to Christ and his work, which 
 were not "festa Christi," the autumn communion in Ztu-ich fell out, and was not 
 revived till 1768, when it was fixed on the Fast-Day of the Confederacy. At 
 Easter, a threefold distribution of the Sacrament took place according to its 
 original institution, namely, on High Thursday to the adult youth, on Good 
 Friday to the middle-aged, and on Easter Sunday to the old. 
 
ITS CONSEQUENCES. 147 
 
 removed * and in the place of the principal altar, a table covered 
 with a white cloth was set, on which the wooden plates with 
 unleavened bread, and the wooden goblets with the wine of 
 thanksgiving, stood. The administration of the ordinance was 
 performed in the following manner : — 
 
 After sermon, the minister with the deacons takes up his place 
 behind the table, his face turned towards the congregation, and 
 says in an audible voice — 
 
 In the name of God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. 
 
 The congregation: Amen. 
 
 The minister : Let us pray. (The congregation kneel.) 
 
 Almighty and everlasting God, whom all creatures honour, 
 worship, and adore, as Architect, Creator, and Father, 
 grant unto us, poor sinners, that we, with upright hearts 
 and with true faith, may render unto Thee thanksgiving 
 and praise, as Thine only begotten Son, our Eedeemer, 
 Jesus Christ, by the commemoration of His death hath 
 commanded us believers to do. And this we pray for 
 the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who with 
 Thee lives and reigns in union with the Holy Spirit 
 one everlasting God. Amen. 
 Hereon the clerk, standing at the right of the minister, reads 
 the passage, 1 Cor. xi. 20-29. The clerks, with the whole con- 
 gregation, on this being finished, say, "God be praised." The 
 following hymn is then sung in responses. The minister 
 begins ; 
 
 Glory to God in the highest. 
 The men : And peace on earth. 
 The women : And good-will to men. 
 The men : We praise and exalt Thee. 
 The women: We invoke and adore Thee. 
 The men: We praise Thee, O Lord God, King of heaven, 
 Father Almighty, for Thy great mercy and goodness. 
 
 The women : Lord God, Thou only -begotten Son, Jesus 
 Christ, and Thou Holy Spirit. 
 
 * The pyxes and altars were broken up and removed. The first experienced 
 this fate because Christ had not commanded " the elements" to be enclosed and 
 worshipped, but to be distributed. Out of the stones of the altars pulpits were 
 hniU_ fiTtTin wbiph mirist -was tn hn Tirp.anhed. 
 
14<8 ITS CONSEQUENCES. 
 
 The men : Lord God, Thou Lamb of God, Son of the Father, 
 that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. 
 
 The women : Thou who takest away the sins of the world, heay- 
 our prayer. 
 
 The men : Thou who sittest at the right hand of the Father, 
 have mercy upon us. 
 
 The women : For Thou alone art Holy. 
 
 The men: Thou alone art King. 
 
 The women : Thou alone art The Highest, Jesus Christ, with 
 the Holy Spirit, to the glory of God the Father. Amen. 
 
 Men and women : Amen. 
 
 Now the Clerk says : The Lord he with you. 
 The congregation : And with thy soul. 
 The Clerk reads John vi. 47-63. After having read this 
 passage, he kisses the Book, saying, " God be praised 
 and thanked," He will forgive us all our sins, according 
 to His Holy Word. 
 The congregation : Amen. 
 
 Hereon the apostle's creed is confessed in responses, by men 
 and women. After this confession of faith, the clerk says : "We 
 shall now, dear brethren, according to the institution of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, eat bread and drink wine according to His command- 
 ment, in grateful commemoration of the death He hath suffered 
 for us, and the blood He hath poured forth for the taking away of 
 our sins. Therefore let each prove himself, according to the 
 words of Paul, as to what comfort, faith, and surety he hath in 
 our Lord Jesu.s Christ, that none give himself out for a believer 
 who is not, and thereby make himself guilty of the Lord's death; 
 also, let no one sin against the Christian community, (or body of 
 Christ.) Therefore kneel down and pray : ' Our Father which 
 art in heaven,'" &c. &c. The congregation closes the Lord's 
 Prayer, spoken by the clerk, with a simultaneous Amen. Now 
 the clerk prays farther: "0 Almighty God, who by Thy Spirit 
 hast made us through unity of faith to be one body, which body 
 Thou hast commanded to say praise and thanks to Thee for 
 Thy great goodness and mercy, in that Thou hast given up to 
 death our Lord Jesus Christ for our sins, grant us to do this with 
 such true hearts that we may, by no hjrpocrisy or falsehood, grieve 
 Him who is the tmth itself. Grant us also, we pray Thee, so 
 
ITS CONSEQUENCES. 149 
 
 innocently to live, as it becomes Thy body, the members of Thy 
 family. Thy children, that thereby also unbelievers may learn to 
 know Thy name, and recognise Thy glory ; Lord, forbid it that 
 through our lives Thy name and glory should be blasphemed. 
 Lord, Thou who livest and reignest for evermore, increase our 
 faith." Hereon the clerk reads a second time the passage, 1 Cor. 
 xi 23-26. At the words, " He took the bread," the minister takes 
 the bread, breaks it, and gives it to the clerks on his right and 
 left. The same is done with the cup. When the passage has 
 been read to the end, the minister conmuuiicates. The appointed 
 office-bearers then bear the bread and the wooden cups with the 
 wine to the communicants, who receive the communion kneeling 
 on their footstools.* While this is'going on, the last addresses of 
 Jesus to His disciples, from John xiii. and following chapters are 
 read from the pulpit. On the ceremony being finished, the 
 minister begins to read Psalm cxiii., which, after his pronouncing 
 the first verse, the congregation carry forward in responses. Then 
 the minister : Lord ! Thou who livest and reignest God to all 
 eternity, we thank Thee for Thy great goodness and mercy. The 
 congregation: Amen. The minister: Go in peace. The Lord 
 bless, &c. &a 
 
 This celebration of the Lord's Supper was accompanied by 
 blessed results. An altogether new love to God and the brethren 
 sprang up, and the words of Christ received spirit and life. The 
 different orders of the Eomish Church unceasingly quarrelled with 
 each other; the brotherly love of the first centuries of Christianity 
 returned to the Church with the gospel. Enemies renounced old 
 deep-rooted hatred, and embraced in an ecstasy of love and a sense of 
 common brotherhood, by the partaking in common of the hallowed 
 bread. Deeply touched, ZwingK thanked the Lord for these 
 wonders of love, which the mass-sacrifice had never accomplished. 
 " Peace has her habitation in our town,-f- — no quarrel, no hypocrisy, 
 no envy, no strife. Whence can such union come but from the 
 
 * In the country, where suitable indiYiduala were not to be found to assist the 
 pastor as above, he read alone. When the responses of the congregation fell 
 into desuetude, the whole Liturgy was read by the pastor. In the town-churches, 
 as in Zurich and Chur, the Sacramental Liturgy is still read by the pastor and 
 his assistants, the latter sometimes selected from the students of theology, with 
 responses on the part of the congregation. 
 
150 ITS CONSEQUENCES. 
 
 Lord, and our doctrine, wliich fills us with the fruits of peace 
 and piety."* Along with the abolition of the mass, and the 
 introduction of the Lord's Supper, changes in a similar spirit were 
 effected in other parts of divine worship. These, too, were 
 transformed so as to serve solely the purposes of instruction and 
 edification. Baptism was administered in the German language, 
 with the omission of superstitious observances and exorcisms. 
 The Catechwnens, instead of being subjected to the Confirmation, 
 received at Easter and Christmas the lesson " to keep God before 
 them. His Word and revealed will, and learn from thence their 
 duties towards Him and their neighbour, to look up to Him as to 
 a Friend and Father, and to apply to Him in every time of the 
 body and soul's need. Such I beheve," continues Zwingli, "to have 
 been confirmation, as practised in the early church, and it served 
 this purpose, that those who were baptised in infancy might, on 
 coming to years of discretion, confess the truth with conviction 
 after knowledge obtained. The name 'Confirmation,' too, dis- 
 tinctly shews this." 
 
 The unintelligible mass and choir-chanting in a strange tongue 
 was made to cease, according to the word of the prophet, Amos v. 
 23 : " Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs : for I will 
 not hear the melody of thy viols." " Wherefore," exclaims Zwin- 
 gli, "farewell, ye temple-murmurs, and paid drawling prayers,i' 
 ye will do us no more ill ; good, I know, ye have never done us. 
 But hail, pious inward prayer that the Word of God awakens 
 in the heart of the believer ; thou gentle sighing of the sovl that 
 lasts but for a moment, yet knows itself, then listens farther to 
 hear what God the Lord will say and reveal. Hail, likewise, thou 
 general prayer, offered up by all Christians for one another, not 
 for pay, but from the heart, be it in the public temple or the pri- 
 
 * Merle d'Aubigne, " Histoiy of the Reformation." 
 
 t The Papal Church knows no congregational singing ; it is therefore false, 
 to say of Zwingli that he did away with it ; he rejected, however, uncondi- 
 tionally, the Mass and Choir-chantings, drawled over in the Latin language, 
 and left separate communities as they chose to introduce the German hymn. 
 He himself, although a warm admirer, and a profound judge of music, did not 
 introduce it, solely from want of time, in the pressure of affairs, to select fitting 
 hymns, and to arrange Divine worship for it in a manner accordant with his 
 own views. We find, however, a commencement in this direction in his metrical 
 version of the 129th Psalm, for which he also composed a tune. Judges speak 
 hiahlv of its merit!!. 
 
LAWS AND REGULATIONS, &C. 151 
 
 vate sanctuaries of Christians. I know that Thou art the prayer 
 to which God will give that which He hath promised." The 
 organs, likewise * which, at that time, were too successful in minis- 
 tering to intellectual laziness and absence of thought in the clergy, 
 were removed, as Bullinger says, because they were found not 
 very well to consist with the apostolic doctrine, as taught in 
 1 Cor. xiv. On the other hand, the Word of God accompanied by 
 prayer was preached with increased zeaL A Bible-lesson took 
 the place of matius ; at nine o'clock an exposition of Scripture, 
 (the prophesying,) followed, this service falling out on Friday, 
 which was market-day ; Bible instruction again took the place of 
 Vespers ; on Sabbath, there was a forenoon and afternoon sermon. 
 Thus Christians had the sound and wholesome spiritual food of 
 the Word of God presented to their acceptance in rich profusion. 
 Their hearts, trained to seek salvation in Christ Jesus alone, drew 
 largely out of His fulness, and grace for grace. 
 
 But this young and new nursery of the Word of God required 
 a protecting hedge. It was preserved against fresh errors and new 
 declensions, by a Christian discipline such as the gospel of Christ 
 demands. To it let us now turn our attention. 
 
 8. ZwiNGtLi's Laws and Eegulations foe Maintaining Cheis- 
 
 TIAN MOEALITY AND EXERCISING DISCIPLINE ON LaITY AND 
 
 Cleegy. 
 
 In the corrupt Eomish Church the ordinances which ought to 
 have preserved and supported Christian morality, and maintained 
 discipline, had degenerated so far from their original design as 
 to have become nothing more but merely the richest sources of 
 gain to the clergy. The greatest iniquity, and~the most enor- 
 mous crime, found a ready pardon from the Church for money. 
 
 * In confirmation of this statement I quote what was written by a layman 
 shortly hefore the Keformation : " The popes and the priests have completely 
 oppressed us. Firstly, They have discovered the way to fish out all our secrets, 
 namely, by the Confessional. They next compel us to go to church, but it is only 
 that we may sacrifice our money. On the other hand, they never go to church 
 themselves, except when they hope to get money. Their duty is to come to 
 church to sing, but that they may he obliged to sing less, they have set up the organs 
 to do their work; there fails but one thing, and for this they work night and day, 
 and that is, that we may go to hell for them." 
 
152 LAWS AND REGULATIONS 
 
 Hence vice teemed in all quarters, and at the papal court itself in 
 rankest fecundity. In contrast to this corruption, the Eeformed 
 Church has in nothing so much manifested its divine origin, and 
 its living connection vdth its Head and Eedeemer, as by that 
 moral purity which it has exacted from its members, and the 
 strictness of discipline which, according to the directory of God's 
 Holy Word, it has exercised. The Confessional, to be sure, 
 which enables the clergy to wield so important a power over the 
 laity, was abolished, as having no foundation in God's Word. 
 " Holy Scripture," writes Zwingli, " knows of no other confession 
 but this, that man should know himself, and throw himself at 
 the feet of the mercy of God, according to the word of the 
 psalmist : ' I said I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord ; 
 and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sins.' (Psalm xxxii. 5.) As 
 God alone pardons sin, and gives peace to the wounded spirit, 
 we must ascribe the healing of our wounds to Him alone, and 
 open them alone to His healing hand. Who has ever discovered 
 a wound to another except to the physician from whom he 
 hoped to receive healing counsel? Thus it is with the Confes- 
 sional. It is God alone who heals our souls ; it is to Him alone 
 we ought to disclose our wound. If, however, you do not know 
 the physician, or do not know where he dwells, no man forbids you 
 to shew your wound to an intelligent counsellor, and ask him for 
 advice. And if he be a wise and' true friend, he will certainly 
 point out the physician to you, who understands his art so well 
 as to be able to cure you. I shall now explain the similitude. 
 He who is unacquainted with the physician, is that man who 
 has not yet recognized the grace that is in Christ, but, conscience- 
 smitten, strives to reheve himself of the burden of sin which 
 oppresses him. The intelligent and faithful counsellor is the 
 servant of the Word, who, like the Samaritan in the parable, 
 pours wine and oil into the wound. Wine denotes the bitter- 
 ness of repentance which it produces, by holding up a glass to 
 the man, in which he sees himself, and whereby, despite aU his 
 wriggling and striving against it, he arrives at a full view of his 
 hypocrisy. For that is a sour and bitter thing which advertises 
 a man, 'Thou art thoroughly wicked;' yet bitterer, 'Thou canst 
 not deny thy wickedness;' but the bitterest of all, 'Thou art dead 
 in sin, and thy case is desperate.' 'Tis now that the M'ound 
 
FOE MAINTAINING CHRISTIAN MORALITY, &C. 153 
 
 begins rightly to smart and burn. The servant of the Word ought ■ 
 now to pour in oil ; I mean he ought to point out to him Christ, 
 who is anointed with the oil of gladness above His fellows. The 
 minister of the Word ought to shew how great mercy God has 
 conferred \ipon us through Christ. If the sinner has learned 
 this, he will let himself be stopped by none, but wUl forthwith 
 run with aU speed to Christ. As respects the arguments, in 
 favour of confession, they are hardly worth an answer. For if 
 one understands but the little which I shaE here say, it will not 
 be difficult for him to see that the Confessional, as it has been 
 in use among us, has no place in Holy Scripture. To confess 
 (confitere) signifies, in the first place, as much as to praise and 
 give thanks ; thus praise the Lord, for He is good. Next, it signi- 
 fies have confidence in Him ; confess that He is our rock and our 
 refuge, as in Psalm civ. It farther signifies, acknowledge the 
 guilt laid to our charge. In this sense those at the present day 
 confess their sins, who, when they hear the Word and are hit by 
 it, run straight to the physician. Finally, we "confess" when 
 we reveal a secret fault or crime to our neighbour, or to one 
 learned iu the Scriptures, that he may either' help us to beseech 
 mercy from our heavenly Father, or that he may give us advice 
 how, in the future, we are to resist this sin. Of this confession 
 James speaks in the fifth chapter of his epistle, ver. 16 : ' Confess 
 your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may 
 be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth 
 much.' On this passage the papists have founded the doctrine 
 of ear-confession, although the holy James speaks of nothing of 
 that kind, but simply of a confession which one makes to his 
 neighbour, when he lays bare to him some inward and hitherto 
 concealed wound. Nothing more can be extracted from the 
 above passage, but that each is to go to his neighbour, and beg 
 of him that he would help him to pray to God for his sins, and 
 that his neighbour or friend may be induced to do this with the 
 greater zeal, he discovers to him his secret wound. In a word, 
 he confesses rightly, and he confesses sufficiently, who puts his 
 trust in God, who praises and thanks Him, who acknowledges 
 to Him his sins, and bewails them, who unceasingly, with the 
 help of his brethren, prays to God for pardon; he, I say, con- 
 fesses rightly. He who is in such a state of mind has, in truth, 
 
154 LAWS AND REGULATIONS 
 
 the greatest need of a priest. But of what priest? Not such an 
 one as, with false keys, opens his gold coffers as a thief, but he 
 who, out of the "Word of God, shews him at once his own misery 
 and God's mercy. Therefore confession, made either to a priest 
 or a neighbour, ought not to be called a discharge for sin, but 
 an ashing for advice." 
 
 Although, however, the oft-abused power over the conscience 
 which the Confessional afforded was thus taken out of the hands 
 of the clergy, it was by no means ZwingLi's design to relax the 
 bonds of discipUne. The duty appeared the more necessary and 
 important in his eyes, of watching with true pastoral vigilance 
 and fidelity over all the members of the flock entrusted to his 
 care. A whole net-work of laws and ordinances on morality and 
 discipline, derived from the Word of God, was cast around the 
 infant community, by which thousands were preserved from 
 errors and gross sins, and gradually trained up to be living mem- 
 bers of the Church of Christ. Marriage occupied a chief place 
 in this system, as being that institution which, more than any 
 other, exerts an influence on public morality, since it is a true 
 image of the spirit prevaiHng in the family, or rather, the result 
 of it. Zwingli had to restore this ordiuance also to its original 
 signification, and divest it of that false splendour which had been 
 cast around it, as if it were a sacrament, that he might set its 
 real sanctity and inviolable character in its true light. " Let no 
 man suppose," says he, " that the dignity of marriage is thereby 
 diminished, that I count it not a sacrament, as it has been 
 thought by some Paul does in Ephesians v. It is my opinion 
 that a twofold error has been committed in the interpretation of 
 this passage. In the first place, the Latin translator has ren- 
 dered the Greek word /iugre^iov, which he ought to have trans- 
 lated secret (arcanum), in every case by the word sacrcmient, a 
 sense which the Greek wUl not bear. In the second place, we 
 have not weighed the meaning of this passage with sufficient care. 
 Paul, namely, intends nothing more here than, by a comparison 
 of Christ the bridegroom and His Church the bride to a husband 
 and wife, to express that Christ has died for His own people, 
 and has made himseH completely theirs, and at the same time, 
 that husband and wife ought reciprocally to do aU and suffer aU 
 for each other. The husband, as the image of God, is especially 
 
FOE MAINTAINING CHEISTIAN MOEALITY, &C. 155 
 
 to love and protect his wife, and give himself for her; the wife 
 to hang on her husband alone with love and true fidelity. By 
 so doing the spouses most closely resemble God, while God, on 
 the other hand, condescends to call himself and His Church by 
 the respective names of husband and wife. Thus marriage is 
 holy, since neither Christ himself nor His Church, nor any 
 believing soul, contemns to be likened to it. If, then, it be main- 
 tained that marriage is a sacrament, because it presents an image 
 of Christ and His Church, I shall not dispute its title to be so 
 called upon this ground. But a consecration or necessary obliga- 
 tion it is not, but simply a bond of union to a common life and 
 fate, to common joys and sorrows." 
 
 From this point of view Zwingli, in contradistinction to the 
 Eomish Church, declared marriage, on certain conditions, to be 
 dissoluble. Christ, indeed, says : "What God hath joined toge- 
 ther that shall not man put asunder." " In my opinion," con- 
 tinues the Keformer, " the proper sense of these words is this : No 
 one shall lightly condemn the divine ordinance of marriage as 
 Papists and others have done. And no one shall lightly part 
 those that have been joined together in wedlock. The Lord con- 
 demns only divorce on frivolous pretences, as was common among 
 the Jews ; by no means every divorce. Neither does He^only 
 except one cause for divorce, although He only mentions one. It 
 is, namely,' customary for the Hebrews to understand under the 
 lesser all the similar, and still more, aU the greater cases. As 
 the least cause He specifies adultery, and at the same time draws 
 the limits beyond which no divorce can take place. For why 
 should God exclude all those causes which are equally weighty 
 and even weightier than adultery, as for example, treachery, 
 poisoning, patricide, &c. Likewise he who is, by nature, incap- 
 able of begetting children, is divorced by laws human and divine, 
 and the woman may maiTy again, although this is nowhere stated 
 in Scripture. Yet Paul says : ' If they cannot contain let them 
 marry, for it is better to marry than to burn,' 1 Cor. vii. 9. Finally, 
 Paul permits divorce where the union is unequal, when one has 
 left the other on account of the faith." 
 
 But while Zwingli, on these principles, declared marriage to 
 be not sacramental, and to be in certain cases dissoluble, yet he 
 took care, on the other hand, that its true dignity and sanctity 
 
156 LAWS AND EEGULATIONS 
 
 should be aU the more rigidly upheld and preserved by the 
 means of a strict Christian legislation and discipline. At the 
 betrothal itself, aU must be avoided which might possibly disturb 
 its holy relations. Hence a betrothal was alone held to be valid, 
 which bridegroom and bride, with the consent of parents or guar- 
 dians, had entered into with their own free will, and to bring 
 about which, neither delusive promises nor selfish match-making, 
 youthful levity, nor the application of any description of force on 
 the part of parents or guardians, had in any degree co-operated. 
 From the laws on marriage, which were passed under the in- 
 fluence of Zwingli, arose the following custom at the giving of 
 the promise : The parents of the bridegroom and bride, with their 
 nearest relatives, held an interview, in which the proposals of 
 marriage were discussed and considered, and then and there 
 written down and signed. Thereon, a clergyman, or if there were 
 none present, one of the most respectable members of the com- 
 pany, took the hands of the bridegroom and bride, and laid them, 
 the one in the other, and formally betrothed them.* A few days 
 afterwards, the nuptial ceremony was publicly celebrated in the 
 church, after the parties had been twice proclaimed. Finally, the 
 law protected the sanctity of the marriage-bed with the severest 
 penalties, as it threatened a violation of it, first with imprison- 
 ment, then with deprivation of the rights of citizenship, banish- 
 ment out of the town and canton, and finally, in the case of the 
 incorrigible, with death by drowning. The above is about the 
 sum of the marriage laws, passed in 1525, and which were read 
 every quarter of a year from the pulpit, that none might excuse 
 himself on the ground of ignorance. The pastor, along with two 
 or four pious and respected members of the community, who 
 bore the title of marriage-judges or marriage-guardians, watched 
 over the administration of the laws and regulations. The 
 Marriage Judicial Court of the town, consisting of six members, 
 became, after Zurich had separated itself from the bishopric of 
 Constance through the Eeformation, the highest court of appeal 
 in matrimonial questions for the whole canton. 
 
 The whole of civil life, indeed, in farther development of an 
 ecclesiastical constitution, based on the gospel, came to be traversed 
 
 * In all probability the secret betrothal of Zwingli was performed in this 
 manner by one of his ecclesiastical friends. 
 
FOE MAINTAINING CHRISTIAN MOEALITY, &C. 157 
 
 by suitable laws, higbly favourable to morality. The sanctifica- 
 tion of the Sabbath above aU, was stringently commanded, with 
 the diligent attendance on public worship, after the abolition of 
 the holidays, except a few,* which took place in 1526. "There 
 is scarcely another law," Zwingli writes, "which God more 
 frequently inculcated on the Jews, than the keeping of the 
 Sabbath. By this law, God graciously commanded man, who is 
 formed of body and soul, to rest his body from labour, that his 
 soul may more conveniently occupy itself with Him. The 
 Sabbath has its foundation in the two first and highest command- 
 ments, in which are contained 'the law and the prophets.' It is 
 grounded on the first commandment, which leads us to the one 
 God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, because we 
 come together on that day to hear God's Word, by which we are 
 introduced to the right knowledge of Him as far as this depends 
 on teaching. Thus Paul also speaks, Eom. x. 14, ' How shall 
 they believe in Him of whom they have not heard.' It is there- 
 fore plain that by the administration of God's Word, we are 
 brought outwardly to the knowledge of the one true God. This, 
 however, takes place on Sabbath, as is to be seen. Acts xiii., and 
 1 Cor. xvi. 2, on which account the Sabbath is by no means to 
 be held as a mere ceremonial ordinance. It is likewise founded 
 on the second comm,andment, which says, we are to love our 
 neighbour as ourselves. On which account we ought to give our 
 servants rest and refreshment. But observe how the Sabbath 
 becomes ceremonial If we celebrate it after the Jews on tfie 
 same day on which they celebrate it, it were then ceremonial, 
 because it were then bound to time, which is an element of this 
 world — an outward thing. Or, if we thought that the Lord's 
 day, that is the Sunday, were also bound to time, so that we 
 dared not transpose it and the hearing of God's "Word to another 
 
 * According to a decree of the Council of 1526, the following holidays, besides 
 the Sundays, were to be celebrated: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and AU- 
 Saints' days, which four chief festivals were called high or high-season, and 
 at which the Communion was dispensed, then St. Stephen's day, the day of 
 the circumcision of Christ (New-Year's Day), our Ladies' Day at Candlemas, 
 Easter-Monday, Ascension, Pentecost, John the Baptist's Day, Mary Magdalene's 
 Day, and the day of Zurich's patron saints, Pelix and Regula. In 1530 all 
 holidays which had respect to the creature were done away with, and besides 
 the Sundays, only Christ's festivals, with Easter-Monday and Pentecost- 
 Mnndav wftrft retained. 
 
158 LAWS AND REGULATIONS 
 
 day, if necessity required this to be done, then also it were cere- 
 monial. But we are not to serve the time, but the time us, so 
 that in every church, if necessity required it, for example at the 
 time of harvest, we can place the observation and rest of the 
 Sabbath on another day, or we may work the whole of the Sab- 
 bath after having first heard the Word of God ; but this only 
 in case of necessity; in all other cases, we ought to let our 
 relatives and our servants rest, as has been already said, and the 
 one bear the other's burdens. If, for example, an avaricious 
 master were to compel his servants to work on the Sabbath, 
 pointing to the words of Christ, Mark ii. 26, ' The Sabbath was 
 made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,' he would err. 
 But how? Just because he treats the Sabbath as a ceremony of 
 no importance. The Sabbath is, so far as it is a ceremony, 
 abolished, and no longer concerns us, for Christ lias freed us 
 therefrom, Matt. xii. 8, that is from the ceremonial part of, it. 
 The spirit of the law is, to love God above all, and our neighbour 
 as ourselves. N"ow it belongs to the spirit of the law, to hear 
 God's Word, to meditate on His benefits, to thank Him for them, 
 to assemble together for pubhc worship and prayer, and next, in 
 respect of love to our neighbour, to allow him to rest on that day. 
 For although we are not bound to a set time, yet we are still 
 bound by the glory of God, by His word, by His praise, and by 
 love to our neighbour to keep a Sabbath. Love will also teach 
 us when we are to work and when we are to Sabbatise. For 
 love never fails. A pious master will never deny his servant the 
 requisite rest, and just as little will a pious servant refuse to 
 work when it is necessary, or rest and go idle to the loss and 
 damage of his master." 
 
 The celebration of the Sabbath was regulated according to 
 these principles laid down by the Eeformer. It was ordained by 
 a mandate of the civil magistrate of 1530: "That seeing that^ 
 firstly, and above all things, we ought to seek the kingdom of 
 God; and seeing that His Word is the only sure guide and 
 directory to this kingdom and to our salvation, we order and 
 ordain that every man, be he noble-born or a commoner, be he 
 of high or low estate, man or woman, child or servant, shall 
 attend the church-service every Sunday at least, at the set time 
 of public worship, except he be prevented by sickness, or other 
 
FOE MAINTAINING CHRISTIAN MORALITY, &C. 159 
 
 sufficient cause." It was farther ordered that each was to remain 
 till the services of the sanctuary were finished, and in no manner 
 to disturb the same. All inns must be closed before and during 
 Divine service. At the time of the harvest, permission was 
 granted to gather in the crops, in the case of threatening or tem- 
 pestuous weather, and with consent obtained of the whole eccle- 
 siastical community. Gambling, cursing, and all excess in 
 eating and drinking, as well as in dress, were prohibited under 
 penalties ; and while the small public-houses, which gave occasion 
 to all sorts of wickedness, were entirely shut up, drinkables were 
 nowhere to be furnished after nine o'clock in the evening. The 
 New-Year's Day, riotous jovialities, and the carnivals, especially 
 the masquerades, were, as " vain pastimes of Popish extraction," 
 to be no longer tolerated. 
 
 The execution of these laws and regulations was dUigently 
 superintended by the clergymen, with the marriage-judges, whose 
 numbers and duties increased in proportion to the enlarged 
 development which the laws of ecclesiastical discipline gradually 
 acquired, so that it became at length necessary to add to the 
 marriage-judges proper, the civil magistrates of each district or 
 community, along with two elderly men of worth and standing. 
 This board of moral disciphne thus composed, summoned delin- 
 quents before them, warned and exhorted to a Christian moral 
 life and conversation, excluded the offending and impenitent, tiU 
 reformation, from partaking in the Communion, and designated 
 them to the civil magistrate for punishment. 
 
 In respect to excommunication, Zwiagli had, in 1523, in his 
 Propositions, laid down the following principles : " E"o single indi- 
 vidual can impose excommunication ; it belongs to the Church, 
 that is, to the community, in which he that is worthy of excom- 
 munication dwells, with their pastor, to do this. It ought to be 
 done in exact conformity with the prescriptions delivered by 
 Christ in Matt, xviii 15, &c., and the sentence ought only to be 
 executed against those who cause public scandal. Thus applied, 
 excommunication is wholesome. For what is more effectual in 
 removing gross and open sius than excommunication? You have, 
 let us suppose, an open adulterer in your community, who gives 
 offence to the whole body; how can you amend him better than 
 by first warning him in a friendly spirit ? if on this he does not 
 
160 LAWS AND EEGULATIONS 
 
 give up his sin, by next taking him more strictly to task in the 
 presence of one or two witnesses ; and if thereon he do not alter 
 his way of life, by advertising it to the church or community. 
 This will then exclude him, and receive him again as God 
 enjoins. Let it thus be done with aU vices, which cannot in 
 justice be passed over in silence. Besides, we are all sinners: 
 and each has need that his neighbour pardon and forgive 
 him. But, in the case of shameless vices, which give public 
 offence, the iron rod of Christ must be applied — for this shews 
 itself very wholesome — that the whole body may not fall into a 
 state of putrefaction and die." The sins which are to be removed out 
 of the Church of Christ by excommunication, Zwingli counted to 
 be adultery, all kinds of unchastity, blasphemy, drunkenness, and 
 the still more serious sins of perjury, theft, and murder, as also 
 avarice, especially as it discovers itself in usury and fraud. 
 
 These principles, however, received only in part their practical 
 application. We have seen above that ZwingU's main object was, 
 with the silent approbation of the community, of which he was 
 secure, to protect the young and tender plant of the Eeformation 
 agaiQst the wild excesses of the Anabaptists. With this view he 
 delivered up the ecclesiastical into the hands of the civil power, 
 but always on the understood condition, the latter were to take 
 the Word of God as their sole directory in all their proceedings. 
 That this might be done, Zwingli and his colleagues watched their 
 conduct with a jealous fidelity, and denounced every attempt to 
 exceed the prescribed limits, with the courage and energy which 
 became them as guardians of a holy treasure, and as prophets of 
 the truth. Excommunication in Zurich thus modified itself in 
 accordance with these ideas. It was, indeed, pronounced, espe- 
 cially in country districts, by the ministers and the StiUstand* 
 (kirk-session), as a temporary exclusion from the communion on 
 great sinners; but as a perfect disseverment from the communion, 
 with loss of citizenship, the right of carrying on a trade, and all 
 other civn privileges, it could only be pronounced by the tem- 
 poral authority. This combination of the ecclesiastical and civil 
 
 * This court in Zurich for the exercise of ecclesiastical discipline was called 
 StiUstand, for the reason, that at the close of divine worship the members 
 remained in the church still-standing with the pastor, making their communica- 
 tions to one another, and reproving those cited before them for discipline. 
 
FOE MAINTAINING CHEISTIAN MORALITY, &C. 161 
 
 powers in one body had already a historical foundation in Swit- 
 zerland; for in the most illustrious, period of its annals the civil 
 power had effectively maintained its right to decide upon the 
 temporalities of the church, as also in questions of discipline and 
 morals, with the inclusion of the clergy, high and low, within the 
 jurisdiction. Zwingli, as a patriotic Eeformer, wished to revive 
 this fine old time with its simplicity of manners, its vigour of 
 character, and honesty of purpose. He wished, therefore, the 
 magistracy to retain its ancient lustre, and to discharge its high 
 duties with the old integrity. Besides the historical foundation 
 Zwingli found in the apostolic Church an example of the com- 
 bination of the spiritual and temporal powers. " Those elders, 
 (presbyters,)" says he, "who assembled with the apostles (Acts 
 chap. XV.), to considt about the outward affairs of the church, 
 were not the ministers of the Word but elders distingushed by 
 age, wisdom, and faith, who, in respect of the regulation and 
 transaction of ecclesiastical business, occupied the same position 
 as the Council does in the State.'' To the objection that, in the 
 apostolic Church, the apostles and not the 'magistracy pronounced 
 excommunication* on blasphemers, Zwingli replied, "that the 
 present relations of the Church to the civil power had become 
 very different from what they then were, the apostles were 
 placed under a heathen magistracy which did not inflict any 
 punishment on vices that a Christian ought to avoid. That the 
 church might have a punishment for such vices, she took into 
 her own hands the warning and cutting off of such offenders, for 
 with the sword she could not punish them, since it had not been 
 put into her hands." This was the apostles' reason for applying 
 excommunication in these cases. When, however, a Christian 
 magistracy punishes such vices, excommunication becomes no 
 longer necessary. 
 
 Zwingli had come to entertain suspicions against excommuni- 
 
 * It was at this time chiefly (Ecolampad who, in Switzerland, pressed the intro- 
 duction of ecclesiastical excommunication, who also differed materially from his 
 esteemed friend in regard to its form, expediency, and application. The ques- 
 tion was discussed in several assemblies and synods; but Zwingli's view always 
 prevailed; without doubt for the reasons, that it better corresponded with the 
 already existing Swiss relations, and that, in a church beset by so many tempests, 
 it was the only practicable course that could be adopted, as the attempts of 
 CBcolampad at Basle afterwards proved. 
 
162 LAWS AND EEGULATIONS 
 
 cation, from seeing the frequent and wanton use made of it by 
 the Anabaptists. " The Anabaptists," said he, " err greatly in 
 pronouncing excommunication on the most trivial offences, and 
 even on those whose punishment properly belongs to the civil 
 power." The transference of a certain authority, however, to the 
 civil magistrate in this matter, had not the effect of preventing 
 the vigorous administration of discipline in individual cases, and, 
 in particular classes of the Christian community. The magis- 
 tracy bowed themselves under the authority of God's Word, 
 brought home to their hearts by faithful heralds, with all the 
 power of living conviction, and they wielded with a Christian 
 seriousness the rod of discipKne both on themselves and their 
 subjects. In the separate communities the ministers worked in 
 union with the Stillstand Court by warning, exhortation, and 
 reproof, in the implanjiing and cultivation of Christian morality 
 and virtue with very beneficial results. The procedure to be 
 followed on the part of the minister and the Court of Moral Dis- 
 cipline was fixed and prescribed at a later period, according to~ 
 principles laid down by ZwingU, to be as follows : Against the 
 punishable the mode of proceeding appointed by the Saviour, 
 Matt, xvtii. 15, &c., shall be observed. The pastor, on an evil 
 report being brought to him against some member of the congre- 
 gation, on the truth of which he can depend, shall, if the case 
 admit of delay, and no public scandal has been given, warn the 
 offender alone, in the first instance, to depart from his wicked- 
 ness and unrighteousness, and exhort him in a friendly and 
 fatherly spirit, but always with a due regard to the special 
 circumstances of the case. In the event that such a warning is 
 no longer practicable, or in the event of its having proved fruitless, 
 even after a repetition of it, the pastor shall then take with him, 
 but in all secrecy, one or else two of the nearest relatives of the 
 offender, or one or two members of the Stillstand, or other respect- 
 able and worthy men, who, in the circumstances, may appear to 
 him to be the fittest for the purpose, and endeavour to win the 
 offender over by pressing representations, that thus he may be 
 spared the higher degree of punishment. If, however, this course 
 be not practicable, or if the matter, by reason of its importance, 
 cannot be ordered in this manner, the pastor shall then act with 
 the advice and co-operation of the elders and marriage-judges, or 
 
FOR MAINTAINING CHRISTIAN MORALITY, &C. 163 
 
 of the whole Stillstand, whom, if the case admit of the postpone- 
 ment, he shall summon to meet on the next Sunday, or Fastday, 
 after sermon, in the church ; he shall then and there open to them 
 the scandal given, shall cause the disobedient person to present 
 himself, and, with the advice and co-operation of the above men- 
 tioned, he shall use his best endeavours to bring him to repent- 
 ance, and to lead him back to the path of virtue and godliness. 
 If the transgressor remain unmoved by all remonstrances and 
 exhortations, he shall, last of all, be handed over to the supreme 
 civil power, who shall then declare him to have forfeited all 
 his ecclesiastical and civil rights, till observed repentance -and 
 melioration, or shall banish him the land."* 
 
 This vigorous ecclesiastical and civil discipline spread itself 
 over all the relations of life, and produced the inost beneficial 
 results. Under its protecting and sheltering influence there grew 
 up and flourished those manly and hardy virtues which so richly 
 adorned the Church of the Eeformation at its commencement. 
 To make these laws and regulations, however, of practical avail 
 to the community, it was clearly necessary that the ministers of 
 the Word, in the first instance, should be under its power, and 
 that their walk and conversation should be regulated by the 
 spirit of the gospel. 
 
 For the purpose of watching narrowly over the doctrines and 
 the lives of the clergy, the half-yearly synods were introduced in 
 the spring of 1528, " to the praise of God, and a protection to his 
 everlasting Word," as the decree of the Council appointing these 
 meetings bears. Twice every year, at Easter and in autumn, all 
 the pastors, who were accompanied by one or two members of their 
 congregation appointed by the Council, were obliged to appear in 
 the town in a Synodal-Assembly which, on the part of the CoimcU, 
 was attended by the burgomaster, six councillors, and the town- 
 clerk, who recorded the proceedings. The sitting was opened by 
 prayer, " in which God was supplicated for grace, th^t the delib- 
 erations of this assembly might, in a spirit of seriousness, be 
 directed to the advancement of His glory, the weal and prosperity 
 of His Church, the maintenance of- truth, and the promotion of 
 godliness and true piety, that none within it might be falsely 
 
 * So runs the ordinance in question. At all events, this high judicial excom- 
 munication was onlv executed in very rare cases. 
 
164) LAWS AND EEGULATIONS 
 
 accused, or any unduly favoured. Upon this the ecclesiastical 
 members took the synodal oath: "That I shall teach and preach 
 the Holy Gospel and Word of God, to which I am called, as it is 
 contained ia the Old and New Testaments, in truth, and with a 
 full Christian understanding of the same, to the best of my ability, 
 (according to the mandates issued by my lords, the CouncQlors of 
 Zurich, at the Eeformation of faith and doctrine,) and shall mix 
 no dogma or doctrine that is doubtful, and not yet introduced and 
 approved by the regular assemblies of the Church. I shall like- 
 wise bear true loyalty and fidelity to my lords, the burgomaster 
 and Council, as to my superiors, and to the citizens ; shall 
 advance the best interests of the town and canton of Zurich ; 
 shall warn them of all that is injurious to their true interests, 
 and avert it in so far as it lies in my power, and shall give all 
 due obedience and heed to their bailiffs and officers, to their 
 commands and prohibitions in all things, just and lawful ; I 
 shall keep the secrets of the Council, aud reveal nothing which 
 may bring loss or cause reproof: all which I swear truly and 
 faithfully to observe." 
 
 The proceedings of the Synod commenced under the presidency 
 of Zwingli, assisted by Leo Jud. The Synod occupied itself 
 almost exclusively with inquiries into the doctrine, occupations, 
 walk, and conversation of the individual pastors, with the dis- 
 tribution of exhortations, reproofs, and purdshment, where these 
 were deemed necessary.* For the purpose of carrying out this 
 reciprocal personal censure, the clergy divided themselves into 
 ten sections, who, each in their appointed order, retired froni 
 the Assembly till a deposition was taken in reference to each 
 from the members of the congregation who were present, from 
 their neighbouring colleagues, and from all members of Synod 
 who were in a position to give information. This deposition had 
 especial regard to the doctrine of the individual in question, his 
 fidelity in the discharge of ofi&cial duties, his love to Holy Scrip- 
 ture, his application to it and other useful studies, his hfe, and 
 the example he set, his domestic economy, and the demeanour of 
 
 * For erroneous doctrine, neglect of official duties, and irregularities of life, 
 the synods could impose temporary suspension from office, imprisonment, and 
 deposition. Offences against the civil magistrate committed by clergymen were 
 punished by the same. The wives and relations of the clergy were also subjected 
 to the punitive code of the synod. 
 
FOE MAINTAINING CHBISTIAN MORALITY, &C. 1 65 
 
 his wife, his children, and the members of his household. Neces- 
 sary and wholesome as this institution proved itself to be, it was 
 yet in the execution, and in particular cases, accompanied with 
 very considerable difficulties, especially as the monies and eccle- 
 siastics of the dissolved cloisters and foundations, who drew 
 stipends from church property, were under the surveillance and 
 discipline of the Synod. A great part of these could by no means 
 be brought to abandon the idle dissolute life which they had been 
 accustomed to lead in the corrupt Eomish Church, while the 
 attendance on sermon and the new public worship, to which all 
 were bound, was to them in the highest degree distasteful The 
 Council, to procure a better obedience in this latter respect, saw 
 itself compelled to exact a small fine (a quarter kern),* from the 
 negligent and obstinate, which was deducted from their income, 
 for every sermon or lection they neglected to attend. 
 
 By these and similar measures, a severe and strict discipline 
 was exercised over the clergy and all connected with them. The 
 great scandals they had caused to the community in the Eomish 
 Church were thus removed from the Eeformed Church. And the 
 more that the ecclesiastics submitted to the rod of Christ, and 
 desisted from their old and bad practices, the more time the 
 Synod found to turn its attention to other church matters. It 
 was about this time that the Baptismal and Marriage Eegisters 
 were introduced. The object of the first was to meet more suc- 
 cessfully the disorders of Anabaptism, and also to ascertain with 
 exactness the age of the adult youth of both sexes, which, with 
 the view of preventing a betrothal, was sometimes falsified by the 
 parents. The special object of the Marriage Eegisters was to learn 
 "who lived together in a state of wedlock and who not ; that, in 
 the latter case, they might be made to complete their union by a 
 regular ecclesiastical marriage, or if not, made to separate." 
 
 Thus the wholesome work of reformation was completed by 
 ZwingU in the Church of Zurich, after the model of the Apostolic 
 Church and the directory of the Word of God. In the preface 
 of " Christian Order and Customs of the Church at Zurich," he 
 says, in reference to the completed work, "The Apostolic, the 
 
 * The income of the clergy, as well as the stipulated annuities to the monks 
 and canons of the dissolved monasteries and foundations was reckoned accord- 
 
166 LAWS AND EEGULATIONS, &C. 
 
 first holy Church of God, had the pure doctrine of truth, prayer, 
 breaking of bread, holy baptism, acknowledgment of sin, repent- 
 ance, amendment and pardon of sinners. (Luke xxiv. ; Acts ii. ; 
 1 Cor. xi.) The Church of Zurich has these also. "What neces- 
 sary customs the primitive Church had, the Church of Zurich 
 has likewise. Marriage is performed with a due regard to order, 
 and with an earnest appeal to God. The memory of the departed 
 is sacred, as of those whose faith and love we ought to foUow. 
 The dead are buried with decency, although not with such cere- 
 monies as have no place in the Word of God. (1 Thess. iv.) 
 Fasting and alms-giving, so highly esteemed by the ancient 
 Church, have also in Zurich their peculiar, excellent, and Christian 
 regulations. The youth are diligently instructed in the elements 
 of the true Christian faith. That there are no outward decorations 
 to be found in our churches of sOk, gold, silver, pictures, carved 
 and engraved work comes from hence, that the old Church 
 had none such, but rejected them. For this reason the Church 
 of Zurich has disburdened itself of all ceremonies, and holds 
 itself to the ancient simplicity. God will not be honoured with 
 the outward appearance, but with faith, love, with a pure heart, 
 and with truth. To Him be glory and praise, through Jesus 
 Christ, for ever. Amen." 
 
FIPTH SECTION, 
 
 ZWINGLI'S LABOURS FOR THE EXTENSION AND SUPPORT OP 
 THE REFORMATION WHICH EMANATED FROM HIM, IN THE 
 OTHER CANTONS OF SWITZERLAND, AS WELL AS IN GER- 
 MANY, FRANCE, AND ITALY. 
 
 " For though I preach the gospel, I have nothing to gl'ory of: for necessity is laid 
 upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel. — 1 Cok. ix. 16. 
 
 1. ZwiNGLi's Relation to the New Evangelical Movement, 
 AS THIS Manifested itself m some of the Swiss Cloisters. 
 
 The Eeformation is an act of God, and not a work of man, 
 however great and glorious the men appear in the annals of his- 
 tory whom God called to execute this His great counsel The 
 Eeformers themselves, illuminated by God's Spirit, which leadeth 
 into the knowledge of all truth, recognized that they themselves 
 were nothing, that in the Word of God alone there is to be found 
 infallible truth, in Christ alone everlasting salvation. "But," 
 says Zwingli, " he who feels in Iris own soul the value of this 
 salvation, and the rest and peace it affords, cannot bear that his 
 neighbour should be ignorant of its joy." Hence a holy apostolic 
 zeal animated them to publish to the whole of Christendom the 
 truth they had themselves acquired, to revolutionise and renew 
 public worship and private Kfe, according to the demands of 
 God's Word. Yet all their labours and conflicts, as they them- 
 selves, in all humility, acknowledge, would have been in vain if 
 God had not powerfully drawn the hearts of men to himself by 
 His Spirit, and awakened them to faith. But just because God 
 sent forth this spirit, like the animating breath of spring, 
 over Christendom, the hearts of men opened willingly to the 
 preaching of the Word of His grace, and the Eeformers were joy- 
 fully hailed as ambassadors of God for the redemption of His 
 people out of the fetters of error, as giants to deliver them out 
 nf flip, -nif, nf dpstniction. At siffht of this fflorious awakenins. 
 
168 EELATION TO THE NEW EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT. 
 
 which manifested itseK everywhere, Zwingli was unable to 
 restrain his emotion, and cried out in a transport of joy: "The 
 world hangs on the gospel, ay, even although ye Papists were 
 to go mad for it. Nay, even where ye suppose there is not a 
 thought of Him, there the very children find the living God. 
 From fear of your rage they hide that before your eyes which in 
 their hearts grows fresh and green, and is already sending forth 
 buds." 
 
 The consciousness of his call to be a feUow-worker with 
 God (1 Cor. iii. 9.) in the great work of the renovation of Christen- 
 dom filled the heart of our Eeformer, in the midst of his labours, 
 with a joyous feeling of triumph, which at times he gave utter- 
 ance to in some such words as, " That which is begun with God, 
 no man can frustrate, but that which is built up without Him 
 must faU." This conviction iaspired him with courage to combat 
 every obstacle which placed itself in the way of the work of 
 Eeformation, and to respond with cheerfulness to the numerous 
 claims that were made upon his industry and zeal. As the newly 
 preached gospel gained one victory after another in Zurich, and 
 more and more took shape both in the public services of the sanc- 
 tuary and in the lives of its professors, the friends of evangelical 
 truth in Switzerland, Germany, France, and Italy turned ever 
 and anon their regards, fuU of hope, upon the indefatigable cham- 
 pion of the gospel there. They applied to him for light upon diffi- 
 cult passages of Scripture, for consolation and advice in inward 
 doubts and trials, for direction and encouragement in the carry- 
 ing on the same work and conflict in their own sphere of labour. 
 With the heart of an apostle, Zwingli lent ever a willing ear to 
 the solicitations of individuals and the Church. He answered 
 all the prayers and questions sent to him in reference to the 
 extension of the gospel, although he had nearly sunk under 
 the burden of labours imposed upon him. "The pressure 
 of business," he wrote once to Haller, " and the care of the Church, 
 impose such a load upon me that Dr. Engelhard lately said he 
 wondered very much I did not lose my understanding. The 
 Suabians write to me, and desire of me more than I can do, 
 although I exert myself to the utmost to content them. There 
 write to me from Switzerland almost all who are exposed to per- 
 secution for Christ's sake. And to give you an example of how 
 
RELATION TO THE NEW EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT. 169 
 
 mucli my time is taken up by business, I shall just mention 
 that I have been more than ten times interrupted during the 
 writing of this letter." 
 
 Let us now contemplate, in a few examples, the fulness of 
 confidence with which the hearts of the friends of evangelical 
 truth opened to Zwingli On the other hand, let us observe the 
 carefulness and watchfulness with which he laboured for the 
 extension of the gospel, and for the culture and support of that 
 divine plant which had sprung up at his feet. The newly arisen 
 evangelic light had darted its rays even into the cloisters, so 
 that here a glorious movement manifested itself Margaretha 
 von Wattenwyl, in Koenigsfeld, (Canton Aargau,) wrote to the 
 Eeformer : " Grace and peace in Christ Jesus be ever granted 
 you from God the Father. My prayer to your reverence is, not 
 to be displeased with my simple epistle ; for Christian love has 
 moved me to write it, hearing as I did how, through your preach- 
 ing of the Word, evangelical truth and doctrine daily increase. 
 Therefore I give thanks to the Almighty and Eternal God that 
 He hath again enlightened us, and by His Spirit sent so many 
 true teachers and ambassadors of His Holy Word. I pray and 
 beseech Him that He" may grant strength and might to you, and 
 all who proclaim His divine Word, that His divine Word may 
 more and more increase in all men." Albrecht von Sandenberg, 
 Comthur of the German order of Kcenitz, near Berne, was like- 
 wise illuminated by a ray from the gospel. Having scruples, 
 however, whether he would be justified in abandoning his posi- 
 tion, and breaking his vow, he expressed his doubts to Zwingli 
 in a letter, begging him to instruct and counsel him as to what 
 he ought to do. Zwingli answered him: " Almost all the abuses 
 in the Church come from the neglect of the doctrine of Christ ; 
 for it is indeed no wonder that men should fall into gross errors 
 when they abandon the light, and love the darkness. God is 
 bound to no town, neither to Jerusalem nor Eome, but He is 
 everywhere. All those who represent Him as being present only 
 in certain circumscribed locahties are false Christians, nay, anti- 
 Christians. Therefore it appears to me a bad design to conquer 
 Jerusalem again by force of arms. Jerusalem, as it now is, is to 
 my mind a weighty proof for the truth of the gospel ; for so 
 Christ prophesied beforehand, ' Jerusalem will be trodden down 
 
1 70 RELATION TO THE NEW EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT. 
 
 of the Gentiles, till the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.' (Luke 
 xxi. 24.) Behold ! the Gentiles are now there. Why shaU we 
 levy war to drive them out, seeing that God has otherwise deter- 
 mined ? Your order sets before it the reconquering and holding 
 of Jerusalem. I know not a shadow of foundation in reason or 
 Scripture for such a design. Yet here something must be allowed 
 to the times, it being at one time held, in the vain conceit of 
 human wisdom, as a great service done to God to protect or to 
 retake such holy places. It is, however, but a vain conceit, as 
 above said. Man fancies that God is especially honoured by orders, 
 companies, sects ; but Christ says, ' In vain they do worship me, 
 teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.' (Matt, xv." 9.) 
 What are orders? Human inventions. Here the objection does 
 not hold good : If one man promises to another anything, he is 
 bound to perform it. Undoubtedly; but you must keep your 
 word to God as well as to man, and you ought to do only that 
 which is weU-pleasing to God, else when you vow to God that 
 which He does not desire, it may be said to you, 'Who hath 
 required this at your hand?' (Isaiah i. 12.) There is nothing more 
 contrary to the wiU of God than sects, companies, orders, distinc- 
 tions; it therefore becomes every man at all seasons to break 
 loose from what is displeasing to God, and lay hold on the free 
 grace of God. I leave it here with you. Do as God commands, 
 only do nothing which can give just ground of offence or disturb- 
 ance to any one. We must not only leave a small temporal estate 
 for God, but even the whole world. Farewell, and may God guide 
 
 you." 
 
 The gospel penetrated into the Carthusian monastery of Ittin- 
 gen (Canton Thurgau), and the desire awoke in several monks 
 for farther light and instruction. Three Carthusian friars of this 
 cloister, unknown to each other, applied to Zwingli, and opened 
 to him their hearts, with the request he would instruct and advise 
 them. The brother Valentin de Saxonia addressed him in the 
 following strain: "Often I speak with you and you with me, 
 dear Huldreich, my glory and my hope, and yet we are personally 
 unknown to each other. Does not that look like an idle tale ? 
 And yet it is no idle tale, but a fact that repeats itself daily.. 
 "Whose heart is not filled to its innermost recesses with Zwingli ? 
 whom does he not instruct ? whom does he not influence ? I 
 
DELATION TO THE NEW EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT. 171 
 
 speak of those who love the truth. For I rejoice, that to the 
 other gifts of Christ this also must be counted to you, that you 
 displease many, by which test alone I am wont to distinguish 
 proofs of God's goodness from those of His anger. I wish you 
 God-speed, because while you give the highest satisfaction to 
 the good, you displease all those who would raise themselves 
 upon the necks of others, and who require from them undivided 
 homage and submission." Disturbed in his conscience as to 
 whether monkery was in accordance with Scripture, and whether 
 its riches were honestly come by, and uncertain whether he should 
 go or remain, he prays Zwingli, for the love's sake which moved 
 the Father to send His Son from heaven to earth, to give him 
 enlightenment and instruction on monkery, vows, tithes, the 
 Mass, &c., &c. " Shall I leave the order, lay aside the monk's 
 dress, and earn my support by the labour of my hands, or what 
 shall I do? Is one rather to expose himself to death and tem- 
 poral punishment than in this way to be a monk, namely, to live 
 according to the mere doctrines of men, to get food and clothing 
 from an unrighteous calling, and to go idle every day ? You will 
 much oblige me if you will instruct me by letter in this matter. 
 The Lord Jesus, my dear Huldreich, keep thee ever." Jodocus 
 Hesch, of the same monastery, was not so far advanced in evan- 
 gelical doctrine, yet he too found himself moved to open his heart 
 to Zwingli. " God," says he, " my conscience, and the whole com- 
 munity to whom I have hitherto preached, are my witnesses 
 how truly and faithfully I preach the gospel; what heed I take 
 to say nothing injurious either to true piety, or that may cause 
 disturbance, and create a factious spirit, or that may injure the 
 name of a good man ; how anxious I am not to draw the doctrines 
 of Scripture from the nearest standing-pool but from the source 
 itseK." He expresses his judgment of Zwingli with great candour : 
 "You have gifts from which Helvetia must expect everything : an 
 ardent, lively, sensible and manly understanding, a retentive 
 quick memory, a versatile intellect, skilled in lore, human and 
 divine, a pleasing fluent delivery, eloquent language. For these 
 accomplishments, I should rate you not alone as the sole remain- 
 ing glory of Zurich, but of the whole of Switzerland, if there 
 were united to these purity of doctrine and agreement with the 
 oninions of the orthodox Fathers of the Church, and with the 
 
172 RELATION TO THE NEW EVANGELICAL MOVEMENT. 
 
 customs of antiquity." He then relates the story of his life, and 
 how after the loss of his exceUent spouse in his 28th year, he 
 became a Carthusian, and that he had not once repented of this 
 step, and he closes this self-confession with the prayer: "Lord 
 see this my resolve, which Thou thyself hast inspired; let my 
 pUgrimage be well pleasing in Thy sight, and guide my erring 
 steps in the way of salvation. Grant, O Lord, to me, unworthy, 
 that Thou mayest stand by me on the day of my departure and 
 the hour of death. Ah, Lord God, remember not my transgres- 
 sions and my sins, but receive my spirit in Thy great mercy when 
 it leaves this body. Enter not into judgment with Thine unworthy 
 and sinful servant. Grant, finally, that this soul, the work of 
 Thy hands, may never be taken by pride or vain conceit, or bow 
 under the sceptre of the enemy of mankind, or, becoming a prey 
 to imclean spirits, be made the sport of hungry dogs. Therefore, 
 I beg of thee, merciful Jesus, by the love with whigh Thou 
 embracest the whole human race, and which moved Thee to 
 descend from heaven to earth, and to take upon Thyself the frail 
 nature of man, to expose Thyself to hunger, thirst, frost, heat, 
 trials, mockery and scorn, blows and stripes, and, at last, the 
 death of the cross ; by this love, I beg Thee, Jesus, my Saviour, 
 turn Thine eye from my sins when I appear before Thy judg- 
 ment-seat, to which I daily feel myself called. Punish me not 
 for my trespasses and my guUt, but pardon me in the merits of 
 the cross. Thy dearest blood, Jesus, which Thou hast poured out 
 on the altar of our atonement for the redemption of mankind, be 
 the payment and satisfaction for my guilt. You know now, 
 my Zwingli, my life and character, which I have here painted 
 with truthful strokes, from whence you may easily conclude 
 whether I have taken the monk's dress at the inspiration and 
 command of God or of Satan." This upright sincere heart, in 
 which the grace of God had began to work thus mightily, could 
 not long remain satisfied with half-measures. Hesch, after he 
 had been farther illuminated by the Spirit of God, and instructed 
 by Zwingli, decided afterwards unconditionally for the Eeforma- 
 tion. "With a like sincerity, the brother Alexius, of the same 
 monastery, applied to Zwingli, begging of him advice and instruc- 
 tion. The Abbot James Eussinger of Pfseffers, was also won by 
 Zwingli to the gospel, and advanced to the utmost of his power 
 
LABOURS ON BEHALF OF EVANGELICAL TRUTH. 173 
 
 the preaching of it. In the monastery of Wettnigen, Zwingli 
 had also friends; and the Abbot George Mueller arrayed himself 
 openly, along with a great number of his monks, on the side of 
 the Eeformation. 
 
 Thus burned the flame of gospel truth, fanned by Zwingli, 
 cleansing and purifying many a heart and conscience, corrupted 
 and debased by monastic observances, and groaning under the 
 yoke of human doctrines and traditions, handed down from cen- 
 turies, and from which it might almost have appeared impossible 
 to free them. But neither cloisters nor foundations were to be 
 the means of extending and supporting the gospel in the different 
 districts of Switzerland ; God had chosen another and far mightier 
 instrument for this purpose, which came infinitely nearer the 
 hearts and consciences of the people. This means was the 
 dissemination of the Holy Scriptures in the mother-tongue. 
 Zwingli says : " Every peasant's cottage became a school, iri which 
 the highest art of all was practised — the reading of the Old and 
 New Testament ; for the right and true schoolmaster of His people 
 is God, without whom all languages and all arts are but nets of 
 deception and treachery. Every cow and goose-herd became 
 thereby better instructed in the knowledge of salvation than the 
 schoolmen." The friends of the Eeformer, by adopting his hints, 
 and drawing encouragement from liis zeal and example, extended 
 this glorious evangelical movement in the towns and valleys of 
 Switzerland. 
 
 Let us now, in Zwingli's circular letters to the different cantons, 
 and to his fellow -labourers in the work of the gospel, take a closer 
 inspection of his great apostolic heart, which beat so strongly for 
 the weal of the Church of his native country, and the implanting 
 and extension of evangelical truth within its borders. 
 
 2. Zwingli's Zealous Labours for the Extension and 
 Establishment of Evangelical Truth and Dooteine in 
 THE Cantons op East Switzerland. 
 
 In the Canton Glarus, Zwingli's scholars and friends in the 
 love of the truth, preached the gospel, and carried on with all 
 fidelity the work he himself had begun there, — Valentin Tschudi, 
 
174 LABOUES ON BEHALF OF EVANGELICAL TEUTH. 
 
 in the town of Glarus, rridolin Branner in Mollis, and John 
 Schindler in Schwanden. Zwingli dedicated the " Exposition and 
 Proof of his Propositions" to the honourable but cautious and 
 sagacious Amman, and to the Council and community of Glarus. 
 He addresses his old parishioners in the following terms, under 
 date 14th July 1623: "No man in our days can withstand the 
 Word of God ; for wherever it is heard, it penetrates with irresist- 
 ible force, and it is accepted even where it is prohibited. ' The 
 kiagdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it,' 
 Luke xvi. 16. For the faith that dwells withia the heart is not 
 always to be seen on the surface. Thus it follows, that the 
 preachers are often persecuted externally, while faith in Christ 
 sits securely in the bosoms of the people ; it is like the leaven, 
 which penetrates where it exists. It is even so with the true 
 believer : he is conscious of his salvation, of his peace and joy — 
 he bears them about with him continually, and cannot bear that 
 his neighbour be ignorant of this joy and this salvation, as in 
 other affairs it is wont to be the case ; he is fired with a holy zeal 
 to publish the good news, and communicate it to others that they 
 may share it with himself Such is the difference between the 
 Spirit of God, the alone teacher of the faith, and our flesh, which 
 is ever selfish. Thus the believer has no rest as long as he sees 
 his brother in unbelief Wherefore, it is evident that the Word 
 of God is irresistible. It would be in vain, then, for your wor- 
 ships to take measures against it: for God would put you to 
 shame. It is, indeed, trae that the Word of God fights agaiast 
 all men, because we are all sinners; while it, on the contrary, 
 is altogether free from earthly dross, yea, purer than sUver and 
 gold, seven times purified. It is thus no wonder that those who 
 would spare their sius reject it, crying, ' Preach what pleases us,' 
 Isaiah xxx. 10, 'prophesy unto us smooth things.' Yet upon 
 such conduct cometh unexpectedly the severest punishment: 
 ' Therefore,' says the prophet, ' this iniquity shall be to you as _a 
 breach ready to fall, swelling out in. a high wall, whose breaking 
 cometh suddenly at an instant.' Therefore, suffer, most dear and 
 gracious lords, that the doctrine of Christ be not put away from 
 you, as though it were some new invention. It shoots forward 
 in our days with a light as clear and bright as in the times of 
 the apostles. Let the Word of God be purely preached among 
 
LABOUES ON BEHALF OF EVANGELICAL TRUTH. 175 
 
 you; God will protect you. Take heed that ye be not the last 
 in the Confederacy to receive His Word, that we have recovered 
 and reconquered. Your teachers will, without doubt, shew you 
 where the knot lies. See that ye give ear to them, for they can 
 instruct you in the truth. Eeflect, there is no people on earth 
 whom Christian freedom better becomes than the Confederacy ; 
 none to whom greater peace and richer blessings may be secured. 
 Keep God and his Word before your eyes, and He will in no 
 wise forsake you. He will keep you according to His will in His 
 grace and favour, Amen. I recommend to you your ministers, 
 Valentin Tschudi at Glarus, Fridolin Brunner at Mollis, John 
 Schindler at Schwanden, and Gregory BinzK* at Wesen, who 
 faithfully proclaim the gospel." These words of the Eeformer 
 to his former parishioners, decided the cause of the Eeformation 
 with the greater part of the Glarians. 
 
 The joyful tidings of the newly proclaimed evangelical truth 
 had also pierced to Zwingli's native vale to Toggenburg, and had 
 met with a warm reception from his fellow-villagers. Zwingli 
 regarded with peculiar joy the progress of gospel truth in this 
 district, to which his heart was knit by the associations of youth, 
 and by many ties of blood and friendship. Animated by these 
 feelings, he sent a letter " To an honourable Council, and to the 
 whole community of his native county of Toggenburg," just at the 
 moment in which they were to decide whether they should receive 
 the newly proclaimed evangelical truth or remain by the old 
 papistical doctrine. The following passages we extract from this 
 letter, distinguished for their vigour and holy zeal : " I praise 
 and thank God who has called me to the preaching of His 
 gospel, that He has led you, who are so dear to my heart, put of 
 the Egyptian darkness of false human doctrines to the wondrous 
 light of His Word. Now that we a re enlightened by the same, 
 so that we recognise the truth, is it not astonishing we can be 
 so blind as not to perceive the temptations of the devU and the 
 flesh, which manifest themselves so openly before our eyes? All 
 this God hath ordered that we may more clearly recognise His 
 power and grace, and, on the other hand, our own sinfulness, 
 
 * Gregory Binzli is Zwingli's teather, formerly mentioned, at the Theodoric 
 School in Basle, 
 t On Monday after Margaretha, 15th July 1524. 
 
176 LABOURS ON BEHALF OP EVANGELICAL TEUTH. 
 
 blindness and guilt. Has not that been a great blindness that 
 we, although the Almighty G-od who hath created us hath so oft 
 and in so many ways revealed himself that he is our Father, 
 and who at length hath given His own Son to die for us, who 
 likewise stands there and calls to us poor sinners : ' Come unto 
 me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you 
 rest ;' is it not great blindness that we, nevertheless, have gone 
 and turned ourselves to the creature, and thought God to be so 
 hard and cruel that we dare not come unto Him? ' And though 
 we have called him Father, yet we have not done it in the Spirit 
 of Christ, for we have not recognised the mystery of His grace in 
 giving His Son to die for us, and have ascribed salvation not to 
 the grace of God, but to our own works, polluted, worldly-miuded, 
 selfish and foolish though they are. But that has been done, 
 that we might the better know and learn God and ourselves. 
 Ourselves, since we see that all our power and wisdom is nought, 
 is of no significance, of no avail, but that at the very moment 
 when we fancy ourselves to be strong and wise, God lets us sink 
 into despair, helplessness, and blindness. For He will that His 
 Word alone be obeyed, and that the life be regulated by it alone. 
 So now in our days that the light of His Word hath displayed 
 itself to such a degree that we therein can see the treacherous 
 dark lies of Satan, the works of darkness will not come to the 
 light but cry out against it. And when they can effect nothing 
 agaiast the truth openly, they take to their old arts, and lay 
 secret snares for its preachers, endeavouring to ruin them by lies 
 and false witness. Therefore, ye have acted in a wise and 
 Christian manner, that ye have not let the preachers of the Word 
 be imprisoned, tormented and slain, at the complaint and desire 
 of every one, against all justice. I write this, not as if I were 
 concerned for the temporal life of the evangelical preachers, (for 
 their lives are alone in the hand of God,) but that your hands 
 may be clean from such misdeeds. ' If Christ has been sub- 
 jected to false accusation from wicked priests. His disciples 
 are taught by Him steadfastly to endure the same. But woe to 
 those who commit such things. Therefore see to it that the 
 Word of God be faithfully preached among you, and without 
 additions. But above all, see to it that it be obeyed. For the 
 name of God is blasphemed by those who give themselves out 
 
LABOURS ON BEHALF OF EVANGELICAL TRUTH. 177 
 
 as Christians, and who live not as Christians. Therefore let all 
 speak before God and his neighbour the truth ; let your speech 
 be yea, yea, and nay, nay. For thus will you serve God in spirit 
 and in truth. Abandon all blasphemy, intemperance, gambling, 
 fornication, adultery, and mercenary warfare, help the poor, pro- 
 tect the wronged and the oppressed. Eegulate your whole lives 
 according to the divine Word, and set your consolation and trust 
 alone in the .Almighty. I should have often written to you, if 
 two causes had not hindered me. Firstly, because my enemies 
 would immediately have cried out, I was seeking human aid 
 and consolation by you, which, God be praised, I can well dis- 
 pense with, on the one hand, because the pious in Zurich have 
 not suffered any injustice to be done me, and on the other, 
 because I would rather have the might of God to be seen, and 
 was unwilling to cast pearls before swine. But where a door is 
 opened to the gospel I take not holiday. Secondly, because, 
 willing as I have ever been to preach the gospel in the place of 
 my birth, I have been always hindered from it. Be now intrepid 
 and undismayed. May God, who has chosen you to walk in 
 His light, increase it to you more and more, that ye may grow 
 in His grace, and that His name may be sanctified and glorified 
 by you, and that after the misery of this life ye may have joy at 
 His right hand for evermore. Amen. Let not yourselves be 
 misled by the wicked lies and strange stories that are told of me. 
 The powers of darkness are always busy at this work. But as 
 for me, I will, by God's grace, so teach and preach that nothing 
 else shall be found in me but a doctrine in conformity with His 
 Holy Word. Every talker may call me heretic, but I know 
 the devil cannot make me out one with you." 
 
 This manly Christian epistle decided the victory of the gospel 
 in the Eeformer's native valley. The Council and the community 
 in the same summer, 1524, caused, through delegates, their wiU 
 to be published to the assembled clergy, " that the Word of God 
 be preached with one accord." The Abbot of St. GaU, indeed, ill 
 union with the Bishop of Chur, sought to persecute its preachers. 
 Three evangelical clergymen, Melitus von Wattwyl, Doering ab 
 dem Hemberg, and Farer von Stein, were accused by the abbot 
 before the Chapter of disobedience. They answered quite in 
 
 ■tTT _ __ _n _ j» rN _ _T 
 
178 LABOUES ON BEHALF OF EVANGELICAL TEUTH. 
 
 we shall submit ourselves, not only to the Chapter, but to the 
 least of our brethren in Christ, but in the contrary case, we shall 
 obey none, not even the mightiest potentate." They appealed, 
 moreover, to the instructions of the Council, to preach from this 
 time forward the Word of God, and this only had they done. 
 The accusers were obliged to return home without effecting 
 anything. 
 
 The following occurrence appeared likely to be one of greater 
 moment : — On St. Catherine's day (25th -November) of the same 
 year, a county meeting was held at Lichtensteig, before which 
 two deputies from Schwytz appeared in a case of hereditary suc- 
 cession. At dinner one of the deputies called out, "Magister 
 Huldreich Zwingli is a thief and a heretic." Henry Steiger, 
 the town-clerk, indignant at this calumny of his esteemed country- 
 man, immediately demanded a retraction of the insulting lan- 
 guage. If not done he would prosecute at law. In the mean- 
 time, a near relative of Zwingli's, George Bruggman, who hap- 
 pened to be sitting at another table, got word of the calumnioiis 
 speech, and rising in great wrath, with some other of Zwingli's 
 friends, was on the point of taking vengeance by some act of 
 violence. It was only with difficulty that the Council, which 
 was now assembled on the open market-place, could prevent 
 matters coming to such an extremity. This they at length 
 effected by adopting Bruggman's declaration, "Magister Hul- 
 dreich is a pious, excellent, honest man, and whoever says the 
 contrary, is a liar, villain, and thief." Upon this decision being 
 come to by the Council, the Schwyzer delegates, boiling with 
 passion, rode off homewards, and set their whole canton in move- 
 ment against the inhabitants of Toggenburg, for the disgrace to 
 which they had been subjected. But the Toggenburgians, above 
 aU the men of Wildhaus, swore to stand by Zwingli to the last. 
 Thus this storm likewise passed away without any farther and 
 more serious consequences resulting from it, and without damage 
 to the gospel Zwingli could, in June 1525, write again to an 
 honourable Council, and to the community of the county of Tog- 
 genburg in general: "I thank God, our heavenly Father, that 
 He hath enlightened you by the light of His Word, and hath 
 introduced you thus into the knowledge of the truth, so that you 
 continue steadfast in your confession of it, which, however, comes 
 
LABOUES ON BEHALF OF EVANGELICAL TRUTH. 179 
 
 all from His grace and mercy, and not from your wisdom. To 
 Him be everlasting praise and glory. May He from henceforth 
 encompass you with the shield of His defence and protection, 
 that you may increase more and more in all that is good. 
 Amen." 
 
 In the neighbouring pleasant lull country of AppenzeU, the 
 glad news of salvation and the morning light of the Eeformation 
 were likewise hailed by many with joy. A zealous pioneer of the 
 faith in this quarter was James Schurtanner, minister in Teufen. 
 Zwingli wrote to him (March 1524): "Be manly and iirm, dear 
 James, and let not yourself be overcome, that you may be called 
 Israel We must contend with the foe till the day dawn, and till 
 the moming-star arise in our hearts, (2 Pet. L 1 9,) and the powers 
 of darkness hide themselves in their own black night. I say this 
 to you, not as though I doubted you would give up the contest, 
 but to encoiirage you, in that you hear how your zealous diligence 
 is a balsam of life to believers. For God is my witness, that my 
 heart leapt for joy when we heard that the pious people of Appen- 
 zeU had received the Word of God. I should have been anxious, 
 too, to have heard of their confirmation and establishment 
 therein, did I not know the faith, truth, and love which you have 
 towards God. With these I doubt not you will finish the good 
 work which God has begun in them. It is to be hoped that 
 although their canton is the last in the order of the Confederacy,* 
 it will not be the last in the faith. For these people dwell not 
 in the centre of a fertile country, where the dangers of selfishness 
 and pleasure are greatest, but in a mountain district, where a 
 pious simplicity can be better preserved ; which guileless simpli- 
 city, joined to an intelligent piety, affords the best and surest 
 abiding-place for faith. Christian doctrine and Christian prac- 
 tice can be nowhere more easily planted than among a people 
 vmschooled in the deceitful arts of the world. Not as though I 
 meant that intellect and wisdom were awanting in the pious 
 Appenzellers, but their simple faithful lives shew us somewhat 
 of the old Confederate, so that the Word of God will, without 
 doubt, train among them a pious and God-fearing race, who will 
 
 * AppenzeU joined the Swiss league in 1513, and was the last in order of the 
 so-called old cantons. 
 
180 LABOUES ON BEHALF OF EVANGELICAL TRUTH. 
 
 extirpate that selfish spirit among us, which, as brother Klaus of 
 Unterwalden* predicts, is waxiag deadly. For where it spreads its 
 rank weeds, no good regiment can exist. AVherefore, take care, as 
 heretofore, of your children, whom you have begotten in the faith, 
 and train them so that neither flattery nor threats may have the 
 power to turn them from sound doctrine. Defend yourself weU 
 against the teeth of voracious wolves, and let them not tear your 
 sheep from you. Bear yourself like a man of God, and may 
 your heart be strong in God, of whose support you may be sure. 
 Salute your faithful feUow-workers in the gospel of Christ, the 
 Bishop of Gais, Bernhardin, and all who hold truly to God, as, 
 God be praised, we hear the most of your bishops do. I com- 
 mend you to God, with all the people of Appenzell; iand pray 
 for me to God with all your people." 
 
 The Eeformation spread and strengthened its roots more and 
 more, especially in the outward-l3dng communities of Appenzell, 
 in the direction of St. Gall. The majority, however, of the inha- 
 bitants of the inner parishes, in the quarter of Scutis, continuing 
 obstinately by the old church, which produced great bitterness 
 of feeling between both parties, it was resolved, at the end of the 
 sixteenth century, to divide the canton into two parts, or rhodes, 
 according to the confessions of faith. Whoever was papistical 
 was to dwell in the iimer rhodes ; whoever was evangelical in 
 the outer. At the separation the Eeformed numbered 6322, the 
 Papists 2782. In St. Gall, which was in the outer district, 
 Zwingli's learned friend, already well known to us. Dr. Vadian, 
 the burgomaster, was a principal prop of evangelical truth. This 
 burgomaster lectured to his fellow-citizens on the Acts of the 
 Apostles, in order to set before them the image of the first apos- 
 tolic church. A contemporary hence said: " Here in St. GaU it 
 is not only allowed to hear the Word of God, but the magistrates 
 themselves teach and preach it." With Zwingli Dr. Vadian kept 
 up an uninterrupted intercourse of the most friendly description, 
 and the word of this friend of his youth had always great weight 
 with Vadian. Other evangelical men, both lay and clerical, 
 
 * Or Nicolas von der Fluehe, the well known hermit of Unterwalden, was 
 held in much respect by Zwingli too, especially as he, like the Reformer himself, 
 warned the Confederates against interfering in foreign affairs, and exhorted 
 them to preserve their ancient pious simplicity. 
 
LABOURS ON BEHALF OF EVANGELICAL TBUTH. 181 
 
 formed close connections with Vadian, and forwarded the victory 
 of the gospel in this town, despite the counteracting influences of 
 a hostilely disposed abbacy. 
 
 But a storm that arose out of the very centre of the new church 
 in this district took a more ominous character, and threatened to 
 exert highly injurious effects on the tender evangelical seed in its 
 first growth ; I mean the fanatical errors of the Anabaptists. As 
 soon as Zwingli saw the danger, he raised his warning voice with 
 true apostolic fidelity, and despatched a circular-letter to the 
 Honourable the Burgomaster, the Council, and whole community 
 of St. Gall, from which we extract the following passage : "Most 
 honourable and dear brethren in God, I deeply lament that such 
 a storm has come over the first growth of the gospel lately 
 planted and just springing up among you; yet I am not sur- 
 prised at it, it is the stratagem of the enemy; wherever God 
 reveals His Word, there, too, Satan sows his tares. We find also 
 in the Epistles of St. Paul, that some, who made indeed a pro- 
 fession of the faith, but who had it not in their hearts, caused 
 much offence by reason of outward things. We see the same in 
 our day also, in some who, shortly before the commencement of 
 Anabaptism, loudly preached before the whole world, " outward 
 things are nothing, they are of no avail to salvation ; let no man 
 rest upon them." Here they spoke the truth, so far as it was 
 done in love, and with measure. The same men we see now, 
 however, for the sake of a mere external sign, destroying peace 
 among Christians, and calling those who contradict them here- 
 tics and anti-Christs, although their whole design is nothing but 
 to set up a heresy of the worst description, — I mean faction 
 and schism." After describing at some length the proceedings 
 and aims of the Anabaptists, he closes with the exhortation: 
 "Wherefore, pious and honourable sirs and brethren, who have 
 already made yourselves famous by your worldly wisdom and 
 industrial pursuits, look well to it that in this time, in which the 
 devil himself sets on us, seeking, since the sword of persecution 
 has failed in dividing us, to divide us upon questions of out- 
 ward things, look well to it, I say, that no man sow dissension 
 among you through the gospel. For there are many so-called 
 Christians who are just as much concerned for their worldly goods 
 as your merchants are for their wares. Nor am I here speaking of 
 
182 LABOURS ON BEHALF OF EVANGELICAL TEUTH. 
 
 those vagabonds who run about the country making a gain of the 
 simple. Such men do not desire the Word of God at all, but only- 
 employ it for their own base purposes. The Word of God, how- 
 ever, is not vain words to be so turned; it is spirit, and it is life. 
 Be undismayed, perverse Anabaptis'ts will accomplish nothing, for 
 their cause is not of God. Let us pray God for one another. 
 May He graciously preserve you all, Amen." As Zwingli pre- 
 dicted, this storm Kkewise passed away without inflicting any 
 damage on the infant church, and to this favourable result his 
 own letter greatly contributed. 
 
 To the mountains and valleys of High Ehaetie or Graubund 
 the report also penetrated of Zwingli' s doctrine, as it is called in 
 a History of the Eeformation* in this country, the doctrine, that 
 in matters of religion nothing is to be believed except that which 
 can be satisfactorily and plainly proved by Scripture, while, as to 
 that which has no foundation in the Word of God, one man has 
 the same liberty to reject it as others have had, and stiLL exercise, to 
 proclaim and establish it. Many pious souls, continues this his- 
 torian, in the three common unions, welcomed this principle with 
 lively joy, and received it as clearly proven and established that 
 hitherto their belief had been shackled by many things which 
 had no foundation in the Word of God. At the instance of the 
 communities themselves, the Diet, the highest authority in the 
 land, met November 1523, at Chur, to take into consideration 
 measures for doing away with the grievances and abuses that 
 prevailed in the Church. Eighteen articles were drawn up to 
 this effect, and confirmed in the year following, of which we 
 here give the first as the most important : " Each clergyman shall, 
 for himself, purely and fully preach the Word of God and the doc- 
 trine of Christ to his people, and shall not mislead them by the 
 doctrines of human invention. Whoever will not or cannot fulfil 
 this official duty shall be deprived of his living, and draw no 
 part of the same." In virtue of this decision, the Dean of St. 
 Martin's, after a disgraceful confession of his inability to preach, 
 was obliged to give way to ZwingU's friend, John-Dorfmann or 
 Comander, who now became the chief instrument of the Grau- 
 bund Eeformation. In Chur, he found the soil already prepared 
 
 * Ahorn's Holy Regeneration of the Evangelical Churches of the three Unions, 
 oomposerl of the freemen of High Ehaetie. 
 
LABOTIES ON BEHALF OF EVANGELICAL TEUTH. 183 
 
 for the seed of the gospel through the labours of Salandrinus, the 
 teacher, whom we have mentioned above as ZwingH's friend. 
 But in proportion as he arose in the esteem of the friends of the 
 gospel, and as the truth, through his labours, struck deeper, its 
 roots spreading fast over the hills and dales of this mountain-land, 
 in the same proportion waxed the animosity of the Bishop of Chur 
 and his party against the preachers of the gospel, and, above aU, 
 against Comander. A band of armed men must accompany the 
 herald of truth into the church, and defend him even in the sanc- 
 tuary from insult and outrage. The same things happened in the 
 country districts, where more than forty ecclesiastics had been 
 gained over to evangehcal trutL The Bishop of Chur now took 
 steps to induce the Diet to interfere against the preachers of the 
 gospel as heretics, insurrectionists, sacrilegists, abusers of the 
 Holy Sacraments, and despisers of the mass-sacrifice. Zwingli, on 
 hearing of the threatening storm, despatched on the instant, with 
 an apostolic vigour, a circular letter, of date the 14th January 
 1525, from which we extract the following: "Grace and peace 
 from God the Father ! Dear sirs and brethren in the Lord, the 
 holy Paul cared not alone for those whom he had converted to the 
 faith, but for all the churches, that is, for aU the faithful, that no 
 infidelity, error, or scandal, might arise among them. I therefore 
 trust that my present writing to you will not be misinterpreted, 
 on the one hand, because I have heard how you have accepted 
 that true and irresistible Word of God, and have permitted, in the 
 most places, the free preaching of the same, and in the second 
 place, because I am a native of the bishopric of Chur. Now I 
 address you in this present concerning no other affair but that 
 of the Evangel of the Son of God, in which God daily uses me 
 with great labour, care, anxiety, contradiction, and opposition ; 
 yet He overcomes always who is Lord over all lords. To Him 
 be praise and glory. I beg your worships well to consider how 
 the Papal authority has taken captive the Word of God, and hid 
 it in darkness, whereby the truth has been withheld from us, and 
 an empty semblance presented to us in the place of it, whereby 
 we have been not only cozened out of our worldly goods, but, as 
 there is ground to fear, have had our souls' salvation put in 
 jeopardy. This is the more especially now to be feared, since 
 the truth has been set in the light of day, and yet many, blinded 
 
ISi LABOURS ON BEHALF OF EVANGELICAL TRUTH. 
 
 by papistical doctrine, will not yield obedience to it. You see 
 now how it stands with the Popedom, and on the other hand, how 
 glorious and vigorous the truth everywhere displays itself, so that 
 the whole Papal power can. effect nothing against it, but has 
 recourse to violence, maltreatment, lies, and bribery, against it, 
 although, Grod be praised, it has not been able to overcome even 
 the least of those who now, for a considerable time, preach the 
 gospel. Wherefore, it is to be feared that if the civil power do 
 not protect those who proclaim the Word, and who are able to 
 give an account of their doctrine out of that Word, that God will 
 again withdraw His favour from us, and allow us to sink again 
 into our old errors. But let every one weigh well what danger 
 and what loss would arise to the whole of Christendom, in body 
 and soul, from such a result. As it is now well known to me 
 that there are some among you who truly and faithfully preach 
 the holy and unadulterated Word of God, — in particular, that hon- 
 ourable, learned, and faithful man, John Comander, — ^may the 
 Lord confirm them in all good, — I beseech your worships to see 
 to it that no violence or injury be done to these, and against the 
 Word of God. Lay the Divine Word yourselves to heart, as it is 
 contained in the Old and New Testaments, and let yourselves in 
 no manner be swayed therefrom. Eefiect on the healing and peace 
 of the conscience, which can alone find rest in the Word of God; 
 let not this divine medicine be again snatched from you, and 
 let not the deceiving treacherous word of any Papal emissary again 
 take captive your conscience; for, as the prophet Amos saith, 
 'the lion hath roared, who wUl not fear?' so I ask, when God 
 equips in its armour and reveals His Word, who will not give 
 ear to and obey it? God does not reveal His Word but to the 
 very sensible pain and punishment of those who will not hear it, 
 and not without great profit in body and soul to those who foUow 
 it. The terrible destruction of Jerusalem is an example of the 
 first, which rejected the Word, that is, the Son of God; while 
 the sparing of Nineveh, because it turned to God, is an example 
 of the second. Wherefore, pious, steadfast, wise, and beloved 
 brethren in God, let not yourselves be seduced by those who seek 
 to stir you up by secret lies and calumnies against the Word of 
 God and its preachers, and those who obey it, thus hatching 
 anarchy and revolt among you. This is the devil's work ; he is 
 
LABOUES ON BEHALF OF EVANGELICAL TRUTH. 185 
 
 powerless agaiast the truth ; but seizes such weapons as lying, 
 confusion, and distraction. May the God who hath begun to 
 break Popery in your hearts, and to introduce you into the know- 
 ledge of His truth, guide and strengthen you, that we may all 
 appear before Him with joy at the last day. Amen." 
 
 This earnest Christian appeal did not fail to produce a power- 
 ful effect in the CouncUs and communities of the Graubund. 
 Accordingly, when the Bishop of Chur caused, through the Abbot 
 of St. Luzi, his calumnious accusation to be brought before the 
 Diet, assembled at Chur on the Christmas of 1525, against the 
 preachers of the gospel, with the view of getting them condemned 
 without a hearing, this high Assembly answered with dignity : 
 " The law which demands that no one be condemned unheard 
 shall also be observed in the present instance." John Comander 
 was permitted to appear and defend himself, and at his desire, a 
 religious disputation was appointed to be held between the par- 
 ties at Ilanz, on the 13th January 1526. The result of this 
 Disputation, at which Hofmeister of Schaffhausen appeared, at 
 Zwingli's instigation, although he was not allowed to take a part 
 in it, was, that seven mass-priests publicly went over to and 
 embraced the gospel, and that the Diet issued an ordinance declar- 
 ing both religions in the three Unions to be free, and requiring that 
 the clergy of both parties should abstain from reciprocal invec- 
 tives and abuse, and preach nothing except what could be proven 
 on good grounds from the Word of God. Thus evangelical truth 
 gained a victory in this canton likewise. " Christ waxed strong 
 everywhere in these mountains," writes Salondrinus to Zwingli, 
 " like the tender grass in spring," and the evangelical pastors, like 
 fountains of living water, refreshed mountain and vale. 
 
 Thus, on the gospel's gaining, after a protracted contest, the 
 victory over the papacy in Schaffhausen, through the labours of 
 Zwingli's friends, Sebastian Wagner, called Hofmeister, Sebastian 
 Hofmann, and Erasmus Eitter, and on the Eeformation's being 
 fairly set up after the model of Zurich, in 1529, it might be said 
 that the inhabitants of the whole of Eastern Switzerland in their 
 great majority rejoiced in the light of gospel truth, and drank of 
 the rich consolations which it affords. 
 
186 INFLUENCE ON THE VICTOEY OF THE KEPOEMATION. 
 
 3. ZwiNGLi's Influence on the Victoey of the Refoemation 
 IN the Canton of Beene, and in the othee Cantons of 
 Westeen Switzeeland ; his Relations to Faeel. 
 
 The qtiestion whethet the gospel or popery should hold sway 
 over the heart and conscience in Western Switzerland, depended 
 for its solution on the course which the government and people 
 of Berne might adopt. "We have seen above with what earnest- 
 ness Zwingli exhorted his friend Berchtold Haller to carry on the 
 work of the gospel, that the crown of life might not fail him. 
 Between Zwingli and his evangelical friends in Berne, Haller, 
 Kolb, Meier, and others, there existed an uninterrupted spiritual 
 intercourse. Every anxiety which distressed the latter, every 
 doubt and uncertainty which disturbed them, every hope which 
 cheered and gladdened them, the Bernese communicated without 
 reserve to their esteemed friend and guide in Zurich. Willingly 
 as Zwingli responded to their requests for the solution of diffictdt 
 scriptural passages or doctrines, he felt himself called upon in 
 humility to warn them not to place too great reliance on his 
 opinions, but to try their own strength, as he was convinced they 
 would accomplish more through it. Provost Mcolas von Watten- 
 wyl, who stood at the head of the Bernese church, and who 
 enjoyed an influence in it almost episcopal, read and admired 
 his letters to Haller. Full of joy and hope for the future, Haller 
 writes to Zwingli: "Our bishop Wattenwyl cannot sufficiently 
 praise and recommend your dear letters to us. ' Rejoice him 
 with one of your epistles. Our Bernese hunger for the Word of 
 God, and we feed them according to the grace given us of the 
 Lord; the Lord Jesus increases with us the number of the faith- 
 ful daily, so that if God abandon us not, it will be hard to sup- 
 press His doctrine, much as a part of the nobility work against it." 
 The Lord having here opened a door, Zwingli could no longer 
 hesitate. "I feel daily more," he wrote to Haller, "what force 
 the words of Paul have, ' necessity is laid upon me, yea, woe is 
 unto me if I preach not the gospel,' 1 Cor. ix. 16, for I too, small 
 though I be, cannot possibly rest and take hoKday, because the 
 Lord who moves my heart will not allow it, though now and then 
 
INFLUENCE ON THE VICTORY OP THE EEFOKMATION. 187 
 
 a sense of -wearmess and a fear of danger will steal across my 
 soul, and fain lead me to give up the contest. Far removed from 
 not watcldng and fighting with and for you, I cannot desist from 
 it." To the Provost von Wattenwyl he wrote : " Grace and peace 
 from God and the Lord Jesus Christ. While it is a source of 
 joy, dearest brother in Christ Jesus, to all Christians, that the 
 faith daily increases and waxes strong in the good town of Berne, 
 your native city, yet your own conversion from darkness to light 
 gladdens me especially. For many things might have hindered 
 you; your illustrious pedigree, (your father was often invested 
 with the dignity of Schuldheiss, and held other ofBces of honour,) 
 your wealth, your own merits, your affability and courtesy 
 towards aE men, and, finally, the high Esteem you enjoyed on the 
 part of popes and bishops. But God has led you in a wonderful 
 manner with your whole people. how true is the saying of 
 Christ, ' No man can come to me except the Father, which hath 
 sent me, draw him.' He worketh all in all ; to Him we shall 
 render eternal praise and thanks for your faith. May God, who 
 hath led us to the wondrous light of the knowledge of His Being 
 and His Word, confirm in us all that He has begun." 
 
 The gospel struck its roots deeper and deeper into the hearts 
 of the Bernese ; the enemies of the Eeformatioh in both Coun- 
 cils were forced to succumb to its friends. On Zwingli's learning 
 of this happy revolution in the public mind, and change in the 
 posture of public affairs, he wrote to Haller in the begin- 
 ning of the year 1527 : " My dearest Berchtold, everything knows 
 its ordination, and even lifeless nature follows it. After the raw 
 north wind come milder airs, and after the hot days of summer 
 autumn displays its golden treasures. Ought we, then, now that 
 the Creator of all things, in whose service we stand, levels the 
 way to us by which we may penetrate into the centre of the 
 enemy's camp, ought we, I say, to enter on the contest with less 
 courage ? No ; unless we might be like the changeable winds. 
 God has opened to you and to us all, in Berne, a door, at which 
 we can take in the dove, for a time scared away but ever long- 
 ing to return. But without a parable, Christian doctrine, once 
 banished from our country, may now be freely preached. You 
 are here the pilot and the saving Noah. Ply all diligence, seize hold 
 of every opportunity, guard yourself against the reproach that 
 
188 INFLUENCE ON THE VICTOEY OF THE EEPOEMAXION. 
 
 fine hopes have heen blighted by your neglect, or by the work 
 not being entered upon with sufficient zeal Stand firm ; hold 
 on. Throw the hooks and the rod of faith so into the hearts of 
 your people, that it wUl be impossible to again tear them out. 
 The Lord send you light and strength." Brilliant success crowned 
 the labours of Haller and his friends. On the Sunday succeed- 
 ing Martinmas 1527, it was unanimously resolved by the Council 
 and citizens to institute, in the fijst days of the coming year, a 
 Eeligious Conference, after the model of Zurich, " without digres- 
 sions, invectives, offensive or abusive language, that the truth 
 might not be concealed, but that the ground of divine truth, of 
 Christian intelligence, and of saving health, might be discovered, 
 and that a worship in conformity with the Holy Scriptures might 
 be planted and observed." To this Disputation there were 
 invited, the four bishops of Constance, Wallis, Basle, and Lau- 
 sanne, (under whose jurisdiction the Bernese lands hitherto stood,) 
 " as the superior pastors and shepherds, not ordained to shear the 
 sheep, but to feed them, at the penalty of loss of rights and 
 incomes in the territory of Berne." Farther, all the members of 
 the Confederacy and Union, of whatsoever party they might be, 
 to the end, that a common Confederacy might also be brought 
 to a common faith without compulsion to any ; and, finally, the 
 whole Bernese clergy, and each and all, be he stranger or native, 
 priest or layman, willing to dispute. All the friends of the 
 gospel turned their eyes on Zwingli, on whose presence at the 
 Disputation they believed the hopes of victory for evangelic truth 
 ia Berne to rest ; in pressing terms Haller prays this " best 
 beloved brother and champion in the cause of Christ," that he 
 would be pleased to attend. " Would to God that you knew the 
 ardent wishes of all of us that this affair might have a Christian 
 issue. You know how much is here at stake, what shame, 
 mockery, and disgrace would fall upon the Evangel and us, if we 
 were found not to be competent to the task. I know, however, 
 out of manifold experience, how much you have at heart the 
 glory of God and His "Word, the salvation of Berne, and of the 
 whole of Switzerland, and that you will do all to aid us in this 
 emergency and crisis of our history. My brother, fail not, the 
 whole town sets its confidence upon you." Zwingli himself was 
 equally resolved to indulge at once the impulse of his feelings. 
 
INFLUENCE ON THE VICTORY OF THE KEFOEMATION. 189 
 
 and the intreaties of his friends at Berne, and immediately applied 
 to the Council of Zurich for permission to attend this Disputa- 
 tion, that he might manifest to every one " that his doctrine was 
 not heretical but truly Christian, not God-blaspheming, but God- 
 fearing, not the offspring of selfishness and ambition, but of love 
 to the glory of God, and the advancement of the general weal, 
 not having for its object dissension in the Confederacy, but union." 
 Far and near friends and enemies of evangelical truth felt the 
 importance of the decision which was to take place at Berne. 
 The four bishops and the Emperor himself, but most pressingly 
 of all the papistical cantons, exhorted the Bernese to give up their 
 design. They returned the dignified answer: "We change 
 nothiug in the twelve articles of the Christian faith; we separate 
 not from the Church whose head is Christ ; what is founded on 
 the Word of God will abide for ever; we only shall not depart 
 from the Word of God." 
 
 From Zurich, an invitation was issued to the Imperial towns 
 of South Germany to send their learned men and clergy to this 
 conference, and was joyfully accepted. On Wew-Year's Eve 1528, 
 there were assembled in Zurich more than a hundred of the 
 clergy and learned men from Suabia and East Switzerland. On 
 the following morning they set out for Berne, accompanied by a 
 delegation of the Zurich Council, and attended by a respect- 
 able body of armed men; the five Eoman Catholic cantons 
 through which their way led them, having refused a safe conduct. 
 Onwards they moved to Berne, to take captive to Christ this 
 proud city, which no enemy had neared with impunity, to 
 establish His gospel there, and bring its heroic citizens under 
 His gentle yoke. Zwingh, fuU of zeal for the glory of God, and 
 ready to surrender his life at any moment in the service of his 
 Master, rode at the head of the cavalcade, by the side of Burgo- 
 master Eoist, and one of the counsellors. On the 4th of January 
 he entered Berne, whither in the meanwhile CEcolampad of 
 Basle, and Bucer and Capito of Strasburg were already come. 
 The Disputation began on the 6th, according to the regulations 
 and directions of Zwingli, who also had drawn up the Proposi- 
 tions, and taken the charge of their printing. A combat, result- 
 ing in victory, was waged for eighteen days by the friends of the 
 
190 INFLUENCE ON THE VICTORY OF THE EEFOEMATION. 
 
 gospel, in tehalf of evangelical truth. In this contest, Zwingli,* 
 even in the judgment of his antagonists, distinguished himself 
 above all others. 
 
 A more lasting effect, however, than that arising from the 
 superiority maintained in the Disputation, was probably produced 
 by the testimonies of their Christian faith, delivered by some of 
 the eminent learned strangers, in sermons which they preached 
 in the Minster.i" Zwingli delivered two sermons. In the first, 
 he gave a justification of his faith and doctrine, explaining the 
 Christian creed, and proving that in aU points he concurred with 
 the articles of faith in it. Upon his touchiag, in the course of 
 his discourse, on the Eomish doctrine of the mass, disproving it, 
 and, on the other hand, developing the significance of the Supper, 
 according to the institution of Christ, a priest, who was just pre- 
 paring to read mass from one of the altars, ;was seen to throw 
 aside his mass-weed, in which he had already arrayed himself, 
 with the words, " If the mass rest on no better bottom, I shall 
 neither read thee now, nor read thee more." Zwingli's last 
 sermon he delivered immediately before his departure from 
 Berne, when the victory of the Eeformation had been decided. 
 He accordingly embraced the occasion to exhort his hearers, among 
 whom there were many steeled warriors, to Christian steadfast- 
 ness, closing with the following heart-stirring appeal : " "Where- 
 fore recognise the freedom which Christ has purchased for you, 
 and continue therein, according to the exhortation of Paul, Gal. 
 V. 1, and be not any more bowed under the yoke of servitude or 
 thraldom. Ye know the oppression we suffered in our consciences, 
 led astray as we have been from one false means of comfort to 
 another, which, however, only overloaded our consciences, which 
 never made them free nor consoled them. But, behold, now 
 
 ' "This beast," so -writes a papistical hearer, " is in truth more learned than I 
 had believed. The malapert CEcolampad may understand the prophets and 
 Hebrew better, and in Greek he may equal him, but in fertility of intellect, 
 in force and perspicuity of statement, he is very far behind him. I could make 
 nothing of Capito. Bucer spoke more than he did. Had Bucer the learning 
 and linguistical acquirements of CEcolampad and Zwingli, he would be more 
 dangerous than either: so quick is he in his morements, and so pleasantly can 
 he talk." 
 
 f Testimonials of Evangelical Truth in modern German, edited by R. 
 Christoffel. Berne, Dalp 1853. 
 
HIS RELATIONS TO FAEEL. 191 
 
 what freedom ye have, and what comfort in the knowledge of 
 God, and in the confidence which ye have in Him through Jesus 
 Christ. From this freedom and redemption of the Spirit, let not 
 yoiirselves be ever moved. There is here a bravery demanded 
 as in no other matter. But as our ancestors, God be praised, 
 stood courageous and immovable in the defence of their civil 
 freedom, so ought ye, and yet more steadfastly for that liberty 
 which sets free the conscience here below, and which will crown 
 you with everlasting joy above. At the same time, trust that 
 the same God who has enlightened and led you, will also in His 
 own time guide our dear neighbours, the other members of the 
 Confederacy, so that we may live together more unitedly than 
 ever in such a true friendship as consists with the will of God. 
 May God, who has created and redeemed us, grant this both to 
 us and them. Amea" 
 
 Before their departure from Berne, the strangers were wit- 
 nesses of a fine act of noble-mindedness. The Bernese pardoned 
 two individuals, who had forfeited their lives by a breach of the 
 "urfehde," or solemn oath, not to take vengeance. "When a 
 king or prince at friendship with us, visits us," said they, " we 
 have the custom, in honour of our royal guests, to set criminals 
 at liberty, with a recommendation to amendment of life. Now, 
 however, that the King of kings and the Priuce of Peace, the 
 Son of God, our Elder brother, has condescended to visit us, 
 why should not we honour Him, who brings to us redemption 
 from eternal perdition, by pardoning those who have sinned 
 against us ?" 
 
 With the victory of the Reformation in Berne, a door was 
 opened for the extension of the gospel to French-speaking 
 Switzerland, particularly to Neuenburg, Waad and Geneva. 
 Already there laboured here, with the zeal of an EUas, William 
 Earel, a Prench nobleman of Dauphiny. He, too, felt himseK 
 irresistibly attracted by the heroic character of Zwingli, and he 
 called the Eeformer's attention to this part of Switzerland 
 and France. Forced to flee to Strasburg on account of his evan- 
 gelical labours, he calls from thence to Zwingli, in the language 
 of admiration: "I wish you all joy that your faith manifests 
 itself so gloriously, and that Christ, through whom you labour 
 and contend, has so strong foundation in you, as is evident from 
 
192 HIS RELATIONS TO FAEEL. 
 
 this, that you recognise His great grace in you, and attribute your 
 strength to Him and His grace, to whom they belong, and not to 
 yourself, ascribing only that to yourself which is seemly, so that 
 God remains God, and man man." After recommending to him 
 a countryman, who had been driven from his home for the gospel, 
 requesting ZwingH, if possible, to procure him a situation as 
 preacher or teacher in the Neuenburg district, or elsewhere, he 
 entreats him to do all in his power " that in this way, too, some , 
 light may be thrown on poor France." Farel himself came after- 
 wards into the very region where he desired to see his expatriated 
 countryman provided for, and then he felt stni more urgently 
 than ever the necessity of combining his labours with those of 
 Zwingli, and drawing strength from his strength. " Continue," 
 he writes, " in the path you have entered upon, bold Christian 
 warrior, to shed your light before us, by piety, faith, and purity 
 of doctrine, and pray the Lord for us, that He may grant us these 
 gifts likewise more and more. A desire for the preaching of the 
 Word shewed itself in Geneva ; but the inhabitants of Freiburg 
 will not have it. Ah! if the Bernese were equally zealous for 
 the glory of Christ as the Freiburgers are for papistical opinions 
 and doctrines. Weigh well the great grace that God has bestowed 
 on you, in that you can do much here for the glorifying of His 
 name. I desire to have you as my fellow -labourer, as well in the 
 work as the ripening fruit. Lend us, in your great foresight and 
 wisdom, help." 
 
 In this manner wrought Zwingli, by the proclamation and 
 triumphant advocacy of the gospel, by his bright example of 
 Christian courage and evangelical steadfastness, yet more, how- 
 ever, by his counsels and his great influence over the magistracy 
 of the different cantons, with the most distinguished success for 
 the extension of the Eeformation in his native country. If we 
 consider, too, as is more fully to be seen in the Life of CEcolam- 
 pad, that he stood with this servant of the Lord, chosen to extend 
 and carry forward to victory the cause of the gospel in Basle, in 
 the closest relations of Christian friendship, strengthening and 
 inspiring him with his own heroic courage and the fire of his 
 spirit, while Zwingli, on the other hand, drank deeply of the 
 John-like love and profound learning of his friend, we have, with 
 the blessed influence he exerted on the church of his native 
 
APOSTOLIC CAKES AND LABOURS. ] 93 
 
 country, an image before us of a true apostle, of a man tmly 
 great. It is with justice that Haller writes to him, " Thou art the 
 eye and the bishop of the whole fatherland, nay, of the whole 
 Christian Church." For Zwingli's glances extended beyond the 
 limits of his native country, and his heart, on which the image 
 of his Saviour was deeply engraved, beat high for the weal of the 
 whole Christian Church. 
 
 4. Zwingli's Apostolic Cares and Labours for the Extension 
 AND Confirmation of Evangelical Truth in Germany. 
 
 After his country, the extension and the victory of the gospel 
 in Germany lay nearest Zwingli's heart. His influence, through 
 means of his numerous friends, bore most on the free imperial 
 towns of South Germany and on the Ehine, where everywhere 
 evangelical men laboured in the spirit of their great exemplar at 
 Zurich, from whom they sought instruction and counsel, and 
 from whom they received many a word of encouragement, explana- 
 tion, and advice. With the zeal of a great military captain fight- 
 ing at the head of his host, and encouraging his men to deeds of 
 valour, Zvsdngli stirred up the preachers of the gospel in the 
 towns of Suabia to combat the anti-Christian papacy. Let us 
 see the force and effect of his words to his fellow combatants 
 in the echo which they found in their breasts. 
 
 Urbanus Eegius of Augsburg writes to his colleague, John 
 Frosch,^ likewise of Augsburg, after reading one of Zwingli's 
 hortatory letters to the latter: " I have read Zwingli's letter, and 
 have re-read it, for I felt my soul inspired by it, and kiiidled to 
 admiration. For the words of this man of God are fire itself, and 
 kindle fire in you. And however little the pen is able to reach 
 the force of the living word, yet there shines out of this letter, 
 in a most wonderful manner, the genuine single-mindedness and 
 fidelity of a truly pious heart, and an unspeakably lofty spirit, 
 that leaves all our words far behind it. But I will not speak of 
 the accomplishments and eloquence of this man. But mark with 
 what carefulness his love takes in all, and thinks on all, how it 
 overlooks nothing in its comprehensiveness that can minister to 
 the glory of God, and the salvation of the brethren. Who is 
 
194 APOSTOLIC CAEES AND LABOURS. 
 
 there that suffers, and Zwingli suffers not? Think you that his 
 soul is not daily moved by the care of all the churches, seeing 
 that he so ardently desires that our Augsburg church may be 
 well provided for? Our Zwingli knows weU the devices of Satan, , 
 the deceit of this world, and the temptations of the flesh, which 
 threaten and counteract the servants of the Word on every hand; 
 for already, for some time back, he has, with great distinction, 
 waged this contest against trial and temptation. I am deeply 
 ashamed of my indifference and lukewarmness, when I consider 
 this burning zeal, so much wanted in our times, and then when 
 I reflect, with a bitter feeling of regret, how strong within me 
 the flesh is, how cold I am in comparison of this glowing love 
 of Zwingli's. Like a brave military chief, he calls on to the 
 combat, while he himself advances, armed with the shield of 
 faith, and skilled in war, and casting himself into the thick of 
 the fight, drives back the onset of the enemy, and piercing to 
 the very wedge-point of the enemy's host, he forgets not, in the 
 sweat and dangers of the battle, his fellow-coinbatants either, 
 but encourages them, and holds them sharply to the fight, that 
 none may turn his foot to flight, or cowardly flinch from his post, 
 nor, terrified by the greatness of the threatening danger, abandon 
 the glorious banner of the Cross, and fall away from Christ, his 
 Captain, to Antichrist. Paul, Christ's unwearied combatant, has 
 often stirred up the lukewarm, and encouraged the wearied and 
 the war-worn, by Christ's and his own example, to the joyful 
 struggle against the woes of this life. With like love our friend, 
 equally dear to you and me, encourages you, not doubtiag but 
 that in so great a town there will be much to obstruct the Word. 
 Go forward as you have hitherto done, persevere, and take to 
 heart the encouraging words of Zwingli, which spring from the 
 purest love." 
 
 It was not, however, with Urbanus Eegius alone, it was with 
 the greater part of the preachers of the gospel in all the towns 
 of South Germany, that the admonitions of the Eeformer told 
 with such a spirit-stirring effect, that it may be truly said the 
 Keformaition formed itself here entirely under the plastic hand 
 of Zwingli, and shaped itself after the model of Zirrich. At a 
 later period, when Memminger stood in danger of being deprived 
 of the preaching of the Word through imperial tyranny, Zwingh 
 
APOSTOLIC CAftES AND LABOUfiS. 195 
 
 raised his voice to burgomaster, council, and citizens, encourag- 
 ing them to united perseverance. "Consider, dear sirs and 
 brethren," he writes, "if the moral and spiritual condition of 
 mankind in the whole of Christendom be not so un-Christian, 
 sinful, and miserable that the conscience of every man must pro- 
 nounce this judgment: We must either better ourselves entirely, 
 or God will punish us. Well, then, now that the mind not only 
 admits, but sees very clearly, that all this iniquity has arisen, 
 and grown to its monstrous size, under the false doctrine of the 
 Pope, and that therefore it is impossible that he can point us to 
 the right course, it is indubitable that we ought to direct our- 
 selves by no other doctrine, if we really wish to better ourselves, 
 and to be reconciled to God, except by God's own Word. Since, 
 then, the Almighty God has opened up to you His Holy Gospel, 
 in which the certainty of salvation is promised, and the example 
 of a blameless Me in Christ Jesus is shewn forth, ye ought, with- 
 out doubt, to magnify God, that in the midst of danger, and the 
 threatenings of His wrath, He has shewed you the way by which 
 you can be reconciled to Him. And although the world for this 
 reason hate, although they threaten to persecute and kill you, 
 you ought to value little such threats. If however, the time 
 should come (as present appearances seem to indicate that it will 
 ere long come) when you are called upon to confess your faith, so 
 reiiect, dear sirs and brethren, that Christ, our Captain, threatens 
 also : Whoever denies Him, He will deny before His Father ; and 
 again, whosoever shall confess Him before men, He will also 
 confess before His Father. Wherefore, confess ye the truth 
 freely, and leave Christ, your Captain, to present your case at 
 the court of the great King, in confident hope that He who hath 
 granted you His light and His Spirit, will also accomplish that 
 which He hath begun. Look not on your own strength, nor on 
 the strength of your enemies, but see how strong He is whose 
 affair it is you have taken up, and whom ye believe and serve. 
 When has He abandoned those that trust in Him? Above all, 
 strive to be unanimous and combined, for with union the sinaUest 
 township has saved its honour, while with disunion the mightiest 
 power has gone to ruin. Be wise, and concern yourselves also 
 for the brethren, which is well-pleasing to God, that all having 
 one spirit, may do one work and battle of God, everything in 
 
196 APOSTOLIC CAEES AND LABOUES. 
 
 the Lord, in all union and fidelity. For I promise you, by God 
 whom I preach, that if ye be of one mind, and let not yourselves 
 be seduced by the hire of falsehood and unfaithfulness, that God 
 will certainly sustain you. I commend you to God, who is 
 strong, and leaves none that put their trust in Him. Follow that 
 sincere, faithful servant of the Lord, Simpert Schenk, and ye 
 have nothing to fear." 
 
 We have already alluded to the fact that evangelical doctrine 
 and the Eeformation effected by Zwingli were welcomed and 
 hailed also in the free imperial towns on the Ehine. In the 
 spirit of Zwingli, and in close friendly relations with him, there 
 laboured in Muelhausen Nicolas Prugner ; in Mayence, for a 
 time, Capito and Hedio; in Strasbui^, Bucer, and Capito and 
 Hedio, after they had left Mayence; in Frankfort, Dionysius 
 Melander and John Haner, who, filled with admiration at 
 Zwingli's steadfastness and true piety of soul, pressingly solicited 
 his friendship ; in Hessen, Francisciis Lambert, who introduced 
 Zwingli's original ideas on ecclesiastical discipline ; in East 
 Friesland, John Aportanus of ZwoU. Here there followed John 
 of Lasky, who, upon a journey which he made from Poland, his 
 native country, in 1523, for his farther instruction in the faith, 
 was introduced to the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures by the 
 Eeformer in Zurich. The ray of divine truth had so fired his 
 soul, that he exchanged the most brilliant prospects in his native 
 country for the poverty of a servant of Christ. From West- 
 phalia* also, and the Netherlands.-f- many turned their eyes, full 
 of hope, on Zwingli He himself felt a thrill of joy pervadrag 
 his soul as his bookseller and friend, Christoffel Froschauer, on 
 his return from the Frankfort fair, reported that the gospel had 
 struck vigorous roots, and offered the fairest prospects in all the 
 Ehenish towns. Occasionally, indeed, his heart was afflicted by 
 the persecutions excited in many quarters against the infant evan- 
 gelical congregations. Into the hearts of these persecuted mem- 
 bers of the body of Christ he infused consolation and courage with 
 the steadfast faith and unwearied love of a true disciple of Christ, 
 
 * The Westphalian poet, Hermann of the Beech-tree, corresponded with 
 Zwingli. 
 
 t The visit of the two learned men, Rhodins and Sagan, shews how high was 
 the esteem in which Zwingli stood. 
 
APOSTOLIC CAKES AND LABOUKS. 197 
 
 and exhorted them to perseverance. When the town of Muel- 
 hausen M^as sorely pressed, by threats and temptations, to depart 
 from the accepted evangelical doctrine, and to return to the papal 
 Church, Zwingli sounded the note of warning and exhortation 
 in the following circular, which he despatched to them. " None 
 can be ignorant that opposition and trials must be encountered 
 by those who will cling to the Word of God, as Paul also shews. 
 (2 Tim. ill 12.) It is therefore weU to be conceived that ye must 
 bear mockery, reviling, and menaces, since ye have come to the 
 knowledge of the truth, and have adopted it. Yet such opposi- 
 tion ought by no means to distress you, for it is in adversity we 
 first learn rightly to believe, to pray, to act, to counseL When 
 believers are tried with force, then first of all is faith proved; for 
 then the believer knows whether he be firm and unchangeable, 
 or whether he would fain draw back. But when faith is rightly 
 fashioned it says, I had sooner lose the whole world than 
 draw back, Now, for the first time, the believer recognises 
 his faith, and becomes conscious of what it demands, namely 
 this, that he set his hope upon God alone, and despise all 
 other means of comfort. Those who experience no adversity 
 may indeed speak of fortitude, but when the hour of trial 
 comes, they often make a miserable exhibition of their faith. 
 Therefore, all trials for God's sake ought to be welcome to us. 
 -For God hath thereto appointed them, that through them we 
 may give proof of our faith, nay, they are designed to prove 
 ourselves to ourselves. Before trial every one prayed according 
 to his own fashion, and knew not what to pray for. (Eom. viii. 
 26.) But when it concerns the main thing, namely, our faith, 
 in which our consciences are at clear agreement with God, and 
 men will rob us of this, then our spirit screams, plaias, and 
 cries to God, in choking sighs, ' Lord ! ah ! Lord God ! help, 
 God ! forsake not thy child.' But here Satan slips slyly and 
 cunningly to our sides, and we say to ourselves, ' If I conquer, 
 then it will be an honour to me too that I adhered to the Word 
 of God,' and he tries to substitute falsehood and guile in the 
 place of our integrity. Such attempts of Satan do indeed much 
 disturb the spirit, so that such whisperings destroy all the fruit 
 and joy of our faith, and now the spirit cries to God more ear- 
 nestly than ever. But danger teaches us not only to believe and 
 
198 APOSTOLIC CAEES AND LABOUTJS. 
 
 pray, but to act well; for then it is we are zealous to do alone 
 those things which please Him who is our only refuge and 
 resource, and through whom alone we can overcome our enemies. 
 Therefore, stout-hearted servants of God, stand firm. He who 
 beholds our conflict is not blind; He spies not out of a narrow 
 window; He oversees with His omniscient eyes all camps, lands, 
 and creatures. Nor will He overlook you who are struggling 
 for His name's sake; He will see you; He will also see, when 
 the time comes, your enemies, and wUl carry them away, like 
 withered leaves before the autumn wind. May God increase 
 your faith. Then the world shall know that God exalts the 
 lowly. God be with you. I pray God that Nicolas Prugner 
 teach sound doctrine as hitherto. Amen." 
 
 Clearly as Zwitigli took in view the individual combatants as 
 they appeared for the cause of Christ, and the situation and neces- 
 sities of the single towns and communities in Germany, shaping 
 his instructions, admonitions, and consolations in accordance with 
 their several necessities, equally comprehensive was the glance he 
 threw on the great struggle raging here between the friends of the 
 gospel and the Eomanists at Luther's war-cry. Thus, at the close of 
 January 1522, when the Diet, so important in the history of the 
 Eeformation in Germany, was held at Numberg, and the newly 
 elected Pope, Adrian VI., endeavoured, through his Deputy, Chie- 
 regati, to induce the assembly to suppress the preaching of the gos- 
 pel, he felt himself moved, in free and manly language, to warn the 
 Imperial towns against the designing schemes of the Eomanists. 
 
 " The lately consecrated Pope of Eome," he wrote to them, " has 
 made to the States of the Empire the following foolish and insane 
 overtures : He resolves, 1st, To reconcile the Emperor and the King 
 of France ; 2d, To reform the Church ; 3d, To raise an army to march 
 against the Turks; 4th, To suppress Luther and his party. I 
 would lay my views before your wisdom in regard to these pro- 
 posals, insignificant though I be ; yet was the prophet Amos 
 called from his flock, and filled with the Spirit of God to teach 
 Israel. If, in the first place, the Pope really intends to reconcile 
 the Emperor and the French King, how comes it that he applies 
 to the German princes, on whom the matter is not in the least 
 dependent? Secondly, if he intends to reform the Church, why 
 does he not, first of all, begin with his bishops and cardinals, the 
 
APOSTOLIC CAEES AND LABOURS. 199 
 
 more especially as it is clear to every man that all the arrogance 
 and abuses of the clergy have taken their rise in Eome, and have 
 from thence spread themselves over the whole world? If, thirdly, 
 he will, as he says, levy an army against the Turks, then I must 
 confess my wonder at this bold resolve of a man turned of sevenly, 
 and my astonishment that he, a priest and vicar of the meek 
 and lowly Jesus, (I will grant him the title for once,) should have 
 the audacity to give such a promise, as if all rested on him, and 
 that, too, at a time when the war (between Spain and France) 
 has not yet been ended, nor these two mighty princes brought to 
 act in unison ; I leave out of view here the circumstance entirely, 
 that it were scarcely wise and politic for the greatest and most 
 experienced military captains, .not to speak of an unwarlike 
 infirm old priest, to involve the whole Christian commonwealth 
 iu a dangerous war with an enemy at once so cunning and brave, 
 so mighty and terrible, as the Turk. These promises which, 
 after the experience we have had, no reasonable man can hold to 
 be sincere, are made by the Eomanists, usually, it appears, at the 
 entrance into office of each Pope, with the sole view of drawing 
 the eyes of the world upon them, by exciting delusive hopes, and 
 to serve as a cloak for, the accomplishment of their principal 
 object, which is, to destroy Luther. How rapidly the doctrine of 
 the gospel has obtained the ascendant, you, illustrious princes, 
 are well aware. This is hateftd to all who have no love to the 
 gospel, and yet they dare not openly attack it. They therefore 
 employ cunning, fraud, and guile, and they endeavour to make 
 evangelical doctrine odious by representing it as Luther's doctrine. 
 What consequences will this opposition have if ye do not boldly 
 meet it? Without doubt this, that many whose spirit is willing 
 but whose flesh is weak, wHl, as Peter did, deny Christ; that 
 those who are ready to suffer all for Christ wOl be everywhere 
 under the pretext that they are Lutherans murdered, burned, or 
 cast into chains. And what, O princes, grieves me most of all, 
 you will stain your hands with innocent blood, and not once 
 dream that ye have done it." 
 
 "Another consequence is," he continues, "that to please the 
 Eomanists you wiUplunge the whole of Germany into the wildest 
 commotion. You see that ' the kingdom of God suffereth violence, 
 and that the violent take it by force.' All these who take the 
 
200 APOSTOLIC CAEES AND LABOUES. 
 
 kingdom of God by violence will be involved in war with the 
 enemies of the gospel, if the gospel, under Luther's name, is to be 
 made war upon or suppressed. In this manner, the Ultramon- 
 tane catapult wOl hurl over upon Germany the elements of con- 
 fusion, disunion, and anarchy, and what advantage this, princes, 
 will bring to your land every one may readily perceive. But this 
 is the very thing Eomanists strive after. I have seen letters to cer- 
 tain people of their party in Germany in which they mention that 
 the Pope will attempt everything to extirpate the Lutheran sect. 
 Nay, the Pope's party are boasting loudly they have found a man 
 who will put things on their old footing. When therefore ye hear 
 that a truce has been concluded between the Emperor and the 
 King of France, know that this truce has not been made either 
 to send an army against the Turks, or for the purpose simply of 
 a short repose for drawing breath, but solely that they may turn 
 their whole strength upon prohibiting the preaching of the gospel , 
 under Luther's name. If this succeed with them, then is Eome 
 master not only of the whole of Germany but of the whole of 
 Christendom. Nor should it blind your eyes, princes, that the 
 late popes have begun to name your sons to bishoprics and car- 
 dinalships. They did this solely urged by necessity, that they 
 might bind you by your sons, delivered up to them as hostages, 
 and thus hold you in their power; for despise you they certainly 
 will if you do it. Let me just allude farther to the report that 
 the newly elected pope hates the cardinals, and is resolved to 
 create no more than eight of them. Thanks be to God that it 
 has come to this. But why did he light on just this number? If 
 the order of cardinals be so beneficial to the Christian community, 
 and so accordant to the institutions of Christ and the apostles, why 
 is not the number rather increased than diminished? Or, why do 
 they dare to abolish that which God has ordained? But if these 
 office-bearers be not appointed by God, why do the popes squeeze 
 even eight of them out of the poor people ? Why do they not rather 
 tear up the roots altogether, that there may be no aftergrowth of 
 these rank weeds ? If Adrian, who, forsooth, would pass himseK off 
 for a wise and learned man, has really at heart the .lately revived 
 doctrine and truth of Christ, then will he forthwith give orders 
 that it be preached without adulteration truly and faithfully, and 
 he will engage to the Christian people to restore all, according to 
 
APOSTOLIC CAEES AND LABOUKS. 201 
 
 his ability, as Christ ordained it ; then will every one who is worthy 
 of the name of Christian support the good work. But is Luther, 
 this pious and learned man, maltreated, who can be safe ? It is 
 even said that Erasmus too has been declared a heretic. If he 
 can be reproached for anything, it is for this, that he has too much 
 spared them, and that he has rather warned them in a gentle and 
 fatherly tone like Eli, than chid them sharply like Elias. If he, 
 which God forbid, has really been declared a heretic, then, with- 
 out doubt, this stigma awaits the most pious and the most inno- 
 cent of men. 
 
 " In conclusion," says Zwingli in this letter to the Germans, 
 " I desire that no man be so foolish as, for the sake of pleasing 
 the Eomanists, who have for so many centuries made Germany 
 their sport and jest, to excite to anarchy and revolt, and that no 
 man be so mean and slavish as to reject the freedom which comes 
 spontaneously offering itself, and thus sink ingloriously into the 
 chains of a deadly thraldom." 
 
 The German princes and estates summoned up resolution to 
 present a list of one himdred grievances to the Papal see, and to 
 hand it to the Legate as an answer to his overtures. The 
 Romanists, however, succeeded very soon in rendering this 
 step for the preservation of the dignity and weal of Germany 
 nugatory, and in inducing several priuces to interfere by force 
 against the preaching of the gospel. Zwingli, with the indigna- 
 tion natural to his straightforward noble character at this un- 
 principled and servile conduct, addresses them: "You have 
 published at Nurnburg, in open Diet, a great number of articles 
 presented to the Pope, in which you complain of grievances. 
 Now, teU me, I pray, is it true that you have so many grievances, 
 or is it not? If you have no grievances, why have you made out 
 a list of them? Why, but to lend a helping hand to the Pope, 
 giving by this li^t of grievances the appearance to the- Christian 
 people in general, as though you were willing that grievances 
 should be removed, that they, in the meanwhile, may be appeased 
 and made to bear the compulsory measures of the Pope until 
 affairs were placed on their former basis. If such was your 
 object, it is plain you are very sagacious people. If, however, 
 you were really aggrieved in these particulars you have specified, 
 how comes it that you continue to protect and countenance an 
 
202 APOSTOLIC CAKES AND LABOURS. 
 
 opposite line of conduct, seeing you might so easily get rid of 
 these grievances? For you have the remedy against them in the 
 Word of God, and it is preached boldly, and the good hear it. 
 And the great majority stands on the side of the Word of God, 
 therefore, you have no cause to fear. What stress are you under 
 to help the pope, who has, from time immemorial, pressed so 
 heavily on all Germans ? Had they had, in former times, the light 
 of the Divine Word, as it now shines manifestly and clearly, they 
 had rejoiced in nothing so much as in getting quit of the burden 
 of Eome. Perceive you not that all priests, let them wear cowls 
 or not, from the highest to the lowest, have sworn fealty to the 
 pope? Who, except in this case, has ever suffered his subjects 
 to take the oath of allegiance to a foreign and distant potentate, 
 to the hurt and damage of his own kingdom? In consequence 
 of this very oath, gold has gone in cart-loads to Eome from the 
 estates of ecclesiastics. All that the pope has bidden or for- 
 bidden to be done, has been with the view of getting money." 
 
 Thus Zwingli laboured for the extension and cultivation of 
 evangelical truth in Germany, penetrating with a clear glance 
 the designs of the enemy, embracing with his large heart all the 
 friends of God's Word, and contributing to them, according to the 
 measure of those powers with which God had so richly endowed 
 him, instruction, encouragement, and consolation. Whoever was 
 forced to abandon the field, and flee from Germany, found in 
 Zwingli a friend and protector, and in evangelical Switzerland an 
 asylum and a home. Amid many examples, we shall only men- 
 tion one of these. Ulrich von Hutten, the gallant knight, who, 
 with chivalric courage, had dared to throw down the gauntlet to 
 the Eomanists, and had electrified Germany with the boldness 
 and vigour of his writings, came to find a resting-place in his 
 last days, and a grave for his bones, in Switzerland, after his 
 friend Franz von Sickengen had closed a hero's eye in death 
 under the ruins of his castle of Sandstuhl. Eepulsed and per- 
 secuted with great bitterness ' of spirit by his former friend 
 Erasmus, without money, and tormented by a painful and soul- 
 crushing disease, he directed his steps to Zwingli at Zurich. 
 Zwingli gave no ear to the detractions and warnings of Erasmus, 
 but procured to his unfortunate brother in the faith the protec- 
 tion of the Zurich magistracy, and the means to enable him to 
 
CIKCULAE LETTEB TO PETEE SEBILLA. 203 
 
 visit the mineral baths of Pfaeffer, to alleviate his bodily pains. 
 But the healing power of these waters couid no longer master an 
 inveterate disease ; yet his soul, animated and strengthened by 
 Zwingh's friendship, raised itseK once more to the joyful hope 
 " that God would again muster the scattered friends of truth, and 
 humble their adversaries." Through' ZwingU's mediation, the 
 bold knight who excused his fiery combative zeal against the 
 Eomanists, which had brought him so many sorrows, with the 
 words, " I cannot help God's having burdened me with such a 
 spirit as I have, so that common pain affects me more deeply, 
 and pierces me more to the heart than other men," found at 
 once a peaceful asylum and medical aid with a friend of the 
 Reformer's. This was pastor Schnegg, who resided on the island 
 Ufenau, in the lake of Zurich, and who had devoted his attention 
 to medicine. Under his roof the life-weary warrior expired, at 
 the end of August 1523, and with him German knighthood was 
 borne to the grave. The fiery and impetuous warrior left no wealth 
 behind him, no furniture, no books — nothing but a pen. 
 
 5. ZWINGLI'S ClECTJLAE LeTTEE TO PeTEE SeBILLA; HIS ZeAL 
 
 FOE THE Extension of the Gospel in Feance. 
 
 If the knight Ufrich von Hutten came to Zurich like a mes- 
 senger of death, bringing the intelligence to ZwingK of the 
 decease of German chivalry, the heart of the Eeformer was 
 rejoiced in the same year by the visit of a French knight, bearing 
 the welcome tidings that the light of the gospel had begun to 
 dawn on France. Anemund Coctus, a warm friend of the 
 Eeformation in France, who laboured for its advancement, under- 
 took a journey to Switzerland and Germany, for the purpose of 
 making the personal acquaintance of Zwingli and Luther. The 
 parson of Grenoble, Peter Sebilla, had expressed to Coctus his 
 resolution to preach the gospel clearly and purely. Coctus 
 accordingly begged of Zwingli at his visit that he would confirm 
 this new evangelist in his purpose, and encourage him to per- 
 severance. Willingly the Eeformer undertook the task, and sent 
 him a letter, from which we extract the following : " Who knows 
 not how the pure true doctrine of Christ has, by cunning and 
 
204 CIECULAE LETTBE TO PETEE SEBILLA. 
 
 lies, been defaced, darkened, and disfigured, so that there failed 
 little of its total extinction. But the Lord of Sabaoth has stUl a 
 little, a very little seed left behind, from which, as we hope, a 
 rich harvest wUl spring up ; for the strength of the heavenly seed 
 is like that of mustard-seed, which is the least of all seeds ; but 
 when it grows up, it becomes the greatest of the herbs, and be- 
 comes a tree, so that the birds of heaven come and nestle in its 
 branches. The seed, however, is, to speak with Christ, the Word 
 of God, which, when it falls on good land brings forth a most 
 abundant crop. In this Word, the poor human soul, not only 
 tossed to and fro by the storms of life, but dis-tracted also by the 
 snares of the spirits of darkness, finds repose and life. Therefore, 
 you have well done in undertaking to preach this Word purely 
 .and with all fidelity, as appears from your letter to Anemundus 
 Truly, flesh and blood have not moved you to this, but your 
 Father in heaven has so drawn you to himself that you believing 
 His Word, desire to bring others also to enjoy the like precious 
 faith. Far be it from you. Do not, however, undertake to put 
 up a buUding without having first sat down and counted the 
 cost." Zwingli, after having described in strong colours the 
 dangers to which the preacher of the gospel is exposed, continues : 
 " If my words have attained their purpose, then provided you be 
 carnally-minded, I have disposed you rather to seek some hole 
 or corner where you may hide yourself, than to appear before 
 your congregation proclaiming the gospel. But the Spirit of 
 Christ that has moved you to begin, will not allow you to do this, 
 for this Spirit rather urges onward in the prospect of suffering 
 than holds back or terrifies. On, then, noble soldier of the 
 cross, advance into thy France armed with the weapons of Christ, 
 proclaim with the sound of a trumpet the gospel of Christ; how- 
 ever much the Papistical crew may fight against it. Christ has 
 already soimded the war-note of attack against the Scribes, Phari- 
 sees, and hypocrites of our day. Who will not gladly arm himself 
 to battle? ' The lion roars,' says the prophet, ' who is not afraid?' 
 Who, in the host of the enemy, will stand when Christ thunders 
 upon them through His servants? Fear and trembling fill their 
 camp. They turn and twist themselves, in doubt and uncertainty 
 what to do. And although, through the princes they have gained 
 over to their side, they should slaughter the flock of Christ, yet they 
 
ZEAL FOE THE EXTENSION OF THE GOSPEL IN FEANCE. 205 
 
 themselves are cowering witli fear lest an awful storm break loose 
 upon their heads ; or when they attempt to combat with the Scrip- 
 ture, the words are congealed in their mouth, in the consciousness 
 tbat they do violence to, and wrest the Holy Word of God. Why do 
 we not break forth in a storming attack against the cowards, in 
 confidence upon the protection of the Divine Word ? God will 
 destroy anti-Christ by the breath of His mouth. Christ is for 
 us, who then can be against us? Although we be but weak 
 vessels, yet none can break us as long as the Lord is on our side ; 
 according to His promise, ' I am with you alway, even to the end 
 of the world.' Why linger, then? Ours is the victory. Heaven 
 and earth shall sooner pass away than that the Word of God 
 shall deceive us. Above all, however, it is needful, if you will 
 rejoice in the victory, to deny yourself and die daily. But such 
 you cannot do of your own strength, therefore you must take 
 your refuge to the alone mercy of God, and pray with your whole - 
 heart that He would be pleased to direct jowc steps, to illuminate 
 yoiir soul, and to strengthen your heart. Then the grace of God 
 will give you sagacity to choose the best ways and the best 
 means, and strength to overcome all. You see, my Christian 
 brother, what advances the gospel has made in Germany in a 
 short time, which wiU be the case with you too, if you call upon 
 God to grant success. And He rejoices when we call upon Him, 
 for He is our friend, and delights himself in our souls. Fare- 
 well, set your confidence upon the Lord, and upon the might of 
 His strength, which will preserve you unscathed in every trial." 
 This soul-stirring address of ZwingFs was not without its due 
 effect, and the more so, as Anemundus Coctus caused it to be 
 printed. The gospel-message winged its way to the heart of 
 Freince with the force and the rapidity of lightning. But the 
 Lord had appointed His servants in this land, above all others, to 
 attest the reality of their faith by the baptism of suffering ; from 
 the very first the confessors of the gospel were persecuted by the 
 enemies of it with fire and sword. " I could name a great people," 
 Zwingli wrote in reference to the French, " from which more than 
 any other the gospel has been forcibly excluded, that it reach 
 them neither by word of mouth nor in writing. But God has so 
 wrought that this same land is well-informed in respect of His 
 Word, and stands in a good relation towards God, although they 
 
206 COEEESPONDENCE WITH EGIDIUS. 
 
 dare not make any outward confession." A regard to this condi- 
 tion of the people, and the prayers of his evangelical friends in 
 France, induced Zwingli to dedicate his principal work, " Com- 
 mentary upon the True and False Eeligions," to Francis I., King 
 of France, and to impress on his heart with all freedom of spirit 
 the duty of allowing the gospel to be preached in his dominions. 
 There seemed reason to hope that this step might not be fruitless, 
 the sister of the king, Margaretha, afterwards Queen of Navarre, 
 being a decided friend of the gospel, and the mother of the king 
 for a time making a profession of favouring it. But the heart of 
 the king remained closed against its divine influences, and both 
 before and after his arm was heavy upon the faithful in this land, 
 so that there remained for them no other choice but either to 
 conceal the jewel of faith from the eyes of the world, or to aban- 
 don their home, that is, if they would escape bonds, the dungeon, 
 or a martyr's death. 
 
 6. ZWINGLI'S COEEESPONDENCE WITH THE AtTGUSTINE MoNK OF 
 
 CoMO ; HIS Measuees foe the Extension of the Gospel in 
 Italy. 
 
 The state of the friends of the gospel in Italy was not a more 
 cheering one, although here, too, an ardent longing for evangeli- 
 cal freedom manifested itself We shaU only refer here to a single 
 case in the spiritual movement which at this time took place in 
 Italy. It will, on the one hand, serve to shew in what esteem 
 Zwingli there stood, and, on the other hand, it will afford us a 
 view of the progress and issue of the Eeformation in this benighted 
 country. In Como, an Augustine monk, Egidius a Porta, had 
 been enlightened by the reading of Zwingli's writings in regard 
 to the unprofitableness of monkery and outward works, so that, 
 like Saul on the way to Damascus, he recognised himself sud- 
 denly with horror as a persecutor of Christ. " If I cannot be a 
 Paul in an things," he writes to Zwingli, " be thou, at least, an 
 Ananias, to guide my erring footsteps upon the path of peace. 
 Fourteen years ago, I let myself be led by what I, in my ignor- 
 ance at that time, considered to be pious zeal, to withdraw from 
 the guardianship of my parents and turn Augustine monk, think- 
 
EXTENSION OP THE GOSPEL IN ITALY. 207 
 
 ing, with the Pelagians, to attain salvation through works. Thus 
 I have taken much trouble not to be pious and learned, but to be 
 esteemed pious and learned ; and entangled in this error, I held, 
 shame, for seven years, the office of a preacher of the gospel All 
 Christian knowledge has failed me, inasmuch as I attributed 
 nothing to faith and aU. to good works. With boldness and con- 
 fidence I taught my people to trust to these, and who can reckon 
 up the amount of poisonous error that I have spread over the 
 field of the Lord ? In truth, I can say, I have persecuted the 
 Church of Christ. But the Lord, according to his goodness, would 
 not that his servant should perish for ever ; he has shaken me 
 thoroughly, and cast me to the ground. The light of my own 
 eyes which I trusted is quenched, my lips are dumb tOl I have 
 begun to cry hoarsely: Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? At 
 length the consoling message came to my heart ; go to Huldreich 
 Zwingli, he will teach thee what thou oughtest to do. glorious 
 message, that filled my soul with unspeakable peace. Thou, or 
 much more, God, through thee, will deliver my soul out of the 
 snare of the hunters." 
 
 Zwingli put his evangelical friends in Como in mind that, 
 besides working out their own salvation, it was their duty to 
 labour for the extension of gospel truth throughout their native 
 land, and he called upon Egidius a Porta, especially, to translate 
 the New Testament into Italian, which he would get printed for 
 him in Zurich. A Porta followed with Christian submission the 
 advice of his revered friend. " I trust in God," says he, " that 
 this tree," speaking of himself, " planted so far from the refresh- 
 ing streams, will in time bear fruit." He laments bitterly the 
 interruption his work experienced by the thousand petty duties 
 he had to perform in obedience to his monkish vows. At length 
 he begs and conjures Zwingli, in the name of his fellow-brethren, 
 to write to the superintendent of their order, and establish, by 
 passages from Holy Writ, how it was the will of God that His 
 Word should be purely and fully preached, and that He is in the 
 highest degree indignant when it is adulterated, and human con- 
 ceits passed current as the wiU of God. Thus brightly burned in 
 this faithful bosom an ardent desire for Christian knowledge and 
 evangelical freedom, which he wished to obtain also for his 
 unhappy countrymen, who groaned under a severe oppression. 
 
208 EXTENSION OF THE GOSPEL IN ITALY. 
 
 temporal and spiritual. But suddenly the letters stopped. The 
 monk disappeared, and with him the begun translation of the 
 'New Testament; We can scarcely go wrong in supposing that 
 the arm of avenging Eome reached him as it did many others, 
 and threw him into some dark dungeon, there to atone for his 
 pure and ardent love to the faith ; for thus Eome was wont to 
 extinguish the flame of the Eeformation when it burst forth 
 brightly for a moment in different quarters in Italy. 
 
 We have thus seen that Zwingli, at the same time, that he 
 carried the great work of the Eeformation into practical accom- 
 plishment at Zurich, advanced it in the whole of Switzerland, 
 France, and Italy, according to the measure of the grace given 
 him by God. As the mountains of his native country, illu- 
 minated by God's sun, and bathed by the dew of heaven, stand 
 great and majestic under the azure canopy, thus stood this Chris- 
 tian hero in the full blaze of Divine truth, and while he himself 
 drew out of the fulness of God, and grace for grace, he sent, by 
 his instructions, his consolations, his admonitions, the refreshing 
 streams of God's salvation to all the neighbouring lands. Yet 
 will the merit of his labours be seen in a stronger light, when 
 we consider the obstacles and the opposition which the Eeformer 
 had to encounter in his great and glorious work. 
 
SIXTH SECTION. 
 
 REACTIONARY MEASURES OE THE PAPAL PARTY FOR CHECK- 
 ING AND SUPPRESSING THE REFORMATION. 
 
 " Yea, the time cometh, that whosoever kiUeth you will think that he doetli 
 God seryice. And these things will they do unto you, because they have not 
 known the Father, nor me." — John xvi. 2, 3. 
 
 1. The Oveetuees of the Pope and the Inteigues op Fabee 
 
 AKE ALIKE UNABLE TO SHAKE ZwiNGLl'S FAITH. 
 
 The more we consider the precipitation with which Eome ful- 
 minated her damning edicts against the heralds of evangelical 
 truth, which were often carried into execution by fire and sword, 
 the more must we feel astonished and surprised at the advances 
 which the popes more than once made towards Zwingli. He 
 had already gained a decided victory over Faber and the Eoman- 
 ists. In the Eeligious Disputation he had, in very clear and 
 unmistakable language, declared his secession from the Pope. 
 He had already professed his faith in the gospel, when the 
 Eoman Legate, Ennius, appeared in Zurich, with a letter from Pope 
 Adrian IV., addressed to Zwingli, from which we extract the fol- 
 lowing: "Although it is commanded to our Nuntius, to treat, in 
 regard to our aifairs, with all your people openly and in common, 
 yet have we commissioned our said Nuntius, inasmuch as we 
 have a more exact knowledge of your distinguished merits, and 
 repose an especial confidence in your obedience, to deliver to 
 you this our letter personally, and to testify to you our favour- 
 able disposition. We exhort you also to give all credence to the 
 said Nuntius, and with the like disposition in which we are 
 disposed to consult your honour and advantage, to labour iji the 
 affairs of us and the apostolical chair, whereby you wiU have reason 
 to rejoice in our very peculiar favour and regard." What were 
 the overtures made to the Eeformer we learn from the following 
 statements made by himseK and Dr. Francis Zingg. In the 
 
 o 
 
210 ZWINGLl'S STEADFAST FAITH. 
 
 Exposition of the 37th Article of his Propositions, Zwingli writes 
 on this subject (in the summer of 1523): "A few days ago I 
 have received, both by letter and by word of mouth, great pro- 
 mises from the Pope, which I have answered as God will, in a 
 Christian and unmoved frame of mind. It is, however, no matter 
 of doubt that I could attain to a greatness such as not every one 
 could reach to, if the poverty of Christ were not dearer to me than 
 the worldly pomp of the papists." To his teacher and friend, 
 Thomas Wyttenbach, he wrote, on the 16th June 1523, ia refer- 
 ence to the same subject: " God grant the Swiss people a sense 
 to understand and love His Word, for the Pope of Eome is seek- 
 ing anew to press his yoke upon them. To me, too, he has sent 
 a brief, under the fisherman's ring,* with brilliant promises ; but 
 I despatched the messenger with an answer according to his 
 merits, telling him in plain language, that I believed the Pope 
 to be anti-Christ." To attain his object with reference to Zwin- 
 gli more surely, the Pope had also written to his friend. Dr. 
 Francis Zingg of Einsiedeln, and begged h\m to gain the Eeformer 
 for Eome by the like prospects already opened up to him by 
 Ennius. Zingg being afterwards asked by Myconius what he 
 was empowered to olfer Zwingli, replied, " all but the papal chair." 
 No ecclesiastical distiuction would have been too brilliant, no 
 living too lucrative, no sum of money too large, had Zwingli con- 
 sented for such a price to become, instead of a disciple, of Christ, 
 a disciple of the Pope. Eome was made to experience with deep 
 shame that the crown of thorns and the cross of Christ are dearer 
 to the believer than all the glory and riches of a depraved church. 
 None felt more painfully all the shame of this refusal than the 
 General- Vicar Faber. For gold and posts of honour he had him- 
 self travelled to Eome. He had, at the feet of the Pope, for a 
 miserable Judas-reward, belied his better conviction, and betrayed 
 his Saviour. Now he had to look on the friend of his youth, 
 who had already, in a manner so brilliant, defeated him in the 
 Eeligious Disputation, and dealt at the same time the severest 
 wounds on the Eomish Chui'ch, despising, with a Christian mag- 
 nanimity, aU those great offers — offers, too, which, so to say, were 
 brought to his very door at Zurich and laid at his feet. This 
 double discomfiture scorched as with a flame his soul within him, 
 ♦ The papal seal, on which Peter is represented as a fishennan. 
 
ZWINGLl'S STEADFAST FAITH. 211 
 
 and he now called into play every engine of calumny and of 
 secret intrigue, that he might, if possible, annihilate ZwingU. 
 " I have, as truly as that Christ is gracious," so wrote Ambrosius 
 Blaarer on this subject to Zwingli, "compassion with the miserable 
 man, and the more so the less that he knows his own wretched- 
 ness. We will pray that he obtain a new heart, that for the 
 future he may be ashamed to have recourse to such desperate 
 expedients." The Legate Ennius, on receiving this repulse to the 
 papal overtures, went straight to Faber at Constance, and there 
 the plan was discussed by these minions of Eome for annihilat- 
 ing the Eeformer, and destroying his work. Zwingli, informed 
 from different quarters of the threatening danger, wrote to his 
 friend, Werner Sterner, in Zug : " I am told that Faber and the 
 papal Legate, Ennius, design to attack me in some dangerous 
 manner. Had I, however, at any time feared secret attacks, I 
 should never have formed so strong a resolution as I have done 
 to preach the gospel. It is my wish that my adversaries come 
 forward openly, they wiU then see how mightily Christ protects 
 me." For the execution of their nefarious designs, the inhabit- 
 ants of the five cantons of Lucerne, TJri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, 
 and Zug, appeared to be the fittest instruments. Here-an ignor- 
 ant and corrupt clergy wielded a fatal power over the conscience, 
 while adroit and reckless demagogues, who in foreign military 
 sei-vice had gained themselves riches and standing at the cost of 
 their sacrificed country, guided with violence or cunning accord- 
 ing to the caprice or exigencies of the moment the Councils and 
 the communities. Freiburg in Uechtland and WaUis formed a 
 close league with all these papal cantons. Berne hovered between 
 the papacy and the gospel, a vacillation which arose from the 
 circumstance that a large part of the nobility were averse to 
 evangelical preaching because of its forbidding foreign service. 
 This party, hostile to the Eeformer, and which, in the Confede- 
 rate Diet, formed an overwhelming majority, was to be employed 
 by Faber and the Eomish Legate for suppressing Zwingli and his 
 work. Already had the resolution been come to under this influ- 
 ence at a Diet in Berne to take the Eeformer prisoner wherever 
 he could be met with out of Zurich. What his fate would have 
 been, a carnival sport enacted , at Lucerne, in the presence of a 
 vast concourse of people, shews. A man of straw, with ZwingH's 
 
212 PERSECUTION OF THE EVANGELICAL PARTY. 
 
 name affixed to it, was dragged to the place of public execution, 
 and there burned as a heretic. Some inhabitants of Zurich, who 
 happened to be in Lucerne at the time, were forced to witness the 
 malicious spectacle. ZwingK, on hearing of this display of spite, 
 wrote to his friends, Zimmermann and Kirchmeier, in Lucerne : 
 " I rejoice that I have been thought worthy among you to suffer 
 shame for the name of Christ. I have, thank God, improbable as 
 it may seem, borne no insult with greater equanimity than this. 
 Your hope must ever grow more and more that Christ will not 
 forsake His own." 
 
 2. The Papistically disposed majority op the Diet gives the 
 
 SIGNAL for the PERSECUTION OF THE EVANGELICAL PARTY. 
 MCOLAS HOTTINGER IS IMPRISONED AND EXECUTED ; CECHSLl'S 
 IMPRISONMENT ; HaNS WiRTH AND HIS SONS ; BURKHARD 
 
 EuETiMANN ; Zurich's dangerous state. 
 
 There was great need for such a confidence, because the war- 
 party in the papal cantons, stirred up by Paber and the Eomish 
 legate, began now to take strong measures against the preaching 
 of the gospel. On the 26th January 1524, a series of resolu- 
 tions were passed at a Diet held in Lucerne, and published in 
 nineteen articles, having for their object the maintenance of the 
 Papacy, and the suppression of evangelical truth. They contaiaed, 
 amongst others, the following decrees : "All the ancient and praise- 
 worthy rites and customs of the Christian Church, shall continue 
 to be observed as formerly by clergy and laymen." " None shall 
 speak or dispute in the taverns, or over wine, upon the Lutheran 
 or new doctrines." "Every one, whoever he be, man or woman, 
 young or old, is called upon, in virtue of his oath, wherever he 
 sees one or other of the articles infringed upon, to testify the 
 same to our lords the governors and their of&cers." When these 
 articles, which aU the states, with the exception of Zurich, 
 accepted, came to be published throughout the country, "the 
 papists and their partizans," as Bullinger writes, " rejoiced, but 
 true believers lamented." The signal for persecution of the. 
 evangelicals was here given by the highest civil authority in the 
 land, " the Diet," and it was followed even to blood. The terri- 
 
NICOLAS HOTTINGEB IMPRISONED. 213 
 
 tory of the so-called " Common Lordships,"* was the principal 
 theatre on which it displayed itseE While the Zurich gover- 
 nors here forwarded the Eeformation, those of the papal cantons, 
 according to their instructions, sought in every way possible to 
 suppress it. The first victim of Eoman persecution was the 
 shoemaker, Mcolas Hottinger of Zurich, whom we have men- 
 tioned above as a zealous but somewhat rash and impetuous 
 friend of the Reformation. Banished for two years from Zurich 
 for his autocratic removal of the crucifix from Stadelhofen, he 
 sojourned during this period in the neighbouring county of Baden. 
 Following his trade here, he neglected no opportunity of giving 
 expression to his religious convictions. In Zuzach he had once 
 said in the " Angel" inn : " The Eomish priests interpret Scrip- 
 ture falsely, and do not perform the mass according to the institu- 
 tion of Christ. We must place oux consolation and hope alone 
 in God, and in none else." On one of his fellow-shoemakers, 
 John Schuetz of Schneisingen, asking him, " What is't with the 
 new faith which the Zurich preachers are bringing in?" he replied, 
 " They preach nothing but the pure Word of God, and the true 
 gospel of salvation. Above all, they teach and prove by Holy 
 Scripture that Christ died once for all for all believers, that He 
 has by this one sacrifice cleansed them from all sin, and redeemed 
 them, and that consequently the mass is a sin and a lie." Speeches 
 like these were conveyed to the ears of the popish-minded gover- 
 nor in Baden, Fleckenstein of Lucerne, who forthwith gave the 
 order to imprison the zealous advocate of the gospel Suddenly 
 Hottinger, at the end of February 1524, was seized in Coblence, 
 when on a journey connected with his calling, and carried pri- 
 soner, first of all to Baden, and afterwards to Lucerne. Upon 
 his steadfast confession of his faith, Fleckenstein cried to him : 
 " Your doings, sir, will be brought before a court where you will 
 get a sentence according to your merits." On which Hottinger 
 replied : " I commit my case to God, and I pray to Him, through 
 
 * Under " Common Lordships" are to be understood those Swiss provinces 
 which, from the circumstance of their having been acquired by conquest, were 
 placed under the jurisdiction of several cantons, and ruled alternately by govei- 
 nors appointed by them. Thus Zurich divided the rule with the papal cantons, 
 and in part with Berne, over the former county of Baden, the free domain on 
 the Aargau, Eeussthal, Thurgau, Eheinthal, Sarganserland, and the four Italian 
 bailiwicks in the present canton of Tessin. 
 
21 4 NICOLAS HOTTINGEE EXECUTED. 
 
 Jesus Christ, that He may graciously preserve me in His truth 
 till death." In Lucerne he was, notwithstanding the interven- 
 tion of his numerous and iafluential friends, as weU as of the 
 government of Zurich, condemned to death by the deputies of 
 the twelve places." On the aimouncement of the sentence, he 
 began to speak of God and the redemption through Christ Jesus, 
 when the amman, Troger of Uri, angrily interrupted him : " We 
 are here to judge, and not to listen to sermons. There is no use 
 of talk ; out with him." Hottinger said : " Let it be done to me 
 according to the will of God, and may He forgive their sins to 
 all them who are against me, and who seek my death." A monk 
 held up a crucifix to his mouth. He put it aside with the 
 remark, " The sufferings of Christ must be engraven on the heart 
 by faitL Not the wooden image on the cross, but His sufferings 
 and death, have obtained for us salvation." An immense multi- 
 tude of people accompanied him to the place of execution, many 
 of whom were so touched by the words and demeanour of the 
 martyr, that they wept loudlj'-. " The Almighty God," said Hot- 
 tinger, turning to the people, " grant you His grace, that you may 
 come to the knowledge of the truth, and be saved." Then look- 
 ing straight up to heaven, he said, with a loud voice : " I com- 
 mend my soul into Thy hands, my Lord and my Eedeemer 
 Jesus Christ; have mercy upoji me, and receive my spirit." 
 Having thus spoken, he bowed his head with patient resignation 
 to the stroke of death. 
 
 While the impression of this deed of blood, which gave a 
 lamentable proof of the cruel severity with which the papal can- 
 tons were prepared to suppress the Eeformation, was yet fresh, 
 there came a deputation from "the twelve places" to Zurich, 
 to move this state to depose Zwingli, and to desist from the 
 work they had commenced. The Council of Zurich answered 
 in writing to this proposal: "We will do in aU respects," they 
 say, among other things, " as far as in us lies according to the 
 terms of the Charter, as becomes true and loyal Confederates. 
 But in what concerns the Word of God and the salvation of our 
 souls and our conscience, in that we shall not yield." In the 
 very same year, 1524, a Diet was held at Zug, from which Zurich 
 was excluded, in which a letter from the Pope was read to 
 the delegates, calling upon them to extirpate heresy within the 
 
PARSON GICHSLIN IMPEISONED. 215 
 
 bounds of the Confederacy. A fresh deputation was despatched 
 to Zurich, who intimated to the Council of this state: "They 
 were forthwith to desist from the begun Eeformation, and not, 
 for the sake of two or three persons, to throw the whole Con- 
 federacy into a state of confusion and dissension." If they would 
 not agree to this, then the cantons remaining true to the faith 
 of their fathers should forthwith proceed to imprison the adherents 
 of the new faith wherever they found them, and punish them in 
 property and person, nor would they suffer the Zurich deputies 
 to take their seats with them in the Diet. Zurich, though not a 
 little dismayed at these menaces, returned the firm and dignified 
 answer: " In matters of faith we shaU rule ourselves by the "Word 
 of God. If some cantons refuse to sit with us in the Diet, we 
 have the unshaken confidence that God the Father, Son, and 
 Holy Spirit, in whose name the Confederacy was founded, and 
 in whom alone we trust, will not abandon us, and that we at 
 last, through grace, will be allowed to sit with Him." 
 
 The joyous spirit of faith which animated Zwingli was also 
 shared by the community of Zurich, and pervaded the coun- 
 cils in their deliberations and resolutions. But on the other 
 hand, louder, and still more loud, sounded the threatenings of 
 the Papists, like the murmurs of the distant thunder in the 
 approaching storm. In the " Common Lordships," in particular, 
 the evangelical party were placed in imminent danger of impri- 
 sonment, and of suffering the utmost for the faith, during those 
 periods when they came to be ruled by papistically disposed 
 governors. Under such circumstances it was that the Evangeli- 
 cals, on hearing that the menaces of the Eomanists were on the 
 point of being carried into execution, bound themselves to lend 
 each other aid, which was also rendered in some commuijities of 
 Thurgau, where the Swiss governor Amberg, who had formerly 
 made a hypocritical profession of a leaning to evangelical doctrine, 
 now expressed openly, and with menaces, his hatred against it. 
 Suddenly, and at a hint communicated to him by the Diet 
 in Zug, he caiised Zwingli's friend. Parson QSchslin of Burg, by 
 Stein, upon the Ehine, to be surprised in the night of the 7th 
 July 1524, bound and carried prisoner to Prauenfeld. On the 
 cry of help being raised, his parishioners hasten intrepidly to the 
 rescue of their beloved pastor ; but it is too late. The watch of 
 
216 PARSON CECHSLIN IMPBISONED. 
 
 Burg discharge their signal-.guns, and the alarm-bells are ringmg 
 through the whole valley, summoning the inhabitants to a 
 general levy. "With the men of Stammheim came the under- 
 governor Hans Wirth and his two sons, Adrian and John, two 
 evangelical ministers fuU of faith and ardent zeal for pure doc- 
 trine, while among the men of Nussbaumen appeared the under- 
 governor there, Burkhard Euetimann. The two under governors 
 were named leaders of the whole body that had assembled in a 
 general levy to free their beloved pastor. Arrived at the right 
 bank of the Thur, they were obliged to halt, the ferry-boat having 
 been removed. The" leaders employed this delay to bring the 
 excited multitude into order, which was the more necessary, for 
 unhappily, as usually happens in popular tumults, some bad 
 characters had mixed themselves among them. From this place 
 a deputation was despatched to the governor at Frauenfeld, with 
 the request that he would liberate the imprisoned pastor against 
 bail. Some were even for rescuing him by violence. " Pastor 
 (Echslin," said under-govemor "Wirth, " is so dear and worthy a 
 man, that I would willingly give all I have, nay, the heart in my 
 body, for him." Contrary to custom, and to all justice, the 
 governor Amberg refused to accept bail, and to set free the pri- 
 soner. In. the meantime the enraged mob had turned their 
 attention to the near-lying and rich Carthusian monastery of 
 Ittingen, whose prior was said to have been in the habit of stir- 
 ring up the governor to measures of severity against the evan- 
 gelicals. The doors of the cloister were burst open, and the mob 
 poured itself, hungry and thirsty, and in part desirous of plim- 
 der, over the church, cloister, cellar, and store-houses. In vain 
 were the entreaties and exhortations of under-govemor "Wirth 
 and his sons, as well as of Euetimann. With the better part of 
 the people these departed, after they had first slaked their 
 thirst at the cloister well. After their departure a fire broke 
 out in the chambers of the cloister, which burned this rich 
 monastery to the ground. According to report an angry father, 
 whose son had been torn by a boar belonging to the cloister, set 
 fire to it. 
 
 The smoking embers of the Carthusian monastery gave to the 
 hatred of the papal cantons against the evangelicals a fresh 
 stimulus, and inflamed them to the fiercest hostility. Zurich, 
 
HANS WIRTH AND HIS SONS IMPEISONED. 217 
 
 indeed, as soon as it heard of the riot, commanded all its sub- 
 jects who had taken part in it to return home. It also pro- 
 mised to institute a strict and impartial investigation into the 
 whole affair. The Diet was adjourned by the papal cantons to 
 Beckenried. A bloody revenge was called for. The implicated 
 commimities, nay, Zurich itself, were threatened with war, and 
 it was sworn to extirpate the heretical doctrine with fire and 
 sword. 
 
 The under-govemor Wirth and his sons, who had been long 
 objects of hatred on account of their evangelical opinions, as also 
 Burkhard Euetimann were accused, if not of having themselves 
 set fire to the monastery, at least of having instigated to it. " If 
 any one be guilty," said the Zurich Council, " let him be punished, 
 but legally, and not by violence." To prevent farther mischief, 
 this state resolved to cause those who were named as guilty by 
 the incensed cantons to be arrested. Wirth and his sons were 
 advised by their friends to flee till the storm had subsided. 
 " I trust in God, and will await the bailiffs," said the elder 
 "Wirth. " Never have the friends of God been overcome by 
 his enemies," preached Adrian his son. When the armed myr- 
 midons of the law came to take them, under-govemor Wirth 
 said : " My lords of Zurich might have spared themselves this 
 trouble and cost; for had they sent a child to me I had gone 
 with it." The three Wirths, and the under-govemor Euetimann 
 of Nussbaumen, were brought to Zurich, where, during three 
 weeks, they were closely interrogated, without anything being 
 discovered in their conduct worthy of punishment. The result 
 of the trial, however, by no means satisfied the other places, which 
 sat with Zurich in the Thurgau court of justice. They required 
 the deportation of the prisoners to Baden, that the investigation 
 might be conducted by all the cantons in common. Zurich 
 would not consent to this, for the reason that; the right of the 
 lower jurisdiction belonged to this state alone, while the prisoners, 
 according to the result of the examination, had committed no 
 crime which could make them amenable to the higher jurisdic- 
 tioiL " Breaking of the peace and sacrilege are crimes," said the 
 papists, " which come under the jurisdiction of the higher courts." 
 "If you will not deliver up the prisoners, we shall fetch them by 
 force. We request a decisive answer. Yes or No." In Zurich, 
 
218 TEIAL OF HANS WIETH AND HIS SONS. 
 
 the opinions as to wliat ought to be done, were divided; Zwingli 
 held that the legal right should be defended, and the extradition 
 refused; others were of the mind that to prevent greater evils, 
 the request should be complied -with. A middle course was at 
 length adopted. It was resolved to deliver up the prisoners to 
 Baden, on condition that they should be tried there only for the 
 incendiarism at Ittingen, and not for matters of faith or -doctrine. 
 The condition, which was accepted by the delegates of the twelve 
 places, was afterwards, contrary to plighted faith, shamefully 
 violated. 
 
 The prisoners, placed in the centre of the delegates of the 
 Council and a company of armed men, were marched off to 
 Baden, August 1524, to the great distress of many of the in- 
 habitants of Zurich. " Alas ! alas, what a miserable setting out 
 that was," cries Bemhard "Weiss, referring to their departure. 
 Zwingli preached, — God will call us to account for this ; and 
 exhorted the people earnestly to pray to God that He would have 
 mercy on the poor prisoners, comfort them, and strengthen them 
 in the true faith. On theic beiag conducted at Baden through 
 the press of the gaping multitude, the elder Wirth said to his 
 sons : " Behold, dear sons, there is now accomplished in us what 
 the apostle Paul says, 1 Cor. iv. 9, ' "We are set forth, as it were, 
 appointed to death ;' for we are made a spectacle unto the world, 
 and to angels and to men." The governor Amberg, the author 
 of their misfortunes, was among the spectators. Wirth stretched 
 out his hand towards him, and prayed him not to be so furious, 
 for there is a God in heaven who sees all things. On \;he follow- 
 ing day they were subjected to a searching interrogation Their 
 innocence iu regard to the plundering and burning of Ittingen, was 
 placed in the clearest light by this examination, as well as by the 
 depositions of witnesses, especially by a letter from the prior of 
 the monastery. But the judges, who were resolved to have their 
 victims executed as criminals, were not satisfied with this result. 
 They were now examined upon the abolition of the mass and 
 images. On this, the deputy from Zurich arose and said: " This 
 is contrary to the agreement." " We know what we are about," 
 rejoined the deputy from Lucerne, with insolence, "and act accord- 
 ing to orders." " In that case, we decline to sit with you," said 
 the Zurich deputies, " and shall, without delay, make report of 
 
TRIAL OF HANS WIETH AND HIS SONS. 219 
 
 this matter to our superiors." The victims of a bitter hostility 
 to the gospel were now, with coarse iasults, put to the rack, in 
 order to extract from them the confession of a capital crime. 
 Wirth, the father, was exposed to the torture from morning tUl 
 noon; his son John from twelve tUl two o'clock. Who has 
 taught you heretical doctrine? ZwingU. or who else? the latter 
 was asked. On his crying out in an agony of pain, " merciful 
 eternal God, help and comfort me," one of his judges called out 
 to him, "Where is your Christ now? Let your Christ help you 
 now." On at length Adrian's being brought in, the Bernese 
 Sebastian von Stein said to him : " Misterkin,* tell us the truth ; if 
 you don't, I swear by my knighthood, which I won where God 
 himself suffered, that we shall open your veins one after the other. 
 You have waylaid your old father with this damnable heretical 
 doctrine, and are about to be the death of him, for we shall do 
 our utmost to tear up this heresy by the roots." On this, Adrian 
 begged they would not rage and storm so, but have mercy, and 
 hear the truth quietly. "Misterkin," rejoined von Stein, "The 
 apostles were not like you, but desired to die with joy." On his 
 being elevated by the rack-rope, this same Bernese mockingly 
 said to him again: " Misterkin, this is the nuptial gift we present 
 you with for your new housewife." i* Euetimann's trial was of 
 shorter duration, and he was this time spared the torture. The 
 deputies then rode off to their several homes, while their mis- 
 handled victims were left to pine in jail till the 28th of Septem- 
 ber. On this day they were brought to a public trial, after they 
 had been repeatedly questioned by torture. The wife of the 
 elder Wirth, Anna Keller, had come with the Council's speaker, 
 Escher, from Zurich, to move the judges to compassion and 
 mercy for her husband and sons. On their waiting upon 
 Hieronymus Stocker of Zug for this purpose, and on Escher's 
 reminding him of Wirth's upright and honourable character, 
 Stocker said: "Ay, it is even as you say, dear Escher; I have 
 been twice governor in Thurgau, and a more honest faithful 
 servant than Wirth I have never met with; in joy or in sor- 
 row, his house and heart were open to all; the stranger and 
 
 * Misterkin," as much as my little priest; for in Roman Catholic Switzerland 
 the priest is usually called Mister (Herr.) 
 t Adrian had shortly before married a nun. 
 
220 TEIAL OF HANS WIETH AND HIS SONS. 
 
 the fellow-coimtryman both found in him the man of honour. 
 Therefore, if he had stolen or murdered, I would have helped to 
 spare him ; but he has burned the image of the holy Anna, Christ's 
 grandmother; therefore he must die without mercy." "God 
 forbid," rejoined Escher, "that a pious man, who has burned 
 notlung but wooden images, should find less grace than a thief or 
 a murderer. This wiU have a bad ending." The governor Wirth, 
 his son John, and Burkhard Euetimann, were condemned to 
 death; Adrian was spared to the entreaties of his mother. On 
 the sentences being made known to the prisoners in the tower, 
 the elder Wirth said to his son Adrian, who had been pardoned : 
 " My son, since God spares you in life, see to it that neither your- 
 self nor any friend of ours take it in hand to revenge our innocent 
 deaths. God in heaven saith, 'Vengeance is mine.' He in His 
 own time avenges all innocent blood shed. He wUl grant us His 
 grace, and strengthen us in true faith till death." As Adrian in 
 deep distress wept bitterly, his brother John said to him : " Dear 
 brother, you know that we have faithfully preached the Word of 
 God; but where the Word of God is there is always the cross. 
 Therefore leave off weeping and be comforted. I praise God 
 that He has held me worthy of this day to suffer and to die for 
 His Word. His name be praised eternally. His will be done." 
 In conclusion, they besought Adrian to comfort those near and 
 dear to them, since they were led to death not for any crime but 
 for the cause of God. A great crowd of people pressed rormd 
 them as they were conducted from the prison to the front of the 
 Town-HaU, where the confessions made by them at the trial, and 
 the sentence of death, were read over. The former were so 
 disfigured, and in part falsified, that governor Wirth cordd not 
 resist expressing his indignation at this dishonest proceeding. 
 But his son John, his companion in condemnation, said : " Not 
 so, dear father, let it pass. The Lord in heaven knows who we 
 are, and how aE. has been gone about. Anti-Christ must always 
 trick himself out with lies and deception. One day the great 
 judgment wiU be held, when dark and secret falsehood, as well 
 as the bright truth, wiU equally stand in light. It is ours now 
 to overcome with faith and patience." 
 
 They were then handed over to the officers of justice, and led 
 to the place of execution. As they passed by the chapel of St. 
 
EXECUTION OP HANS WIETH AND HIS SON. 221 
 
 Joseph, the ecclesiastic who accompanied them, exhorted goYernor 
 Wirth to kneel down and pray to the saints. His son John 
 answered the priest: "Why should we kneel before wood and 
 stone? God in heaven is alone to be called on and worshipped. 
 To Him do you also turn." And turning to his father, he con- 
 tinued : " Dear father, remain steadfast, you know there is only 
 one Mediator between God and man, Christ Jesus." " Certainly, 
 my son," returned the old man, " and with His preserving grace 
 I wUl remain true to Him till deatL" On their approaching 
 the place of execution, the son took leave of the father in the 
 following words: "Dearest father, from this time forward you 
 are no longer my father nor I your son, but we are brothers in 
 Jesus Christ, our Lord, for whose name's sake we are now about 
 to suffer death. And if God will, we shall this day come to Him, 
 who is the Father of us all, and shaU possess with Him, and all 
 the saints, everlasting rest, joy, and bliss. Therefore, dear 
 brother in Christ, be of good cheer, commit yourself to the Lord, 
 and let Him reign." " Amen," said the father, " the Almighty 
 bless thee, dear son and brother in Christ. To Him be glory, 
 praise, and thanks, for ever and ever." The three victims of per- 
 secution for the faith knelt down one after the other, " in the 
 name of Jesus,'' and were beheaded. The Christian end of these 
 men made a deep and sad impression on the people, who saw, 
 vriih. indignation, on their naked bodies the marks of the cruel 
 treatment they had experienced on their trial. The two hoary- 
 headed martyrs left behind them sixty-seven children and grand- 
 children. Their property at first was confiscated to the 
 government, but at the intercession of Basle, Schaffhausen and 
 Appenzell, this resolution was so far modified, that the widow of 
 the governor Wirth obtained her deceased husband's property, 
 after paying eight hundred florins costs, and twelve gold crowns 
 to the executioner. Adrian Wirth received the appointment at a 
 later period to a country charge in the canton of Zurich, where for 
 forty years he laboured with distinguished success. The im- 
 prisoned Oechshn, after being dragged from prison to prison, and 
 shamefully maltreated, at length received his liberty, and was 
 chosen by Zurich to a country charge. 
 
 The quarrel between Zurich and the other cantons, on account 
 of the affair at Ittinger, lasted* for three years, during which time 
 
222 zueich's dangerous state. 
 
 Zwingli set forward the Eeformation-work in Zurich, without 
 letting himself be interrupted by these proceedings, deep as the 
 interest was which he took in them. The unintermittedly con- 
 tinued efforts to establish and disseminate evangelical doctrine, 
 meanwhile, incensed its adversaries to the highest pitch. Often 
 were they on the point, during the affair of Ittingen, of levying 
 war on Zurich, and thus at one stroke suppressing Zwingli and 
 his doctrine. The ,danger from this quarter was the greater, 
 because in Zurich itself there were people to be found in all 
 ranks, but more especially in the ranks of the nobility, who were 
 hostile to the Eeformation, and devoted to the interests of the 
 papacy. An of&cial examination entered into, gives the follow- 
 ing examples of the state of feeling : — The butcher Steinbruechel 
 had openly avowed: "I have in my house two spears, and if 
 the Confederates appear before the town, neither one nor other 
 shall be used against them ; on the contrary, I shall go over to 
 them and join them." On the occasion of a quarrel between the 
 evangelically and the papally disposed members of a family, the 
 grandfather, who adhered to the old doctrines, said : " If the men 
 of Baden come hither, I'll give a.hand to the delivering up of 
 Zwingli, for he has caused mischief enough. Why does not some 
 one hide iu a corner, take him at unawares, and knock the 
 fellow's brains out with an axe." These, although isolated cases, 
 show what sort of reception the threatenings of the papal can- 
 tons found in various quarters in Zurich. But the murmurs 
 of the nobility were deeper; for by the prohibition of foreign 
 mercenary military service, pay, and other large sums of money 
 from foreign princes went out of their hands ; and by the dissolu- 
 tions and revolutions that had taken place in the foimdations 
 and cloisters, they were deprived of schools and nurseries for 
 their children. 
 
 3. Fabee employs the ill-humoue of the Swiss Papal paety at 
 
 THE defeat of PAYIA TO FOEM A CLOSEE ALLIANCE WITH THE 
 
 Empeeoe. Baden's Eeligious Disputation; Thomas Mfe- 
 
 NEE; THE insults OFFEEED TO THE ZUEICHEES. ThE FOEMAL 
 alliance OF THE PAPAL CANTONS WITH AUSTEIA. 
 
 The warlike ardour of the enemies of the Eeformation was cooled 
 
EFFECTS OF THE DEFEAT; OF PAVIA. 223 
 
 in an important degree by the following event, and Zurich, in the 
 meantime, was secured agaiust a surprise. In the battle of 
 Pavia, the Imperial army had totally defeated the French, led by 
 the king in person, who was made a prisoner in the battle. A 
 numerous body of Swiss from the papal cantons had joined the 
 French army. The corpses of from five to six thousand Swiss 
 covered the bloody battle-field ; five thousand, who were taken 
 prisoners, but who were soon afterwards released, returned to 
 their homes without arms and in rags, while many, exhausted 
 with disease and hunger, died by the way. Everywhere the cries 
 of widows and orphans resounded, lamenting the loss of husband 
 or father, and deep were the curses uttered against the pensions 
 from the foreign princes which had spread such desolation over 
 the land. Under the influence of these calamitous events many 
 called to mind Zwingli's warning words, and reflected how differ- 
 ent it would have been had his advice been followed ; Zurich 
 was for the moment more envied than hated. ZwingU, with all 
 the earnestness, and in the spirit of one of the old prophets, spoke 
 on the Sunday after St. Fridolin, of the olden times of the Con- 
 federacy, when, with poverty and simplicity of manners, piety, 
 brotherly love, and courage, flourished. " Now," said he, " by the 
 destructive influences of foreign mercenary campaigns, the country 
 is brought to the verge of ruin, and calamity gathers on calamity." 
 He seriously exhorted the nation to earnest prayer that God 
 would grant them a right understanding to know the truth, and 
 to do what was well-pleasing in His sight. 
 
 The benefits to the Eeformation from this turn in the public 
 mind of Switzerland, which extended itself even to Lucerne andr 
 the mountain-cantons, Faber and his party, however, knew to 
 disappoint, and they succeeded in diverting the course of events 
 to the advantage of their own cause. In his struggle after eccle- 
 siastical honours this zealous defender of the papacy had suc- 
 ceeded in arriving at the dignity of a spiritual counsellor of the 
 Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, brother of Charles the Fifth. 
 In this position he laboured to bring the enemies of the Eefor- 
 mation in Switzerland into closer alliance with the Austro-Span- 
 ish Imperial house, which formed the central point of influ- 
 ence for the party for the whole of Europe. In these labours he 
 was greatly assisted by the ill-feeling created against France by 
 
224 EFFECTS OF THE DEFEAT OF PA VIA. 
 
 the miliappy battle of Pavia. From this time forward the threads 
 to all important undertakings against the Eeformation in Swit- 
 zerland as well as in other countries of Europe were attached and 
 set in motion by the Austro-Spanish Imperial house, which the 
 Pope well knew to draw ever closer to himself. In all these oper- 
 ations, Paber, as long as he lived, played a very important part. 
 The great influence he wielded appears from the following under- 
 taking, which he meditated and set in motion against Zwingli 
 and the Eeformation. The victories which the Eeformer gained 
 by the Eeligious Disputation, and the repeated challenge of the 
 Zurichers, " prove it to us by the Word of God, then we shall 
 follow you, and abstain from the Eeformation," made a very pain- 
 ful impression upon the bishops, prelates, and the whole papal 
 clergy. They deliberated, therefore, as Bullinger mentions, day 
 and night, how they might dam up, or yet better, how they might 
 dry up, at its source, the stream that threatened to lay level with 
 the ground the stately building of their power and magnific'ence. 
 The more sagacious were well aware that the Eeformation could 
 not be suppressed by measures of violence or persecution, and 
 that it must be conquered by those very weapons through which 
 it had risen to its present power and ascendancy. Besides, their 
 people generally expressed great dissatisfaction that the clergy 
 were not better able to defend the old doctrines. A Eeligious 
 Disputation, in which the popish party might be made secure of 
 victory, through the arrangements adopted, and the selection of 
 the judges to decide upon the result, appeared to be the best 
 means of saving the " old Church." Such a discussion which, 
 according to their views, could only be held in some papistically 
 inclined place, was, at the same time, to be made a snare for 
 entrapping Zwingli into the power of his enemies. They were 
 then to lose no time in at once condemning and burning him as 
 a heretic. 
 
 In such a plan the Eomanists conceived they had found, after 
 long search, the means of fettering by human institutions the 
 free preaching of the gospel, and of putting the hated Eeformer 
 out of the way by the semblance of judicial procedure. To this 
 work of darkness. Dr. John Eck, vice-chancellor of the High 
 School of Ingolstadt, then the most celebrated champion of the 
 papacy, at the instigation of Faber, the friend of his own and of 
 
baden's religious disputation. 225 
 
 Zwingli's studies, was to lend the arms of his extraordinary 
 learning and great volubility of speech. Already he had, not 
 without glory, disputed with Luther and Carlstadt at Leipzig, 
 1519, from 27th June tUl 13th July, and had, for his bearing on 
 this occasion, been richly rewarded and honoured by the Pope, so 
 that this opportunity of gaining fresh glory and money was by no 
 means disagreeable to him ; " for," as BulHnger says, " he loved, 
 liked Balaam," the wages of unrighteousness." The higher clergy 
 in Suabia and in Switzerland, as also the Suabian league, and 
 the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, raised, by taxation, vast 
 sums of money. With these Eck was to be handsomely paid. 
 At the same time, the leaders of the Eomanists in Switzerland, 
 well accustomed to being bribed,* (Bullinger) were won over to 
 the undertaking. In order to remove any scruples which might 
 be raised in any quarter by the Swiss papal party against the 
 Disputation, the Bishop of Constance as well as the Archduke 
 Ferdinand and the Suabian league wrote special letters to the 
 Diet, strongly advising its appointment. Such preparations 
 having been made. Dr. Eck despatched an address in writing to 
 the assembled Confederate deputies in BadeiL In this document, 
 after praising them for their faithful perseverance in the old faith, 
 he exhorts them, as honourable, laudable, consistent Christians, 
 not to let themselves be turned aside from their good and Chris- 
 tian undertaking, nor to be shaken by Zwingli's ensnaring and 
 blasphemous writings. " For this Zwingli," continues Eck, 
 "teaches in his works manifold errors, tarnishes the faith, wrests 
 to a violent and heretical sense Holy Scripture, the Word of God, 
 and substitutes for the true a false signification. Such I offer, 
 when and where it may suit you, with the help of the Almighty, 
 and with the grace of the Holy Spirit, to prove against the said 
 Zwingli in a Disputation. For I am fuU of confidence that I 
 shall, with little trouble, maintain against Zwingli our old true 
 Christian faith and customs to be accordant with Holy Scripture 
 and not opposed to the same, and to prove that his ensnaring 
 doctrines, lately sent abroad into the world, are contrary to it, and 
 have no foundation therein." 
 
 Zwingli did not leave this challenge of Eck's long unanswered. 
 
 * As above-mentioned, the recipients of pensions and presents from foreign 
 princes were the most violent enemies of the Reformation, 
 
 P 
 
226 BADEN'S EELIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 
 
 " Tell me," he writes in. reply to him, " how dare you maintain 
 that, out of love and reverence towards God, you had written to the 
 Confederates, while, both by life and doctrine, you manifest very 
 plainly that you do not believe on God at all ? Did you believe 
 in the God whom we Christians adore, you would never dare to 
 fight against His Word. But what do we see? We see you, for 
 some years back, contending against the Word of God in so 
 wicked and foolish a manner that all Christians must hold you 
 to be an enemy of God, nay, men of your own party can no longer 
 place that confidence in you which you hoped to acquire. If gra- 
 titude, fear, and love towards God dwelt within your bosom, you 
 would, if I really were the seducer of the people that you describe 
 me to be, first of all have exhorted me in a friendly manner, for 
 so God always speaks to sinners first ; and had you been a ser- 
 vant of God, and given yourself up to the guidance of the Holy 
 Spirit, you would have thus acted in conformity to what God com- 
 mands in His Word: " If thy brother shall trespass against thee, 
 go and tell him his fault between thee and htm alone," Matt, xviii. 
 15. But you write to a pious Confederacy a letter without my 
 knowledge full of insolent vituperation of me. What need have 
 you of addressing me to appoint a time and place to dispute? K 
 you are so desirous of it, come when you will to Zurich. The 
 gates of this city stand open to you at all tinies, and I shall know 
 how to answer you, depend upon it. If I have, by my preaching, 
 led my people astray, it is reasonable I should be made to lead them 
 again upon the right track, by being proved, in the midst of them, 
 to be a false teacher. Tou confidently assert that, by the grace 
 of the Holy Spirit, you wUl maintain the old Christian faith in 
 its integrity against me. TeU. me, pray, what you mean by the 
 old faith. Have you any older than the faith on the true God, 
 the Creator of heaven and earth, and on Jesus Christ and the 
 Holy Ghost? Or are you able to communicate older instruc- 
 tions upon this faith than those to be drawn from the Word of 
 God itself, which God has spoken by Moses and the prophets, 
 and at length by His only-begotten Son and His apostles? The 
 old faith, in my opinion, is that which is in accordance with what 
 was settled from the beginning, and the old doctrine is that which 
 God himself has revealed ; but these are somewhat older than your 
 fathers and customs of which you boast. Set off, then, gladly on 
 
BADEN'S RELIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 227 
 
 a journey to Zurich. It is time that I should cease to teach false 
 doctrine where I have done so ; but much more is it time that 
 you cease to delude the poor people by your wickedness and 
 deception, and to circulate calumnies against the pious servants 
 of the Lord behind their backs." The Zurich Council, sent 
 through their own messengers a pressing invitation, with a safe- 
 conduct, to Dr. Eck to repair to Zurich, as the accused Zwingli 
 ought, in justice, to have his guilt established in the presence of 
 his own magistracy. Eck, however, declined this invitation, 
 under the pretext that he had akeady entered into arrangements 
 with the Diet. 
 
 The deliberations as to the mode in which the Disputation 
 should be conducted, and the place where it should be held, were 
 continued by the Confederate deputies for a considerable time ; 
 Eaber at length succeeded, by dint of persuasion and bribery, in 
 getting this point arranged to his satisfaction. Zurich was not 
 invited to any of the deliberations. They selected the small 
 town of Baden in the Aargau as the place of disputation, and its 
 object was promulgated to be, " to silence Zwingli and such like 
 who promidgate delusive and ensnaring doctrines, to turn the com- 
 mon people from his errors, and to pacify their minds." The aim 
 thus was not to investigate truth, but to put Zwingli to silence. 
 The letter of safe-conduct betrayed also the openly pronounced 
 object of the discussion, which letter was put into the hands of 
 the Council, with the pressing request they would provide in 
 every case that Zwingli should come, safe-conduct being secured 
 to him and his friends, provided he arrived in no dangerous way, 
 and demeaned himself in a manner worthy of the safe-conduct. 
 The Council, however, recognised, after obtaining the opinion of 
 a Commission named for the purpose, " that, according to Confe- 
 derate law, every accused person ought to be tried at the place of 
 his residence, and that, therefore, Zwingli was only bound to 
 justify himself in Zurich, where he preached." While the Coun- 
 cil, by this declaration, firmly refused to assist at the discussion 
 in Baden, Zwragli, on his own part, replied to the safe-conduct 
 sent to him by the Diet, in the following terms : " I thank God, 
 gracious lords, that in your wisdom you have resolved upon a 
 public disputation, and shall by no means withdraw myself from 
 the same, in so far as Holy Scripture, explained by itself, be 
 
228 BADEN'S RELIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 
 
 recognised as the only and last judge, the articles to be discussed 
 be fixed upon beforehand, the Assembly and all its members be 
 sufficiently secured against violence. But how, dear sirs, can 
 you desire that I should journey to Baden, which is under the 
 jurisdiction of my determined foes, 'the five places?' Have not 
 they publicly allied themselves together to proscribe my doctrine? 
 Do they not decry me in every document they issue as a heretic? 
 Have they not, even ia the general invitation to the Conference, 
 repeated the charge, although, in the invitation to Zurich, it be 
 omitted ? Do I not know that they, along with Freiburg, have 
 formed the resolution, two years ago, to take me where they could 
 find me, and to bring me to Lucerne? And is it not a common 
 saying among their people, that one is not bound to hold a safe- 
 conduct with heretics? In Freiburg, they burned my writings, in 
 Lucerne my effigy ; I might well know who, with honest inten- 
 tions, would advise me to put myself in their hands. This I have 
 plainly stated to the Great Council of Zurich, placing myself, 
 however, entirely at their disposal to do with me as they may 
 deem fit. Once more I offer to defend my doctrine against any 
 opponent, be it in Zurich, in Berne, or St. Gall, without doubt 
 considerable and respectable towns." In reference to the safe- 
 conduct, he called their attention to many ensnaring passages, 
 especially to the one that the safe- conduct was only to be kept so 
 long as he conducted himself in a manner worthy of it. With 
 such a condition, no free discussion could take place ; for should 
 he, for example, say, " the Pope is anti-Christ," this speech would 
 be maintained to be unworthy of the safe-conduct, and it would 
 be broken. That Zwingli, moreover, rightly penetrated the 
 designs of his enemies is sufficiently clear from the following 
 statements and occurrences. Eck and Faber had openly declared 
 that heresy could only be thoroughly extirpated by the use of 
 fire and sword. Immediately on the resolution of the Diet being 
 published that the Disputation should be held in Baden, Thomas 
 Murner* had exclaimed from the pulpit in Lucerne, " Zwingli, I 
 
 * Thomas Murner, a native of Strasburg, a not unlearned but a low-minded 
 yenomous monk, had, after many devious courses, and many struggles in life, at 
 length settled down at Lucerne, where he gained the favour of the heads of the 
 state by his intemperate invectives against Zwingli and the Eeformation. He 
 was, with the town-parson Bodler, a man of a like stamp, a demagogue of the 
 papal party in this town. ,^ 
 
Baden's religious disputation. 229 
 
 warn you that your last hour is come." In a conversation, the 
 deputy of Lucerne had replied to one who observed that the 
 safe-conduct would certainly be kept with ZwingU if he came to 
 Baden, " if we had him once here he should have prison-diet for 
 the rest of his days." Captain Ueberhnger of Baden was wOling 
 " to be called his life-long hangman if they woidd but let him be 
 the judge over ZwingH" From Berne, Zwingli's brother-in-law, 
 Tremp, wrote to him, " As you value your life, abstain from going 
 to Baden, for I know from a sure hand that no safe-conduct wiU 
 be held with you." The Eomanists, however, shewed by their 
 actions, still more plainly than by these threatening and warning 
 expressions which escaped some of the members of their party, 
 the design they had in view. In Lucerne, Henry Messberg was 
 put to death by a slow process of drowning for speaking against 
 the nuns, and Jack Nagel was burned ahve for the dissemination 
 of "Zwinglian doctrines." At Schwyz, Eberhard Polt of Lachen, 
 and a priest from the same quarter, suffered death by fire for 
 speaking against the ceremonies. In Thurgau, also, there was an 
 individual burned by the orders of "the five places" for impugn- 
 ing the mass. Faber displayed a like spirit of persecution in his 
 own district. Peter Spengler of Freiburg, (in Breisgau,) was, at 
 the command of the episcopal bench of Constance, of whose move- 
 ments Faber was then well known to be the mainspring, drowned 
 as a heretic; and only a few days before the eomimencement of 
 the Disputation in Baden, Faber assembled, in the open market- 
 place at Mersburg, a consistory under his presidency, to try for 
 heresy John Huegehn, parson of Lindau. He confessed that he 
 " believed the Holy Scriptures and the articles of the true primi- 
 tive creed; against this he had taught nothing ; was, therefore, no 
 heretic, but a true Christian." He was deposed from the priest- 
 hood, and condemned to suffer death by fire, which punishment 
 he underwent with prayerful resignation and Christian fortitude. 
 Such proceedings shewed very plainly what ends Faber, Eck, 
 and the Eomanists had in view by the Disputation at Baden ; 
 Zwingh especially had too much perspicacity of mind, and knew 
 his adversaries too well to be ignorant of their designs. In some 
 preliminary fencing with Faber and Eck in writing, which pre- 
 ceeded the discussion, and in which he made them feel very 
 sensibly his immense superiority to them, he clearly shewed 
 
230 baden's ebligious disputation. 
 
 that lie penetrated their artifices : " I and not the Disputation 
 am the object in view, if I were once under the ice the Disputar- 
 tion would be at an end." " You and your knaves," cries he to 
 Faber, who jeered at him for his mistrust, "and all to whom 
 money is dearer than truth, right, and their very life, I trust only 
 as far as I prudently can. But I will not stake my life on what a 
 knave might stake it. Suppose that one of your villains, by a 
 shot or a stab deprived me of life, and a magistracy apprehended 
 him, (which might be difficult, for in such cases flight is generally 
 secured,) of what use would it be to twist such a fellow upon the 
 wheel? Know that I hold myself much too dear to venture 
 myself among you, not, indeed, for my own sake, but for the sake 
 of my dear Lord Jesus Christ, whose Word I may longer help to 
 proclaim and defend with all the faithful, and stop the mouths 
 of you papists. You are a well-spring from which blood pours 
 forth, for you have followed after bloodshed for years. I shall 
 give an account of my doctrine to every man to whom it is due, 
 but not in the place where every one may wish to have it 
 Thereto the rights of your god, the pope, do not at all bind me. 
 Let me be heard before my own community, there I am ready 
 to justify myself. Christ himseK says : ' Ask them which heard 
 me what I have said.' Ask ye also the church congregation who 
 heard me, or read my books, and if you find anj^hing wrong in 
 them, write against it ; you do not require my person to do this. 
 And although you were to take my life, yet you must refate my 
 doctrine with the pen, for unless you do this, you cannot tear it 
 from the hearts of those in whom I have implanted it. You 
 stigmatise me for saying, ' One should not expose himself to 
 a useless death.' Do you not know that Christ teaches the same 
 doctrine in the words, ' When they persecute you in this city, flee 
 ye into another;' and agaia, ' Neither cast ye your pearls before 
 swine?' You feel deeply offended at this, and yet I have em- 
 ployed the words of Christ in their true sense, which is, that we 
 should not cast our costly treasure of pearls, which the truth is, 
 before those who will not accept it, but who will despise and 
 persecute it. These Christ calls swine. Of such swine you are 
 certainly one, and your fellows belong to the same breed, who 
 keep cryiag 'heretic,' 'heretic,' when the gospel of Christ is 
 proclaimed in their hearing by any of Christ's ambassadors." 
 
BADEN S EELIGIOUS DISPUTATION. 231 
 
 Firmly as Zwingli resolved to avoid the snare so clumsily laid 
 for him, by declining to appear at Baden, the CouncU, with equal 
 firmness, refased to allow him to go. Thus the Disputation at 
 Baden, from 21st May till 8th June 1526, in which (Ecolampad 
 and Haller represented the Eeforming party, was held without 
 Zwingh's presence * In spirit, however, as Myconius assures us, 
 he was present, and by his labours, continued day and night, and 
 by the advice which he transmitted to Baden, he did the cause 
 more real service than had he been present in body. Measures 
 were taken each day to apprise ZwingK of the course of the 
 Disputation, and of Eck's objections. A student from WaUis, 
 who, under the pretext of using the baths, sojourned at Baden, 
 attended the Disputation regularly, writing down the proceed- 
 ings from memory every evening. Two young students, by turns, 
 Thomas Plater of WalLis, and Zimmermann of Winterthur, 
 brought these notes with CEcolampad's letters over night to 
 Zvringli at Zurich, carrying upon their heads baskets with hens 
 to avoid observation. In the morning, they returned with his 
 answer. On Plater's knocking at the door on the night before 
 Pentecost, and being at length admitted, he found the Eeformer 
 already in bed. " He soon, however, appeared," relates Plater, 
 when he heard I was there, rubbed his eyes, and said : " Ay ! ay ! 
 you are a restless lad. Here am I, who have not been in bed 
 these six weeks, thinking that as to-morrow is Pentecost, I should 
 get a snatch of rest." He set himself down, wrote his opinion upon 
 the question in dispute, and sent his answer to Baden the same 
 night. Upon the Disputation being ended, Thomas Mumer, the 
 monk, came forward before the whole assembly, and read forty abu- 
 sive articles against Zwingli. " I thought," said he, " the coward 
 would come, but he has not shewn face. I declare forty times, by 
 all the rights which order things human and divine, that the tyrant 
 of Zurich and his followers are knaves, liars, perjurers, adulterers, 
 infidels, thieves, sacrilegious, food for gallows, and that no 
 honourable man, without blushing, can keep company with 
 
 * CEcolampad was in less danger of his life by Zwingli's absence than he 
 would have been by his presence. Zwingli's fall would have brought about 
 that of his friends likewise, who happened to be present, while their death in 
 his absence would hare served no purpose, except to irritate Basle and Berne, 
 towns which it was hoped would yet be gained to the papacy. 
 
232 THOMAS MUENEE. 
 
 them." This conclusion of the Conference, as well as the whole 
 hearing of the papal disputants, made upon many of those present 
 a very unfavourable impression, so that in spite of the shouts of 
 the Eomanists, the consequences of the Disputation were by no 
 means advantageous to the papacy. Berne and Basle, indeed, 
 shortly afterwards broke loose from the party; and through the 
 instrumentality of zealous evangelical preaching, were entirely 
 won over to the Eeformation. At the same time, the papists 
 made the unpleasant experience, that in two countries at once, to 
 wit, in Switzerland through the Baden Disputation, and in Ger- 
 many through the first Diet, begun at Speyer, 1526, which the 
 Archduke Ferdinand, at the orders of his brother Charles V.,* 
 summoned, for the purpose of suppressing the Eeformation, their 
 savage demeanour and persecuting measures, instead of throwing 
 fear and alarm into the ranks of the evangelical party, as they 
 had hoped, only brought fresh accessions of numbers to this 
 party. Indeed, a very short time afterwards, the Austro- 
 Spanish Imperial house itself appeared willing to assume a 
 more favourable attitude to the Evangelicals of Germany, the 
 Emperor Charles V. breaking with Pope Clement VI., and send- 
 ing his soldiers, who were mostly Protestant mercenaries, to take 
 and plunder Eome, which they did. These events, however, 
 exercised but an insignificant influence on Switzerland. In 
 Eome, the Swiss mercenaries from the mountain cantons fought 
 with a heroic courage against the Imperial host, defending the 
 Pope against the Emperor, at the very time that their fathers and 
 brothers at home drew closer to the Archduke Ferdinand in the 
 defence of the old faith, and the suppression of the Eeformation. 
 Soon after the Disputation had taken place, the period arrived 
 at which the cantons had to renew the oath of Confederacy 
 between each other. The papal cantons declared they would 
 neither give nor take the oath from Zurich ; " Basle, St. Gall, and 
 Muelhausen, must be treated in the same manner," said they. This 
 conduct embittered the Eeforming party, the more so as the signs 
 grew plainer of an approximation of counsels on the part of the 
 
 * In aletter of the 23d March 1526, from Seville (Spain), Charles V. instructed 
 his brother the Archduke to the following eifect : The Diet is to maintain the 
 old customs of the Church, and execute the edicts of Worms, (which commanded 
 the suppression of the Lutheran doctrine and writings.) 
 
THOMAS MUENER. 233 
 
 papal cantons to those of the Archduke Ferdinand. This prince 
 was indeed preparing war against Zurich, with the full under- 
 standing of the mountain cantons. At the same time the intem- 
 perate and shameless behaviour of Thomas Murner was in the 
 highest degree revolting ; the coarse libels which this ribald monk 
 uttered against the adherents of the Eeformation proved an inces- 
 sant cause of irritation. His "Black Calendar" especially contains 
 the worst specimens of this description of writing which the 
 imagination can picture to itself By the side of a portraiture of 
 Zwingli, suspended from the gallows, there is the superscription : 
 "Calendar of the Lutheran-Evangelical Church-Eobbers and 
 Heretics." At the introduction of the principal supporters of the 
 Reformation, hardly any term in the vocabulary of low abuse is 
 spared; the whole concludes with the declaration, that all its 
 followers are "Impotent unprincipled villains, thieves, lick- 
 spittles, dastards, and knaves, and that the heretics ought to be 
 burned, and sent in smoke to the deviL" Such insults were not 
 only passed over with impunity by the civil power of the papal 
 cantons, but were joyfully hailed by them, and disseminated far 
 and wide, so that the indignant Zurichers had just cause to com- 
 plain : " the foreign monk. Dr. Murner, vituperates us from his 
 venomous malicious heart with such insolence, as to fill many 
 a worthy man with indignation. You, however, dear Confederates, 
 do not command him silence." Zurich had to bear other affronts 
 from the Eomanists. On the Council of this state striking a new 
 silver coin, Uri prohibited it, as if it were derived from sacrilege ; 
 and in Zug, cups were stamped upon it to designate it such. 
 
 This ever increasing hostility, thus openly expressed against 
 Zurich, inspired the enemies of Zwingli and of the Eeformation in 
 Zurich itself with fresh hopes and courage.* They began to move. 
 
 * Zwingli writes on this subject, in letters to his friends in Basle and Stras- 
 burg: " For some time bacli there has been again observed, whenever the cause 
 of the gospel met with any difficulty, a great stir, and noisy and congratulatory 
 meetings of our swarming Catalines. It was clear as day that these people 
 would venture as much as the Cataline conspirators did in Borne. I confess 
 that, as their words and actions betrayed more and more plainly their hitherto 
 concealed plots, I, for my part, began to warn loudly against treachery. I suc- 
 ceeded, despite the defiance and hypocrisy with which they met me, in intimidating 
 their chief power, and undermining their walls. They thought to have remained 
 unobserved. I gave them to understand this was not the case, and that I myself 
 
234 THE EEFOBMATION EXTENDS ITSELF. 
 
 For some time gloomy reports had been spread abroad in the town 
 that men in high positions, who were in the receipt of secret pen- 
 sions from foreign princes, were stirring up the people against the 
 regulations and decrees of the government. The suspected indi- 
 viduals were apprehended, and subjected to an instantaneous and 
 searching examination within closed doors. James Grebel, (the 
 father of an old but dubious friend of Zwingli's and the Eefor- 
 mation, whose acquaintance we shall afterwards make as one of 
 the heads of the Anabaptists,) was convicted. He confessed to 
 having received pensions and bribes from several princes at 
 once. Neither his grey hairs nor the high esteem which he 
 had hitherto enjoyed in Zurich and in the Confederacy, could 
 avert from him the highest penalty of the law. Others, found 
 guilty in a less degree, were banished from the country for 
 a longer or shorter period. These exiles, along with several 
 monks who, conscious of guilt, had secretly withdrawn from the 
 town, contributed not a little to stir the embers of hatred and 
 animosity among their co-religionists in the other cantons. 
 
 In spite of all these hindrances, the Eeformation, animated by 
 the breath of the Spirit of God, extended itself on every side. 
 Berne, and Schaffhausen had declared decidedly for it ; in Grau- 
 bund, Glaurus, and Appenzell, the Eeformers constituted the 
 majority, and while St. Gall, at an earlier period, had received 
 the gospel, there appeared growing signs of an evangelical move- 
 ment in Thurgau, Eheinthal, Sarganserland,- and in the free 
 domains of Eeussthal; nay, they appeared in the valleys of Italy 
 itself Tlie mountaineers in the Waldstaedte alone withstood the 
 breath of the new spirit, even as the glaciers of their alps resist 
 the genial influences of spring. 
 
 Under these circumstances, they began to turn their eyes with 
 
 might perhaps make a disclosure. And so it was. I was, without their know- 
 ledge, in possession of certain letters, and had besides learned something here, 
 and something there. The investigation begins. Much comes to light, partly 
 insignificant, and partly important. Well Grebel, father of Conrad, is beheaded. 
 He who held the highest character amongst us had received from the Emperor, 
 the King of France, and the Pope, more than one thousand gold florins, under 
 the pretext of rewards to his son. Several of the clique fled, the gates being 
 negligently watched, one in a cart, hid under manure. The examination is still 
 going on. I warn the one party to take an example by such an issue of the pro- 
 ceedings, I exhort the other to tear up this evil by the roots." 
 
ALLIANCE OP THE PAPAL CANTONS WITH AUSTRIA. 235 
 
 increased hope towards the Austro-Spanish house, and trusted 
 that it would lend them aid to suppress the hated innovation 
 and its supporters. The Archduke Ferdinand, after his election 
 in the autumn of 1527 to be King of Hungary, had emitted a 
 decree from Ofen, in Hungary, at Faber's suggestion, in which 
 he forbids his subjects, on the penalty of death, to take up 
 Zwingli's doctrine, or even to harbour one of the followers of it ; 
 and his brother, Charles V., wrote, on the 3d February 1528, 
 from Burgos, (Spain,) to the papal cantons, praising them for 
 their steady continuance in the ancient faith, and exhorting them 
 to continue in the same course. Both on the eastern and northern 
 frontiers Switzerland bordered on the dominions of Austria, and 
 here, by letters and messages, an uninterrupted intercourse was 
 carried on between the Austrian officials and the Swiss Eomanists, 
 which the papal clergy, high and low, zealously fostered. In 
 February 1529, at length, a formal alliance was drawn out at 
 Feldkirch, between deputies of the five papal cantons and Aus- 
 . trian delegates appointed for the purpose, which, two months 
 later, was documented and sealed at Waldshut. "We, King 
 Ferdinand, and 'The Five Places,'" so runs the treaty in part, 
 " with the lands, dominions, and territories of both parties to this 
 league, remain steadfast to the ancient true Christian faith and 
 Christian sacraments ; and if it so be that any one within our 
 territories and dominions shall dare to attack the ancient true 
 Christian faith and venerated sacraments, or secretly or openly 
 to preach against the same, and endeavour to turn the people 
 therefrom, such an one shall be punished in property and person. 
 Austria sends, in case of need, six thousand foot and four hun- 
 dred horse, with the requisite artOlery, into Switzerland. To 
 this end the Eeformed cantons may be blockaded, and provisions 
 prevented from entering them, or seized." Plans of a campaign 
 were drawn out, according to which the Eeformed cantons were 
 to be invaded from different points at the same moment. Every- 
 thing gave intimation that a resolution had been come to to sup- 
 press and extirpate evangelical doctrine by force of arms. In 
 Germany preparations were made for the second Diet at Spires, 
 with the view of the suppression of the Eeformation, while in 
 Barcelona, (Spain,) the emperor concluded peace with the pope, 
 
236 ALLIANCE OF THE PAPAL CANTONS WITH AUSTRIA. 
 
 on the 5th August 1529, solemnly promising the papal ambassa- 
 dor to root out heresy with the sword. 
 
 Zwingli penetrated more clearly than almost any of his con- 
 temporaries the designs and intrigues of the combined enemies, 
 papal and Imperial The infatuated blindness, indeed, of many 
 of his countrymen gave him the deepest affliction, as appears 
 from a letter to his friend Werner Steiuer: " I speak the truth," 
 he says, " in Christ, and lie not, that no pain so sharply affects 
 me as the incredulity of some Swiss. This lies heavily on my 
 heart, and torments me night and day ; truly not as though I 
 feared for myself, but for them." But, full of faith, he doubted 
 not for a moment of the ultimate victory of the right cause. " It 
 ought not to terrify us," he wrote, " that Faber and his crew not 
 only work without intermission against, the truth, but that they 
 use every means in their power to accomplish the ruin of the 
 preachers and teachers of it. We ought rather to rejoice at it, 
 for this manifold opposition is a plain sign that we are near the 
 promised land. The Papists pipe from their , last hole, there- 
 fore they are so furious." 
 
 But the quarrels which arose between the advocates and friends 
 of the Eeformation themselves were far more keenly felt, and 
 more deeply injurious than the reaction of the Papists. To these 
 let us now direct our attention. 
 
SEVENTH SECTION. 
 
 OBSTACLES TO THE PROGRESS OE THE REFORMATION, ARISING 
 FROM DIFFERENCES OF OPINION UPON THE SACRAMENTS OF 
 BAPTISM AND THE LORD'S SUPPER. 
 
 " For there shaU arise fialse Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great 
 signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the 
 very elect. Behold, I have told you before. Wherefore, if they shall say unto 
 you. Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret cham- 
 bers; believe it not." — Matt. xxiv. 24-26. 
 
 1. InTEODUCTION. — ZWINGLl'S STANDING-PomT. 
 
 We have seen how Zwingli, equipped in the armour of God, 
 victoriously wielded the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word 
 of God, against the Papacy, storming with this potent weapon 
 many of the strongholds of this anti-Christian power. In vain 
 the burning missiles of lying calumny and intrigue were dis- 
 charged against the champion of God. Unhurt, he stood girded 
 with truth, defended by the armour of righteousness on the right 
 hand and on the left, the shield of faith before him, and the 
 helmet of salvation on his head, ever ready to proclaim the 
 gospel But just as the papal enemy, smote by the two-edged 
 sword of the Spirit, began to give way, another arose in a 
 different quarter, which pretended to fight under the same banner 
 with the friends of truth, which employed the same watch-word, 
 but which raised the shout of battle in their rear and flank, thus 
 not only procuring, by their furious and ill-timed fanaticism, a 
 breathing space for the Papists to rally their broken forces, but 
 throwing such confusion into the ranks of the Evangelicals, that 
 many, in the tumult thus occasioned, mistook the friend for the 
 foe, and directed the whole weight of battle against the friend, 
 instead of assailing the enemy. But while the bravest com- 
 batant may be deceived by a stratagem, which produces such a 
 dislocation of forces, it is just in such a moment of peril 
 
238 HIS STANDING-POINT. 
 
 tliat tlie prudent general manifests his superiority, hy pene- 
 trating with an eagle glance the designs of the enemy, and 
 taMng measures accordingly with a wise deliberation to frus- 
 trate them ; with a suddenly made evolution, he falls upon the 
 enemy behind him, while he holds in check the beaten foe 
 in front. Such a generalship did Zwingli shew in this crisis; 
 but it Was a spiritual generalship, proving aU in the light of 
 God's "Word, and of a faith which, resting upon God and over- 
 coming the world, knew correctly to balance, with a sharp dis- 
 crimination, the opposing claims of truth and falsehood, as they 
 hung in the balance of controversy and of fight. Painfully as 
 he was affected by the disunion in the ranks of truth, he allowed 
 himself neither to be led astray by illusion, however tricked 
 out it might be in the garb of piety, nor to be hurried away 
 to any excess or violence by the angry attacks of his erring 
 brethren. "We glorify God in the highest," he wrote to his 
 friends in Berne, " as well for every accession as for every defec- 
 tion ; not only when He strengthens our hopes but when He tries 
 our patience. It is then we truly experience what fighting is, 
 when the enemy not only attacks us in the front, but on the flank 
 and rear ; nay, when the very members of our household join 
 him." The position which Zwingli took up, and the opinions he 
 maintained in these conflicts, have been from first to last grievously 
 misrepresented, and, indeed, grossly misapprehended. How? 
 Because the standing-point he assumed, and from which he acted, 
 has not itself been apprehended and steadily kept in view. In 
 order to answer the misrepresentations, and to prevent all miscon- 
 ceptions of ZwingU's opinions, with regard to the nature and 
 significance of the sacraments, we intend, shortly, to illuminate 
 from the right quarter the standing-point he took up in these 
 disputes. 
 
 The authority of the Word of God being recognised by all who 
 took part in these controversies, for each party sought to make good 
 its views by quotations from Scripture,* the question in the end 
 came to be, Who has adopted the right method of discovering the 
 
 * Even the Anabaptists, while they often, by their pretended direct revela- 
 tions, placed themselyes higher than the written Word, recognised its authority, 
 in so far that they represented their doctrines and observances as founded aiid 
 enjoined in Scripture, although they often took up its utterances in a spirit too 
 literal, and often understood them quite falsely. 
 
HIS STANDING-POINT. 239 
 
 true sense of Scripture ? Let us learn from Zwingli's own words 
 his opinions iipon tMs point : " The Word of God," he says, " is 
 full of significance, and rich in reference and allusion, and 
 although it has but one, and this the simplest and the truest 
 sense, yet it happens that, owing to the obtuseness and limited 
 range of the human faculties, the genuine and proper sense of the 
 Holy Ghost, who it is that speaks in Scripture, is comprehended 
 but rarely and with difficulty, except by those whom the Spirit 
 has conducted into His innermost sanctuary. It is thus that so 
 many various explanations and senses are produced by the inter- 
 preters of Scripture, each striving to explain it to the profit of the 
 Church, according to the gift given him of God.. Nor are they 
 to be so severely reprehended for their mistakes, when, as often 
 occurs, they miss the mark in their commentaries, in so far as 
 they keep solely in view that which is, in all the books of 
 Scripture the grand and main object, the glory of Qod and the 
 salvaiion of man. For Holy Scripture is an unmeasurable, and, 
 in its whole extent, unnavigable sea, the depth of which has been 
 sounded by none ; it is a field, the cultivation of which wiU afford 
 exercise to the intellectual labours of man during centuries. The 
 Word of God is infallible perfect truth, — ^there is nothing therein 
 unconsidered, disconnected, or self-contradictory ; where, however, 
 we do not understand the sense and the connection, there the 
 fault lies not in the Word of God, but in the darkness and 
 bluntness of our understanding. When these statements occur, 
 which, at the first blush appear to stand in contradiction to 
 other statements, the different passages ought to be held opposite 
 each other; nor ought we to hold obstinately to a single one 
 without any regard to the others, but view the whole in the light 
 of all. What I mean will appear clearly by the following 
 example : Arius* defended his heresy with the passage, John xiv. 
 28, ' My Father is greater than I.' Now Arius, along with this 
 statement, ought to have weighed the following, John iii. 16, 
 ' For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten 
 Son:' and farther, cnap. x. 30, ' I and my Father are one;' again, 
 
 * Arius, the well-known false teacher, presbyter of Alexandria in the first 
 half of the fourth century, denied the equality in essence of the Son with the 
 Eather. Although his doctrine was condemned by the Church, the sect called 
 after his name maintained itself for a considerable time, and much disturbed the 
 peace of the Church. 
 
2J-0 HIS STANDING-POINT. 
 
 chap. xvi. 15, 'All things that the Father hath are mine;' and 
 chap. xiii. 3, 'Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things 
 into His hands.' Had Alius compared these and countless other 
 passages of a similar bearing from the gospel of John, with the 
 statement, ' My Father is greater than I,' he would have found 
 that this passage bore reference alone to the human nature of 
 Christ, that in this he was less than his Father, not iu His divine 
 nature." " Almost every error comes from the literalists, who 
 wrest the letter in a manner contrary to the true sense. The 
 letter is for the sake of the sense, and is designed to serve it, not 
 the sense the letter; and the letter must be explained according 
 to the spirit and the true sense, else the former were nothing but 
 a deception and a delusion. For there is not a word, the very 
 plainest and simplest word that can be spoken on earth, which 
 if one is bent upon chicanery and deception, may not be wrested 
 from its true sense and falsified. Therefore it is not only with 
 Holy Scripture, but with every law, with every precept, order or 
 edict that is issued, with every speech, or use of language what- 
 ever, a standing rule, that the purport and sense shew the con- 
 tents and significance of the words, and not that the dark, and as 
 yet, comparatively speaking, unintelligible word be allowed to 
 overmaster, to confuse, and mistify the sense. This may be shown 
 by innumerable examples from Holy Scripture, as well as from 
 profane books ; I shall illustrate it by a single one. Christ com- 
 mands : ' If thy foot offend thee, cut it off.' If we were to 
 estimate the sense of these words according to the literal standard, 
 it would be requisite to take from man not only one foot but 
 every foot he had, even although he had as many as the centi- 
 pedes or the sea-urchins. But if we keep to the true sense and 
 purpose of Christ, according to which He means to say, that we 
 are to cut off from the body, which is the Church, the infectious 
 part that, like a cancer, would eat into the whole if not removed, 
 it is evident that not the foot upon which a man goes and stands 
 is to be cut away, but the corrupt brother in the faith, even 
 although he might in other respects be as serviceable as one foot 
 is to the other. The clear sense must determine the less clear 
 sense, not the words the sense. The words of Christ are spirit, 
 not letter; therefore one ought not in a stubborn and violent 
 spirit to hang on the letter alone, but to take the letter according 
 
HIS STANDING-POINT. 241 
 
 to the spirit. But still the letter must not be despised." If you 
 say the letter kills, of what use is it then? I reply: this is a 
 mode of speech ; for properly speaking, it is not the letter which 
 kills, but he lolls himself, is himself the cause of his death, who 
 rests upon the letter alone, and pierces not to the sense and the 
 spirit. The ropes draw not without the horse, nor the horse 
 without the ropes, but both when they are united. The ropes, 
 however, keep the horse in the straight hue. If there were no 
 letter in Scripture, each would speak according to his own spirit. 
 The written Word is therefore the rule, and the rope by which 
 all is to be directed. The spirit of truth, i.e. the spirit of the 
 believer, illuminated by the Spirit of God, comprehends the letter, 
 and rules it. The Spirit wrests not the letter or the sense, but 
 it clears it up, and makes it plain. It is not only carnal, it is 
 something worse, so foolishly to hold to the unintelligible letter 
 that one will not listen to the clearer word. We will that one 
 reject not the letter, but esteem it very highly, but only for the 
 right understanding of the sense, else the letter is worse than 
 useless, for it becomes positively hurtful" 
 
 While Zwingli, according to these principles of interpretation, 
 which will hold true for ever, investigated the Scriptures, and 
 explained their meaning, he preserved himself from the errors in 
 which others were involved, so that the Word of God was, iu 
 truth, to him " a lamp to his feet and a hght to his path." An- 
 other guiding star which lighted him and preserved him from 
 error was faith, which, in its whole depth and clearness, and a 
 confidence founded upon God, he seized and retained firmly in 
 his grasp. Let us hear how he expresses himself upon the mean- 
 ing of faith. "Faith," says the apostle, "is the substance of 
 things hoped for (the essential confidence in the things) ; the evi- 
 dence of things not seen." The meaning of the apostle thus is, 
 faith is something substantial, fundamental in the soul, not a 
 light hap-hazard dreaming or thinking, which shapes itself now 
 so and now so, that is, something uncertain ; but a firm and sub- 
 stantial confidence of the soul, with which it entirely depends on 
 that hoped for, to wit, the thing which can alone be the Object of 
 hope with infallible certainty. The expression, " the things 
 hoped for," is a periphrasis for God, upon whom alone we can 
 with truth set our hope. But the words of the apostle mean 
 
242 ms STANDING-POINT. 
 
 farther, that faith is tJiat substantial and solid thing in our soul, 
 vouchsafed to us by Him who is the object and the confidence of 
 our hope. The words, " and the evidence of things not seen," 
 elucidate the first part of the statement ; for the invisible is again 
 a circumlocution for the one God, as the visible denotes the 
 creature. See Eom. i. 20; 2 Cor. iv. 17, 18. Thus faith rests 
 alone upon Him who cannot be perceived and recognised by the 
 senses, but of whom the mind, the intellect, the soul, with reflec- 
 tion and confidence, is conscioiis. Therefore faith can neither have 
 reference to, nor find support on, any creature, but has alone to 
 do with the one invisible God. Thus it is contrary to the nature 
 of faith to turn itself upon anything visible, i.e., upon any crea- 
 ture as creature. "When we are pointed to Christ, this is done 
 for the reason that he is God and man ; but to his humanity 
 none is to be directed, as he himself says, John xii. 44 : " He 
 that beheveth on me, believeth not on me, (i.e., he is not to have 
 faith or confidence in me in so far as I am man), but on Him that 
 sent me." Faith is consequently the essential and living power 
 of the soul animated by the Spirit of God, which rests firmly and 
 imihovably upon God, who is invisible. Man is thus inwardly 
 conscious of faith in the soul, which then springs up when he 
 begins to despair of himself and to perceive that he must set his 
 confidence upon God alone ; then, however, arrives at perfection 
 (is perfected), when he renounces himself entirely, and gives him- 
 self wholly up to the Divine mercy ; but so that inasmuch as 
 Christ has given himself for him he reposes fall confidence in it. 
 But how is the believer to know his faith? 'Tis then thou art 
 free froni sin when thy soul firmly trusts in the death of Christ, 
 and rests upon it. But this faith comes not from man, it comes 
 alone from God, as Paul likewise derives it from the Holy Ghost, 
 1 Cor. xii. 9, &c. Flesh and blood, i.e., man, comprehends not 
 that God has become man, and that through His death the whole 
 world has received new life and blessing. Man reasons much 
 rather in this way; thou hast sinned, consequently thou must 
 suffer the penalty, or give satisfaction. So run human contracts. 
 He who believes, however, that, by the death of Christ, the sins 
 of the whole world have been atoned for, has learned it from 
 another teacher, namely, from God. Faith, then, comes not from 
 flesh and blood, but from God. Flesh and blood, i.e., man, cannot 
 
HIS STANDING-POINT. 24S 
 
 comprehend this, partly because what is good in him is so small, 
 partly because his sins are of such magnitude and of such number 
 that it is impossible for him to come to God. When, however, 
 he begins to recognise and believe that he can obtain justification 
 and salvation not through his own strength, and through his own 
 righteousness, but alone through the free mercy of God, such 
 knowledge and belief comes to him from God, it descends to biTn 
 from heaven. Such a man is born again; he is born from above, 
 and begins a heavenly hfe; his former life displeases him, he 
 abhors sin, and acknowledges himself to be a sinner before the 
 Majesty of heaven ; he cleanses himself daily from his transgres- 
 sions, he feels grief for past sins, and guards against new ones. 
 If he falls, he quickly rises and flies to God, arms himself to 
 battle against the enemy, and stands steadfast at his post. Neither 
 does the proclamation of the Word work such a faith as this ; for 
 we see that many hear the gracious message of the gospel and 
 yet believe it not. Nay, the greater part of those who heard 
 Christ himself remained without faith, and many of those who 
 can talk of Christ from Holy Scripture trust not upon Him, as 
 may be seen in those who seek their salvation in the creature, or 
 in external things. Thus faith proceeds not from human reason 
 or intelligence, but alone from the Uluminating and drawing 
 Spirit of God. This our dear Lord Jesus himself teaches, John 
 vi 44 : " No man can come unto me except the Father which 
 hath sent me draw him." He then proves from the prophets 
 that it was recognised by them of old that the knowledge of the 
 Eedeemer must be learned from God ; and then he adds, " Every 
 man therefore that hath heard and hath learned of the Father 
 Cometh imto me," ver. 45 ; from which words we plainly perceive 
 to what school we must go to be instructed in the knowledge of 
 the Son; to the Father. Thus faith can come from no quarter 
 but from God. One man can shew to another by the outward 
 Word with what love God, as Father, embraces us, and what He 
 has given us in His Son. This consolation the evangelical 
 preacher can represent and proclaim to the dejected and doubt- 
 ing conscience, but that it with fuU confidence accept it, approve 
 it, and firmly believe it, this he cannot effect. He who believes 
 a preached gospel, and . trusts in Christ, from him despair evan- 
 ishes, and the conscience, staid upon certain and undoubting 
 
244 HIS STANDING-POINT. 
 
 faith., becomes healed and pacified. For what shall He refuse 
 us, who has given His only-begotten Son for us? But that a man 
 believes this, holds fast to it, and becomes transformed to a new 
 man in Christ, this is the work of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, 
 this effect is sometimes ascribed to the evangelical teacher, and 
 it is considered to be the effect of his mediation, as when Paul 
 says, " He hath begotten the Corinthians through the gospel." In 
 the same manner, when Scripture ascribes salvation to faith, that 
 is attributed to the nearer and more known cause which is alone 
 the work of God. It is God alone who justifies and saves, and 
 that out of pure mercy and grace. As Paul also says, Eom. viii. 
 30 : " Whom He did predestinate, them He also called ; and whom 
 He called, them He also justified." To speak correctly, then> it 
 is election and not faith which saves. But because faith is the 
 surest sign of our election, that is here ascribed to faith which 
 properly belongs to election. In Kbe manner, Paul, when he 
 writes to the Eomans, chap. x. 17, " Faith cometh by hearing," 
 attributes to the nearer and to us better known cause that which is 
 alone the work of the Spirit and not of the outward preaching. 
 And this is a truth, not only proved to us by such testimonies of 
 Scripture as, " No man cometh unto me except the Father draw 
 him," and "to another, faith (is given) by the same Spirit," 1 Cor. 
 xii. 9, and many others, but by daily experience ; for we see that 
 many who hear the preaching of the gospel believe it not. Paul, 
 however, means to say something more than that it is necessary 
 that the Word be preached, through which means God plants 
 faith, from whom all growth proceeds, by his own hand. For 
 even apostolic labour, though derived from the power of God, is 
 but a means ; the inward drawing^ of the soul is the immediate - 
 act of God's Spirit. Faith likewise comes not from outward things, 
 but alone from a drawing God. Nor can outward things even con- 
 firm it. Christ indeed says : " If I had not done among them the 
 works which none other man did, they had not had sin," &c. &c. 
 These words seem to import that miracles wrought faith; but this 
 is not their sense. For who saw greater miracles than Pharaoh 
 and the Pharisees? And who believed less than they? There- 
 fore signs and wpnders do not make a believer; they lead only in 
 so far to faith as God in the soul of man is operative and di'aws. 
 From this stand-point Zwingli investigated the significance of 
 
HIS STANDING-POINT. 245 
 
 the " sacraments," aud their reference to the work of salvation. 
 By sacrament, the Eomans understood an oath, and principally the 
 oath which soldiers swore when they joined the army, — ^the oath 
 to follow the standards. Latin ecclesiastical language employed 
 " sacrament" to designate a sign or symbol of a holy thing. Both 
 these significations Zwingli combined, so that, according to him, 
 " the sacraments were solemn symbolical assurances and promises, 
 or signs of obligation. This they are in a double sense. Firstly, 
 because God's gifts of mercy and grace which He has vouchsafed 
 to us in Christ are presentiated and assured to us by them. 
 Hence the name of Sacrament properly belongs to those holy 
 transactions alone which God has instituted, commanded, and 
 ordained in His Word, which itself is as firm and sure as the 
 oath of God can be. Secondly, " Sacrament" signifies, in respect 
 to us, a symbolical obligation upon oath, seeing that he who 
 receives the sacrament binds himself thereby to do that which is 
 demanded by it. He who has been marked by the holy rite of 
 baptism will hear what God says to him, wiU. learn His command- 
 ments, and Live according to them. Wherefore Paul derives from 
 baptism the strongest encouragements to crucify the flesh.^' Bap- 
 tism is thus that symbolical sign by which we are summoned, 
 and by which we bind ourselves to lead a new life, engaging to 
 shew gratitude to the grace of God, which has been done to us in 
 Christ, who has washed us by His blood, that we may not be again 
 stained with sin. Baptism does not regenerate or make us new 
 men, but it reminds us that we be such, or at least that we seek 
 to be such. In the Holy Supper of the Eucharist, we comme- 
 morate the propitiation made, when Christ, the God-man, was 
 .offered up in sacrifice in His human nature, and we thank God 
 for this great benefit, obliging ourselves to lead a Christian life with 
 love to the brethren. While in this holy transaction we praise the 
 gracious gifts of the divine goodness and mercy, these are not com- 
 municated to us except symbolically, the symbols and the preached 
 Word simply a/rmowncvng them to us. It is the Holy Spirit 
 alone which draws the mind to its own source of light and joy, 
 by which the souls that have pined in despair on account of their 
 sins are again quickened and renewed in youth. If the mere 
 tra/nsaction could do anything of this sort, then were Judas come 
 to himself again, and had not left the society of the other dis- 
 
246 HIS STANDING-POINT. 
 
 ciples to go away and betray his Master. Nay, the executioners 
 themselves who nailed Christ to the cross, or blasphemed Him 
 at the cross, had changed their disposition, and had not given 
 free course to theix wickedness, if the outward things had brought 
 faith or the pardon of sins. For they saw that thing by which 
 the sins of the world are expiated, not symboUcaUy expressed, 
 but transacted before their eyes. However nothing of the kind 
 followed. For only those repented whom the Spirit inwardly 
 illuminated to recognise Christ as their Saviour, and whom the 
 Father drew, that they might come to Him, and joyfully receive 
 Him. Outward things, therefore, can only oMnounce and signify. 
 Yet Christ condescends to caR the bread His body, which, to 
 speak with Augustine, is but the sign of His body; and men 
 enlightened by the Spirit of God follow their Master, attributing 
 to the holy Eucharist all that for which we give thanks in this 
 solemn act of praise. They call it the body of the Lord, because 
 we thereiu commemorate that Christ became man, and died for 
 us. They call it pardon of sina, because we therein give thanks 
 that Christ purged away our sins by His death. They call it a 
 nourishment of souls, because in it He is exalted who alone is 
 the undoubted pledge of our hope. Not as though the natural 
 bread were the natural body of Christ, or as if the same, eaten 
 and digested, took away sin, or as if the natural bread and the 
 natural body of Christ could nourish the soul, but because the 
 divine goodness has acted towards us in so gracious and familiar 
 a way as to present certain images and forms of inward spiritual 
 things to our outward senses, which signs it dignifies with the 
 same names as the things themselves which they signify, because 
 they are the symbolical signs and intimations of the more sub- 
 stantial realities. Hence the holy fathers taught that the sacra- 
 ments consisted of two things — of the visible and invisible, or of 
 the sensible and the spiritual • Not as though the bread in the 
 Supper were at once the sign and the thing, that is, the real 
 bread and the real body of Christ, but in the sense that the bread 
 is the sign, while the thing signified is, that Christ has given 
 himself for us, and been actually sacrificed, which is confessed 
 and believed by the partakers of the Supper. Of this reality the 
 bread is the symbol present to the senses, the reality itself, how- 
 ever, is present to the believing soul. Not as if the bread were 
 
THE ANABAPTISTS OF ZURICH. 2-17 
 
 natural and visible bread, and at the same time the natural and 
 invisible body of Christ, but the bread is natural and visible 
 bread; the thing, however, which nourishes the soul, namely, 
 that God has given His Son for us, is the invisible. Of this 
 invisible the bread is the visible sigh. Nor is it meant to be 
 asserted that the bread is natural bread perceptible to the senses, 
 and at the same time a spiritual power, but simply that the 
 bread, as it falls upon the senses, points to the spiritual renewal 
 of the soul which is effected through faith in Christ sacrificed for 
 us. The diAdnely illuminated men, then, who, after the example of 
 Christ their teacher, have employed very strong language on this 
 subject, have not done wrong in so doing, inasmuch as they per- 
 ceived that with no colours could they sufficiently magnify the 
 greatness of the benefits conveyed. But it is highly objectionable 
 in us to be so foolish and perverse as to attribute to a thing sym- 
 bolical that which belongs to God, and at once to transform the 
 Creator into the creature, and the creature into the Creator. 
 Christ has not instituted the sacraments that we may seek or place 
 our righteousness in them, but that we may be reminded and 
 stirred up by them to arrive at true righteousness of heart and faith ; 
 for the external signs do not make us righteous, but they point us 
 to justification by faith, and they awaken us to holiness of liEe." 
 Having thus surveyed the standing-point which Zwingli took 
 up upon this ground, we shall pass over to the contests which 
 he was compelled to wage from the position which he assimied, 
 and first of all, with the Anabaptists of Zurich. 
 
 2. The Anabaptists of Zurich. — Theie Ovektuees to 
 Zwingli, and Factious Spieit. 
 
 We have already, on various occasions, alluded to those men 
 of impetuous character who plunged into the conflict of the 
 Eeformation without^ the necessary consecration of heart and 
 soul, and whom Zwingli was oftentimes compelled to exhort to 
 moderation and temperance of spirit, lest the pure and healing 
 stream of the evangelical movement might be disturbed by their 
 passions, or made to overflow its banks. These men became, 
 after they had failed to shape the Eeformation according to their 
 
248 THE ANABAPTISTS OF ZURICH, 
 
 views, the founders and heads of the sect of the Anabtiptists* 
 Zwingli himself speaks of them in the following terms : " They 
 who have begun with us the strife about baptism have often 
 before this time entreated us to found a new church or commu- 
 nity, free from sin. These were fanatical men of turbulent dis- 
 positions, who had already formed the resolution to change the 
 freedom of the gospel into the license of the flesh. They came 
 to us ministers of the Word in Zurich, at first, indeed, in a 
 friendly, but yet in so importunate a spirit, that one could bode 
 mischief from their very mien and bearing. They thought it 
 would be impossible for us to prevent that, even among those 
 who boast themselves as belonging to the gospel, many should not 
 be found who would stand in the way of it. It could never be 
 expected that all should live as Christians. ' Now,' said they, 
 ■ according to the Acts of the Apostles, the faithful separated 
 themselves from the others, and formed a new church. The 
 same thing must be done now.' They begged us to publish 
 a declaration, that those who were disposed to follow Christ 
 should place themselves to us, in which case they promised us 
 that our host would far exceed that of the unbelievers. The 
 community of the saints would then choose their council or 
 senate from among themselves, as it was very apparent how 
 many disbelieving and impious persons were to be found in the 
 Council and in the present mixed Church. We returned them 
 the following answer: 'It is undoubtedly true that there ever 
 will be people who, though confessing Christ, lead ungodly lives, 
 
 ♦ An attempt has been made to prove that Anahaptism constructed itself out 
 of the various sects of the middle ages. In Zurich, however, this cannot be 
 shewn to have been the case. The principles of the Anabaptists might indeed 
 find a favoured soil where such seeds existed, but in general it is without doubt 
 true what Hase says in his work entitled " The New Prophets." " Anahaptism 
 has had its originators and heads in various regions ; but everywhere among the 
 people of German extraction, where the Reformation has reared its standard, we 
 meet with Anabaptists without any proveahle connection with each other, and 
 in so multiform shapes, that any individual origination is out of the question. We 
 can only conclude that they shot up simultaneously upon the common soil of 
 the Reformation. Anahaptism, a posthumous natural son of the Reformation, 
 bearing a full family-likeness to the first-bom son. Protestantism, fighting with 
 the latter against the Papacy, had of necessity to faU out and part company with 
 it. Rebaptisation was the solemn rite by which it formed itself into an exclu- 
 sive sect. Tet rebaptisation was but the outward badge of Anahaptism falling 
 on the eyej like the cup of the Hussites." 
 
THEIR OVEBTUEES AND FACTIOUS SPIEIT. 249 
 
 and make a mock of virtue, nay, of godliness itseE If such, 
 however, perseveringly give themselves out as Christians, and 
 their practice is such as to permit of their being suffered by the 
 Church, they yet belong to our party, according to the principle 
 which Christ himself laid down at the planting of the gospel, a 
 time which has so much resemblance to our own, ' He who is 
 not against us is with us.' He has also commanded that we 
 should let the tares grow with the wheat till the harvest. Thereby 
 we have the confident hope that of those who are disinclined to 
 godliness several will daily change and amend their lives. But 
 even although this result should not take place, it is still possible 
 for even the most pious to live among the godless. The example 
 of the apostles is not applicable here, since they from whom 
 they separated did not confess Christ. Nor would the greater 
 part of these join in a separation from us, even were they more 
 intimately bound to Christ than we ourselves. In the continual 
 a d m ini stration of the Word, we shall proclaim to all that which 
 it is necessary for them to know, if they will not trifle with their 
 own salvation, and we doubt not the number of believers will 
 continue to increase steadily by the continual exhibition of the 
 Word, and not by the tearing asunder of the body into many 
 parts.'" 
 
 To the leaders of this extravagant party belonged Conrad 
 Grebel, a descendant of one of the most honourable families of 
 Zurich, who had formerly enjoyed the friendship of his brother- 
 in-law Vadian, and through him of Zwingli also. He had 
 studied at Vienna and Paris, and had made acquirements in 
 learning by no means common, especially in the Greek language ; 
 but he had, by a life of dissipation and debauchery,* squandered 
 away his patrimonial means, and so ruined his health, and so 
 sullied his mind, that as Hottinger says, " he resembled a mirror, 
 that, stained by an impure breath, takes up and reflects even the 
 most beautiful image in deformed and distorted shapes." To 
 him was united Felix Manz, the natural son of a prebend and a 
 Zurich maiden. He also had received a learned education, and 
 
 * We have learned above in the Sixth Section the melancholy end of his 
 father on the scaifold. The money which the hoary-headed father drew from 
 foreign princes, in violation of his oath and duty, the son dissipated in rioting 
 and debauchery. 
 
250 THE ANABAPTISTS OP ZURICH. 
 
 had made considerable proficiency in Hebrew. Botb had at first 
 expected of Zwingli that, as '' Eector of the Schools," he would 
 have caused some of the prebends to be suppressed, and appointed 
 and paid them out of the funds as teachers, Grebel of the Greek, 
 and Manz of the Hebrew languages. As, however, this could 
 not be done without an infringement of the rights guaranteed 
 and obligations already entered into, and Zwingli, besides, reposed 
 no great confidence in them, they sought to satisfy their ambition, 
 and accomplish their interested objects in another way. To the 
 above two, there united themselves some men from the people, 
 and some country priests, who, without the unction of the Spirit, 
 and more from hatred to the papacy than love to the Lord, sided 
 with the Eeformers, and who, in the sequel, gave themselves up 
 to their impure zeal and fanaticism, instead of subjecting them- 
 selves to the discipline of the Word of God, and the guidance of 
 His Spirit. These were joined by William EoeubH,* parson at 
 Wytikon, John Broedlein at ZoUikon, Simon Stumpf at Hoengg, 
 and a run-away monk Blaurock, called George of the house of 
 Jacob, of Chur. At first they had no fixed party-standard to 
 call together the new community, and bring their fanaticism into 
 action. The waves of the peasant insurrection, which raged at 
 this time in Germany, threw the notorious Thomas Muenzer,"f- on 
 the Swiss frontier. In Waldshut, this fanatic made the acquaint- 
 ance of the parson of the place, Balthazar Hubmeier, whom he 
 entirely gained over to his objects. On Muenzer's approaching 
 Switzerland, and holding intercourse with the Zurichers of like 
 opinions, they soon discovered a badge of distiuction for the new 
 community: it was rebaptism. They began to depreciate infant 
 baptism, and to represent it as highly objectionable.;]: " It sur- 
 
 •■ 'WiUiam Boeubli was a native of Kotenbiirg on the Nekar; parson at Basle 
 he caused the Bible, instead of the relics, to be carried in a procession, and, in 
 consequence, was obliged to flee and came to Zurich, where, as we hare seen 
 above, he made- an ostentatious marriage, as the first ecclesiastic who renounced 
 celibacy. Zwingli passes this judgment upon him ; he was bold and loquacious, 
 but had little understanding. 
 
 t Thomas Muenzer, bom at Stolberg on the Harz, had studied at Wittenberg, 
 and was afterwards preacher at Zwickau, where he, with like-minded friends, 
 the so-called "Zwickau prophets," founded the sect of the Anabaptists. 
 Banished from Saxony, he came over to Suabia, where, chiefly by the sermons of 
 these fanatics, the peasant insurrection was excited to Waldshut. 
 
 } They called it a " dog's bath," " an invention of the devil," or when they 
 woiild use milder language, " an invention of the pope and anti-Christ." 
 
THEIR OVERTURES AND FACTIOUS SPIRIT. 251 
 
 prised us much," says Zwingli, " that they were so zealous against 
 it, but at length we observed that it was for the reason that, on 
 infant baptism being rejected, they might have a pretext for 
 organising their church under the banner of rebaptisation." 
 Zwingli held a disputation with them upon this controversial 
 point, and endeavoured to instruct them. With this view, he 
 arranged a meeting with them once a-week, when he hoped that 
 arguments and counter-arguments might open their minds to 
 better opinions, (Zwingli himself candidly confesses, that he held 
 for a time the opinion, that it would be better not to baptise the 
 young till they had reached a convenient age.) But instruction 
 was not the object of these fanatics ; the abolition of infant bap- 
 tism, and the introduction of anabaptism, were only to serve as 
 pretexts for bringing a spirit of insurrection to bear on all order 
 in Church and State. With the change in baptism, the Holy 
 Supper was to be degraded to an evening revel, which they held 
 under the name of " setting up the table of the Lord"* in particu- 
 lar houses at nocturnal meetings. At the same time, they rejected 
 all regularly ordained preachers, maintaining that no paid clergy- 
 man can preach the truth. In the state, they recognised no 
 authority. " No Christian," they said, " can assume a civil ofhce, 
 or carry the sword, or be judge ; none is obligated to pay rents, 
 tithes, or dues ; all chattels are common to all." Community in 
 wives was also not only taught by them, but practised, as appears 
 from the words of Zwingli : " Into whatever house they enter, they 
 lay snares for the fidelity of wives, and innocence of daughters, 
 and cause them to fall; for in their spotless church fornication, 
 adultery, perjury, theft, deceit, and whatever more wicked can 
 be conceived, happens far more frequently than among those 
 whom they decry with the opprobrious epithets of the 'flesh' and 
 ' devil' I speak the truth, and could, if necessary, prove what 
 I say. But in whatever crime or vice they are taken, their 
 defence is ever the same : I have not sinned, I am no more in 
 the flesh but in the Spirit; I am dead to the flesh and the flesh is 
 dead to me." 
 
 Zwingli recognised, at an early period, the great danger 
 
 * Such a " Supper" Hutmeier celebrated at Waldshut, a military captain by 
 bis side, surrounded by shouting and drinking soldiers, with the resonance, now 
 of a light song, now of a pious psalm in wild confusion. 
 
252 THE ANABAPTISTS OF ZtJEICH. 
 
 threatened by these dangerous and delusive doctrine's ; and with 
 a wise circumspection, he adopted measures fitted to avert it. 
 "We have seen above how, in order to preserve the change in 
 public worship and its ordinances from the evil influence of such 
 people, he gave over the decision in regard to any alteration to 
 be made to the Council, with consent of the congregation. The 
 legal civU authority, in its relation to the Christian moral, he 
 considered in his sermon, " On Divine and Human Justice." 
 " The Scriptural Character of the Christian Minister," in a 
 treatise. But with a true appreciation at once of their 
 fanaticism, and of the principles of Christian charity, he dis- 
 suaded against any violent interference with them, although 
 they nevertheless proceeded to the wildest excesses. In Zol- 
 liken, Broedlein and KoeubK excited the people, on the Pente- 
 cost of 1524, to break in pieces the images, the altars, and even 
 the baptismal font. This occurrence was the more vexatious 
 to Zwingli and his friends, as it took place when they were 
 seriously deliberating about removing the images in a legal way, 
 and changing the mass into the celebration of the Supper. The 
 Council interfered against this act of violence, imprisoning 
 Eoeubli, and banishiag Broedlein from the town and territory of 
 Zurich. Broedlein's friends gave him a feast at parting, at which 
 Manz, Blaurock, and one after the other, a number of untavited 
 guests appeared, many of whom, heated by wine and exciting 
 speeches, desired to receive the "baptism of the regenerate." 
 Manz and Blaurock consented. The rebaptised, baptised again 
 others, and so the fanaticism spread. Upon the following Sun- 
 day, as another preacher entered the pulpit at Zolliken, Blaurock 
 stood up in the centre of the church, and commanded him to 
 keep silence : " I am," said he, " the door, by me if any man 
 enter in he shall find pasture ; whoever goes in otherwise is a 
 thief and a robber; as it is written: 'I am the good shepherd; 
 the good shepherd giveth His life for the sheep,' so I give my 
 body and my life for my sheep, my body to the dungeon, and my 
 life to the sword, or the fire, or the rack, wherever, like the 
 blood of Christ on the cross, it may be drained from the flesh. 
 I am the beginner of baptism and the bread of the Lord, along 
 with my elect brethren in Christ, Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz. 
 Therefore the pope with his followers is a thief and a murderer. 
 
THEIE OVERTURES AKD FACTIOUS SPIRIT. 253 
 
 Zwingli and Leo Jud, too, witli their followers, are thieves and 
 murderers until they recognise this." So ran the confused creed 
 of this fanatic. It was with difficulty that the under-governor 
 maintained the peace, so as to enable the new parson to deliver 
 his sermon. Meantime, the spirit of fanaticism blazed up still 
 higher. Bands of these people carrying lighted torches pro- 
 menaded the streets of Zurich, shouting dark prophetic sayings, 
 and held from time to time nocturnal assemblies, "to set up the 
 table of the Lord." Whole crowds of deceivers and deceived 
 clothed themselves in sackcloth, bestrewed themselves with ashes, 
 and girding themselves with ropes, cried on the public streets : 
 " Woe, woe to thee, Zurich ; in forty days thou shalt be destroyed." 
 The Council ordered the ringleaders of the sect to appear at the 
 Town-Hall, that they might there defend their doctrine against 
 Zwingli in open disputation, or be instructed by him in a better, 
 and turned from their error. They made excuses ; " they had 
 already spoken enough with Zwingli upon their doctrine, and 
 might not answer him any more, especially as in consequence of 
 his long speeches, they could never come to it." They were 
 obliged at length to yield obedience. Accordingly, on the 17th 
 January 1525, the Disputation with the Anabaptists took place, 
 in which Zwingli gained a complete victory over them, all their 
 arguments being thoroughly answered. The Council then pub- 
 lished the following ordinance: "An error having arisen in 
 respect of baptism, to the effect that infants should not be bap- 
 tised until they arrive at years of discretion, and knowledge of 
 the faith; and some having, in consequence thereof, left their 
 children unbaptised, we have ordered a disputation upon this 
 matter on the grounds of Holy Scripture ; and have ordained that 
 without regard to this error, children must be baptised as soon 
 as bom ; and those who have left their children unbaptised, must 
 have this rite performed within the next eight days. Whoever 
 will not conform to this decree, shall, with wife and child, with 
 purse and property, quit the town of our lords, their jurisdiction 
 and territory, or take what farther may befall him."* The 
 
 * Hettinger, in his " History of the Confederates during the Church-schism," 
 2d Section, page 34, has incorrectly given the contents of this decree of the 
 Council, it heing, according to him, to the effect that all children are hence- 
 forward to be baptised before their eighth year, on the penalty of banishment. 
 
254) PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 expatriation wliicli, in conformity witli this decree, was pronounced 
 on some of the party, was not in accordance with Zwingli's 
 sentiments, for he would rather have had the fanatical spirit die 
 out under his powerful influence at Zurich, than, by the dispersion 
 of its authors, have caused it to be more widely disseminated. 
 Those left behind in Zurich still continuing their irregular pro- ' 
 ceedings, a number of them were inclosed in the Augustine 
 cloister, that they might be brought from their errors by ZwingH 
 and his colleagues, who frequently visited them for this purpose. 
 But this measure was equally unavailing. The outlawed carried 
 their doctrines farther and farther, and the imprisoned persisted 
 obstinately in their delusion. Nay, they even gave out that 
 Zwingli, in his conversations with them, had been refuted and 
 put to silence. Grebel, indeed, had the audacity to write to 
 Vadian: "Zwingli has conferred with the greatest simpleton 
 amongst us, and yet he, with the help of God and His truth, has 
 put him to shame, with all his wisdom." In these circumstances, 
 some of the Anabaptists themselves desired a new public dis- 
 putation with Zwingli, and in their petition to the government 
 to this effect they gave the assurance, that " whatever is then 
 discovered to be in accordance to the Word of God, we shall 
 stake our persons and lives, our honour and property upon. As, 
 however, we have not received from God the gift so to speak 
 with Zwingli that he may thoroughly understand us, or we fully 
 express ourselves, we beg you will permit certain who have been 
 banished for this matter to appear with a safe-conduct at said 
 Conference, and thereafter to return to their present place of 
 residence free of danger." 
 
 3. Public Disputation with the Anabaptists, 
 6th November 1525, 
 
 Zwingli's Opinions on Baptism, Rebaptisation, and Infant 
 Baptism. 
 
 Zwingli supporting the petition of the Anabaptists, a Dispu- 
 tation was fixed for the 6th November 1525, and a free safe- 
 conduct secured to all who were wUling to attend the same, and 
 
PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 255 
 
 defend their views and opinions. As rulers of the Conference, 
 there were appointed: Dr. Vadian of St. Gall, Dr. Sebastian 
 Hofmeister of Schaffhausen, Comthur Schmidt of Kuessnacht, 
 and Abbot Joner of Kappel. Zwingli, along with Leo Jud and 
 Kasper Grossmann, undertook to speak against the Anabaptists, 
 who assembled in the town in great numbers from all the com- 
 munes of the canton, under their chief men, Grebel, Manz, and 
 Blaurock. The town-hall was akeady filled with the multitude 
 of auditors and participators in the proceedings, when a fresh 
 crowd thronged in with the exclamation, "O, Zion! 0, Zion! 
 rejoice Jerusalem!" which made it necessary to adjourn the 
 meeting to the Great Minster Church. 
 
 Here Zwingli developed, with lucidness and dignity, his views 
 of baptism, and the propriety of infant baptism, and rebutted 
 with force the objections of his opponents. " In respect of bap- 
 tism,"* he said, "nearly all the teachers in the Church have 
 erred since the days of the apostles, by attributing to the water a 
 significance which it has not, and which the holy apostles have 
 not taught; and thus they have misapprehended the words of 
 Christ, John iii. 5, when he speaks of water and the Spirit. 
 Baptism has four different senses in Holy Scripture. Firstly, it 
 signifies the dipping in water, whereby alone we are designated 
 or consecrated to a Christian life.-i" Secondly, it is taken to repre- 
 sent the inward illwrnination and attraction when man acknow- 
 ledges and depends on God, and this is the baptism of the Spirit. X 
 Thirdly, it signifies the outward doctrine of salvation, and the 
 outward washing' with water. § Fourthly, and finally, it stands for 
 the outward washing and the inward faith at once, \\ that is, the 
 designation and obligation to lead a Christian life, and for the 
 assurance of salvation in its whole extent. Now as some pay no 
 
 * According to Bullinger's testimony, who was present both at this and the 
 former Disputation with the Anabaptists, Zwingli answered their objections in 
 the same way, and with the same arguments as he employs in his afterwards 
 published writing, "Baptism, Anabaptism, and Infant Baptism;" and as he 
 himself says as much, we have thought proper to take from it what concerns 
 this section, 
 
 t Baptism by water, or ordinary baptism. 
 
 t The baptism of the Spirit, or inward baptism. 
 
 § The baptism of water and doctrine at once. 
 
 II The baptism of water and the Spirit at once. 
 
256 PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 regard to these distinctions made by Scripture, they run into 
 strange errors, and judge of things which they do not understand. 
 We shall establish each of the above significations by passages 
 from Holy Scripture. In John iii. 23 it is said: 'And John 
 was baptising ia ^non, near to Salim, because there was much 
 water there: and they came and were baptised.' Here it is 
 clear that water-baptism alone is spoken of, it being said there 
 was much water there, which could alone serve a water-baptism. 
 Of the baptism of the spirit, Christ speaks in the Acts of the 
 Apostles, chap. i. 5 : ' For John truly baptised with water; but ye 
 shall be baptised with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.' 
 Here Christ clearly marks the distinction between the two bap- 
 tisms. John baptised only with water, and the outward doctrine. 
 Nay, the apostles, and John, and all that ever were, have no other 
 baptism to administer but that of water and of doctrine; for 
 the baptism of the Spirit no man can give, but God alone. 
 Therefore Christ says, immediately thereon, 'but ye shall be 
 baptised with the Holy Ghost' This signifies the inward teach- 
 ing, drawing towards and fastening on God. Christ, however,' 
 speaks not of such in the sense as if He rejected the baptism 
 of John ; for the external baptism of John, of Christ, and His 
 disciples is one and the same baptism, and what Christ says of 
 the baptism of John holds good of all human baptism. Peter, 
 Paul, James baptised only with water, or with outward doctrine, 
 for with the Spirit they could not baptise, God alone baptising 
 with the Spirit, how, whom, and when He wUL In regard to 
 the third sense, the doctrine of the apostles and their baptism 
 shews that 'baptism' is taken for the outward doctrine and 
 baptism by water at once, as John himself says, John i. 16, 'I 
 baptise with water.' Now, John did not baptise only with water, 
 for he united instruction with it. As, however, his doctrine, as 
 well as that of the apostles was but external, and of no avail to 
 influence the heart, it was, in as far as they were concerned, as 
 much an outward thing as the dipping in water, or the sprinkling 
 with it. Therefore he himself says, 'I baptise with water,' 
 although he taught not less than baptised, as he speaks after- 
 wards, ' I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.' But 
 we find 'baptism" taken for doctrine in John iii 22: 'After 
 these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of Judea: 
 
ZWINGLl'S OPINIONS ON BAPTISM. 257 
 
 and thei-e he tarried with them, and baptised." How ? Did Christ 
 baptise? Yet it is immediately afterwards added, John iv. 2 : 
 " Though Jesus himself baptised not, but his disciples." It is 
 imdeniable that baptism here, in the first instance, means teach- 
 ing. For Jesus taught, which was specially His office, while 
 His disciples administered the baptism by water. How Christ, 
 however, drew the heart thereby, He himself alone knows. The 
 baptism of John is likewise tsiken for doctrine in Matt. xxi. 25, 
 and Acts xix. 1. We said, fourthly, that baptism signifies the 
 Christian's order of salvation, that is, the inward faith which 
 saves, as it is said in 1 Peter iii. 21 : ' Baptism doth only now 
 save us.' Now baptism does not save us, neither that of doctrine 
 nor of water, hvX faith. But that one might receive water-baptism, 
 unaccompanied by faith, appears from John vi 66. No one of 
 those disciples were unbaptised. For we hear, John iv. 1, ' He 
 made and baptised disciples;' but He reproaches them, vi. 56, 
 ' Ye also have seen me, and believe not,' and in the same chapter, 
 ver. 24, ' But there are some of you that believe not.' Yet He 
 baptised them. Nor was Judas believing, as it is written, ver. 
 70, 'Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?' 
 It is evident from what has been said that Judas was baptised, 
 for Christ made many more disciples than John, and baptised 
 also through his disciples. They cannot, however, have been 
 unbaptised, seeing they baptised others. Thus water-baptism 
 has been administered to those who did not believe, and many 
 have received it who believed not. We find here and there 
 examples of the baptism by the Spirit's being bestowed before the 
 baptism by water. Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, Gamaliel, 
 were believers, but secretly ; hence they were without doubt not 
 baptised, else they had not been able to conceal it, for baptism 
 is granted and received for the sake of the other fellow-believers, 
 and not for his sake who receives it, as though it effected some- 
 thing by him. In the Acts of the Apostles, chap. x. 44, Cornelius 
 and all who heard Peter received the Holy Ghost before they were 
 baptised. Thus water-baptism and Spirit-baptism are not neces- 
 sarily united. Nay, throughout Holy Scripture we find more 
 frequently that the Spirit was granted after baptism than before 
 or during it. But we shall quote a plainer example, which 
 irrefragably demonstrates that there, where water-baptism has not 
 
258 ZWINULI'S OPINIONS ON BAPTISM. 
 
 reached, faith has been existent, and salvation obtained. The thief 
 on the cross believed, and was the same day with Christ in para- 
 dise, and yet he had not been baptised with any outward baptism. 
 From thence we learn that baptism is an outward ceremonial sign, 
 to which salvation is not bound, as we have shewn in the example 
 of the thief and others ; also that they are not necessarily con- 
 current with one another, nor must of necessity be united. We 
 shall here more closely consider the baptism of the Holy Ghost. 
 It was an outward and an inward baptism at the same time. The 
 latter is taught by John, in Matt. iii. 11, and Luke iii. 16: 'I 
 indeed baptise you with water unto repentance: but He that 
 cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy 
 to bear : He shaU baptise you with the Holy Ghost and with 
 fire.' Here, in the first place, we learn, that although John says, 
 ' I baptise you with water,' he will by no means be understood 
 to say that his office consisted alone in baptising with water. For 
 could he have effected by water alone the knowledge of sin and 
 repentance? One must be a very long time bathed iu water ere 
 he come to the knowledge of himself and repentance, or seek 
 Christ as His Eedeemer and Comforter. Therefore John will say 
 nothing else here but, ' I am a weak vessel, which can only bring 
 the doctrine outwardly to you, and give you the outward baptism 
 of water, and am not so strong as to soften the heart; but He that 
 cometh after me is much stronger than I : He is able to pierce 
 into the heart. He will baptise you inwardly with His Spirit, 
 inflame you with His love, or endow you with tongues,' &c. &c. 
 The baptism of the Spirit is nothing else than that of which 
 Christ speaks, John vi 44 : ' ISo man can come to me except the 
 Father- draw him.' And what the drawing signifies, He imme- 
 diately shews in the words, ' Every man that hath heard and 
 learnt of the Father cometh unto me.' Thus the inward baptism 
 of the Spirit is nothing else than the teaching which God causes 
 our hearts to experience, and the drawing whereby they are com- 
 forted and assured ia Christ. This baptism none can administer 
 but God, nor can any be saved without it; but a man can be 
 saved without doctrinal baptism, and without water baptism. 
 Proof : the thief on the cross was neither outwardly taught 
 nor baptised, and yet was saved. It thus follows, that faith is 
 the alone necessary condition which saves us who hear the Word 
 
ZWINGLI'S OPINIONS ON BAPTISM. 259 
 
 preached; and tliis no man plants within us but God alone. The 
 other baptism of the Spirit is an outward sign, namely, the 
 miracle of tongues. This sign is not given for the sake of those 
 who speak with foreign tongues or languages, for they have been 
 already inwardly assured of salvation; but for the sake of the 
 unbelievers. What unbelievers? Those to whom the gift of 
 tongues was communicated? No, for they were believing. But 
 they were granted to the believing, as a sign and a wonder to the 
 unbelieving. This outward baptism of tongues the Lord himself 
 hath promised. Acts L 5 : 'Ye shall be baptised with the Holy 
 Ghost not many days hence.' Now they had already become 
 believers, but the fire of love was increased, and the tongues 
 granted, when the words of Christ were fulfilled at Pentecost. 
 This sign is not necessary to salvation, for it was vouchsafed to 
 few, and but rarely, (Acts ii. 3 ; x. 46 ; xvi 31) ; it was a miracle, 
 and was done, like other miracles, when Ood willed. Thus, by 
 the mouth of the Son of God himself, the miracle of tongues is 
 called a baptism. As now this sign sometimes took place before, 
 sometimes after, wapter-baptism, in all fairness of reasoning 
 doctrinal baptism may be likewise communicated before or after 
 water-baptism." 
 
 Here the Anabaptists objected: Christ says. Matt, xxviii. 19, 
 20, " Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptising them in the 
 name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," &c. 
 It is plain from this passage that mankind are to be taught before 
 they be baptised. 
 
 Zwingli: Through these words ye very far deceive yourselves 
 and others, looking wholly to the succession of the words, and 
 obstinately crying : Christ says, " Teach and baptise them." In 
 the first place, look at the words which immediately follow, 
 " Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have com- 
 manded you ;" for from thence we learn that baptism is a com- 
 mencing sign, and that then only after it has been communicated 
 is the teaching of all the things which Christ commanded to take 
 place. As, however, you lay so great weight on the Uteml succes- 
 sion of the words, " Teach and baptise them," I, for my part, am 
 willing, for your sakes, to stand to it. "Teach all nations and 
 baptise them," say ye, and I say, " Baptise them in the name of 
 the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost ; teaching 
 
260 PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you." 
 Now, I say, which of us, you or I, gives the plainer word in 
 respect of teaching. You have, indeed, " Teach all nations, and 
 baptise them ;" on the other hand, ye have not what should be 
 taught. We express it plainly, " Teach them to observe all things 
 whatsoever I have commanded you;" and this stands after bap- 
 tise. Moreover, the passage in the Greek runs very differently 
 from the way in which you interpret it ; for what we translate 
 by "teach" is, in the original, " Make to disciples" (fiahrnvaaTs), 
 or, " Bring to me as to a master." Accordingly, the passage in 
 the Greek text runs exactly so, " Go ye, make all nations my dis- 
 ciples, baptising them in the name of the Father, of the Son, 
 and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things what- 
 soever I have commanded you." See now if the literal succession 
 of the words does not much rather speak for us, although I do 
 not so obstiaately cleave to the letter, for the letter of the gospel 
 may not less kill than the letter of the law. I know, however, in 
 the faith which I have to God, and, according to my understand- 
 ing, small though it be, of the Word of God, that this is the right 
 true natural sense ; for Christ previously said, at the calling of 
 His disciples, "He would make them fishers of men." What 
 does that, however, signify, but the bringing men to Christ ? But 
 I shall not contend farther in respect to the position and sense of 
 the words. I would only shew you that is in vain that with 
 these you undertake to do away infant -baptism. For, even 
 although the words were interpreted in your favour, they have no 
 bearing at all on the baptism of children, so that they may not 
 be baptised before the doctrinal baptism. The Jews and heathens 
 were to be made disciples of Christ by doctrinal and water-bap- 
 tism, but the children of believers belong already to the Church 
 of Christ, as also the children of the Israelites belonged to the 
 people of God. 
 
 Anabaptists : If these words have no reference to children, then 
 they ought not to be baptised, because Christ has here instituted 
 baptism. 
 
 Zwingli : Here you err again, because you do not know the 
 Scripture, nor rightly understand it. (Matt. xxii. 29.) Baptism 
 was not here first instituted ; for Christ baptised a long time pre- 
 vious to this through His disciples, and He himself was baptised 
 
PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 261 
 
 before this ; consequently, it must have been instituted at some 
 earlier period. Wherefore, observe, baptism was instituted by God 
 through John, who, for this reason, is called " The Baptist." '' Be- 
 hold," says God, through Malachi, chap. iii. 1, " I -will send my 
 messenger, and he will prepare the way before me." This messen- 
 ger, or angel, is no one else but St. John the Baptist. (Mark i. 4.) 
 John, however, when he came, baptised, as appears plainly from 
 all the gospels. But if he came to make plain and prepare the 
 way of the Lord, and baptised, then it is evident he has begun 
 the baptism of the Lord. 
 
 Anabaptists : The baptism of John and the baptism of Christ 
 were not one and the same, but they are different baptisms ; for 
 the baptism of John was but a prefiguration or foreshadowing 
 of the baptism of Christ. 
 
 Zwingli : I know that you have not only the papists but all 
 the divines, too, for your assertion. But with the strong, invin- 
 cible "Word of God which is on my side, I trust to shew that ye 
 are all in the wrong. That the baptism of John and the outward 
 baptism of Christ were the same the already quoted passage from 
 the prophet Malachi shews. For if John had another baptism 
 than that of Christ he had not begun to prepare the way of the 
 Lord, but he had made a way of his own, which, however, was 
 contrary to the way of the prophets. These have alone led to 
 God and His work ; of themselves have they begun nothing new 
 or different. When, however, ye maintain that the baptism of 
 John is but a type of that of Christ, ye do violence and injustice 
 both to Christ and Joha To Christ, because you regard not 
 what He says, Luke xvi. 16: "The law and the prophets were 
 vMil John ; since that time the kingdom of God is preached," 
 &c. Now, if the law and the proj)hets continued tiU John, and 
 since that the kingdom of God is preached, then John with his 
 baptism could have been no type or shadow ; for it is clear from 
 the statement of Christ that John preached the kingdom of God, 
 ie., the gospel ; consequently, he began the baptism of Christ as 
 he began the doctrine of his kingdom. For how can it be said 
 that his doctrine was the light and his baptism only a shadow 
 of a future baptism ? To John you do violence and wrong in 
 making him a shadow, and counting him to the Old Testament, 
 he being, according to the order of God, a preacher of the gospel, 
 
262 PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 preaching and revealing it so plainly as no prophet ever did, and 
 he being the first who pointed to the Lord Jesus Christ when the 
 time of His revelation came, as it is said in John i. 29-31 : " The 
 next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith. Behold 
 the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. This 
 is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man which is preferred 
 before me : for he was before me. And I knew him not : but 
 that he should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come 
 baptising with water." From these verses we learn plainly that 
 John came to reveal Christ to the people of Israel ; therefore he 
 was no shadow-maker, but a revealer of the Redeemer of the 
 whole world. 
 
 Anabaptist : John himself calls his baptism only a water- 
 baptism; but the baptism of Christ is not a water-baptism alone, 
 consequently the baptism of John and of Christ cannot be the same. 
 
 Zvnngli ; Had you opened your ears wide enough you had long 
 heard the answer to this objection. Did John only baptise with 
 water? No. Then know and understand that when here he 
 speaks of baptising with water he does not mean the dipping in 
 or besprinkling with water alone, but he means also his doctrine ; 
 for; by a water-baptism, he could not teach them to recognise 
 Christ. Therefore he specially understands here, when he speaks 
 of baptising with water, the doctrine ; this he so administered, 
 that he taught them to recognise Christ, and to place their hopes 
 upon Him. 
 
 Anabaptist : It is impossible that the baptism of John and the 
 baptism of Christ are one and the same ; for John could not bap- 
 tise with the Holy Ghost, as He himself says. Matt. iii. 11, But 
 Christ baptised with the Holy Ghost. 
 
 Zwingli : Be grateful that, like the fox, you yourselves bring 
 the skin. Tell me, when the disciples baptised, or when one now 
 baptises, with what does one baptise ? With the Holy Ghost, or 
 with water ? You must acknowledge that the disciples and all 
 men administer nothing but the outward baptism of doctrine and 
 of water, and that they are not able to baptise inwardly with the 
 Holy Spirit. Tell me now if the baptism of the disciples were the 
 baptism of Christ, for ye will have it that your baptism is that of 
 Christ ? But if John administered the baptism of water and of 
 doctrine just as the disciples did, how much more is the baptism 
 
PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 2G3 
 
 of John nothing but the baptism of Christ, he having been, 
 accordiag to the order of God, a founder of the doctrine and of 
 the baptism ? The baptism, however, which Christ received from 
 John himself proves, ia the clearest manner possible, that John's 
 and His own baptism were the same. Christ has been baptised 
 as a pattern and example for us, you must admit. Now, if Christ 
 was baptised with the baptism of John as an example for us, we 
 likewise must be baptised with John's baptism. The baptism, 
 however, was not John's but Christ's, although the ignorant then, 
 as in our own day, called it the baptism of John, although it was 
 just as little his as the baptism performed by Paul, or Cleophas, 
 or Apollos, were theirs, and which Paul repudiated as his, and 
 would by no means suffer to be called his, I Cor. L 12. If, then, 
 Christ, together with the apostles, were baptised unto John's 
 baptism, there cannot, ia truth, be more than one baptism, and if 
 we be baptised according to the example of Christ, then we must 
 of necessity be baptised by John's baptism. There is but owe 
 baptism, which John began, and which continues to the present 
 day. And if the baptism with which John baptised should not 
 last to all eternity, then neither Christ nor the apostles were 
 baptised with the right baptism. Away, then, with such futile 
 objections. Paul exhorts the Ephesians, chap. iv. 5, 6, with great 
 propriety, to unity, for they are, " One Lord, one faith, one bap- 
 tism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through 
 all, and in you all" Annihilate this passage of Paul's, if you 
 can, ye baptism-splitters. If John has taught one Spirit, gathered 
 into one body, taught only one hope in Christ Jesus, only one 
 faith, only one God and Father, as Christ and the apostles, why 
 allow not his baptism to be one baptism with the one baptism of 
 Christ. God give you understanding ! 
 
 Anabaptist : The doctrine of John and that of Christ and the 
 apostles were different, for John preached the law and repentance, 
 Christ and the apostles, on the other hand, preached the gospel. 
 The doctrine thus being different, the baptism of John was 
 different from the baptism of Christ. 
 
 Zwingli: In substance John preached the gospel, as Christ 
 himself and the apostles; although I know well that Christ's 
 preaching was more powerful, more beautiful and stronger than 
 that of any other man, Matt, vii. 29. Mark describes the com- 
 
264 PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 mencement of Christ's preaching in the following words, Mark i. 
 14, 15: "Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came 
 into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and 
 saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand : 
 repent ye, and believe the gospel." But John also made the 
 same announcement, as Matthew relates in the following words, 
 chap. iii. 1, 2 : "In those days came John the Baptist, preaching 
 in the wilderness of Judea, and saying, Eepent ye : for the king- 
 dom of heaven is at hand." Here it must be well observed that 
 the gospel has two parts : "the one consisting of repentance and 
 amendment of life ; the other of confidence to God through the 
 Lord Jesus Christ. So Christ himself taught; Luke xxiv. 47: 
 "And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached 
 in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem." The 
 gospel indeed is sometimes designated by the word " repentance" 
 alone, as in Acts xi. 18 : "Then hath God also to the Gentiles 
 granted repentance unto life." Christ, however, can alone raise 
 the Spirit to life, for although we feel repentance, yet we have 
 not peace of soul ; but when we believe on Christ, then it is we 
 first experience joy and life. Sometimes Scripture terms the 
 pardon of sin the gospel, as in Acts x. 43 : " To him give all the 
 prophets witness, that through his name whosoever believeth in 
 him shall receive remission of sins." Here the gospel is called 
 the remission of sins. We have thus found that John preached 
 the gospel, that is, the one part of it, faithfully, therefore ye ought 
 not to exclude htm from the list of Evangelists or preachers of 
 the gospel, since, where it is said repentance is preached, the 
 whole gospel is meant, as has been proved above. So Mark says, 
 chap, vi 12 : " And they went out and preached that men should 
 repent." But even although we leave this distinction out of 
 sight, yet we can prove that John preached the gospel as clearly 
 as any apostle. In John i 29, he says, " Behold the Lamb of 
 God, which taketh away the sin of "the world." Here is the 
 whole sum of the gospd, in so far as it means the grace of God 
 by which Christ the Lamb of God taketh away the sins of the 
 world. Shortly after, he says, " And I saw and bare record that 
 this is the Son of God." This is, however, the very confession 
 of faith on which Christ builds his Church, Matt, xvi 16-18. 
 Christ teaches ofttimes through parables that He is the true Son 
 
PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 265 
 
 of God, and that he who believes on Him has eternal life, as in 
 John iv., vi., vii., &c. Because it is expressed in parables, is it less 
 the message of the grace of God? I think not. If I shew, then, 
 that John preached the very same doctrine, it is, I hope, proved 
 that John, not less than the other messengers, preached the 
 gospel. Go and read what he says to his disciples and the Jews, 
 who came to Him about purification, concerning Christ, John iii. 
 27-36, especially the two last verses : " The Father loveth the 
 Son, and hath given all things into his hand. He that believeth 
 on the Son hath everlasting life : and he that believeth not the 
 Son shall not see life ; but the wrath of God abideth on him." 
 What apostle has called Christ Jesus more plainly the Son of 
 God into whose hands the Father hath committed all things? 
 Who has, in a clearer and shorter form, expressed the whole sum 
 of the gospel than the God-commissioned baptiser has done in 
 this address? What is this: " Go ye into all the world and 
 preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is 
 baptised shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be 
 damned?" Mark xvi 15, 16. Is it not even the same? Paul 
 says. Acts xix. 4 : " John verily baptised with the baptism of 
 repentance, saying unto the people, that they shotdd believe on 
 biTTi which shotdd come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus." 
 Is it not the gospel when sinners are taught to repent and amend 
 their ways ? As he, however, who feels repentance would, without 
 hope, have fallen into despair; God sent His Son to be our com- 
 fort, and the sure pledge of our redemption. To Him John 
 pointed very distinctly. He testified that this is the Son of God, 
 John i. 34. He said: "He that believeth on the Son hath ever- 
 lasting life," John Mi. 36. Is not this the fundamental and clear 
 gospel? Accordingly, the doctrine of John, of Christ, and the 
 apostles, is one and the same doctrine, and proclaims the salvation 
 of all men through Christ Jesus. Him John preached as the 
 coming, he pointed to him also as the present Saviour, as did also 
 the apostles. Turn to Matt. x. 7 ; Mark vL 12 ; Luke x. 9. They 
 also preached the kingdom of God, the salvation through Christ, 
 although He was not yet crucified ; and Christ proclaims himself 
 as the Saviour, although He had not yet suffered death. This, I 
 say, that ye dividers of baptism may not assert John preached 
 only the coming Christ, the apostles and we preach the slain 
 
266 PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 Redeemer. For he preached even as Christ himself and His 
 disciples preached. Thus the doctrine of John is the same as 
 the doctrine of Christ, as his baptism is one and the same with 
 the baptism of Christ. 
 
 Anabaptist: If the baptism and doctrine of John were the 
 same with the baptism and doctrine of Christ, how comes it that 
 the apostle Paul rebaptised those twelve disciples of John, who 
 had only received John's baptism. Acts xix. 1, &c. ? Does not 
 this passage clearly prove our assertion that those are to be bap- 
 tised again who received baptism before they were properly 
 instructed? Does it not clearly shew that John's baptism is less 
 than Christ's baptism? 
 
 Zwingli: That the doctrine and baptism of John are the same 
 with the doctrine and baptism of Christ, we have already 
 sufficiently established and proved, and this passage from the 
 Acts makes nothing against our proof if we will only rightly 
 understand it. The matter here referred to is as follows : Apollos 
 was a very learned Jew, as we learn from Acts xviii. 24, but 
 instructed only in the elements of the Lord's doctrine, ver. 25. 
 The little which he knew of the doctrine of Christ he had learned 
 from John or his disciples, not from Christ or his disciples. 
 Hence it is said he only knew the baptism, or much rather the 
 doctrine of John, (for baptism here stands for doctrine.) He 
 knew, however, the doctrine of John as imperfectly as he knew 
 the doctrine of Christ, for had he understood the full sense of the 
 doctrine of John, he would have known essentially the gospel 
 Now so much as this Apollos knew he taught faithfully and 
 zealously. Acts xviii. 25 ; Aquila and Priscilla having, however, 
 come to him, they taught him the way of the Lord more fully. 
 Mark this, that that which he previously called the " baptism," 
 he now calls the " doctrine," ver. 27. By this Apollos the twelve 
 men in question, chap. xix. 1, &c., were instructed. Now as he 
 himself knew not the way of the Lord fully, the twelve without 
 doubt knew it still less ; for it cannot easily be supposed that 
 they surpassed their Master, who was so well versed in the Scrip- 
 tures. On Paul's coming to Ephesus, where Apollos, who had 
 from thence sailed for Achaia, had taught before him, Paul began, 
 according to his custom, to preach the gospel. There met him 
 the twelve, who gave themselves out as disciples of Christ. 
 
PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 267 
 
 After Paul had convinced himself of their deficient knowledge, 
 he inquired of them whether they had received the Holy Ghost, 
 i.e., whether they stood right with God, and whether their hearts 
 were comforted. (He made no inquiry about the tongues, sujjh 
 not being necessary to perfectness in the gospel.) They then 
 manifested their ignorance, and confessed they had not so much 
 as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost. Paul then asked 
 them unto what then they had been baptised, i.e., what had been 
 taught them, unto what they had been directed in the doctrine 
 communicated to them. They refer to nothing either in the 
 doctrine of John, or in the doctrine of Christ, but simply name 
 the teacher whose doctrine they yet did not fully understand. 
 Just as in the present day some land-lopers say they are Lutheran 
 or Evangelical, although they have nothing evangelical either in 
 doctrine or life about them ; they but fatten upon the godly 
 without working. Not that I mean to compare these twelve 
 honest men, in regard to the deception practised, to such knaves, 
 except in so far as disinclination is concerned, to admit their 
 ignorance manifested in their giving themselves out as Christians 
 and disciples. Paul, on discovering this desire to cloak their 
 ignorance, told them that which they themselves did not know, 
 namely, that John baptised with the baptism of repentance. 
 Mark here if baptism and baptising can be anything else but 
 doctrinating and indoctrinating. Accordingly, the sense of the 
 passage quoted by you is the following: John taught the doc- 
 trine of repentance, and through it also the assurance of grace 
 (thus the two parts of the gospel), and exhorted the people to 
 believe on Him who should come after him, that is, on Christ. 
 It cannot, however, be proved that the twelve men had any- 
 where received water-baptism, for we cannot find that Apollos 
 gave them the baptism of water, we only know that he zealously 
 taught, as far as he was able, the baptism of John, (here the 
 word is plainly used in the sense of doctrine,) Acts xviii. 25. 
 John taught, and at the same time baptised with water. Christ 
 taught. His disciples baptising with water. And if this Apollos 
 had been baptised with water, Luke would not have omitted 
 mentioning it. It is, however, highly probable that these twelve 
 received from Apollos instruction in the elements of Christian 
 doctrine. For Luke means to shew, when he tells us that 
 
268 PUBLIC DISPUTATION "WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 Apollos had been in Ephesus, and but imperfectly taught that 
 Paul first planted the doctrine of Christ in Ephesus. By Aquila 
 and Priscilla still less were they baptised ; for they were so weU 
 and clearly instructed in the gospel that they taught ApoUos 
 more fundamentally. Or, if we should maintain that the twelve 
 had been baptised by AquUa and Priscilla, then the disciples of 
 Christ baptised previously to instruction, in which case we -had 
 in respect of baptism completely got the better of you. It is 
 therefore clear and manifest that these men had not been baptised 
 by Apollos, and also that baptism here signifies doctrine. If it 
 is evident, then, that Apollos did not baptise with water, and 
 that Paul does not speak here of baptism by water, why do ye 
 then, ! ye ignorant unintelligent teachers of the people, and 
 rioters, rebaptise under the colour of this passage in the Acts 
 (chap. xix. 1 and following), rebaptism being, in verity, contrary 
 to Christ. Christ says, John xiii. 15: "I have given you an 
 example that ye should do as I have done to you." And as He 
 has been an example to us in everything, that we should shape 
 our actions accordiug to his pattern, neither dare we administer 
 baptism otherwise than he lias had it administered on himseE 
 Christ, however, was baptised with the baptism of John, as also 
 the apostles, and neither He nor the apostles were again baptised. 
 Nov may we let ourselves be again baptised. 
 
 Anabaptists: We baptise ourselves now, because we do not 
 know whether we have been baptised or not. 
 
 Zwingli : What are your names ? 
 
 The Anabaptists give their names. 
 
 Zwingli: Know you not that Christians receive their names 
 at baptism? Have you then no god-fathers? And have they 
 not told you that you were baptised? 
 
 Anahajptists : Yes; but we do not know whether we have been 
 baptised or not; for granting that, as infants, we have been 
 baptised, this took place at such an age that we could not know 
 it, and therefore we must receive baptism now that we may be 
 assured of it. 
 
 Zwingli : Do ye know, then, that ye have been born of your 
 own mothers ? 
 
 Anabaptists : Yes. 
 
PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 269 
 
 Zwingli: You could know this of your own knowledge just as 
 little as that you were baptised. 
 
 Anabaptists : But although we have been baptised, it is the 
 Pope's baptism we have received, which has been defaced and 
 falsified by superstitious additions, so that we have not been 
 rightly baptised. Therefore we must, first of all, receive the right 
 baptism. 
 
 Zwingli : The true formula of baptism is : "I baptise thee in 
 the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." 
 Therein all teachers of the church agi'ee, and herein we are at one 
 with the papists. You also admit this to be the right form of 
 baptism. Now tell me, if baptism, performed with these words, 
 could be falsified by anjrthing antecedent, nay, by perverse, 
 superstitious prayers, and foolish mummery. If you reply. Yes, 
 then, in your opinion, the devil is stronger than God, if God's 
 work can be annihilated by the devil's power. If you say, No, 
 then the baptism of Christ has not been falsified, and we have 
 gained the day already ; for you and we have been, at a former 
 time, rightly baptised. Why, then, do ye harrass and disquiet 
 pious Christians with such groundless and frivolous assertions ? 
 We have been all baptised, and, in truth, rightly baptised ; for 
 every woman can baptise herself What is of highest importance 
 is, that we become new men, that we pass under the cross of 
 Christ, that we die, and be dead daily at once ; for the flesh con- 
 tinues to send forth its suckers, which must be without inter- 
 mission pruned and cut off. This all takes place through the 
 strength of God, which He, through His grace, causes to dwell 
 and work in us, but not through rebaptism or anabaptism, which 
 has not the slightest foundation in the doctrine of Christ, but is 
 quite contradicted by it. Baptism is an image of the death of 
 Christ, Kom vi 4. Now Christ has died once, and cannot die 
 any more. As now, they sin grievously against God who pre- 
 tend they offer Christ daily; because once offered on the cross, 
 He took away thereby the sins of the whole world to all eternity ; 
 they also sin grievously who crucify Him again with their second 
 baptism, and despise the significance of his resurrection. He 
 has risen only once, we also should be but once raised from bap- 
 tism, and from thence our lives long live no more to sin. 
 
 Anabaptists : Children are nowhere in Scripture eommanded 
 
270 PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 to be baptised, nor is it anywhere said that Christ or the apostles 
 baptised children. Infant baptism, then, not being founded or 
 commanded in the Word of God, but an invention of the Pope, 
 or the devil, it ought to be done away with as an abuse, as other 
 papistical abuses have been done away with. 
 
 'Zwimgli : But it is nowhere commanded in Scripture that the 
 inhabitants of Calcutta should be baptised, nor do we find that 
 Christ or the apostles baptised any one in Calcutta, and yet we 
 baptise now in Calcutta, and do rightly therein ; for they also, as 
 all people, are to be made disciples of Christ, we baptising them, 
 and teaching them to observe all things whatsoever Christ has 
 commanded. Farther, it is nowhere said in Scripture that women 
 were present at the supper of Christ ; nor have we an express 
 command of Christ to admit them to the Eucharist, and yet we 
 allow women to partake of the Lord's Supper, and are right in so 
 doing ; for it would be quite contrary to the will of God to exclude 
 them. Therefore let no man thus judge : Christ has not baptised 
 children, therefore we ought not to baptise them. In respect of 
 outward things, many things are not expressly mentioned in the 
 Word of God which yet with God we do. 
 
 Anabaptists: You have ever defended yourself against the 
 Papists with the asseveration, what is not founded in God's 
 Word holds not, and now you say: "There are many things not 
 in the Word of God, which yet with God may be done." Where 
 is now that word of power with which you vanquished the Suf- 
 fragan Bishop Faber and all the monks? " In vain they do wor- 
 ship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men." 
 (Matt. XV. 9 ; Isaiah xxix. ] 3.) 
 
 Zwingli : What I have ever said, that I shall say till death, 
 nor will you ever discover that I have said aught but one and 
 the same thing. Therefore weigh better the sense of my words. 
 They have no reference to what you lay to my charge, for I 
 speak of outward elementary things, for which we have no 
 express command, but which we yet observe with God. Thus, 
 in respect to the Supper or Eucharist, here we have a distinct 
 institution, and a clear intimation that it is a commemoration, 
 and nothing more can be made of it, although the whole host of 
 Papists were to lose their senses upon it. Its commemorative- 
 ness, however, is not such an elementary, i.e., such an outward 
 
PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 271 
 
 thing that it were uncertain, and that it might be given out to 
 be a sacrifice; for it has its distinct definition, and the ground- 
 idea of the whole Epistle to the Hebrews concerns it. The ele- 
 ment, however, or outward thing, that women likewise should 
 celebrate the commemoration, is nowhere to be found in any pas- 
 sage of Scripture. Yet we do rightly when we admit them to 
 the Supper. In the name of God hold the same language in 
 regard to infant baptism. If God has commanded to baptise, 
 don't say, " But not the children." "Why do ye make a difference 
 in mankind? Axe children men too, or are they not? If they 
 are mankind, then you must grant they are to be baptised, seeing 
 we can make no difference in mankind between old and young, 
 man and woman. 
 
 Anabaptist: The man that is to be baptised must first be 
 instructed, and have faith ; an infant cannot have it, and conse- 
 quently may not be baptised. 
 
 Zwingli : Prove me this by a clear passage of Scripture. 
 Anabaptist: In Matt, xxviii. 19 it is written: "Teach all 
 nations, baptising them," &c. Here Christ himseK commands 
 us first to teach, and then baptise. 
 
 Zwingli: I have already proved that the Greek text does not 
 admit of such a sense being put upon this passage, and that it 
 has not the meaning which ye would extract from it; for it is to 
 this effect: Make all nations my disciples, baptising them, and 
 teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have com- 
 manded yovL Since ye will again wrest the sense of the pas- 
 sage, it is clear that you are only waging an empty war of words, 
 which Paul forbids. (1 Tim. vL 5.) To the partaking of the 
 Supper or commemoration of Christ's death, unconditional faith 
 is to be demanded, in accordance with 1 Cor. xi. 28 : " But let a 
 man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink 
 of that cup." On the other hand, it is nowhere said that one is 
 to examine himself before baptism. Without doubt the divine 
 providence of God has not demanded examination before baptism, 
 inasmuch as it knew that believing Christians would furnish 
 their children with the sign of children of God, as this was done 
 under the Old Testament by circumcision. 
 
 Anabaptist: What God wills that we should do. He has 
 expressly commanded in His Word. He has, however, nowhere 
 
272 PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 commanded infant baptism, and Christ and His apostles have 
 never practised it; it is therefore an invention of men, or of 
 Satan, and thereby we abide. If you will establish the legiti- 
 macy of infant baptism, do it by the Word of God; for we desire 
 God's Word, and not man's word. 
 
 Zwingli: If in regard to outward things of eternal observance, 
 about which there is no clear and distinct announcement in the 
 New Testament, a dispute arises, we are in this case to turn from 
 the doctrine of Christ to Moses and the prophets, that he may 
 not blame us like the Sadducees : " Ye do err, not knowing the 
 Scriptures," Matt. xxii. 29, and that we may learn from the Word 
 of God what ought to be done. Thus, for example, inarriage is 
 an outward rite of eternal observance; yet the New Testament 
 contains no prescription as to how it is to be performed, although 
 we find such in ISTumbers xviii. It is a like case with infant 
 baptism. We admit that in the N"ew Testament there is no 
 express command that children are to be baptised, much less, 
 however, is there any prohibition of it. When God made the 
 covenant with Abraham, He gave him circumcision as a covenant- 
 sign for the sake of his posterity, as it is said in Genesis xvii. 7, 
 &c. : " And I will establish my covenant between me and thee, 
 and thy seed after thee," &c., &c. Circumcision was performed 
 on the eighth day after birth. Circumcision, however, was an 
 obligatory sign, and Abraham and his whole posterity were to 
 circumcise their children, for the reason that they might have the 
 God of Israel pointed out to them as Him in whom Abraham . 
 believed, as God afterwards commanded by Moses, Deut. xxxL 
 11, 12, thou shalt read this law before all Israel in their hearing: 
 " Gather the people together, men, and women, and children, and 
 thy stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and 
 that they may learn, and fear the Lord your God, and observe 
 to do all the words of this law." Thus the covenant commenced 
 with the outward sign which God really commanded, because 
 He knew weU what would follow if it were neglected. What 
 God, however, has spoken and commanded, has always a good 
 object, although we may not know the exact reason for which He 
 commanded it. In the present case, let us observe weU from 
 the diligence with which God inculcated the command, how he 
 provided that the children, even from the cradle, should be led 
 
PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 273 
 
 to himself, upon whom Abraham trusted, and to whom the child 
 was obligated by the external sign that it might not, through the 
 carelessness or unbelief of its parents, or by the instrumentality 
 of heathenish people, be led away to idolatry ere it came to be 
 properly instructed. Now, in the New Testament economy, 
 baptism has entered into the place of circumcision, with the 
 difference that circumcision obligates to God under the covenant 
 of the law ; baptism, indeed, likewise to God, but through Christ 
 to God under the covenant of grace. Here I refer to what Paul 
 says of circumcision and of baptism, Colos. ii. 10-12, where he 
 calls circumcision " a burial in baptism." The sense of these 
 words is : Ye were, then, when ye put off your sins, circumcised 
 with the circumcision which is without hands ; for ye were not 
 less than they visibly circumcised, but with the circumcision of 
 Christ, which, through the washing with water, signifies the same 
 as circumcision. Therefore, ye are buried with Christ in baptism 
 that ye may die unto sin. Now " the dying unto sin," and " the 
 circumcision from sin," is one and the self-same thing, which, 
 in the one case, is signified by outward circumcision ; and in the 
 other, by baptism, and therefore he calls baptism our circum- 
 cision. Hence it is evident that baptism in the New Testament 
 has come into the place of circumcision in the Old. Again, as to 
 what regards the origin of infant baptism, there is in my mind no 
 doubt that it was begun, as Augustine* says, at the time of Christ 
 and the apostles, although no mention- is made of it in express 
 words. Tor in regard also to the commemorative Supper of 
 
 • Augustine, the famous Father, and Bishop of Hippo, (bom a.d. 354, died 
 A.D. 430,) says in his hook against the Donatists, (an anabaptistical sect of his 
 time,) " as in the murderer (the thief on the cross) salvation was accomplished, 
 although baptism could not he applied, (yet spiritually, it was not awanting 
 through faith,) so also by baptism salvation is effected." Such is the belief of 
 the church general in reference to infants who are baptised, who truly have not 
 yet believed with the heart unto righteousness, nor confessed with the mouth 
 unto salvation, which the murderer could do ; on the contrary, when the sacra- 
 ment is performed upon them, they oppose the words spoken in baptism by 
 their cries, and yet no Christian will assert they are baptised in vain. If, how- 
 ever, a divine recommendation of this ordinance be demanded, (although that 
 which the universal church believes, not appointed by any Council, but every- 
 where, and at all times observed, may justly be regarded as having been 
 ordained by the apostles,) we may truly learn what the baptism of infants 
 signifies by looking to the circumcision of the former people, 
 
 S 
 
274 PUBLIC BISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 Christ, there is nothing said by any evangelist or apostle as to 
 how it was ordered according to the institution of Christ, except 
 by Paul, and by him only in 1 Cor. x. 16, and following; and 
 xi. 20, and following. For although in Acts ii. 42, we find that 
 bread was broken, we do not find in what manner or order it was 
 done. If the Corinthians had not abused the Supper, we should 
 have had no place in Scripture from whence we could learn how 
 it had been kept. Now I say the same with respect to infant 
 baptism. Although it is not described or stated in express words, 
 yet it is from various intimations in the Word of God to be con- 
 cluded that they also, with the general multitude who were 
 baptised, received baptism; surely the women and children were 
 fed with the rest, yet they are not counted. Matt. xiv. 21. "We 
 shall now quote some proofs for our view. In Matt xix. 13-15, 
 Luke xviii 15-17, there is the narrative which Mark x. 13-16 
 gives in the following words : " And they brought young children 
 to him, that he should touch them : and his disciples rebuked 
 those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much 
 displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come 
 unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of 
 God. Verily I say unto you. Whosoever shall not receive the 
 kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. And 
 he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and 
 blessed them." 
 
 In the first place, they are blamed who forbad little children 
 to be brought to Christ ; are those not to be blamed who forbid 
 them to be baptised? For if theirs is the kingdom of God, why 
 should the sign of the people of God be denied them? As Peter 
 said, (Acts x. 47,) when he saw that Cornelius with his whole 
 family had received the Holy Ghost : " Can any man forbid water 
 that these should not be baptised, which have received the Holy 
 Ghost as well as we?" so must I likewise say in regard to in- 
 fants : Who will forbid them water when we see that they are 
 God's as well as we who believe? 
 
 Artabaptist : Is it, however, said that Christ baptised the 
 children, when it is related that He took them up in His arms 
 and blessed them? 
 
 ZwiMgli : Who says it? I quoted the passage for two reasons ; 
 one you have heard; Are they God's? who wiU forbid them water, 
 
PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 275 
 
 the sign of God's people? The other is, that I may show hy these 
 words what care and zeal the parents manifested in thus bring- 
 ing their children to Christ ; and seeing this, we can, with no 
 semblance of truth suppose, that they had not their children 
 baptised, although this be not stated in express words. The Jews 
 looked more to outward things than any other people, for which 
 they were reproached by Christ, John iv. 48 ; Luke xi. 29 ; and 
 by Paul, 1 Cor. i. 22. Thus it may, with all safety, be assumed 
 that they let themselves as weU as their children be designated 
 by baptism. When, therefore, of a whole company or of a whole 
 household it is related that they had been baptised, it may be 
 assumed with all probability that there were children also among 
 them, and that these also were baptised. 
 
 Anabaptist : In Acts iL 37, 38, it is written : " Now when they 
 heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter 
 and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we 
 do? Then Peter said unto them, Eepent, and be baptised every 
 one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, 
 and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." Can these have 
 been children whom Peter's sermon so pricked in heart? Have 
 infants asked, "What shall we do?" Has Peter recommended 
 children to repent? 
 
 Zwrngli : And if ye went to unbelievers at this day — ^but that 
 you do not do, although you all say that you are sent by God to 
 preach, but you go only to those regions where the gospel has 
 been abeady planted, and there you destroy by your anabaptism 
 what was formerly built up in peace — if, however, you went, you 
 would without doubt baptise only those who understood your 
 preaching and received it. When these believers, however, had 
 been well and rightly instructed in the nature of the ordinance, , 
 they would, without doubt, attach their children to Christ by the 
 sign even from the cradle. 
 
 The commencement of baptism in the times of the apostles is 
 described, as in aU histories, without any particular mention of 
 children, although they may have been present, as we have seen 
 in the narrative of the miraculous feeding they really were. Nor 
 is it inconsistent with the sense in Acts ii. 41 that children were 
 baptised, for all that is said, " they were pricked in their heart," 
 " what shaU we do," and " repent," is quite applicable to a com- 
 
276 PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 pany in wMch there was a mixture of women and children, 
 although the men only who understood the word, and whom it 
 in the first instance concerned, spoke, the women and children 
 not speaking. Tor the children, although they did not believe, 
 belonged not less to the number of believers than the fathers 
 themselves ; since among the Jews, the family was counted to the 
 father by every census which' God commanded. Nor in con- 
 sequence of the circumcision in which they formerly walked 
 could they have any other view than that they should now bap- 
 tise their children as they formerly circwmcised them. Paul gives 
 us a farther proof in favour- of this view, in 1 Cor. x. 1, where he 
 says, " All our fathers were under the cloud," plainly understand- 
 ing by " fathers," all the people with the women and children. 
 They also aU " passed through the sea," " were all baptised to 
 Moses in the cloud and in the sea," although the women and 
 children are not particularly mentioned. The sense of this pas- 
 sage is, however, the following: Paul would exhort the Christians 
 at Corinth not to place their dependence on outward things, and 
 not to suppose that by these, and without a change of their sinful 
 lives, they could be saved. Accordingly he says : " Ye might think, 
 because ye have been baptised, and have partaken of the sym- 
 bolical food of the Eucharist, that you were saved. It is not so. 
 For our fathers had the sign even as well as we ; and as we are 
 placed under the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, 
 so they also were under the cloud, and passed through the sea, 
 they were nourished from heaven above, as our souls also receive 
 comfort through Christ, in consequence of which consolation ye 
 celebrate the holy feast of commemoration; yet, notwithstand- 
 ing all this, they were punished by God for their sins. And 
 although these miracles were but obligating signs of a prefigura-. 
 tive character, it wOl fare with us as with them if we seek our 
 salvation through any external signs; for just the more did they' 
 trust on themselves from thinking of aU the wonders which God 
 had wrought in their behalf" I have cited this passage here, 
 however, for the reason that the image of the cloud and of the 
 sea signifies baptism, as Peter himself tells us. Now, this sub- 
 jection to these signs took place before the children of Israel 
 were brought under Moses, that is, were brought under the law, 
 from which it may be readily seen that Paul looked upon bap- 
 
PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 277 
 
 tism as a common obligative sign for the whole people of God, 
 for believers and their children. For as, in the one case, young 
 and old together passed through the sea, and were under the 
 cloud; so also in baptism, which was symbolised by the cloud 
 and sea, yowng and old without difference are obligated and 
 bound. "We see thus from the custom of the children of Israel, 
 and from the testimony of Paul, that infant-baptism must have 
 been usual at the times of the apostles, which also the histories 
 themselves prove, relating how the apostles baptised whole house- 
 holds. In 1 Cor. i. 16, Paul says: "And I baptised also the 
 household of Stephanas," and Acts xvi. 15, say: "and when she, 
 (Lydia,) was baptised, andher household," in which cases, it may, 
 with safety, be assumed, that there were children in the house- 
 hold. It is in the same 16th chapter that mention is made of 
 the jailor. He "said. Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And 
 they said. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be 
 saved, and thy house. And he took them the same hour of the 
 night, and washed their stripes ; and was baptised, he and all his, 
 straightway. And when he had brought them into his house, 
 he set meat before them, and rejoiced, believing in God, with all 
 his house." (Ver. 30-34.) Here there were, doubtless, children 
 under the " all his," who would especially rejoice that their 
 father had become a believer, and that he rejoiced in his faith. 
 Thus the young especially rejoiced at the entrance of Christ into 
 Jerusalem, of whom He said, as the rulers, priests, and Scribes, 
 called on Him to command them silence, " out of the mouths of 
 babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise." (Ps. viii. 2.) It 
 is thus with good ground to be supposed that all believers directed 
 their next care to their children, and bound them over to that 
 same God, to the knowledge of whom they themselves had come. 
 Therefore we do weU and act rightly in binding our children to 
 God and the Eedeemer from their earliest years, according to the 
 example of the old covenant and of the apostles, and in bringing 
 them to him according to his invitation, the more especially as 
 much that is good ilows from infant-baptism. By this we may 
 readily recognise the Divine wisdom in the vouchsafement of this 
 outward sign. In the first place, it is beneficial for us to be early 
 instructed in Christian doctrine and discipline. For this end the 
 pastor ought, at certain seasons, to collect the youth, and faith- 
 
278 PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 fully instruct them in tlie elements of the doctrine of salvation. 
 If this be not done, each may propagate his owd errors among 
 his children. This is of especial importance at the present time, 
 when you, Anabaptists, manifest such reserve to all who con- 
 tradict you that you forbid your children to go to the legally 
 appointed evangelists or bishops to hear sermon. What wiU 
 become of us if more sects arise ? The other good effect of infant- 
 baptism is, that the youth are necessitated from their first years 
 to live as Christians, while their parents are placed under an obh- 
 gation to instruct them in Christianity. Let it be supposed that 
 children were not baptised before the sixteenth or eighteenth 
 year, or even later, the consequence would be, that on your say- 
 ing to your neighbour, " Why do you bring up your children in a 
 manner so contrary to Christianity?" He would reply, "I don't 
 know whether they wUl be Christians or not ;" and the child 
 itseM could say, which in the petulancy of the young spirit would 
 certainly occur often : "What have I to do with your warning? I 
 can become a Christian or not." The third good effect of infant- 
 baptism is, that it corrects remissness in religious education. 
 Each would excuse his negligence in instructing his children from 
 their earliest years, with the apology, " it is still soon enough." 
 Nor would all men learn with the same ardour to know God, and 
 to call upon Him as we even now find. For this reason we take 
 god-fathers or sponsors, that, on the decease of father and mother, 
 they may instruct the children in the doctrines of salvation. 
 
 These and other arguments Zwingh brought forward during 
 the three days' Disputation on infant-baptism. In the estima- 
 tion of all competent to judge they had the more weight, because 
 the Anabaptists were unable to advance a single argument which 
 would stand ,the test, in proof of their assertions. Instead of 
 justifying, by Scripture, the innovation they moved for, they 
 were obliged to confine themselves to certain subtle objections, 
 which Zwingh always rebutted with a calm deliberation. 
 
 For example, an Anabaptist said : I would make it manifest, 
 from the Word of God, that infant-baptism is an invention of Satan, 
 but no man can understand me, except one who is without sin. 
 
 Zwingli: Do you understand it yourself? 
 
 Anabaptist: Yes, thank God. 
 
 Zwingli: Then you are without sin? 
 
PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 279 
 
 ArMhaptist : Would to God that all men acknowledged their 
 sins as I do. With this exclamation he withdrew, and had no 
 desire to take any farther part in the Disputation? 
 
 Another said: Infant-baptism is an invention of the Pope; 
 Nicolas II. has first introduced it. 
 
 Zwingli : Whence do you know this ? 
 
 Anabaptist: I have read it in the Pope's book inyself.* 
 
 Zwingli : Do you understand Latin, then? 
 
 Anabaptist: No. 
 
 Zwingli : How can you say you have read it in the Pope's book, 
 when you are ignorant of Latin, and this book has not been 
 translated into German? You, Anabaptists, maintain you do not 
 Ue, is this not lying? Moreover, Pope Nicolas II. lived about the 
 year 1055, while we know, from the writings of Augustine, who 
 lived about the year 4<00, after Christ, that, at his time, infant- 
 baptism was generally cugtomary, and that, in his opinion, it had 
 been administered by the apostles. How, then, could Pope 
 Nicolas II. first have introduced it? 
 
 Another came forward, and 'placing himself before Zwingli, 
 and employing all the gestures of an exorcist, said, Zwingli, 
 Zwingli, I conjure thee, by the living God, speak the trutk 
 
 With perfect composure Zwingli answered, I shall, and you 
 shall hear it. You are a -stupid, riotous boor, as silly a one as 
 our lords have in the whole land. Amid universal laughter, the 
 fanatic, who had boasted he would overcome Zwingli with a 
 single word, slunk back into the crowd speechless. 
 
 Neither the subtleties of the learned Anabaptists, nor the 
 quaint sallies of the narrow-minded fanatics among them could 
 throw the Eeformer for a moment off his guard ; and, while he 
 replied to the one with weU-grounded solid learning, he worsted 
 the other with his shrewd and pointed remarks, often with sar- 
 castic wit. Zwingli had gained a complete victory, so that the 
 Council, after the Disputation was over, published the following 
 declarations : " The Anabaptists and their followers having, for 
 three successive days, disputed in our Town-hall, and in the 
 Great Minster, in our presence, and in the presence of the whole 
 
 * Under this name was understood the so-called " Decatalia," i. e., a collection 
 of papal laws and rescripts. These were vulgarly called, " The Book of the 
 Pope." 
 
280 PUBLIC DISPUTATION WITH THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 community, and each and every Baptist, without any hinderment, 
 having spoken his quarrel, dispute, and opinion, it hath, from 
 first to last, shewn itself by the true divine Scriptures, maintained 
 by the strongest arguments, that Magister Huldreich Zwingli, 
 with his followers, has completely overcome the Anabaptists, 
 demonstrated the invalidity of Anabaptism, and, on the other 
 hand, established the validity of infant-baptism. It hath also 
 been rendered very evident by this Disputation that the ring- 
 leaders and sectarists of Anabaptism have set up their doctrines 
 out of an insolent, intemperate, and arrogant mind, and in no good 
 spirit, thinking to draw to them a particular sect and faction, 
 contrary to the command of God, to the despite of us, the temporal 
 magistracy, to the implanting of all disobedience, and to the 
 destruction of Christian charity between man and man; for they 
 esteem themselves to be better than other men, and without sia, 
 as their words and maimers, works and gestures, clearly shew ; 
 considering which, we hereby command and enjoin aU persons, 
 man or woman, young man or maiden, to abstain from such 
 Anabaptism, and we authorise infants only to be baptised. Given 
 on St. Andrew's Day, 1525." 
 
 Manz, Grebel, Blaurock, and the other chief men of the sect, 
 were called before the Council, and seriously exhorted to acknow- 
 ledge their errors. But in vain ; they obstinately persisted in 
 maintaining them, nay, they found means to issue an address 
 from prison, in which the Council now enclosed them, stimulat- 
 ing their followers to a new resistance to the above decree of the 
 Council. 
 
 4-. The Riotous peocbedings of the Anabaptists in the Can- 
 ton OF Zurich. — Theie Couese and. End. 
 
 These repeated instigations to opposition against the civU 
 authority were so much the more deserving of punishment, 
 because, in the country district of Zurich, as well as in other 
 parts of Switzerland, the flames of civil insurrection, which had 
 already raged destructively in the so-caUed "peasant-war" in 
 Germany, and had only been quenched in streams of blood, 
 threatened to fasten on the doctrines of the Anabaptists. The 
 districts on the Ehine were the first ,to feel the influence of this 
 
RIOTOUS PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANABAPTISTS. 281 
 
 insurrectionary spirit. Payment of legal dues and villanage were 
 refused to the governor of Eglisau, and, upon his shewing a dis- 
 position to maintain the existing fish-rights, a mob collected, and 
 set his authority at defiance. " Freely has God Almighty given," 
 they cried, after the example of their German co-religionists, "the 
 beasts of the wood, the birds in the air, and the fish in the run- 
 ning stream. The use of them belongs to the countryman, who 
 must also bear the loss and damage they occasion." A deputy of 
 the government, who meant to exhort them to order, was received 
 with a shower of stones. The spirit of insubordination spread 
 farther and farther. On the 23d April 1525, a swarm of riotous 
 peasants broke violently into the cloister of Eueti, the abbot of 
 which had previously escaped with the moneys, valuables, and 
 documents, and gave themselves up to outrageous licence, and 
 the wildest excesses. In contempt of the orders of the governor 
 of Grueningen to go to their homes they pulled the alarm-bells, 
 and thereby increased the number of their comrades; The whole 
 host now rolled itself against the house Bubikon of the order 
 of St. John, where riot and revelry began anew, and it was only 
 with considerable difficulty that some deputies of the government 
 who hastened thither succeeded in inducing the uproarious mul- 
 titude to go home, there put in writing their complaints and 
 wishes, and hand them in to the government. 
 
 From no less than five different communes petitions of griev- 
 ances were delivered to the government, in which were demanded 
 the dissolution of the subject-relation, (the petitioners regarding 
 God alone as their Lord, on the other hand, their superiors in 
 Zurich as only lords-protectors,) confiscation and application of 
 the property of the cloisters for the benefit of the district in which 
 they may lie, the right di every community to call and appoint 
 their pastors, and, finally, abrogation and diminution of several 
 imposts. One of these petitions concluded with the prayer : 
 " May our lords of Zurich look well to the above matters, and 
 consider our and the poors' need according to the Word of God. 
 And if this should accord more, may our officers not be restricted 
 from giving it." The Council investigated the reported griev- 
 ances, and issued to the districts a very lengthened, instructive, and 
 tranquiUising answer. "We record," it is said, among other things, 
 " our satisfaction that your petitions are not brought before us in 
 
282 RIOTOUS PEOCEEDINGS OF THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 an intemperate spirit, (as is tlie fashion of tlie times,) and have, 
 therefore, sat in Council upon your articles, examining all deeds, 
 documents, contracts, letters, and seals, which we have agaiast 
 you and you against us, worthy people of the country-district, 
 and we have weighed these, and compared them with Holy Scrip- 
 ture, the Word of God, as also have had special regard to the 
 ebullitions which have everywhere manifested themselves of late. 
 In regard, then, to your first article : " That you will only have God, 
 our heavenly Father, for your Lord, us, however, for your tem- 
 poral superiors ; we opine that it requires no answer, it being 
 seK-evident; for, as God is the Lord and Saviour of us aU, so are 
 your lords of Zurich, in worldly affairs, in aU townships, lord- 
 ships, and governorships, your lawful and natural lords and 
 superiors, having brought you under them with no force or violence 
 of war, but by free purchase. Therefore let the matter so rest, 
 for, if you obey God, and render to Him what is due, ye will in 
 all things lawfully obey your lords and superiors, as God com- 
 mands to obey Him and the magistracy." In this dignified 
 Christian spirit the separate articles were considered ; unjust 
 burdens and grievances were removed ; while the legality and 
 necessity of various dues and services were clearly established. 
 The answer concludes with the exhortation and the wish : "Now, 
 dear friends, we have good hope that, after you have received our 
 answer, you will be satisfied, and content yourselves, as you can- 
 not but see that we have honourably and faithfully met your 
 requests, and done more than enough; for it were neither becom- 
 ing for us nor for you, that any one should refuse the magistrate, 
 or any other, the obedience that is due to him in law and right. 
 Consider likewise what hostility we and the whole province at 
 present suffer from without, in that we cleave to the Word of 
 God, and wiU have nothing to do with foreign princes. Live ye 
 then, peaceably and obediently, in the discipline and in the fear 
 of God, and do not, by riot and disobedience of your superiors, 
 prepare for yourselves loss, and damage, and shame? But if 
 any one among you instigate to rebellion and disobedience, set 
 him right, and warn him to depart from such courses, that we both, 
 in the town and in the country, may live together, according to the 
 will of God, unitedly, and in obedience, both towards him and our 
 lawful superiors, and may maintain that which God the Almighty 
 
BIOTOUS PEOCEEDINGS OF THE ANABAPTISTS. 283 
 
 hath granted to our fathers, and us, their children, to our great 
 glory, so that every one may see that we have good, faithful 
 rulers, and we, on the other hand, good, faithful, and obedient 
 subjects, and also, that we may, reciprocally with one another, 
 pursue that which is conducive to piety, peace, and content- 
 ment. We, on our parts, engage to do and suffer aU for you, as 
 it behoves pious and honourable lords and superiors to do and 
 suffer for their subjects. May the Almighty help us both, in our 
 respective duties, with His divine grace." 
 
 These exhortations, which were read aloud, and explained and 
 commented on orally by deputies of the government, in all the dis- 
 tricts, met, at first, with no very favourable reception Several com- 
 munes annoimced that they would only give their answer after con- 
 sultation with the others, in consequence of which, on Pentecost 
 Monday, 5th June 1525, a meeting of the populace was held on a 
 field near Toess, where about four thousand men were present. Nor 
 here at first would they allow a deputation of the Council, headed 
 by the burgomaster, to speak. " It is for us to order," cried the 
 insurgents ; " and we'U accustom the towners to walk a-foot, 
 while we shall ride deputies." Gradually, however, the voice of 
 duty and of fair play prevailed with the multitude, and a gover- 
 nor, Lavater, and others succeeded in obtaining a hearing. The 
 rabble dispersed without having come to any resolution. Many of 
 those who had taken part in the meeting were, on the home-going, 
 invited by the citizens of Winterthur, and hospitably treated in 
 their houses, when the events of the day were farther discussed. 
 Many were thus brought to a better mind. Some errors prevailing 
 on tithes, a public disputation was ordered to be holden on this 
 subject, in which Zwingli again took a chief part. While the 
 Anabaptists and the rioters denounced their exaction as contrary 
 to law and justice, the town-clerk, am Gruet, whom we have 
 already mentioned, as a zealous partizan of the Papacy, defended 
 their legality, on the ground of the Levitical law. Zwingli was thus 
 placed between two fires. Against the town-clerk, he maintained 
 that the Levitical tithe-law, with the whole Levitical priesthood, 
 and aU dependent upon it, was abolished by the New Testament. 
 Against the Anabaptists, he made it clear that the existing tithes 
 had grown to be a legal debt, through sale and' purchase, which 
 debt must be discharged, according to human and divine law. 
 
284 EIOTOUS PEOCEEDINGS OP THE ANABAPTISTS. 
 
 (Eom. xiii.) Above all, the tithes devoted to the support of 
 public worship were absolutely necessary, inasmuch as, if not 
 exacted, the expenses of worship must be defrayed by other im- 
 positions. 
 
 Both in sermons and writings Zwingli and his friends wrought 
 with zeal and ardour to throw the light of the gospel round this 
 subject, and Christian truth here proved itself to be a leaven 
 penetrating the whole mass of the people, filling and governing 
 the mass by its power. The insurrectionary and turbulent spirit 
 of the Anabaptists, both in regard to things civil and ecclesiastical, 
 having been completely exposed by the public disputation, and 
 deprived of its baleful power, their proceedings fell into a general 
 unpopularity, which immediately shewed itself in expressions of 
 confidence in the government and its measures, addressed to it in 
 answer to a renewed summons on its part. " Our persons and pro- 
 perty," wrote Eegenstorf, "dear sirs, we shall place at your dis- 
 posal, so long as you continue to rule in a Christian spirit; for 
 although we had some grievances to complain of, we have, on the 
 other hand, borne in mind the lessons of the evangelists and 
 apostles, which shew equally to you and to us how one part is to 
 hold itself in reference to the other; and we gratefully recognise 
 your love, your toil and trouble, and that you have removed from 
 us some burdens. Continue to act towards us as affectionate 
 fathers towards their sons ; plant the good, root out the evO., as 
 that which of itself cannot long endure."* 
 
 It was here also the power of divine truth which put an end to an 
 insurgent spirit which had widely extended itself, and threatened 
 to dissolve all civil order. The merit, however, of having effected 
 this great good, next to the divine mercy belongs to Zwingli, who 
 saw, with penetrating glance, all the exigencies of the occasion, 
 who shaped the course of proceeding in the light and accord- 
 ing to the prescriptions of the Word of God, and who, by the 
 energy of his preaching and writings, bowed the hearts both of 
 nilers and ruled under its sacred influence. After the Anabap- 
 tists had lost all authority and respect among the people, their 
 chief men were, at Zwingli's advice and intervention, set at liberty, 
 
 * A single individual, " Suesstrunk," was beheaded by the sword for yitupera- 
 tions of the government, continued opposition to the laws, and excitement to" 
 rebellion. 
 
RIOTOUS PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANABAPTISTS. 285 
 
 with a serious admonition to amend their ways. They soon, 
 however, hegan again to hold meetings, and to spread their doc- 
 trines among the credulous. Manz and Blaurock were accord- 
 ingly again imprisoned, a fate which Grebel only escaped by a 
 speedy flight. About the same time some followers of this sect 
 perpetrated at St. Gall, where they were greatly on the increase, 
 a deed of horror which opened the eyes of all to the dangers to be 
 apprehended from these fanatics. In an out of the way house at 
 Muehlegg, near St. Gall, there lived an octogenarian peasant, 
 Schucker, with his five sons, who all, with the remaining members 
 of the family, and the servants, had taken up Anabaptism. On 
 Shrove-Tuesday, the 7th February 1526, many of the sect were 
 assembled here. A calf was killed, and a feast made, the partici- 
 pators in which got so inflamed by the deep potations of wine in 
 which they indulged, that, as Bullinger mentions, they spent the 
 whole night amid extraordinary gestures, contortions, dialogues with 
 each other, visions, and revelations. Towards morning, Thomas 
 Schucker came up to his younger brother, Leonhard, with the 
 gall of the calf in the bladder, saying, " Bitter as gall is the death 
 thou shalt suffer. Kneel brother." Leonhard obeyed the summons. 
 Thomas took up a sword, and with the words, " The will of the 
 Father is accomplished," his brother's head rolled at his feet. 
 All present shrunk back horror-struck, and fled from the fratricide. 
 He, however, ran with the reeking sword, clad only in his shirt 
 and trowsers, to the burgomaster. Dr. Joachim Vadian, and 
 shouted in his ears, " I proclaim to thee the day of the Lord." , 
 The fanatic was taken into custody, and he was executed on the 
 16th February. 
 
 Universal indignation was expressed at this act of enormity, 
 and the people vehemently called upon the government to put a 
 stop, by measures of severity, to such disorders. Blaurock, as a 
 foreigner, was whipped out of the town, and banished the land. 
 Manz, and two Anabaptists from the country, on their refusing 
 to make any recantation or promise of amendment, were put 
 to death by drowning.* ZwingU had no share whatever in 
 these proceedings, having, notwithstanding the attacks made 
 upon Mm by the Anabaptists, always advocated the adoption of 
 
 * This punishment they suffered, not for their religious opinions, but for their 
 obstinate resistance tQ the civil authority. 
 
286 EioTOtrs peoceedings of the anabaptists. 
 
 mild measures, because lie would alone work through the light and 
 the power of the "Word of God, and through it alone disperse the 
 mists of error. Indeed, the complete victory gained in Switzerland 
 over the Anabaptists is to be ascribed to the use of this weapon. 
 The contest, however, cost the Eeformer, as he himself expresses 
 it, more sweat than his light with the Papacy; nay, he caUs the 
 latter, in comparison with this, but child's play. But sweat and 
 toil were not here in vain. For the new church came out of this 
 trial, purified and strengthened, and proved itself soM, hke the 
 house built by the wise man upon the immovable rock, against 
 which the storm roared and the waves lashed in vain. Zwingli 
 himself, in carrying on this contest, became only the deeper 
 versed in the knowledge of the Word of God, while, at the same 
 time, he was especially led, by his studies on the subject, to per- 
 ceive the intimate connection subsisting between the Old and 
 New Testaments. 
 
 In two quarters, however, the evil consequences of this strife 
 of opinions made themselves visible, and opposed serious obstacles 
 to the progress of the Eeformation. On the one hand, this wild 
 offshoot was, with mischievous joy, represented by the Papists as 
 the natural consequence and fruit of the free preaching of the 
 gospel, so that, on this ground, the enemies of the gospel succeeded 
 in many places in suppressing it, and in stifling the thirst which 
 had recently been awakened for its healing waters. On the 
 other hand, these divisions exerted an injurious influence medi- 
 ately on the farther development and conformation of the Eefor- 
 mation, by opening up a new source of dissension, the so-called 
 " Supper-contest" between Luther and Zwingli and their respec- 
 tive friends and scholars. We shall now proceed to survey this 
 important contest more narrowly, in so far as it concerns Zwingli. 
 
 5. The Docteine of Zwingli and of Luthee in eegaed to 
 THE Loed's Supper — The Idiosynceasies and Diffeeent 
 Development of theie Minds. — Oeigin of the Steifb 
 about the Loed's Suppee. 
 
 The Kke contest which Luther had to carry on against the 
 Anabaptists in Saxony, Zwingli had to maintain against the same 
 enemy in Zurich, nay, the fanatics in Zurich, as it has been 
 
ZWINGLI AND LUTHER ON THE LORD'S SUPPER. 287 
 
 above mentioned, borrowed their names and their party badges 
 from their German co-religionists. While Luther was sojourning 
 at the Wartburg, (from April 1521 till March 1522,) his colleague 
 and former fellow-labourer in the work of the Eeformation, Dr. 
 Andrew Carlstadt,* had entered into connection with fanatics 
 from Zwickau,-f who boasted of direct revelations from heaven, 
 who rejected infant baptism, and attacked and with infuriated 
 ardour, sought to overthrow the existing order in church and 
 state. Under the influence of these people, and hurried away 
 by his ill-regulated zeal for reformation, Carlstadt endeavoured, in 
 union with some heated spirits, especially from amongst the 
 students, to revolutionise, in a turbulent and violent manner, 
 which gave deep offence to many, the whole institutions of public 
 worship. The Mass was suddenly abolished, ami the Supper, 
 without preparation of heart and confession of sin, administered 
 in both kinds, the altars were cast down, the ijionks who shewed 
 any disinclination to the new system of things were maltreated, 
 and the images were thrown out of the churches. Luther, when 
 he heard at the Wartburg of these riotous proceedings, repaired, 
 trusting in the protecting arm of God, instantly to Wittenberg, 
 and restored order by the power of his preaching, which he con- 
 tinued before a great concourse of people for eight days succes- 
 sively, and won over Carlstadt again to more wholesome labours 
 in the service of the Church and the University. When Luther 
 set his face against these violent attempts at reformation, he was 
 not the less convinced of the necessity of abolishing, in the course 
 of time, everything in public worship and ecclesiastical arrange- 
 ments, which had a tendency to compromise the honour of God, and 
 the merits of Christ, and thereby to do injury to the salvation of 
 the soul Like Zwingli,^ he held it to be his chief commission 
 
 * His name was, properly epeating, Andrew Ralph Bodenstein; he is, how- 
 ever, generally called Carlstadt, after his birth-place of this name in Franconia. 
 
 t The so-called " Zwickau prophets." The most important members of this 
 society were Nicolas Storch, a cloth-maker, Martin Cellarius, Marx Huebner, 
 and the notorious Thomas Muenzer. 
 
 t Thushespeaks particularly in reference to images, in his preaching against the 
 Anabaptists, during the first eight days after his arrival in Wittenberg. " Idols, 
 they are called, on which the heart hangs like pears on a tree; of which there 
 have been many among the heathen, and of which there are many at this day in 
 the popedom; which are not simply looked at, but are looked at with confidence, 
 such an image being regarded as a god, and heretics having worshipped such 
 
288 ZWINGLI AND LUTHEE ON THE LOED'S SUPPER. 
 
 faithfully to preach the Word of God, and leave it to the Lord to 
 appoint the time and the hour when a reform, for the weal of His 
 Church should be undertaken. Among the ordinances of public 
 worship which, in the Papal Church, had departed the widest 
 from its original institution and import, to the great detriment of 
 the salvation of souls, the Mass occupied the first place, which 
 had usurped the place of the Supper appointed by Christ. Both 
 the Eeformers, accordingly, after they found in Christ salvation, 
 and in the Word of God. the true light, by which to prove and 
 test aU existing ecclesiastical ceremonies, were filled with a holy 
 indignation against the false doctrine spread by the papists, 
 " that the Mass is a sacrifice," the merits of Christ's sufferings 
 being thereby depreciated, and the doctrine of the apostles, that a 
 sacrifice for sin was made once for aU by Christ, practically 
 annulled ;* both likewise recognised in the asseveration, which 
 was the natural fruit of this doctrine, " that the priest, in the Mass, 
 daUy offers up Christ for the living and the dead," the grand 
 source of the Church's corruption ;-f- and both united in demand- 
 images in which confidence is placed. Such may be pulled down, but only by 
 the lawful civil authority, for such images are not only looked at with the eye, 
 but are looked at with devotion, with confidence, and adoration." 
 
 * Zwingli: The pretence of popery, that it offers up Christ for other men, it has 
 itself invented. The pretence is without foundation in the Scriptures, and 
 from it two impugnments of God, and two great crimes, have arisen. The first 
 impugnment of God consists in this, that the worth and preciousness of the suf- 
 ferings of Christ are darkened. Christ, who was true God and man, is of so great 
 and infinite value, that His death, He being only once sacrificed, is rich and pre- 
 cious enough to pay for the sins of the whole world to all eternity. JNow, popery 
 giving out its sacrifice for sin, the matter stands thus ; either Christ, by His suf- 
 fering, once for all, did not complete redemption, or redemption is no longer of 
 avail. Both areimpugnments of Christ. The other impugnment is, that no man can 
 offer a greater sacrifice than himself., as Paul teaches, Rom. xii. 1 ; mark, this 
 is the highest sacrifice which a man can offer, himself. Whoever pretends to ofier 
 Christ, takes the honour from Christ and gives it to himself. Luther : That Christ 
 is offered in the mass is a blasphemy against God, and an enormity, and the worst 
 sin which can be committed. Christ has been once sacrificed; now He requires 
 nothing more but that we praise Him to all eternity. The sacrifice of Christ 
 once made holds good for ever, and we are saved by believing on it. If any- 
 thing is erected at the side of this sacrifice it is a blasphemy of God. 
 
 t Zwingli: The false opinion that the Mass is a sacrifice has implanted and 
 encouraged every vice. For all robbers, usurers, traitors,' murderers, adulterers, 
 have had the opinion, if mass were said for them it was all right with them. And 
 it cannot but be that such have been often led to commit sin on this very ground. 
 It is very visible in the Masses they have paid for, and the benefices they have 
 
ZWINGLI AND LUTHEB ON THE LOED'S SUPPEE. 289 
 
 ing that this sacrament should be brought back to the simple 
 state in which it was instituted and exemplified by Christ * and 
 that the Supper should be administered in both kinds. With the 
 conception of the sacrificial character of the Mass, there is closely 
 connected the false doctriue adopted by the Papal Church through 
 the resolution of a Church-Council, held at Eome, 1215, "that 
 the bread and wine are changed into the real and essential body, 
 and into the real and essential blood of Christ, by the priestly 
 consecration at the Supper." In the conflict wa!ged against this 
 doctrine, the different intellectual peculiarities of the two Eefor- 
 mers, and their different intellectual visual powers, now in 
 diametric opposition, now approximating very closely, arising 
 from a difference in spiritual education and manner of life, made 
 themselves felt so sensibly that these two great men, who stood 
 upon one and the same foundation of faith, became involved in a 
 gigantic contest that occupied them much till their deaths, and 
 tore asunder the church, renovated by them, and placed by them 
 on the one rock of salvation, Jesus Christ, into two mighty fac- 
 tions. We shall now direct our attention to the diverse views of 
 the two Eeformers upon this subject ere we proceed to the detail 
 of the conflict itself which unhappUy broke out between them. 
 From the standing-point of faith on God alone and his Word, 
 
 founded. Popery, however, had not enough in robbing the living of their money 
 to discharge her masses; she brought the dead into the bill also. 
 
 Luther: From the moment that the Mass was proclaimed to be a sacrifice, from 
 that moment the devil easily drew the money and property of all the world to 
 himself, and, by the force of riches, he brought into the priesthood, avarice, ambi- 
 tion, pride, unchastity, all viUany and baseness, to the total extinction of a true 
 priesthood, till at length the world knew nothing more but mass-priests and their 
 sacrifices, with which all men were deceived who weened that, by their money, 
 they could obtain forgiveness of sins, and everlasting life. 
 
 * Zwingli's opinion on this point is well known, it having found currency and 
 recognition in the Calvinistic Church. Luther expresses his sentiments in this 
 manner : "The nearer our Masses come to the first Mass of Christ, the better with- 
 out doubt they are, and the farther from it, the more dangerous. An efibrt is to 
 be made above everything else, that we may safely and happily come to a true 
 and right knowledge of this Sacrament, that all may be set aside which has been 
 added to the first and simple institution of it by human devotion and zeal, such 
 as mass-robes, ornaments, chanting, prayers, organs, candles, and the whole pomp 
 of visible things, and that we may turn our outward eye and our inward 
 soul to the pure institution of Christ, and maintain nothing but the Word of 
 Christ, by which He has ordained, instituted, and completed it." — Walch, vol. 
 xix. p. 35. 
 
 T 
 
290 ZWINGLI AND LUTHEK ON THE LOED'S SUPPER 
 
 which Word must be held to explain itself, Zwingli had, at 
 a very early period, arrived at the conviction that the transub- 
 stantiation doctrine of the Papistical Church is false, and that it 
 has put an erroneous interpretation on the words of the institu- 
 tion of the Holy Sacrament, " This is my body," and " This is my 
 blood," from which erroneous interpretation the false dogma is 
 derived. Christ has, by His death on the cross, accomplished an 
 eternal redemption and propitiation for our sias, of which we can 
 alone be paitakers through faith* To this propitiatory death the 
 Holy Supper refers us, by the symbols of bread broken and wine 
 poured out. The reality, i.e., the fruit, of the redemption and 
 propitiation, we appropriate to ourselves alone hj faith. Hence 
 both the expressions, " eating the flesh of Christ," and " drinking 
 His blood," are to be understood figuratively for " believing on 
 Jesus Christ, who was crucified, and shed His blood for us." The 
 bread broken and the wine poured forth into the cup make pre- 
 sent to us, in a figurative sense, the crucified body of Christ, and 
 His blood shed for us. He who, in true faith, partakes of these 
 symbols in the Supper, to him Christ is as near as if He were 
 dying for him at that very moment on the cross ; for Christ, who 
 is everlasting God, is omniscient at all times, and his sufferings 
 are eternally fruitful. (Heb. ix. 14.) * In this sense, the Holy 
 Supper has been given and appointed to be an eternal sign of the 
 love of Christ, and its intention is to make present to us, as often 
 as it is celebrated. Him who suffered for us on the wood jof the 
 cross in such a manner that, with the eye of the soul, we may behold 
 Him alone, admire and embrace Him with lively faith. Now, just 
 as certainly as this touching of Him by faith is far more precious 
 than the touching even of His body, (for-many have touched Him 
 materially to their destruction, but no man has contemplated Him 
 in faith in the above described manner without benefit,) just as 
 certainly is it this contemplation and partaking alone which is 
 required. While we are, by faith, assured of that which the 
 symbols represent to us, that Christ has atoned for our sins, our 
 soul is freed from the hunger of despair, and we are everlastingly 
 quickened with the heavenly nourishment of God's love and 
 grace." This view of the partaking of the Supper Zwingli con- 
 ceived to be grounded on the words of Christ, John vi., in which 
 * Exposition of the Eighteenth Article of the Propositions. 
 
ZWINGLI AND LUTHEE ON THE LOED'S SUPPEE. 291 
 
 Christ himself explains how the expressions, " eating his flesh," 
 and " drinking his hlood," are to be understood. Christ incul- 
 cates here, ver. 26, upon the Jews, who sought earthly food from 
 Him, the necessity of labouring for heavenly food, which "endureth 
 unto everlasting life," and He designates "himself," ver. 35, 
 as " the bread of life which everlastingly quickens him who comes 
 to him, and believes on him." In what manner He is the bread 
 of life, He explains in the words, ver. 51 , " The bread that I will 
 give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." This, 
 my self-sacrifice, for sinners, wiU propitiate the world again to 
 my Father, which propitiation is nothing else but a restoration to 
 life ; thereby, by my giving myself up, and dying, I become a 
 food for souls, on which they may nourish their hopes, and 
 be certain of the mercy of God; for how could the Divine 
 mercy deny anything to poor sinful man, having given up the 
 Son for him. Thus my flesh, in so far as it is killed, is a food, 
 ie., a hope and consolation of the souL When Christ says, 
 ver. 54, "Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath 
 eternal life," and in ver. 47, "He that believeth on me hath 
 everlasting life," it is clear that "eating His flesh" and "behev- 
 ing on Him" are one and the same thing, for if not there would 
 be two different roads to salvation; the one by the eating of His 
 flesh, and the other by believing on Him. It is thus oi faith, and 
 not of bodily eating, that Christ here speaks. This is still more 
 clearly evident from the conclusion of his address, ver. 61-63. 
 The Jews, not comprehending, or not being willing to compre- 
 hend, the gracious, though figurative, speech of Christ, and his 
 disciples murmuring over the "hard saying," Christ adds, ver. 
 63, " It is the Spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth nothing : 
 the words that I speak unto you they are Spirit, and they are 
 life." Can plainer words be used to repel the opinions and 
 assertions, more froward than pious, that the substance of the 
 bread is changed into flesh, or that Christ is bodUy and essen- 
 tially partaken of in the Supper, than these : the flesh profiteth 
 nothing? That Christ is here speaking of His own flesh is clear, 
 for it was this alone which was the subject of discourse, and this 
 they had to eat, as they thought, which, for the Jews and the 
 disciples, was a hard saying. But how does his flesh profit 
 nothing ? Plainly for eating, as the disciples understood His 
 
292 ZWINGLI AND LUTHEE ON THE LORD'S SUPPER 
 
 words, and which foolish conception He would here dissipate. 
 Otherwise, the flesh of Christ is of great, nay, of incalculahle 
 value, but as slain, not as eaten. Slain it has delivered us 
 from death, but eaten it profits us nothing. He who is truth 
 itself tells us this, therefore it must be so. " The words," He 
 continues, " that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are 
 life." What words? "He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh 
 my blood hath everlasting life," and, " He that beheveth on me 
 hath everlasting life." These words, — that Christ on the cross 
 is our redemption and salvation, believed by us, and received 
 into the depth of our hearts, procure for us everlastiug life. 
 These are the words that Christ spoke that are spirit and 
 life. Another passage which Zwingli brought forward in proof 
 that by "eating Christ" is to be understood "believing on 
 Christ," he took from 1 Cor. jii. 4 Paul teaches here that they 
 of old are just as worthy as we, having had the same God whom 
 we have, the same Christ whom we have, although they set their 
 hopes upon the promised, we upon the already come Messiah; 
 yet God was displeased at them when they were disobedient 
 Among other things which he says ihey had not less than we, 
 were " the same spiritual meat," and " the same spiritual drink." 
 But it is undeniable that they neither ate the bodily flesh, nor 
 drank the bodily blood of Christ, He not having become man 
 tni many hundred years afterwards. Therefore their eating 
 must have been nothing else but their believing on Christ, who, 
 at a future day, was to give His body, and shed His blood for 
 them. If, however, they had " the same spiritual meat" which 
 we have, as the apostle says, and they did not eat his body, or 
 drink his blood, our eating of the body and drinking of the blood 
 of Christ can be nothing but our believing on Him who died for 
 us. In the light of these passages of Holy Scripture, Zwingli 
 proceeded to an explanation of the words of institutioa If the 
 eating of Christ's flesh and the drinking of His blood signifies, 
 according to the declaration of the Lord himself in the gospel of 
 John, believing on Christ, and if He corrects the misconcep- 
 tion of the disciples with regard to the bodily partaking of His 
 flesh with the words, " the flesh profiteth nothing," the same 
 phraseology in the words of institution must have the same sense 
 as here, for Christ cannot possibly desire us to eat His flesh. 
 
ZWINGLI AND LUTHEE ON THE LOED'S SUPPER. 293 
 
 which he so distinctly states in John vi. profiteth nothing. The 
 Word of God contains no contradiction of itself, but it exhibits 
 a beautiful harmony throughout, if we but rightly understand it. 
 Holy Scripture is replete with figurative language and expres- 
 sions, and Christ employs such modes of expression, both when 
 speaking of the doctrine of the kingdom and of His own person, 
 as, "the seed is the Word of God;" "the field is the world;" 
 " the harvest is the end of the world;" " I am the vine." These 
 are all figures of speech of a similar form with " this is my body 
 and this is my blood." 
 
 Just as Zwingli, after weighing the words of institution in 
 connection with the above passages, had obtained the conviction 
 that they were not to be taken literally, but figuratively, and 
 was seeking for a fitting expression to make the image intel- 
 ligible and comprehensible to every one, there came to him, in 
 the summer of 1522, two learned men from Holland, John Rho- 
 dius and George Sagan,* with a treatise, in the form of a letter, 
 from the Dutch lawyer, Cornelius Honius or Hoen, upon the 
 words of the institution. Honius \mderstood the words in 
 a figurative sense, and he found the figure in the copula- 
 tive " is," which he rendered by " signifies." This explanation 
 of the figure pleased Zwingli extremely well, because it seemed 
 to bim at once to correspond with the sense, and to be simple 
 and intelligible to every mind, and because it withdrew the chief 
 foundation for the papistical transubstantiation-doctrine, which 
 rested principally upon the strict literal sense of this small word.f 
 Above all, however, Zwingli found himself compelled, by a regard 
 to the context, to take the words of the institution ia the figu- 
 rative sense, and to explain " this is" by " this signifies." Luke 
 relates the institution in the words, chap. xxii. 19, " And he took 
 
 * According to an account, the truth of which, from various hints in Zwingli's 
 and in Luther's writings, appears to be in the highest degree probable, the two 
 Dutchmen had first repaired to Luther, 1523, requesting him to intimate his 
 concurrence in the contents of Hoen's letter. From anxiety lest a desecration 
 of the sacrament might ensue, Luther declined the request, although Carlstadt 
 urged him to comply with it. Hereon they came over Basle to Zwingli at 
 Zurich, who found the views of Hoen correspondent with his own. 
 
 t The ever-repeated proof for the doctrine of Transuhstantiation is contained 
 in the words: " Christ said. This is my body, and this is my blood, consequently 
 bread and wine are understood as changed into the real body and blood of the 
 Lord, as often as the priest pronounces these words at the consecration." 
 
294 ZWINGLI AND LUTHER ON THE LOED'S SUPPER. 
 
 bread, and gave thaiiks, and brake it, and gave unto tbem, say- 
 ing, This is my body which is given for you : this do in remem- 
 brance of me." Here we must not disjoin the words, " this is 
 my body," and "which is given for you," but we must allow 
 them to stand in their natural connection, which is, " this is my 
 body which is given for jovl" From this it is clear that Christ 
 speaks of His body, which was given up to death for us, and 
 farther, that the bread is not this body, because if so, then a loaf 
 of bread must have been given up to death for us. Christ pointg 
 to the bread, and says, " This is my body which is given for you" 
 Mark here how the words of Christ present the key to their own 
 explanation in the little word " is," which must not be under- 
 stood, as it stands between bread and body, in the literal, but in 
 the figurative sense; therefore, the bread "signifies" my body 
 which is given for you, or the bread is a sign of my body. But 
 how does the bread in the Supper signify the body of Christ? 
 To this I answer with Christ, inasmuch as it is "given for us." 
 Christ means by these words only to say that the bread is the 
 sign that He hath given up His body to us for death, which His 
 following words demonstrate, " this do in remembrance of me." 
 Here we learn for what purpose the figure of bread has been 
 appointed, namely, as a memonalof Christ, and that the bread is 
 not the body of Christ, but signifies or symbolizes it, we, in break- 
 ing of bread remembering Him through the sign before us. 
 Paul gives the words of the institution in 1 Cor. xi. 24, thus: 
 " This is my body, which is broken for you." Given for you, and 
 broken for you, signify the same thing, Paul here alluding only 
 to the resemblance which lies hid in the transaction. The words 
 in reference to the cup, Luke xxii. 20, gives thus : " This cup 
 (cup for that which was contained in it) is the new testament 
 in my blood, which is shed for you." That these words of Christ 
 may be clearly seen, compare those given by Paul, 1 Cor. xi. 25, 
 which are the same, " This cup is the new testament in my blood" 
 The sense is shortly this : The cup is the new testament, which 
 is sealed in my blood, shed for you. Here we see, first, that 
 neither Luke nor Paul says the cup is the blood of Christ, from 
 whence it is to be concluded that the other evangelists had no 
 intention to speak differently from them. Although they say, 
 "The cup (i.e., the wine) is my blood," they mean to assert 
 
ZWINGLI AND LUTHEE ON THE LOED'S SUPPEB. 295 
 
 nothing more than the cup is a sign, a signification, a memorial 
 of the blood of the new testament which has been shed for us. 
 To the objection that is here made. If the cup is the new testa- 
 ment, it is Hkewise the blood of Christ, for Christ's blood is the 
 new testament, I reply: The blood of Christ is not the new 
 testament, but the pardoning merciful remission of our sins, as 
 in Jer. xxxi 34, and Heb. viii. 12, 13, is the new testament; but 
 the blood of Christ has obtained this remission. Hence it is 
 clear that the blood of Christ is not the new testament, but the 
 blood of the new testament, i.e., the blood through which the 
 new testament, to wit, the remission of sins, has been acquired. 
 In the like sense, in the old testameiit, the blood with which the 
 people and the book of the law were sprinkled, was called the 
 blood of the testament, but never " the testament." Nor do we 
 find that the blood of Christ is anywhere called " a testament," 
 although it is called " the blood of the new testament." Now, 
 if the cup here signifies the new testament, we must admit this 
 only to be a figure of speech similar to that by which Moses calls 
 circumcision the covenant, although it was but the sign of the 
 covenant. Gen. xiii. 13. In the same manner, the cup in the 
 Eucharist is called the testament, because it signifies the blood 
 of Christ by which the new testament was acquired. 
 
 Fiualty, I cite the words of Paul, 1 Cor. xi. 26, " For as often 
 as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's 
 death till he come." Here the word "shew" means nothing 
 more than praise, exalt, magnify, a signification which it has ia 
 1 Peter ii 9, and in various passages of the Old Testament 
 Paul would say that the Christian Church is not to omit glori- 
 fying the death of Christ tiU He come at the last day. 
 
 In the above maimer, Zwingli proves that the words of the 
 institution of the Holy Supper, if taken in their proper connec- 
 tion, do not admit of the literal acceptation, but speak decisively 
 in favour of the symbolical sense. This view found at once confir- 
 mation and illustration in the passage in Exod. xii. 11-27, where 
 the Pascal sacrifice or Lamb is called "the Lord's Passover," 
 although it only symbolises or commemorates it. We have 
 already seen how the attention of Zwingli was called by a dream 
 to this passage, which seems to speak most unequivocally of all 
 for the figurative sense of the words, " This is my body." Let us 
 
296 ZWINGLI AND LUTHER ON THE LOED's SUPPEE. 
 
 now see how he carries out the comparison between the two pas- 
 sages, and establishes his view. 
 
 In Heb. x. 1, it is said that the law has " a shadow of good 
 things to come." As however, amid all the shadows -and pre- 
 figurations which are fulfilled in Christ, none bear a stronger 
 resemblance the one to the other than the Paschal Lamb of the 
 Old Testament does to the crucified and slain Christ of the New 
 Testament, all the apostles and all the fathers of the Church are 
 of the mind that the Paschal Lamb is the finest type of the death 
 of Christ, and that Christ himseK is the real Paschal Lamb, by which 
 believers, delivered from the slavery of sin, are brought into the 
 heavenly Canaan. Hence Paul says, 1 Cor. v. 7, "Por even Christ, 
 our Passover, is sacrificed for us," &c. Christ himself shews this' 
 by word and deed, for He says, two days before the Passover: " Ye 
 know that after two days is the Passover, and the Son of man will 
 be delivered into the hands of men to be crucified, alluding plainly 
 in these words to the circumstance, that in this Passover the 
 Lamb should be slain that taketh away the sins of the world. 
 During the Supper He said, deeply moved, "With desire I 
 have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer;" to the 
 end, namely, that He might abrogate the old, and institute the new 
 solemnity, and change the commemoration of a single people 
 delivered from Egyptian bondage into that of the world redeemed 
 from the dominion of the devil and of death. As none can deny 
 that the festival that was once celebrated as a commemoration 
 of redemption from bodily servitude has passed into that of our 
 Supper or Eucharist, in which we rejoice, not indeed over bodily 
 deliverance, but over the propitiation of the world again with 
 God, through His Son, there is undoubtedly no passage in the 
 Old Testament more worthy of examination than that which 
 treats of the institution of the old Passover. For in Holy Scrip- 
 ture upon like subjects the expressions are like. 
 
 . There the Paschal Lamb is called " the Passover," or " the sacri- 
 fice of the Passover," while in reality it only signified the Pass- 
 over, or was a symbol of it; here "bread and wine" are called 
 " the body and blood of the Lord." Shall we not here adopt the 
 figurative signification, when we admit it there, everything being 
 so simiLar and corresponding ; there a commemoration is appointed, 
 here likewise; there it is the redemption of the body, here the 
 
ZWINGLI AND LUTHEE ON THE LOED'S SUPPER 297 
 
 redemption of the soul, which is celebrated. As there a symbol 
 of commemoration was appointed before the event itself took 
 place, the commemoration of which was to be held by coming 
 generations, so here the symbol of Christ slain for us was insti- 
 tuted before He really was slain, while for coming generations 
 it was to be the symbol of the slain Eedeemer. There, on the 
 evening preceding the day on which the redemption was to be 
 accomplished the figure was instituted ; here likewise the figure 
 was appointed on the evening before the day when the redemp- 
 tion was accomplished, when Christ, the true herald, proclaimed, 
 " It is finished." But why do I seek in these single particulars 
 to compare the shadow with the reality, when in every believing 
 soul, as soon as the word passover is pronounced, the recollection 
 of the death of Christ is at once vividly recalled ? Why will we 
 not recognise in the same light the figure of speech employed 
 in the Supper, which figure we perceive so plainly in the type, 
 especially since all is clear when we concede it; all is dark, 
 confused, unintelligible, inexplicable, when we deny it. 
 
 In conjunction with the Word of God, properly interpreted by 
 itself, Zwingli's faith led him to a right recognition of the sig- 
 nificance of the Supper. In the light of faith he shrunk before 
 the dreadful consequences of the transubstantiation-doctrine, on 
 the ground of which, the bread and wine were worshipped, and 
 salvation, instead of being sought through faith in Christ, was 
 placed in the outward partaking of the elements. "We are 
 fallen," says he, " into such gross folly as actually to believe that 
 if we but saw the bread, it would bring to us salvation. Nor 
 was this foUy enough; what we saw we worshipped, forgetting 
 our own principles, in which all, both ancients and moderns who 
 have written on the subject are agreed, namely, that the himnanity 
 of Christ is not to be worshipped at all; God alone is to be 
 worshipped. But no man has seen God at any time. Why do 
 we worship, then, anything visible, since God alone is to be 
 worshipped, and He is invisible? In what sophism can those 
 take refuge who teach that the Eucharist, as they call it, is to be 
 worshipped? Do we see that any one of the apostles adored the 
 Supper when Christ instituted it in His own commemoration? 
 Ah! our souls are so entangled in the meshes of this error, that 
 I fear if truth itself were to stand revealed before our eyes, we 
 
298 ZWINGLI AND LUTHEE ON THE LOED'S SUPPER 
 
 should not accept it. To what is oiir faith directed? or on what 
 is it grounded? Is not God the ohject of it? Why do we 
 hesitate, then, to break loose from ceremonies? Why do we 
 place our hope on things to which Christ never directed it? Is 
 not our salvation to be found alone in Him who is the Saviour 
 of aU the ends of the earth?" 
 
 Zwingli, although he had come to the firm conviction that the 
 word " is" in the institution of the Supper, must not be taken 
 literally, but in the sense of " signifies," by no means desired the 
 adoption of any change in the formula itself; " for," thus he 
 expresses himself, "when it is said, 'this is my body,' the sacra- 
 ment is much more solemn and sublime than when it is said 
 " this signifies my body," wherefore we desire not a letter of it 
 changed. The significance of the Supper in this point of view 
 he illustrated by the following image, as ingenious as it is 
 pertinent : — " As the father of a family who is on the point of 
 journeying to a distant land, gives to his spouse his best ring, on 
 which his image is engraved, so our Lord Jesus Christ at his 
 departure has bequeathed to His bride, the Church, His image 
 in the sacrament of the Supper. This His image he delivered 
 over to us with the words : ' This is my body, this is my blood. 
 Do this in remembrance of me, and shew by thanksgiving, praise 
 and prayer, that I, the husband of your souls, have purchased 
 you.' When the father of the family, at handing over the ring 
 to his spouse, says : ' See in this myself,' he gives much more than 
 if he said, ' See, this is my ring ;' yet he gives not himself 
 bodily, for he is, as we have said, on the point of departure. 
 Himself, however, he presents in all his marital faithfulness 
 and love, just as if he said: 'Thou shalt not be only assured of 
 my faithfulness and love to thee, but also of this, that I am 
 wholly thine, and therefore I give to thee this ring as a symbol 
 and pledge.' Thus Christ, also, when He was on the point of 
 going for us to death, presented us the bread and wine with the 
 words : This is my body, and this is my blood, although He was 
 even then about to withdraw his natural body from the earth, 
 and transplant it into heaveiL Nevertheless, He presented him- 
 self to us wholly in His mercy and faithfulness, as if He said: 
 Now I go for you to death, and soon thereafter I shall again 
 depart from hence. Ye shall not, however, doubt therefore of my 
 
ZWINGLI AND LUTHEE ON THE LOED's SUPPEE. 299 
 
 love and care for you. I am entirely yours with all that I am. 
 In testimony of it, I give you the symbol of this my sacrifice and 
 of my last will When ye now, by this commemorative Supper, 
 see this bread and this cup presented to you, you are to think of 
 me, that I have given myself up for you, and ye shall so think of 
 me as if you saw me before your eyes. In this manner, we really 
 glorify the Supper of the Lord through the presence of Christ, 
 for, through the contemplation of faith. He is as present to our 
 mind as the symbols of His body crucified for us, and His blood 
 shed for us, are present to our senses." This view of the sense 
 and significance of the words of institution, as well as of the 
 Supper itself, Zwingh had obtained at a much earlier period* than 
 that at which he conceived it expedient to make them known. " I 
 testify before God," are his words, " that, with His glory alone in 
 view, I have, for several years, conversed in private upon this 
 subject with many men of learning, because I was unwilling to 
 spread anything abroad amongst the people inconsiderately and 
 rashly which might excite dissension. But the more I consulted, 
 the more I found to concur with me in opinion. Often, too, have 
 I besought the Lord that He would point nle out the way in 
 which this most important matter of all, in the judgment of the 
 simple-minded, might be represented in a manner intelligible to 
 all, that, for the future, this sacred solemnity of the Church 
 " might tend to edification and salvation." Meanwhile, Zwingli, 
 in his sermons, impressed upon his hearers with emphasis the 
 duty of seeking salvation through faith vn Jesus Christ, who died 
 for us, warning them against applying to any creature the vene- 
 ration and worship which are due to God alone. The bread and 
 wine of the Supper are holy in the transaction, because through 
 
 ♦ When this view first presented itself fully to Zwingli's mind cannot be accu- 
 rately ascertained. It is probable that he saw the error, and rejected the doctrine 
 of Transubstantiation at the same time with that of the Adoration of the Saints, 
 saint-worship and deified bread equally compromising the merits of Christ, and 
 that immediate faith upon Him, by which alone we can be saved. The first 
 evidence of his change of opinions is contained in a letter to his teacher and 
 friend, Thomas Wyttenbach, of the 15th June 1523. That his new views, how- 
 ever, had been, at this time, completely developed, we know from his own con- 
 fession : " Tor a greater number of years than it is necessary here to state, I have 
 held the opinion, which I expressed in a letter to Alber, 16th November 1524, 
 and in the Commentary, (Match 1525.). My intention, however, was not to 
 publish it to the world without due consideration, &c. &c." 
 
300 ZWINGLI AND LUTHEE ON THE LOED'S SUPPER 
 
 them Christ is realised by the believing soul, but extraneously 
 to the transaction it is but bread and wine, for Christ dwells in 
 heaven, at the right hand of the Father, but on earth, in the 
 hearts of believers, and not in pyxes." Por the rest he awaited 
 in pious resignation the right moment of time, when the Lord 
 should reveal this truth to His people, by himself, or by others. 
 At the time when our Eeformer had gained this standing-point, 
 through the course of that zealous yet cautious investigation 
 after truth peculiar to his mind, Luther, under the impulse of a 
 fiery and living faith, was striving to unwind himself from the 
 errors of Transubstantiation. The former was disgusted at the open 
 idolatry practised through the Sacrament; the latter found him- 
 self, in the first instance, hurt in his faith by his change of opinions, 
 accustomed, as his mind had been, to the exaltation of the out- 
 ward act of the Sacrament, a natural consequence of the doctrine 
 of Transubstantiation.* Hence Luther inculcated with such 
 earnestness faith, -(■ as a main requisite to a blissful partaking of 
 the Sacrament, that, out of the outward act | (opus bperatim), of 
 the Papal Church, there might be an act of faith (opus operantis), 
 a partaking of the Sacrament without faith being not only value- 
 
 * Luther also allowed the adoration of the Sacraments. " Let it be free," he 
 says, " to every one to worship Christ in the Sacrament or not; he neither sins 
 who does it, nor he who does it not, for Christ has not enjoined it. It is thus free 
 to worship Christ in the Sacrament or not, because He will have it free, and has 
 given no command on either side. Therefore let him worship who will, and let 
 him worship not who will not; neither one nor other sins; nor is there heresy 
 on either side. If I may or may not worship God in the living man, why not in 
 the Sacrament, as His body and blood are certainly present?" 
 
 t Luther undoubtedly had not such clear ideas in reference to the object to 
 which faith is to be directed, and on which it should rest, as Zwingli had. " By 
 the former, faith was more an exalted pious disposition of the soul, sometimes 
 leaning on what was very mediately divine. ' 
 
 t It is remarkable that the two Reformers drew from the same circumstance 
 or transaction different conclusions, and yet arrived at a similar result. For 
 example, of the crucifixion Luther says, " that the outward transaction saves 
 none; else this most important of all transactions had certainly saved the Pha- 
 risees and the Roman soldiers; their salvation, however, did not take place, 
 because faith failed them." Zwingli deduces from the same event the inference, 
 that sensible handling and perception save no one, else the soldiers who crucified 
 Christ, and the Pharisees who had the immediate view of that which procured 
 the salvation of the world, had been saved. It is the spiritual contact and con- 
 templation by the eye of faith which make us partakers of the redemption 
 achieved by Christ. 
 
ZWINGLI AND LTJTHEE ON THE LORD'S SUPPER 301 
 
 less but injurious to man, like bread and wine taken unseason- 
 ably. That, however, which rests alone upon the outward partak- 
 ing of the elements, and the conception that there is in them the 
 body and blood of Christ, is not the true faith. " If you," writes 
 Luther, " in the trials which the devil puts you to, or, in the hour 
 of death, were to say: I have taken the Sacrament, and I believe 
 that it is truly the body and blood of Christ, the devil would rejoin ; 
 I believe it too. Thus this your faith helps you not, and the devil 
 has won, and will trip up your heels, so that there is no help for you 
 more. But if you say : Look, thou tyrant, or devil, and death, I have 
 received the Sacrament, in which my Lord Jesus Christ truly 
 vouchsafes that His body and blood are mme, and that He hath 
 given me all that the words contain in them, then he must flee 
 before you." "To the believer, then, this Sacrament is a sure 
 sign that He is made one with Christ and His Chtirch, and that 
 Christ, together with His life and sufferings, has become his own."* 
 Carried forward by His faith, Luther shot ahead of the papistical 
 doctrine of Transubstantiation, it affording no consolation to him. 
 On the other hand, he was unable to free himself from the con- 
 ception that Christ, in some incomprehensible manner, was 
 bodily present in the Sacrament, such an idea being too inti- 
 mately associated with his peculiar cast of mind, and too much 
 entwined with his whole style of thought and conception. Thus 
 he arrived at the doctrine, " that in the Sacrament two things 
 are presented to us ; first, The body and blood of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ in bread and wine ; second, The great and glorious promise 
 which is offered to every partaker of the Sacrament, that the body 
 of Christ has been given for us, and His blood shed for us, for the 
 remission of our sins. This view he established, as the Papal 
 Church does the doctrine of Transubstantiation, with the words of 
 institution, " This is my body given for you, this is my blood 
 shed for you," He was, indeed, at times strongly tempted to go 
 
 * Luther and Zwingli here agreed almost literally in that which they both 
 regarded as the chief thing in the Sacrament ; it was the sweetest consolation to 
 both that Christ had become ours, and both admitted that the believer had the 
 assurance of it in the Supper. At the outbreak of the dispute, Luther, carried 
 away by his passion, confounded the subsidiary with the main-point, and pro- 
 secuted a conception which, in his opinion, as stated in the text, the devil him- 
 self might hold with an energy and an emphasis as if life and an salvation 
 depended upon it. 
 
302 IDIOSTNCEACIES OF THEIE MINDS. 
 
 beyond this view of the significance of the ordinance, and to 
 behold in the bread and wine symbols of the body and blood of 
 Christ; but, accustomed as devout monk to honour and adore 
 the bodily present Saviour in the sacrament; and, besides, over- 
 mastered by an imagination which allowed him to contemplate 
 the spiritual only in the sensible form,* he found the words of 
 institution according to his interpretation so strong and power- 
 ful, as to cause him to say: " Avaunt! to all such temptations." 
 "I acknowledge,"-]- he says, at a later period, when speaking of 
 these trials, " that if Dr Carlstadt, or any one else, had been 
 able to convince me that a sacrament is nothing but bread 
 and wine, he had done me a signal service. I have suffered 
 so much vexation in regard to this matter, and have so 
 wrestled and wriggled myself upon it, that I had veiy gladly 
 been clear of it, for I very well saw what a great stroke I 
 could deal the papacy through it. And I have had two 
 who wrote to me more cleverly than Dr Carlstadt upon it,:|: 
 and who did not mangle the words either according to their 
 own ideas. But I am caught, and carmot get out. The text 
 is aU too powerful for me, and the words will not out of my 
 head. Yet this very day, if any one were to prove to me on solid 
 grounds that simple bread and wine alone were there, I should 
 be no longer so attacked. I am but too inclined to this view 
 when I feel the Adam within me." This confession, which 
 Luther made at the outset of the dispute, gives us a deep insight 
 into his heart, and explains his extreme sensitiveness and irritar- 
 bility whenever this subject came under discussion; it touched 
 an open wound in his otherwise great souL These different 
 modes of conceiving and representing the significance of the 
 Supper, in reality very nearly related to each other, although in 
 the outward form, in many respects, very different, result from 
 the diverse intellectual character of the two Eeformers, the basis 
 of faith being the same in both. Zwingli was endowed by God both 
 
 ♦ When he prayed for his sick friend Melanchthon, our Lord God " must pre- 
 serve him." " For," he continues, " I threw him the sack before the door, and 
 rubbed his ears with all the promises of prayer, that must be heard." 
 
 t To the very dear friends of God, all Christians atStrasburg, 15th December 
 1524. 
 
 X In my opinion these are probably Rhodius and Sagan, who, as above men- 
 tioned, are said to have visited Luther with Honius's letter. 
 
IDIOSYNCEACIES OF THEIE MINDS. 303 
 
 witha fine appreciating sense of the divine, and a penetrating under- 
 standing in regard to the phenomena of nature and the relations and 
 affairs of life. These splendid endowments found food and nourish- 
 ment which suited them along the flowery path of his youth and 
 education. On the mountain summits, where heaven and earth 
 are parted by a sharp drawn line, the reflective soul finds every- 
 where occasion to admire the majesty of God outshining all the 
 works of creation, while the understanding is sharpened and invi- 
 gorated hy the contemplation of the manifold objects which meet 
 the eye within the range of vision. A profound and pensive intel- 
 lect, with a predominant imagination, are Luther's characteristics. 
 The rougher and thornier the path of his youth and education were, 
 the more deeply and intensely he turned his inner glance* to the 
 mysteries of his own being, where his imagination created a 
 world of its own, which bore but little resemblance to outward 
 relations. As to his eye, heaven and earth mingled with each 
 other in one grey mass of fog and mist, his powerful imagination 
 invested every emotion which awoke in his soul, every thought 
 ^ that arose there, in a visible tangible form. 
 
 * We shall here, for the sake of clearness, present a short summary of the 
 chief parallel events of their lives, in order to shew more distinctly how they 
 approach towards and diverge from each other. 
 
 Zwingli and Lnther were, as is well known, bom within a few weeks of each 
 other, Lnther on Martinmas 1483, Zwingli on 1st January 1484. Their parents 
 were pious, upright peasants ; Zwingli's, affluent and indulgent to their children ; 
 Luther's, poor and austere. Whilst Zwingli's teacher, George Bnenzli, was dis- 
 tingtiished for learaing and gentleness of disposition, we only know Luther's 
 master at Mansfield, as a savage school-tyrant, who flogged his pupil one fore- 
 noon fifteen times. Zwingli's parents liberally relieved their son from all the 
 cares of earning his livelihood, Luther had to beg his scanty meal with singing. 
 Both excite admiration by their fine voices. Luther's brings him the means of 
 support from widow Cotta in Eisenach, while Zwingli's had nearly introduced 
 him to a cloister life. About the year 1502, both became acquainted with the 
 Scriptures; Zwingli in Basle, at the feet of Wyttenbach, Luther in the library 
 of Erfurt, where he sees a complete Bible for the first time. About the year 
 1505, Zwingli finds in Leo Jud a friend that remains faithful to him during his 
 whole life, while Luther loses in a terrible manner such an one in his Alexis, 
 which induces him to seek a cloister. Erom 1506-1510 Zwingli, as parson of 
 Glarus, wrestles against the temptations of life, and combats the corruption of 
 his country, while Luther suffers under inward trials, and the malice of the 
 monks. Zwingli, by the study of the classics, pierces to a deeper acquaintance 
 with the Bible, while Luther, by reading the writings of the mystics, arrives at 
 the same result. In the year 1510 Luther, in 1513 Zwingli, go to Italy, enthu- 
 siastic advocates of the papacy. Both are surprised in the Milanese at finding 
 
304 IDIOSYNCEACIES OF THEIR MINDS. 
 
 The mental development of the two gifted youths, who began 
 their studies at a time when intellectual life moved in two sepa- 
 rate currents, corresponded also with the very differently formed 
 impressions of their earlier years. The dry and barren learning 
 of the schools, in the cultivation of which the best spirits of the 
 middle ages exercised themselves, had lost, with many, its splen- 
 dour and importance, and from Greece and Italy there arose the 
 light of a better culture, in the spread of the knowledge of the 
 dead languages, and of the glorious master-works of antiquity 
 God led the son of the Swiss mountaineer, the tender-feeling, 
 sharp-witted, ZwingU, into this school, which afforded his intellect 
 the requisite nourishment. Luther, the son of the S axon plains, was 
 conducted by another and a steeper path, that better corresponded 
 with his peculiar cast of mind. Many deep-thinking men in Ger- 
 many had already turned their regards from the superficial train- 
 ing of the schools to fathom the soul, in order to sound in its 
 depths the sacred mysteries of the life in God and the Saviour. 
 And what they saw and felt in moments of spiritual awakening 
 they set down in deeply-drawn characters for the instruction of 
 mankind. God led the miner's son, the ardent Luther, into the 
 deep shafts and passages in which these learned men have depo- 
 sited their treasures, often, indeed, covered with a thick coating 
 of dross. But both these youths the Lord had destined to one 
 and the same great work; Zwingli was not to pitch his tent 
 in the outer court of the Gentiles, nor Luther to dissipate his 
 energies in dreamy contemplation behind cloister walls, and 
 in the twilight of the mystics. By the mysterious process 
 through which God conducts the. men who seek Him to their 
 proper stations in His kingdom, he led them both to Holy 
 Scripture, to the apprehension of eternal truth, and to the feet of 
 
 another ritual for the mass— the Amhrosian. Luther, in his journey, becomes 
 acquainted at Eome with the thorough dissoluteness of the lower classes of the 
 Roman clergy. Zwingli, in his Italian campaigns, has his eyes opened to the 
 total corruption of papal misgoTemment. In the year 1517 both found peace 
 of soul through faith on Jesus Christ, and while Zwingli, resolute to proclaim 
 the Word of God without respect of human laws and doctrines, attacks the pil- 
 grimages and the adoration of the Virgin; Luther, from the same standing- 
 point, attacks the sale of Indulgences, and without intending it, shakes the 
 papacy to its foundations. " When I assailed this abuse," he wrote himself 
 afterwards, " I was yet a monk, and the most absurd Papist in the world, so 
 drunk, so drowned in Papal doctrines, that had I had the power, I should 
 willingly have put all to death who refused obedience to the Pope." 
 
CONTEST REGARDING THE SUPPER. 305 
 
 Him who alone is the true teacher. Thus the two greatest men 
 of the time, the representatives of different kinds of intellect, and 
 different directions of thought, stand before us with the combined 
 testimony they sent forth, — " The Word of God is the only direc- 
 tory of faith and practice ; in Christ alone is salvation to be 
 found," — as two bright examples of the glory of divine teaching, 
 and the power of the gospel. The Christian, indeed, suffers a 
 pang,, that one . of them, under the influence of error, yielded so 
 far to the bent of his natural disposition, as at times to compro- 
 mise the love, whicli is the bond of perfectness, towards his 
 brother, who stood on the same foundation of faith as himself. 
 Yet God's thoughts are not our thoughts; He allows the greatest 
 minds to be overtaken by some infirmity, that we may give our 
 hearts unreservedly to Him who knew no sin, and in whose 
 mouth there was no guile. 
 
 6. How THE Contest regarding the Supper broke out, and 
 WITH what reasons Zwingli rebutted the objections of 
 Luther against his doctrine of the Supper. 
 
 Luther, had, by his authority, and by the power of his preach- 
 ing, restored order at Wittenberg, but the authors of the disturb- 
 ances had not been converted from their opinions. The German 
 people, who in many parts of the country sighed under severe 
 oppression, often exercised with great injustice on the part of the 
 civil and spiritual authorities, rose, in 1524 and 1525, in fierce 
 insurrection against their tyrants. The Zwickau prophets took 
 part in this rebellion, and the notorious Thomas Muenzer, in 
 Thuringia and Suabia, exercised a very important and baleful 
 influence in it* Carlstadt, too, gave himself up again to his 
 former spiiit of fanaticism, and abandoned, on his own respon- 
 sibility, his post as professor and preacher in Wittenberg, to 
 preach at Orlamuenda, near Lena, one of Wittenberg's affiliated 
 churches. Under his influence the images were here broken to 
 shivers, and thrown out of the churches, and public worship 
 altered in accordance with his views. In order to give his opin- 
 
 * It cannot te shewn that Carlstadt took part in the civil insurrection. He 
 appears rather to hare confined his violence to ecclesiastical affairs. 
 
806 CONTEST EEGAKDING THE SUPPEE. 
 
 ions a wider dissemination, he erected, at Lena, a printing-press, 
 from wMch he issued a series of small publications, to the great 
 displeasure of Luther. He had, in one of these pieces, entitled, 
 " Whether it can be proved, by Holy Scripture, that Christ is 
 present in the Sacrament with body, blood, and soul," delivered 
 the opinion (1 524), that Christ, at the institution of the Supper, 
 referred in the words, " Take, eat," to the bread, on the other 
 hand, to himself in the words, " This is my body." From hence 
 he drew the conclusion, that neither bread nor wine are changed 
 into the body and blood of Christ, as the papists teach, nor that 
 the body and blood of Christ unite with the wine, as Luther's 
 opinion was, but that the bread and wine are only symbols of 
 Christ's broken body and shed blood, and that the ordinance of 
 the Supper is a solemn commemoration of the hody of Christ 
 given for us. 
 
 Luther expressed his just iudignation at the seditious propen- 
 sities of the Zwickau prophets, and Carlstadt's despicable beha- 
 viour ; in his work,* "Against the heavenly prophets," and in an 
 Appendix to it, "On Images and the Sacraments," he assaUed 
 with great vehemence the view Carlstadt had expressed on the 
 Supper. This gave rise to a violent paper-war betwixt Luther and 
 Carlstadt ^f" In the end, Carlstadt was forced to quit Orlamuenda 
 
 * Among other eccentricities which Carlstadt displayed is the following: He 
 laid aside his ecclesiastical costume, strutted about in a grey coat and felt hat, 
 like a peasant or artisan, had himself called neighhour Andrew, and wished to be 
 subject to the judge at Orlamuenda. 
 
 t Zwingli writes, at a later period, in reference to the manner in which Luther 
 and Carlstadt fought with each other, to the former, in the following terms: "Your 
 everlasting complaints, that nobody has replied to what you have written against 
 Carlstadt, have forced me to a perusal of your polemical writings. But, gracious 
 heavens, how little that is solid and well considered does one find in them? I 
 have only seen, in the whole affair, two blind fighters rushing into single combat. 
 Carlstadt, indeed, is on the tract of truth, but ignorant of the true significance 
 of the figures, he transposes and perverts the words senselessly, like some raw 
 recruit, who has, indeed, courage and arms, but without skill, not knowing 
 on which parts of the body he must fasten his arms. Thus, instead of the har- 
 ness, he binds the helmet on his breast, the greaves he puts on hiu forehead, and 
 with the arm-rings he covers his legs, out of the coat of mail he makes a helmet, 
 and out of the helmet a quiver, out of the javelin a bow, and out of the bow an 
 arrow. So Carlstadt went into battle. But you, too, though trained to war, 
 rush into liie arena without consideration, and without arms, and make him' who 
 is inexperienced in the use of his arms so ridiculous to all, by heaping upon him 
 
CONTEST EEGAEDING THE SUPPEE. 307 
 
 and the Saxon territory, being threatened with banishment for dis- 
 obedience. He now directed his erring steps to the south, whither 
 his friend Muenzer had proceeded, to take part in the insurrection 
 of the peasants in Suabia. His work upon the Supper, which was 
 disseminated with great zeal, operated like a firebrand in Ger- 
 many, many having already quarrelled with the Transubstantiation 
 of the Eoman Catholic Church without either adopting Luther's 
 artificial solution of the difficulty, or being able to form a more 
 satisfactory one of their own from Scripture. The strife upon 
 this subject came to none more unseasonably than to the truly 
 pious Zwingli, who ever treated what was holy with a tender 
 reserve, and would have it so treated by others. He had already 
 in private gained so many friends for his own view as developed 
 above, and which had its firm foundation in the Word of God, 
 that he ventured to hope " it would pass into the hearts of the 
 faithful without the noise of angry warfare. For nearly all to 
 whom he opened it, breathed freely, and looked gladly up like 
 people returning from the darkness and solitude of a dungeon, meet- 
 ing the gracious light and kind friends." "Now Carlstadt comes 
 forward," continues Zwingli, " with his declaration, a too strained 
 one, as even his most ardent followers admit, after they had 
 weighed the sentiments of the ancients upon the subject which 
 I produced to them. I have also learned that Carlstadt had 
 resolved to come to Zurich for the purpose alone of talking over 
 this subject with me, upon which he is grossly ignorant. Some,* 
 however, in their dark fanatical spirit, have so strongly dissuaded 
 him from a meeting with me, that he has not even saluted me 
 when he saw me. Nay, the medicine they have given him has 
 operated in this respect so powerfully, that he neither at Basle 
 nor at Strasburg spoke a syllable with the ministers of the Word 
 upon that subject. Those also to whom I have just referred, as 
 being filled with a dark fanatical spirit, were well acquainted 
 with my views of the Supper, although they could by no means 
 be brought to accede to them. No sooner, however, had they 
 heard of Carlstadt's declaration of opinion, than they hasted to 
 
 every possible jibe, jeer, and sally of wit, that no eye could recognise him again 
 in the form in which you paint him. Nay, by your noisy exaggerations and 
 invectives, you have set the spectators in the dilemma of not knowing whether to 
 laugh at or compassionate the poor man." 
 
 ♦ Grebel Manz and their friends above-mentioned. 
 
308 CONTEST EEGAEDING THE SUPPEE. 
 
 Basle* themselves, brought his books on their backs hither, and^ 
 filled not only cities, towns, and villages with them, but even 
 the hamlets. The result, however, by no means corresponded to 
 their expectation, for very few adopted the opinion, as I think,' 
 deterred by the hardness and violence of the interpretation. 
 What should I now do who have to preach the Word of God in 
 Zurich? Although a great part of the brethren were agreed, in 
 regard to the main point, (for each had for himself learned through 
 feith and my preaching how unreasonable it is to look for flesh 
 and blood in that which Christ, speaking of His body and blood, 
 has declared to be spirit and life,) yet they withheld their consent 
 from so rash an interpretation. I say, what was I to do, who saw 
 Carlstadt thus running eagerly to the goal but missing it? Was 
 I to repel the people back once more to their former error against 
 my own convictions. I did this : I began immediately to explain 
 the figurative meaning (tropus) which lies in the words of our 
 Lord, and I did it with so much success, that the brethren 
 comprehended all I had to say, ere I was half through with the 
 explanation I had to make. When could I have more seasonably 
 come forward with my opinion than just then when the subject 
 had been broached in so dangerous a manner? N"ay, would it 
 have been at all wise to have kept silence?" 
 
 To this step, Zwingh was in part also induced by a resolution 
 of the Zurich Council which forbad the dissemination and read- 
 ing of Carlstadt's writings. Although the Eeformer disapproved 
 of such a measure in itseK, he had double cause to find fault with 
 it here, inasmuch as it had a tendency to suppress the truth along 
 with error. He accordingly expressed openly his disapprobation 
 of it, and effected its withdrawal. At the same time, he com- 
 bated the error which lay in Carlstadt's view, and established 
 the truth by an exhibition of his own opinions. This difficult 
 task he had not only to perform in Zurich, but also elsewhere, 
 as the contest so passionately entered into by Luther and Carl- 
 stadt began to burst out in various places. Thus the two 
 parsons of Eeuthngen, Matthew Alber,who adhered to Luther's 
 views, and Conrad Hermann, who approved of Carlstadt's 
 explanation, desired to hold a public disputation upon the sub- 
 
 * Here Carlstadt had got some books printed. 
 
CONTEST BEGAKDING THE SUPPEE. 309 
 
 ■ject, and in this manner involve the community in the dispute. 
 As soon as Zwingli heard of this intention, he wrote a letter to 
 Alber, stating his opinions at length, and strongly dissuading 
 him against a disputation. Zwingli adjured Alber "by Jesus 
 Christ, the Judge of the quick and the dead, (so strong was his 
 language,) to shew this letter to none of whom he did not cer- 
 taioly know that he was firm in the faith on one Lord." The 
 letter, however, was widely circulated in Southern Germany, in 
 Switzerland, ana in Alsace, a dissemination which Zwingli indeed 
 himself aided by sendiag copies of it to friends on whom he had 
 reliance, such as Bucer and Capito,* in Strasburg, fficolampad in 
 Basle, &c. They all expressed their decided approval of the 
 contents. Intelligence of Zwingli's views upon the sacrament 
 reached Luther also, who, however, had not the least idea that 
 the Zurich Eeformer had gained these by an independent study 
 of the Word of God, or that they differed in any respect from 
 Carlstadt's. Under this impression, he wrote on the 21st Decem- 
 ber 1524, to Amsdorf: "Carlstadt's poison is spreading fast. 
 Already Zwingli and Leo Jud have adopted his opinions." 
 Carlstadt now occupied in Luther's heated imagination the same 
 position to Zwingli and his like-minded friends in Southern 
 Germany, as Thomas Muenzer did to the insurrectionary peasants 
 in Thuringia and Suabia. Had Luther exercised but a small 
 degree of self-control, he would have soon perceived how gi'ound- 
 less his suspicions were, and that Zwingli's views of the Supper 
 had just as little origin in the fanaticism of the heavenly prophets 
 as that spring flowers derive their blossoms from wintry storms. 
 
 * Capito wrote (January 1525) to Zwingli: "Bucer is wholly at one with 
 you in the matter of the Supper, although he was at first more devoted to 
 Luther's view than I could have expected in a man of such penetration, but it 
 may be, he had the circumstances of the times more in his eye than the cause of 
 truth." Luther received his information of the SwissEeformation, and the course 
 it took, mostly from travelling students, who exaggerated all, and represented 
 many things falsely. Isolated infringements of the laws of fasting, and isolated 
 iconoclastic excesses communicated by such tale-bearers, were generally regarded 
 at Wittenberg as things approved of by Zwingli, and severely censured, as is 
 very evident from Melanchthou's letters to Hummelberger of Kavensburg, and to 
 Hess' in Silesia. Zwingli's independent standing, and his great merits in the 
 work of the Reformation, were unknown to Luther and his friends at Witten- 
 berg ; they weened the Swiss Reformation was but a distortion of the light that 
 beamed from Wittenberg. 
 
310 CONTEST EEGAEDING THE SUPPEK. 
 
 Nor did they know that this calm and temperate champion of 
 the faith was to all insurrectionists, to use his own words on 
 the subject, "as favourable as to the devil" But instead of 
 confining himself to a calm examination of the subject in the 
 clear light of truth, he gave full rein to the fury of a fancy 
 enkindled by passion, and falsely attributed to Zwingli and his 
 friends* opinions, motives, and qualities of soul, which were as 
 far from him as midnight darkness is from the noontide Hght 
 Thus Luther never got free of the mistake that Zwingli denied 
 the presence of Christ in the Supper, whUe the latter distinctly 
 says : " That he regards the Lord's Supper without the presence 
 of Christ in it as an enormity, before which eveiy Christian must 
 shudder." -f- But, according to him, Christ, who has all life in 
 himself, and gives life to all who believe on Him, is not present 
 in the lifeless bread, but in the believing soul. 
 
 Keeping, then, the grounds in view, with which Luther com- 
 bated ZwingH's view, and those with which the latter defended 
 himself, let us, for the sake of clearness, represent them both as 
 delivering their sentiments in their own words : — 
 
 Luther: The sixth chapter of the gospel of John, on which 
 you build your view of the holy Supper, speaks not of this " 
 sacrament at all; why do you refer to it? 
 
 Zwingli : For this reason ; you draw into the sacrament maiericd 
 flesh and blood. It is this very passage which gives us a solu- 
 tion of the bodily eating of the flesh and blood of Christ, by the 
 statement which it makes, " that it profiteth nothing." As 
 you, on the other hand, make this corporeal partaking essential 
 to the sacrament, how could I better answer the error than in the 
 words of Christ himself, with which he corrects in his disciples 
 the very same error? Christ teaches here the gospel; the Jews 
 and his disciples were led astray by his words, and stumbled 
 at corporeal flesh-eating. If now in the sacrament any one faU 
 erroneously upon the idea of eating material flesh, the antidote 
 for this error is to be sought in the place where it was first growa 
 
 Luther: When Christ, however, says, John vi., "The flesh 
 profiteth nothing," He is not to be understood as speaking of His 
 
 * To these belonged, besides his colleagues in Zurich, CEcolampad in Basle, 
 and Bucer and Capito in Strasburg. 
 t See ZwingH's letters to Martin Bucer of 12th February 1.531. 
 
CONTEST KEGAEDING THE SUPPER. 311 
 
 owji flesh, but of the nature and infirmity of flesh generally, as 
 in Isaiah xl. 6, " All flesh is grass." Christ's meaning is, that 
 carnal understanding profiteth nothing, He by no means saying, 
 " My flesh profiteth nothing;" for how could he mean this, since 
 it is by it we are redeemed? 
 
 Zwingli: It is true, in the first place, that carnal understand- 
 ing profiteth nothing. On the contrary, it is hurtful Christ 
 however is not here speaking of carnal understanding, as you 
 maintain; for by speaking of carnal understanding in the bad 
 sense. He would not have replied to the doubts and objections 
 of the disciples, which had reference to corporeal eating. Hence 
 the answer of Christ must regard the corporeal eating of His flesh 
 in such a manner as to remove these doubts and objections; for 
 if not, then He has not corrected their misconception at all, but 
 has begun a new discourse about carnal understanding, which 
 is contrary to His custom, which ever is to resolve doubts, and 
 to explain His misunderstood words. Moreover, the narrative 
 itself teUs us very distinctly that Christ did reply to the mur- 
 murs which His disciples raised in regard to the bodily eating of 
 His flesh. For it runs thus : " When Jesus knew in himself that 
 his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them," &c. These 
 words plainly shew that He is about to resolve that point, which 
 caused them difficulty. Farther, the succeeding words shew 
 that he continues to speak of the former subject of discourse, 
 and abides by it, " Therefore said I unto you, that no man can 
 come unto me except it were given unto him of my Father." 
 For He thrice at least repeats the sense of these words. In short, 
 the point in dispute was the eating of His flesh, of which Christ 
 says " that it profiteth nothing," as they understood it. But in 
 the second place, that Christ does not say my flesh, but simply 
 the flesh, can create no misunderstanding, for His language had 
 reference to no other flesh but His owil Nor does He say my 
 Spirit it is which quickens, but simply the Spirit that quickeneth. 
 But every believer understands that He is here speaking of His 
 Spirit, although He does not expressly say my Spirit. In the 
 third place, the flesh of Christ profits us much, for it was cruci- 
 fied for us. The Jews and the disciples, however, would not 
 rightly understand this, referring what He said to corporeal eat- 
 ing. Therefore Christ says my flesh eaten profits nothing, but 
 
312 CONTEST EEGABDING THE SUPPEE. 
 
 crucified it brings us the greatest good which the history of man 
 has ever witnessed. 
 
 Luther: The words of the institution are^ "This is my body; 
 this is my blood;" and these words we must believe, for he who 
 beKeves not every word that Christ has spoken will be damned. 
 
 Zwingli: This is true, but we must first see that we rightly 
 understand the sense of Christ's words. For to misunderstand 
 Christ's words, and to build our faith on this misconception, is 
 not believing Christ's words, but our own misunderstanding of 
 them. It is well said, all the words of God are to be believed 
 without reserve, but first of all we must understand the words 
 ere we believe them. Else through the not understanding of 
 them we deceive ourselves, while we think to maintain our mis- 
 understanding by crying out, " We are to believe God's word." 
 We must therefore seek to comprehend rightly the words of insti- 
 tution, by comparing them with such passages as, "the flesh 
 profiteth nothing;" "the field is the world;" " John is Elias;" 
 " the rock was Christ." Then we shall find that they express a 
 figure, for " this signifies my body," or " this is the symbol of my 
 body," as which they must be understood. 
 
 Luther: I will have no "figuratising"* of the word of God; 
 we must take Christ's words in their plain natural sense, " this 
 is my body." 
 
 Zwingli : Then it follows that the bread is changed into the 
 very body of Christ. The Eoman Pope then is right in his doc- 
 trine of Transubstantiation, and Paul is wrong when he says, 
 1 Cor. X. 17, " We are all partakers of that one bread," here call- 
 ing that bread which is in reality the body of Christ. 
 
 Luther: The words of Christ are not to be understood as 
 implying that the bread is changed into the substance of the 
 body of Christ, but that while we bless the bread the body of 
 Christ unites with the consecrated bread, and while we bless the 
 cup the blood of Christ unites with the wine. Hence Paul, 1 
 
 * " Kgm-atising," (Zeichelei,) Luther accused CEcolampad of, because he 
 explained the words of institution to be, The bread is a figure of my body, follow- 
 ing Tertullian in this. Zwingli, on the other hand, explained them, The bread 
 signifies my body, following here, as his authority, Ambrosius. Luther accused 
 him of "figuratising." CEcolampad and Zwingli, howerer, are so much at one in 
 their views of the Supper, tliat the one ofteii uses the phraseology of the other. 
 
CONTEST KEGAEDING THE SUPPEE. 313 
 
 Cor. X. 16, calls the consecrated cup the communioii of the blood 
 of Christ, and the bread broken the communion of the body of 
 Christ. 
 
 Zwingli : But in the first place, you must not translate " the 
 cup of blessing" in the passage quoted, but "the cup of thanks- 
 giving," for the Greek words, i-bXoyla and suXoyeh* signify thanks- 
 giving, or to give thanks, and not to bless or consecrate. In like 
 manner, the place in Psalm cxiii. 2, where the same word occurs, 
 ought not to be rendered, " Blessed be the name of the Lord," but, 
 the Lord's name is to be praised, or given thanks to. The word 
 commimion is here taken for community or congregation. Hence 
 this is the meaning of the words : The cup of praise or thanks- 
 giving with which we give Thee praise or thanks, or which we 
 drink with thanksgiving, is it not the communion of the body of 
 Christ? For we are all one bread and one body, since we all 
 are partakers of one bread with one another. Paul will in these 
 words turn the Christians at Corinth from idolatrous worship and 
 sacrifice, and he propounds this doctrine to them : " Ye are 
 another community than that ye should eat in the community of 
 idolaters ; for you are the community of the body and blood of 
 Christ. When ye then take the sacrament, and eat and drink 
 with one another, ye shew that ye are one body and one blood;" 
 to wit, the body of the Church manifesting itseK through faith 
 on the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave his body and his blood for 
 them. Now Paul calls the believers the community or communion 
 of the blood of Christ, as may be clearly deduced from the 
 words, "for we being many are one bread and one body, for we 
 are all partakers of that one bread." Mark how plainly he calls 
 us one bread and one body, for the reason that we eat together of 
 one bread. This is the true sense of the passage.-|- Moreover, if 
 the words, "this is my body," are not to be understood, as you 
 admit, in the sense that the bread is changed into the real body 
 of Christ, it is evident they are not to be taken in their plain 
 
 * See Luecke's Commentary on John, Vol. ii., page 62, iliXtyt'ir and ili^xfirTsTi/ 
 are cognate expressions, which were both employed in the usual Jewish thanks- 
 givings before meals, n3"l3 ; eiiXiyuv relates more to the external form of it, 
 while ivxxfifreTs expresses more the contents. The exegesis of this distinguished 
 Lutheran doctor accordingly confirms Zwingli's idea. 
 
 t Luther had before this explained and commented on this passage in the 
 sense of Zwingli in his " Sermon upon the solemn Sacrament of the body and 
 blood of Christ." 
 
gl4 CONTEST REGARDING THE SUPPEE. 
 
 and natural sense. Wliat then, I pray you, is their meaning, 
 in your opinion ? 
 
 Luther : They signify the bread and they signify the body of 
 Christ at once in the sense, " This is bread and this is the body 
 of Christ, or in the bread is the body of Christ." 
 
 Zwingli : Thus the words of our Lord are not plain and simple, 
 but are to be understood in a twofold sense, if they designate 
 bread and the body of Christ. If bread remains bread, and if 
 in the bread the body of Christ is partaken of, then they are not 
 taken in their plain natural sense, but they form what is called a 
 synecdoche.* For Christ did not say, "in the bread is my body," 
 but He said, " bread is my body." Do you see, dear Luther, 
 how you yourself depart from the plain and natural signiiication 
 of the words, and declare them to contain a figure of speech ? 
 What reasonable ground have you now to set up against the 
 view that they ought to be understood as a conditional or 
 figurative form of speech, seeing that you yourself maintain them 
 to be a synecdoche, and thus figurative ? 
 
 Luther: The bread is bread, and at the same time also the body 
 of Christ; both the bread and the body of Christ are partaken of 
 in this sacrament in a wonderful and to us inexplicable manner. 
 
 Zwingli : Christ called upon the Jews to believe Him for the 
 very works' sake, if not otherwise ; for the wonders were done so 
 openly, that none could deny them. Shew us then here the 
 wonder, that we may see and believe it. For Christ has before- 
 hand prophesied, "For there shall arise false Christs and false 
 prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders ; insomuch, 
 that if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect." If 
 then we are to be cautious in respect of wonders, even where 
 they are actually wrought, how much more in respect of those 
 that axe not done at all, and that are nowhere in the Word of 
 God given out as such. 
 
 Luther: The body of Christ is not partaken of in a gross 
 or sensible manner, but in a way known to Christ alone. 
 
 Zwingli : Yet it must be partaken of in a very gross and 
 carnal manner, if the words are to be understood in their plain 
 and natural sense. For in this sense they are: this bread is this 
 
 » This figure of speech Luther employed very often, whether it suited or not, 
 while he censured tropes used hy his opponents, in the strongest manner. Synec- 
 doche is the trope according to which a part is taken for the whole. 
 
CONTEST BEGAKDING THE SUPPEK. 315 
 
 my body given for you. Now it is a grogs body, a body covered 
 with wounds and strokes that has been given for us, and 
 consequently, it is this body which must be partaken of by 
 us, if the words are to be taken in their plain, obvious and natural 
 sense; or, if not, please to shew us, by passages from Holy 
 Scripture, in what other way He is to be partaken of ? 
 
 Luther : The body of Christ is everywhere, for He governs and 
 fills all things. 
 
 Zwingli : Then the angel proclaimed to the women an untruth 
 when he told them, " He is not here, but is risen." And Christ, 
 who is the truth itself, has spoken what is untrue, for he 
 repeatedly assured his disciples he would be no more in this 
 world, that is in his humanity. 
 
 Lvther : The humanity of Christ is everywhere present, and 
 fills all things as wheat fills a sack, and He is also in a peculiar 
 manner present in this sacrament, that we may know where to 
 find him. 
 
 Zwingli : The assertion that the body of Christ fills all things 
 is opposed to the words of the angel, and were it true, would 
 destroy the reality of His ascension and make it a deception. 
 The assertion, then, is an absurd one, which is entirely coiaed out 
 of your own brain, and contradicted by the written Word. In 
 respect of the second part of your reply, it is contradicted by 
 what Christ says in respect of the time in which we live, that is 
 to say the interval between his ascension to heaven and the day 
 of judgment. Matt. xxiv. 26-27. " Wherefore, if they shall say 
 unto you, Behold, he is in the desert ; go not forth : behold, he is 
 in the secret chambers ; believe it not. For as the lightning 
 cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall 
 also the coming of the Son of man be." It is also in opposition 
 to the articles of the Christian creed, " He is ascended to heaven, 
 where he sits at the right hand of God, the Father, from whence 
 also he shall come to judge the woild,"&e. FinaUy,itis atvariance 
 with the words of Christ, Matt. xxvL 64, " Hereafter shall ye 
 see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power," &c. Lo ! 
 the Son of man sits at the right hand of God, and from thence 
 reveals His power and glory from this time forward, as He him- 
 self says. And from this time forward we are not to seek for Him 
 •anywhere else, but at the right hand of the Father. 
 
316 CONTEST EEGAEDING THE SUPPEE. 
 
 Luther: What we assert does all take place in a manner 
 invisible, for Christ does not descend to us a-nd again ascend to 
 heaven by a ladder or by a stair. 
 
 Zwingli: It is, however, contradicted by the words of the 
 angel, Acts i. 11 : "This same Jesus which is taken up from you 
 into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him 
 go into heaven." 
 
 Luther: Yes, so He will come to judgment. But this passage 
 has no reference to His presence in the SupJ)er. 
 
 Zwingli: Holy Scripture only teache's that He wiU come a 
 second time to judgment, and forbids us to seek for Him anywhere 
 but in heaven, at the Father's right hand. JSTay, Christ calls 
 those false prophets who shall point to Him as here or as there, 
 and says, "from henceforth ye shall see the Son of man sitting at 
 the right hand of power." In this time, which he designates with 
 the words " from henceforth," we are now living. Therefore, we 
 will contemplate Him there where he is. For wherefore should 
 He unite His natural body with the bread in the Supper ? 
 
 Luther : That it may- confirm and assure our hearts and 
 faith. 
 
 Zwingli: It is the Spirit, as Christ himself tells us, that 
 ■quickens, the flesh profiteth nothing. And this Spirit is, accord- 
 ing to His promise, to abide with us, and teach us what we are to 
 speak, so that we require to take no thought what to say. Matt. 
 X. 19. 
 
 Luther : By the corporeal eating, the remission of sias is in 
 part given to us. 
 
 Zwingli: That Christ by his death has atoned for our sins, 
 having become a curse for us, is a truth so oft repeated in Scripture, 
 that it is not necessary here particularly to state it. But if sins 
 be forgiven by the natural partaking of the body of Christ, the 
 sins of the disciples would have been already pardoned at the 
 Supper. In this case, the blood of Christ shed for us would not 
 alone cleanse us from all sin, as the apostle John assures us in his 
 1st Epistle, chap. i. ver. 7, but the draught of wine at the Supper 
 would effect this purpose also. For what reason then did Christ 
 die on the cross? Or, are there two paths to justification, one by 
 faith and another by the corporeal partaking of the body and blood 
 of Christ? Into what an abyss of confusion do we plunge ourselyeg, 
 
CONTEST EEGAEDIlSfG THE SUPPER. 317 
 
 when we leave the Word of God, and indulge in our own 
 idle imaginations ? 
 
 Luther : In the bread the very thing is presented to us which 
 is proclaimed by the preaching of the Word. 
 
 Zwingli: But what are we to make of such passages as, " He 
 who beheveth on me hath everlasting life," "No man cometh 
 unto me except my Father draw him." If a man can really 
 give the salvation which he preaches in so substantial a form as 
 this, why do we not make those who hear the gospel, but who 
 believe it not, even against their will, partakers of the draught, 
 which is bitter indeed to them, but of healing power ? 
 
 Luther : You are so obtuse and so unspiritual that you com- 
 prehend nothing at all of these high things, which must be 
 spiritually understood. It is those only who believe who partake 
 of the body of Christ naturally. 
 
 Zwingli : Yet we believe, and yet do not partake of the body 
 of Christ in a natural manner. 
 
 Luther : We must believe that we partake in this Sacrament 
 of the body of Christ, and they who believe this, they partake of it. 
 Zwingli: Take care of making a dangerous sport oi faith, now 
 attaching one sense to it, now another, according as it suits your 
 purpose. Is not saving faith this : to believe that Jesus Christ is 
 the Son of God, and to place our trust alone in Him? Why con- 
 found so dishonestly a sound faith in Christ with notions 
 entirely contrary to the language and spirit of Scripture? Is 
 there in the whole Bible the slightest intimation that we are to 
 believe that the body and blood of Christ are to be partaken of 
 naturally united with the bread? What apostle has ever said: 
 " We believe that we have eaten or drunk thee ?" Have not all 
 with one consent confessed : We believe that thou art Christ, the 
 Son of the living God? You, however, would perform a certain 
 jugglery before the eyes of the simple-minded, and you screen and 
 defend your vain conceit under the holy name of faith. And you 
 stigmatise us with the names of heretics, false teachers, and unbe- 
 lievers, for not accepting this vain conceit of yours, because we 
 have learnt something very different from the Word of God. We 
 however set our confidence in God through Jesus Christ, know- 
 ing that this faith alone saves us, and not your silly dreaming. 
 For nowhere do we learn from the Word of God that Christ is 
 
31 8 CONTEST REGAEDING THE SUPPER. 
 
 corporeally partaken of in the Supper, but most surely we leani 
 that we are to feed upon Him in the sense of believing on Him, 
 John vi. May God grant you grace better to know Him and 
 His Word, Amen. 
 
 These are the chief objections which were made by Luther 
 against Zwingli's views, which the latter triumphantly repelled, 
 with arms borrowed from the chamber of God's Word. The dis- 
 pute, indeed, branched itself out into various questions, some 
 more nearly, some but very distantly, connected with the Sacrar 
 ment, as, for example, the relation to each other of the two natures 
 in Christ. As it is impossible for us to pursue the debate into the 
 ramifications into which it spread, we abstain from entering farther 
 into this question here. Zwingli, making a complete refutation 
 of Luther's -vdew by the Word of God, and establishing His own 
 upon it, his opponent became more and more pressed to make use 
 of those arguments which the Eoman CathoKc Church have 
 advanced in defence of Transubstantiation. From this point of 
 view, Luther ascribed to the Sacraments an importance in dia- 
 metric opposition to his earlier statements, and which not a little 
 jeopardised the doctrine of justification by faith. If he formerly 
 taught, " Before God we have quite enough to do to believe the 
 gospeil; but now He wiU have us to serve men, and to make a 
 profession of the faith which we bear in our hearts by some out- 
 ward signs before the world," he now niounted to the thoroughly 
 papistical assertion, " When I present to you the bread, I present 
 to you God with aU his gifts."* He compared now the Sacra- 
 ment to " the sun," which daily rises, and describes its circuit in 
 the heavens, remaining ever the same sun. Immovable and 
 unchanged, whether man see and feel it or not, the same to the 
 blind, or to him that closes the window, so that it neither shines 
 upon, nor warms him, so also the Sacraments, when celebrated 
 according to the Word of God, are in their nature complete and 
 perfect, and saving works of God. In contrast with this com- 
 parison, which ascribes to the Sacrament far too high a position and 
 importance, to the detriment of the glory of Christ, Zwingli illus- 
 trated the position of the Eedeemer, exalted to the right hand of 
 God, by the same figure. " Consider," says he, " the sun, which, 
 
 * You may now, then, cries Zwingli to him on this, make yourself the admin- 
 istrator of all the gifts of God, as the Pope has done: 
 
CONTEST EEGAEDING THE SUPPEB. 319 
 
 being a limited body, is not in two places at once. Yet it 
 enlightens the whole earth, so that Indian and Spaniard, Mus- 
 covite and Moor, behold it, although none of these lands or 
 peoples are in contact with the sun's disc. Thus, the Sun of 
 Eighteousness, Jesus Christ, real God and man, is, with the 
 splendour and glory of His divine power and nature, everywhere 
 present. On the other hand, the body of His humanity is only 
 in one place, at the right of the Father, but yet He is everywhere 
 gazed on, and contemplated by the eye of the soul and faith. He is 
 our satisfaction, although He is but in one place, namely, in heaven. 
 Nor shall we wish Him down as little as we should desire to draw 
 the sun to the earth. There above, at the right hand of the 
 Majesty on high. He sits enthroned in glory, casting down upon 
 us the beams of His grace, and disseminating upon those who are 
 round about Him the rays of light, joy, and bKss." 
 
 Luther allowed himself so far to be carried away by the false 
 view he had once adopted as to make the assertion : " Although 
 a knave, or an unbeliever, take or give the Sacrament, he takes 
 the right Sacrament, that is, Christ's -body and blood, just the 
 same as if he acted most piously." To this Zwingli answered, 
 " Christ says. He who eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood 
 abides in Me, and I in him. None would be bold enough to 
 maintain that a knave, or an unbeliever, is in Christ, and Christ 
 in him, which yet, according to your statement, would be true. 
 It is certain that the impious partake of the Sacrament in the 
 symbols of the body and blood of Christ, and, indeed, to their 
 damnation. But believers alone partake of Christ by faith truly, 
 and hence they abide in Christ and He in them. The statement, 
 that faith is not necessary to preach the gospel, and to dispense 
 the Sacrament, is directly opposed to Holy Scripture, and is an 
 arrow from the Pope's quiver. Paul says, 1 Cor. iv. 2, ' More- 
 over it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful.' But 
 how can a man be faithful to God, his Lord, without believing on 
 Him, and loving Him? The ofi&ce of the ministry* above all 
 requires faith ; for, he who does not possess it, is no servant of 
 
 * Luther, in the course of this dispute, in reference to theministerial office, 
 fell into an awkward contradiction of his former principles. In the " discourse 
 upon the New Testament," he sajrs, " Therefore, if they have but faith, all 
 Christian men are priests, and all women priestesses, be they young or old, 
 
320 MANNER OF CONDUCTING THE CONTEST. 
 
 God, but a servant of the devil, and administers his word. The 
 same holds, in the administration of the Sacrament, the celebra- 
 tion of which is one of the duties of the Christian ministry. He 
 who .has not faith would sooner conjure the devil than the body 
 of Christ." 
 
 Luther : Yes, it comes all by the power and Word of God. 
 
 Zwingli : Were not devils expelled by the Word of God, and 
 the blind made to see ? Look more narrowly at the words of 
 Peter, Acts iii. 6, " In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise 
 up and walk." Has not the impotent here been made to stand 
 up by the power of God ? Has not Peter pronounced the name 
 of Jesus upon Him ? But no man can call Jesus Lord, except by 
 the Holy Ghost. It is, however, the believer alone who speaks 
 and acts in the Holy GhosJ. Attend to the passage, in Mark xvi, 
 17, " And these signs shall follow tliem that believe : in my name 
 shall they cast oiit devils," &c. Observe here to whom it is that 
 the Lord grants power to work wonders, and to act in His name, 
 it is to those who believe. AVhoever, then, in the stead of Christ, 
 discharges the office of the ministry, and dispenses the Sacrament, 
 must have faith above all things. 
 
 7. The Diffeebnt Mannee in which Zwingli and Luther 
 
 CONDUCTED THE CONTEST ; THE EeSULT OF IT. 
 
 Having thus stated the arguments and counter-arguments 
 advanced by Zwingli and Luther in this disputation, we shall 
 now cast a glance at the spirit in which each of them waged the 
 contest. While we think it must be clear to every unprejudiced 
 mind that Zwingli had on his side the Word of God, rightly un- 
 derstood, we shall also find that he conducted the contest, in 
 which he became involved without any fault of his, in such a 
 manner as became a Christian. Unhappily the same cannot 
 be said of Luther. We must not, indeed, leave out of 
 view that this eminent man had suffered much from youth 
 up, that he had come through a rough school, where, of 
 
 master or servant, wife or maid, learned or unlearned." At an after period he 
 held the opinion that if the devil himself would only hecome pious enough to 
 allow himself to be ordained, he might discharge the office of the ministry very 
 well, and dispense the Sacrament. 
 
MANNER OF CONDUCTING THE CONTEST. 321 
 
 necessity he had to take on a rough outside, if he would not 
 altogether sink into intellectual apathy and imbecility. He 
 himself, indeed, confesses : " My hull may be somewhat hard, but 
 the kernel is tender and soft." Unfortunately he exposed only to 
 Zwingli the hard rind. While he with justice regarded himself 
 as a chosen vessel of the Lord for the reformation of the Church, 
 he committed the great mistake of looking upon every opinion 
 or doctrine he himself espoused as a truth of God,* and of 
 infallible certainty. From this point of view it was natural to 
 regard those of his adversary as suggested by Satan. -f- Accord- 
 ingly, at the very outset of the contest, he spoke the terrible 
 words which permitted no change or modification of his views 
 afterwards : :j: " One party must belong to the devil, and be God's 
 enemy; there is no middle way." How very differently Zwingli 
 judges of his position to his opponents ! He was as convinced 
 as Luther was of himself that he was a servant of God, and called 
 to co-operate ia the great work of Eeformation, but he never 
 foygot that we are all men liable to err. Accordingly, he began 
 every disquisition on this important subject of debate with prayer 
 to God for illumination; while Luther began or ended every one 
 of his with some reference to the devil. § In his very first writing 
 
 * He gives the most distinct expression to tliis sentiment in a writing under 
 date January 1539. See De Wette's Letters, Book iv. page 155. 
 
 t " I hold that I alone have stood (not to speak of the old) in twenty tempests 
 and commotions which the devil has blown, First, there was the popedom; yea, 
 I think all the world should clearly know with how many whirlwinds, bulls, and 
 books the devil through the same hath raged against me, how he has torn me to 
 pieces, and brought me to nought, (without my having sometimes a little stirred 
 them up,) and yet effected nothing by it, except that they increased their wrath 
 and fury till this day without ceasing. And just as I was almost dying of fear 
 with this raging of the devil, he breaks in another hole, through Muenzer and 
 the insurrection, that he may blow out my candle altogether. And as Christ 
 stops up this hole, he drives in some panes of my window, through Carlstadt, 
 roars and howls that I thought he would carry away light, wax, and wick at 
 once. But God helped his poor wind-light here too, so that nothing was 
 quenched. Then came the Sacramentalists and the Anabaptists, and drove in 
 door and window, to extinguish, as they thought, the light. Verily, they did 
 their best, but they did not accomplish their will." 
 
 X Luther had written, in reference to his doctrine of the Supper, " that in the 
 event of his being pressed by any extremity to say or teach anything else, he 
 would have it known that it was false, and a suggestion of the devil." Zwingli 
 justly characterises this declaration as a plain confession of despair. 
 
 § Zwingli writes, upon one of such conclusions to a book of Luther's: "The 
 
 X 
 
322 MANNER OF CONDTTCTING THE CONTEST. 
 
 on the subject in his letter to Alber, Zwingli prays: " Ahnighty 
 God lead us on the right path, and if we are about to undertake 
 anything against Thy truth, send Thy angel} that we may not 
 be turned aside to the folly of ignorance or of love of vain -glory, 
 but that He may thrust us to the wall till our foot be crushed, 
 that is, till the impure carnality be quenchedj that we no more 
 blaspheme the name of God." 
 
 With what mildness aM love does he reply to Luther's heavy 
 accusation that the devil had whispered him his doctrine ! " You 
 write, dear Luther, 'that the devil has taken possession of us; we 
 had indeed read that Christ hath died for us, but we receive it 
 not into our hearts.' We do not know what better to say to this 
 than to reply in the words of Paul, 'Who art thou that judgest 
 another man's servaiit?' (Eom. xiv. 4.) If we repeat to you the 
 sum of what we believe and teach, you either say we have learned 
 it from you — and is it not wonderful that if we have learned it 
 from you, you do not recognise your own doctrine ? — or you say 
 we do not believe our own confession. What are we to do? We 
 can do nothing but joyfdly bear the reproachj and lay our case 
 before the just Judge." 
 
 Zwingli, in the course 6f the contest, having established many 
 self-contradictions against Luther, that he might be led to reflect 
 he too was subject to error, assures him : " I say this in truth, not 
 to make any insulting reproach against you, but to hold up your- 
 self to yowrself. How can you refrain from saying, when your 
 own assertions are held up to you, "I have made a mistake?" How 
 short, but how healing for all the churches were these simple 
 words ! Is there among mortals one that with right can be 
 called free from error? Nothing unusual would happen to you 
 were you to say, "I am mistaken.'' For we all go wrong in many 
 respects. Then, indeed, something quite unheard of would happen 
 to you were it to be said Luther has never stiimbled, never erred. 
 Nay, it were altogether blasphemous were we foolish enough to 
 
 best of it all is, that he closes his hook like the parson who lectured his people 
 thus: ' Mark, if you don't better youlrselves, and I too, we shall all go to the devil. 
 To which may the Lord help you and me, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.' So 
 Luther ends saying, ' If I shotild say anything different, 1 here publicly inake 
 known that it is false, and a suggestion of the devil. To which may my Lord tod 
 Saviour help me, Jesus Christ.' His former book he began with the devil, this 
 one he ends with him." 
 
MANNER OP CONDTJCTING THE CONTEST. 323 
 
 ascribe to you that which alone belongs to the Supreme Being. 
 Eeflect how much trouble you will spare the poor people of Ger- 
 many, who all entertain this view, which you will not espouse, or 
 will not dare to espouse if you speak this single word. Conquer, 
 yes, undoubtedly conquer, will our opinion; but if you oppose it, 
 the victory will be all the more dearly purchased; all will congra^ 
 tulate themselves upon it if you but say, "I am mistaken." To err, 
 to stumble, to deceive oneself, is human ; and you will not deem 
 anything human foreign to you." With the greatest anxiety and 
 tenderness he endeavoured to extricate his opponent from the 
 meshes of passion in which he had wound himself, and to gain 
 him over to a more gracious and dignified management of his 
 cause. " There were many," he says, " ere your ill-temper laid 
 itself, who, in the heat of the debate, treated of this important 
 subject, upright and conscientious men they were, whom you 
 spared not in a manner consistent either with your own or their 
 dignity. I now appeal from Luther in a passion to Luther 
 appeased and pacified. For it cannot escape you how dangerous 
 it is to take counsel of anger, .self-conceit, obstinacy, and ill- 
 humour, and other passions ; with what boldness and insolence 
 fteypass themselves off as justice, courage, firmness, and dignity. 
 Give up, I pray you, your scolding, which is disreputable, and 
 cease to overwhelm us only with hard words. Not as though I 
 cared for such blasts; I have, thank God, pretty well accustomed 
 myseK to them, and stand upon a rock which does not reel, and 
 which gives me a sure footing against the storm ; but I greatly 
 prefer to see truth coming forward in its own might and strength 
 than to see a man making himself unamiable by the use of 
 jinmeasured language, which always gives cause to suspect there 
 is pride at bottom. Let us reflect also that God is a spectator of 
 this contest : He who knows better than we ourselves the spirit 
 in which we act. Let us also consider that not ordy ,the whole 
 of Germany but the whole of Christendom, not only the present 
 but future centuries to the end of time are our judges, and that 
 they will form a juster judgpient of this matter, because they 
 wiU be less infected by passion." With a tender pastoral fidelity 
 he sought to prevent this conflict from disturbing the peace and 
 interests of the renovated Church; and with this object in view, 
 he composed all his first treatises in the Latin language, that the 
 
324 MANNER OF CONDUCTING THE CONTEST. 
 
 subject might be discussed among the learned, and that only 
 after they had come to a solution of it, it might descend to the 
 common people. "It was my opinion," he writes to Luther, 
 " that you also should conduct this dispute in the Latin language, 
 that it might be first sifted by the learned, and the community 
 only then be made acquainted with it when a satisfactory 
 solution had been arrived at." But Luther disappointed this 
 weU conceived intention. "With the impetuosity of his character, 
 he threw the gauntlet amongst the people, and strove to rouse 
 and animate them against ZwingU and his friends. When this 
 subject came, however, to be discussed among the people, Luther 
 and his friends found to their deep disappointment, that their 
 measures had produced entirely opposite results to that which 
 they anticipated. They then, in direct opposition to the prin- 
 ciples they had formerly propounded in reference to the freedom 
 of the Church, made themselves guardians or tutors of the people. 
 They got prohibitions passed against the dissemination of the 
 writings of Zwingli and fficolampad, and caused their followers, 
 in various places, to be persecuted; "For now," wroteLuther to the 
 landgrave of Hesseri, " it is a war to the knife with the 
 SacramentaUsts," as Zwingli and his friends were called by their 
 opponents. Zwingli was deeply grieved and justly indignant at 
 this behaviour of Luther and his party. He tenderly upbinds 
 the wounds of the Christians, who found themselves lacerated in 
 their inmost souls by this strife, in these words : " Hold, dear 
 Christians, to the Lord; not to Paul, nor Peter, nor Luther, nor 
 Zwingli, It is evidence of a weak, not to say sluggish faith to 
 plain, ' to which side shall I now turn, as these two hold different 
 opinions.' For who are we, that none are to dissent from our 
 opinions ? Is it not a true saying, that every man is a liar? 
 Cling, then, to the Lord, and carry on His work unweariedly, 
 and give no countenance even to the most learned, or to the 
 most pious, to imagine it is a sin if any be not of their opinion." 
 In reference to the prohibition of his books, in total abnegation 
 of the principles of Christian freedom, which Zwingli had brought 
 so powerfully into play against the popedom, Zwingli expresses 
 himself in the following terms, in a writing against Dr Strauss:* 
 
 * This Dr. Strauss was a restless spirit, who had been thrown into prison at 
 Eisenach, for insun-ectionary attempts. He was now induced to publish a very 
 
MANNEK OP CONDUCTING THE CONTEST. 325 
 
 " Tell me, which of the two appear to have a suspicions cause. 
 Those who allow the writings of their opponents to circulate 
 freely and without violent restrictions, combating them in an 
 open and manly way before their respective communities, or 
 they who bark against their opponents before the simple-minded, 
 write publicly against them, and calumniate them in writings, 
 which they very much recommend to the perusal of their flocks ; 
 but when their antagonists reply or explain, shout instantly, while 
 they prohibit their writings, "they are not to be listened to at 
 all ; a grosser heresy has never lifted its head ? " AVhich think you 
 separate from the Word of God and his Church? You or we? 
 We let your writings, the pope's, and every anti-Christ's writings 
 be freely read, and combat your errors alone with the sword of 
 the Word of God* You, on the other hand, mean to accomplish 
 your objects by prohibitions. You, Strauss, do this, and others 
 besides you, and you mean to introduce a new power and tyranny 
 amongst us? What has the pope done but issue the command: 
 ' Let that alone. Don't read that. It is heretical?' When you 
 now, in like manner, banish the truth from your churches, what 
 are you but new popes, who deprive the community of their free 
 judgment, and move the princes just as the pope did to protect 
 your errors. This is departure from the Word of God ; this is 
 separation and schism. But the path to unity is to allow 
 freedom to all, to bring before the congregation everything that 
 can make for or against an opinion, and then to leave the people 
 to judge for themselves. For God is not a God of division, but 
 of unity; He will not allow those to err who are assembled 
 
 rigmarole work against " the unwholesome doctrine of Magister Zwingli." 
 CEcolampad was of opinion Zmngli should not waste time upon him. He, 
 however, answered him more from regard to the Margrave of Baden than to 
 Strauss. 
 
 * In another place, Zwingli thus describes the position he takes up to the 
 writings of his antagonists: "We forbid no doctrine to be brought before the 
 Church, be it rank popery, or Lutheran refined, or be it muddy and dirty, and 
 therefore quite unlike Luther, (whose name in German admits of a pun, in the 
 sense of pure, clear.) We stand over it, however, with the thrashing flail of the 
 Word of God, and winnow and sift it properly. We then find in many a writing 
 that it has not more substance than corn in a bad year; it is sheer chaff. Your 
 polemical writings too may be freely read among us, but when they are 
 thoroughly thrashed, they yield little else but straw and chaff. They are like 
 the fig-tree that makes a great appearance with its leaves, but on which there 
 is no fruit." 
 
326 MANNBE OF CONDUCTING THE CONTEST. 
 
 together in his Spirit ; He will cause peace, unity, and concord 
 to efdoresce in the churches." Thus Zwingli, at the same time 
 that he defended the honest convictions of his soul, defended 
 ecclesiastical liberty against that new species of tutelage to which 
 Luther and his followers would subject it. 
 
 While Luther thought he must bring prominently forward his 
 great merits as a Eeformer compared to Zwiugli, in such language 
 as : "We dare vaunt ourselves that Christ has been first preached 
 by us. If the popedom were as terrible as of old, these people 
 would be as stUl as mice. But now Zwingli reproaches us with 
 defying Christ. Such is the reward we get for acknowledging 
 these people;"* our Eeformer satisfied himself, in reply to such 
 groundless imputations, with a simple defence of his own in- 
 dependent part in the work of Eeformation. " When you make 
 the boast that you were the first to lug forth the Bible from under 
 the bench, you go, methinks, too far. If we examine who by 
 their philological acquirements made it first known, we shall 
 find it was, some years ago, Valla, -f and in our own times, 
 Erasmus, the pious Eeuchlin and Pettikan. Without their 
 assistance, neither you nor others had effected what has now 
 been done — I mean in so far as the work may be ascribed to 
 man. But who dare boast himself ? Is it not God alone who 
 gives the increase? Axe not Paul's words here in their place, 
 1 Cor. iii. 6, 7: 'I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave 
 the increase. So then neither is he that planteth anything, 
 neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase;' and 
 ' Not unto us, OLord, but unto thy name be the praise.' On the 
 other hand, I shall gladly recognise your merits. Although there 
 were not a few, my good Luther, who knew the sum and sub- 
 stance of true religion as well as yourself, yet none in aU Israel 
 dared to come forward to the fight, so terribly they feared that 
 dreadful Goliath that stood opposed to them in his fall panoply 
 
 * This statement of Luther is untrue. Although he nowhere recognised the 
 merits of Zwingli, we see how the latter mentions him, page 76. 
 
 t Laurentins Valla was born at Piacenza, 1416. He had laboured in many 
 of the towns of Italy as a teacher, with great acceptance. He laid the Church 
 under obligations to him by his historical researches, and by his notes on the 
 New Testament, to which Zwingli here refers. Mttch persecaited by the monks, 
 he died at Rome, 1465. 
 
MANNBK OP CONDUCTING THE CONTEST. 327 
 
 and power. Here, here you were the true David, anointed by 
 the Lord for the work. "Wherefore, all believing souls will never 
 cease to sing with joy and gladness, ' Saul hath slain his thou- 
 sands, but David his tens of thousands. Now, as for myself, dear 
 Luther, I have ever reverenced my teachers as fathers. If, then, 
 out of the fulness which God has granted to you, anything had 
 flowed to me, why should I not acknowledge it? "Why, above 
 all, if I had learned the contents of the gospel from you, should 
 not I confess it? But I shall candidly tell you how it is. There 
 were many distinguished men, long before the name of Martin 
 Luther became famous, who truly recognised in what the essence 
 of religion consisted, and who were instructed by very different 
 teachers from those whom you suppose. For in respect of myself, 
 I testify before Gnod that I learned the substance and chief pon- 
 tents of the gospel partly by the perusal of John and the writings 
 of Augustine, and partly by the diligent study of the Epistles of 
 Paul in the original G^^eek, which, with this hand, I copied out 
 eleven years ago, (1516,) eight of which years you have been 
 ruling like a king." In such a modest and amiable spirit Zwingli 
 answered Luther's hard words, never for an instant forgetting 
 that they stood wpon the same basis of faith. "While he repelled 
 Faber, who sought to extract advantage froua this dispute between 
 him and Luther in the preliminary skirmish before the Baden 
 Disputation, with the observation, " Luther and I will be truly 
 one without your interference, for we have one faith in Jesus 
 Christ," he endeavoured to bring Luther himself to the conscious- 
 ness of this unity in faith, reminding him of the contest between 
 Paul and Barnabas, on Mark's account, as told to us in Acts xviii, 
 " Here, in laruth, the noblest vessel and armoury of God, Paul, 
 was in the wrong. For why should not Mark join them in the 
 work of the gospel, he having never denied it, although he had 
 left them in PamphylLa, and had gone to Jerusalem? Here Bar- 
 nabas, a decisive, resolute, but at the same time mild and tem- 
 perate Christian, was in the right, while Paul was in the wrong. 
 Although the dispute betwixt them waxed so hot that they 
 parted from one another, yet they were again one. For Paul, in 
 1 Cor. ix., which he wrote long after their dissension, makes 
 honoiirable mention of Barnabas. "We then humbly pray Luther, 
 by the same spirit in which we all live, in which he has preached 
 
328 MAKNBR OF CONDUCTING THE CONTEST. 
 
 the gospel, as we also believe it, by the same spiiit in which, at 
 the last day, we shall have wished to preach it, to reflect that 
 he is not exalted above error, since Paul himself, in the heat of 
 temper, went too far, who yet, in respect of doctrine and hoUness, 
 is equal to, or even surpasses, all the apostles. We know Luther's 
 courageous advance against the Papacy, when none ventured it. 
 We know, at the same time, however, which, with God's grace, 
 he will also admit, that his knowledge and learning are but of 
 moderate dimensions ; let him therefore beware lest the devil 
 tempt him to pride. God- has given him strength of soul enough, 
 let him turn it to His glory, and sure we are that we shall be in 
 all respects one with him. May the God of truth grant this- 
 Amen."* 
 
 While Zwingli in this contest was much superior to his anta- 
 gonist in the clear establishment of his position by passages from 
 the Word of God, which to every unprejudiced mind must be 
 convincing, he at the same time greatly excelled him in the pious 
 delicacy and reserve with which he handled things sacred. How 
 wisely and tenderly selected are the images by which he illus- 
 trated his conception of the significance of the Supper. It is 
 enough to remind the reader of the image of the royal marriage- 
 ring, and of that of the sun. We cannot, however, restrain our- 
 selves from mentioning a third, which he made use of in his ■ 
 sermon at Berne to represent that the bread and wine of the 
 Eucharist distinguishes itself above all other bread and wine, in 
 significance if not in substance. " The flower in the phillet of the 
 bride is far more glorious there than if it stood alone and for 
 itself, although the same flower. Thus, likewise, the stuff and 
 substance of the bread in the Holy Supper is the same as in 
 other bread, but the dignity and solemnity of this holy transac- 
 tion lends to it a peculiar character, that in this respect it is not 
 like other bread, but holy bread." Luther, on the other hand, 
 
 ' Can there be a greater contrast than that of Luther's language in reply to 
 the ahove of Zwingli? " "Well, then, since they are so abandoned, and make a 
 mock of all men, I shall give them a Lutheran warning, saying, Cursed be such 
 love and union into the abyss of hell, because such union not only tears miser- 
 ably the Church in pieces, but, after the manner of the devU, mocks at and 
 befools it. No, 'tis not for me, dear friends of peace and love. If, after hav- 
 ing murdered the father, mother, wife, and children of a man, whose own life I 
 intended to take, I should turn and say to him, Let us have peace, dear brother, 
 
MANNEE OF CONDUCTING THE CONTEST. 329 
 
 often gave way to rude and coarse expressions * which Zwingli 
 always encountered with meekness, or at most, with some " cheer- 
 ful witticism," as he expresses himself. An example of this kind 
 is to be found in his address to the Christians at Esslingen, in which 
 he is led to give way to his sense of the ludicrous, by the dark and 
 confused combination of the ideas " fleshly" and " spiritually," on 
 the part of the Lutherans. " When we say," he writes, "we have one 
 faith with them, to wit, confidence in the death of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ, and this is ' to eat His flesh,' and ' drink His blood,' they 
 reply to us, ' Oh ! but there is another eating of His flesh, and 
 drinking of His blood, to wit, a "spiritual-fleshly."' On our 
 objecting, ' To eat the flesh fleshly profits nothing,' they reply, 
 ' Nay, that is all done spiritually ; you don't understand it, and 
 are infidels, fanatics, hypocrites, and revolutionists.' Mark, I 
 pray of you, which of us is false and fanaticaL We speak accord- 
 ing to the Word of God, which teaches us that ' to eat Christ,' 
 is ' to believe on Christ,' John vi. 35 ; you make an invention of 
 your own, and speak of a fleshly-spiritual eating, which is an 
 idea somewhat resembling ' a wooden poker.' Judge your own- 
 selves which of us be fanatics — ^we who give so clear a sense to 
 spiritual eating, setting the fleshly eating behind it, or you, who 
 
 we shall be good friends, the matter is not so great that we should quarrel about 
 it, what should he say to me? How dearly he ought to love me! Now, the 
 fanatics murder Christ my Lord, and God the Father in His Word, my mother 
 Christianity, along with my brethren, and they would slay myself, and they say 
 I ought to be at peace with them — we ought to cultivate love towards each 
 other!" 
 
 * Having once pronounced the extraordinary idea, that the body of Christ is 
 everywhere present, in every leaf, in every grass-stalk, on the table, and under 
 the table, he goes on: " Now there come other fanatics who pretend, 'Is it so ? Is 
 Christ's body at all comers? Oh, then, I'll gobble and drink Him up in the wine- 
 houses, in plates, glasses, and pots ; there is then no difference betwixt my table 
 and the Lord's table ! Oh, how we shall eat Him up ! ' Such scandalous swine 
 are we incorrigible Germans that we have neither sense nor reason, and when 
 we hear of God we pay as little respect as if the subject were a Merry Andrew. 
 And God knows I write such things very unwillingly, because I know it must 
 come among such dogs and swine. But what am I to do? The fanatics are 
 responsible for it, who compel me to it. Now, listen to this, you sow, dog, or 
 fanatic, you who are but an unreasoning ass, you will not so soon eat, drink, 
 and handle Him as you suppose, although Christ's body is everywhere present; 
 nor shall I speak with you of such things. Go, sow, into your stye." We can 
 assure our readers that this passage is by no means the most striking proof for 
 the statement in the text. 
 
330 MANNER OF CONDUCTING THE CONTEST. 
 
 make a painted representation with words, that is neither under- 
 stood nor believed by any creature on earth. If I understand 
 the word ' fanatic' aright, those fanaticise who, by things which 
 they do not understand, fall into a passion, and talk arrant non- 
 sense, at the same time persuading men they themselves under- 
 stand it very well, others do not. They act Like that impostor of a 
 painter who pretended to the younkers he painted churches, but, if 
 they were not legitimately born, they could not see them. Now 
 the younkers woiild pass for legitimate, and they one and all. 
 acknowledged they saw the churches. It is so in our case. 
 When some great doctor blusters and says, ' He who believes not 
 this is no Christian,' each is ready to swallow it, and let himself 
 pass for a prim, pious, and Sunday Christian." 
 
 Am.ong ZwingH's friends and followers who took part in the 
 polemical war against Luther, there was no one who more distin- 
 guished himself than ieo Jud, who brought together, in a special 
 publication, the views of Luther and Erasmus, as they main- 
 tained, them before the outbreak of the dispute, in order to esta- 
 blish that at that time they spoke of the spiritual presence of 
 Christ, and the spiritual partaking of Christ, in precisely the 
 same terms as Zwingli now did. This work, however, which 
 appeared under the assumed nameof LudovicusLeopoldus, instead 
 of opening the way, as it ought to have done, to a reconciliation 
 with Luther, had the directly contrary effect in the opinion of 
 Lavater.* Luther was profoundly offended at the reproach, that 
 he stood in open contradiction to himself, though made in 
 terms the most sparing to his feelings. (Ecolampad's participa- 
 tion in the contest was. of greater importance to Zwingli's cause. 
 Endowed with a rare meekness and suavity of temper, he brought 
 his solid learning into the service of his venerated friend, and 
 while Zwingli .directed his attention principally to establishing 
 the accordance of his doctrine with Scripture, CEcolampad under- 
 took to prove its agreement with the opinions of the orthodox 
 fathers. The activity of both in their separate provinces filled 
 up the proof in beautiful harmony and completion, while each, 
 in the spirit of a staunch friendship, was ready to repel any false 
 accusation directed against the other. There occur to us here 
 
 t Lewis Layater, Zwingli's tMrd successor at the Great Minster of Zurich, 
 I)Hblished a valuable history of the Sacramental Controversy. 
 
MANNER OF CONDUCTING THE CONTEST. 331 
 
 the words CEcolampad used to the fourteen Suabian pastors, who, 
 in a polemical writing entitled "The Syngramin,"* directed against 
 himself, thought it their duty to depreciate Zwingli. He defended 
 his friend, and replied, " Did you know how much he does and 
 suffers for Christ, you would certainly shew him greater honour." 
 
 On the side of the Lutherans, there took part in this contro- 
 versy chiefly the Wittenberg town-pastor Bugenhagen or Pomer- 
 anus,-f John Brenz, pastor in Schwaebish-HaU, Wilibald Pirk- 
 heimer,| Osiander in Nuenb'erg, and some others of less note. 
 
 * John Brenz, with thirteen of his colleagues, published this polemical book, 
 which will be reviewed in the life of CEcolampad. He studied at Wittenberg, 
 and was always a faithful follower of Luther, by whom he was much and fre- 
 quently commended. 
 
 t Bugenhagen was a native of Pomerania, and usually went by the name of 
 Pomeranus, from the place of his birth. His attack against Zwingli was con- 
 tained in a published letter addressed to Pastor Hess of Breslau, and as Schenkel 
 weU rematks, displays just as profound a comprehension of the Zwinglian 
 doctrine of the Supper, as that which is to be found in most Lutheran polemical 
 works of the present day. He manifests no comprehension at all of Zwingli's 
 specific standing-point, and doltishly reproaches him with " confounding the 
 little word ' is ' with ' signifies,' "saying that in this his whole theology consists. 
 This insignificant production received at the hands of Zwingli a thorough and 
 masterly refutation, of which it was not at all worthy. 
 
 t Wilibald Pirkheimer was at an earlier period much more attached to 
 Zwingli than to Luther ; he had, like the Zurich Beformer, enjoyed a classical 
 education. It is remarkable, that the men wlio had been so educated, but who 
 yet had not soared into the higher regions of a living Christian faith, and thus 
 had not penetrated into the sanctuary of Christian truth itself, but were content 
 to take up their position in the outer court of the Gentiles, were at first greatly 
 prejudiced against Luther. They feared from his ardent and strenuous labours 
 in the faith, which made light of all their select forms, injury to the cause of the 
 newly awakened classical culture. Such men were Erasmus of Basle, Dr. 
 Zasius of Freiburg, Briesgau the famous jurist, and Pirkheimer. Zwingli, who 
 united to their classical ta«tes Luther's lofty and far-reaching faith, defended 
 him in letters addressed to them, and compared Luther in a letter to Zasius 
 with the prophet Elias. With Erasmus he had a rupture on Luther's account ; 
 for, highly as he honoured classical culture, and those who possessed it, and 
 above all Erasmus, faith stood still higher in his estimation. Upon the out- 
 break of the Supper-controversy, all the men of the above stamp defended the 
 much more Roman Catholic ideas of Luther, and repaid Zwingli's noble-minded 
 efforts at mediation between them at an earlier period, by joining the former in 
 proclaiming the doctrine and person of the Zurich Beformer heretical and 
 damnable. Luther manifested his grateful sense, of this favour, especially 
 towards Pirkheimer, by assuming as true all the perversions of Zwingli's 
 doctrine which the latter had allowed himself in his polemical writings, instead 
 of examining Zwingli's writings for himself, and it was from so false a standing- 
 point as this, that Luther combatted Zwingli and his doctrine. (Compare 
 what Ebrard says in the second vol. of his Dogma of the Supper.) 
 
332 MANNEE OF CONDUCTDfG THE CONTEST. 
 
 If we glance at the result of this contest for both parties, we 
 shall find it was much more favourable for Zwingli and his 
 friends than they might have been led to anticipate. Our Ee- 
 former, however, possessed far too profound a knowledge of the 
 human heart, and of the motives which influence the great 
 majority in their opinions and judgments, not to be well aware 
 how difficult was the stand that pure and naked truth had to 
 make against the gigantic power of prejudice and traditionary 
 belief on the side of Luther. "I know," he says, " how difl&cult 
 it is to combat a delusion that has struck its' roots deep into the 
 hearts of aU. For our very veneration of Christ seems to justify 
 a vehement defence of those outward signs, which we call 
 sacraments ; and we think if we acquit ourselves of this task, we 
 have done some great thing, while our first object ought to be 
 more and more to resemble the great Master, whose name we 
 bear. The contest is dangerous with so many and so furious 
 enemies. For each will pass for most pious, by raging most 
 furiously." Although, however, his position was a difficult one, 
 and although Luther, not only by the wonder-working power of • 
 his richly metaphorical and popular language set the whole mass 
 of popular prejudices in motion for his view, but also threw into 
 the scale the whole weight of his personal authority and personal 
 convictions and passions, Zwingli's cause travelled on from one 
 victory to another, while he, as he says himself, always allowed 
 the truth to appear in her own person, and with her own power- 
 ful authority, nor made her disagreeable by the use of unmeasured 
 language, which always gives reason to suspect pride ; inasmuch 
 as the simple-minded and single-hearted Christian much more 
 gladly listens to truth, -when she makes her appearance in her 
 own simple robe, than when she stalks forth oppressed with a 
 load of ornaments, and proceeds to hector and to bully. 
 
 Thus Zwingli's doctrine of the Supper spread rapidly through 
 the whole of Switzerland, forwarded by the convincing advocacy 
 of his writings, which breathed the spirit of Christian mildness 
 and charity, admirably blended with manly resolution and sound 
 sense. While at the religious disputation in Berne 1528, an 
 overwhelming number of the preachers and men of learning from 
 Switzerland, Southern Germany, and Strasburg, with the excep- 
 tion of Althainer of Nurnberg. and "Rurgauer of St. Gall, gave in 
 
MANNER OF CONDUCTING THE CONTEST. 333 
 
 tlieir adhesion to his doctrine ; the clergy of the Margraviate of 
 Baden, with the exception of Dr. Strauss, were not behind in 
 expressing their conciirrence, and as Zwingli could count upon 
 at least the half of the population of Augsburg, the preachers 
 of that town gave publication to similar views with his own, in 
 a writing which they issued on Palm Sunday 1527. "As God in 
 the Old Testament commanded that His mercy and redemption 
 should be yearly commemorated at the feast of the Passover, 
 without doubt, for the purpose of awakening true confidence 
 in Him, who is alone able and willing to save, so Christ our 
 Eedeemer, in the last Supper immediately preceding His suffer- 
 ings and death, commanded his disciples, while he himself fed 
 them with faith, seriously to ponder his unmeasureable love 
 towards us in the work of redemption, saying, ' This do in 
 remembrance of me.' And Paul says, ' Ye do shew the Lord's 
 death till he come,' without doubt that our confidence towards 
 him as to our only Eedeemer, may be awakened, strengthened, and 
 sustained, if so be that we bear in mind that the Son of God 
 himself has taken upon Him our sins, and is the true Paschal 
 lamb which taketh away sin, for He hath given His body as a 
 propitiatory sacrifice for us, and hath poured out His blood for 
 the pardon of our sins, to cleanse our conscience from dead 
 works, and to confirm the New Testament, the covenant of grace 
 betwixt God and us, that our sins are forgiven, and that we are 
 endowed with a right understanding of God, are become his 
 people, and he our God, as he hath promised us, Jer. xxxi." 
 Ebrard observes that this conception of the significance of the 
 Supper closely resembles Zwingli's. 
 
 But even in places where Luther and his party could recklessly 
 proclaim their views, Zwingli had resolute adherents of his 
 doctrine. At the instance of Pirkheimer and Osiander, who in 
 their polemical works surpassed even their exemplar in Witten- 
 berg in passionate vituperations of the Swiss, Zwingli's writings 
 had been prohibited in Nurnberg ; yet here John Haner and 
 the famous painter, Albrecht" Durer,* had the courage to 
 espouse and defend his doctrine. Nay, in Wittenberg itself, he 
 
 * Inan interchange of words which he had with Pirkheimer upon this subject, 
 the latter said, " what you say cannot be painted." Upon which Durer replied, 
 " But what you say cannot be written, not to spealc of painting." 
 
334 MANNER OF CONDUCTING THE CONTEST. 
 
 had his adherents, as Capito informs us, where Luther, by the 
 force of his authority, suppressed, in a manner keenly felt hy his 
 nearest friend Melanchthon,* any opinions that differed from his 
 own ; and the same was the case in Brunswickf and other places. 
 In the towns on the Ehine, in the whole of Holland and East 
 Friesland, as Bucer mentions to Zwingli, 9th July 1526, and in 
 France, his doctrine of the Supper had free course among the 
 Evangelicals, so that Zwingli could write with good reason: " If 
 we look to it closely, we shall perceive that the majority of 
 Christians are of our way of thinking," and ia a letter to 
 Osiander, he ventured to express the confident hope, "that within 
 the period of three years our opinion will be the preponderating 
 one in the half of Europe."J This result of the polemical war, 
 so favourable for Zwingli, was not unknown at Wittenberg, 
 and was even admitted, however reluctantly, by Melanchthon 
 and Luther. The former wrote to the elector, John Frederick, 
 " that the doctrine of the opposite party had the assent of many 
 men who had a name for learning in Germany ;" and Luther let 
 the Germans know, by his bitter taunts,§ the deep disappoiat- 
 ment he felt at this result. The soul of this great man, in truth, 
 clouded itself more and more in the conduct of this stijife, to 
 which result domestic and public misfortunes also contributed 
 their share. The plague raged at this time in Saxony, and had 
 changed Luther's house, as he expresses it, into a lazaretto ; he 
 himself was laid low, by a very dangerous attack, which he 
 
 * Melanchthon, Luther's hest friend, wrote in a letter some years after his 
 death: "Luther was by all his great virtues hasty and passionate. I was often 
 obliged to manifest a slavish subjection to him, as he frequently followed the 
 humour of the moment, and then consulted little his own dignity and the general 
 good. He could not well endure contradiction." 
 
 t Where Laffards, first Rector in the High School, concurred in Zwingli's 
 doctrine. 
 
 X Luthier's view could only hold its ground,'where, either directly or indirectly 
 through his scholars and friends, the whole weight of his personal authority was 
 thrown into the scale. The phenomenon is hence easily explained, that outside 
 of Germany, Zwingli's view was adopted with hardly any opposition. 
 
 § " We Germans are such blades, that whatever is new we fall to it, and hang 
 on it like fools. And he who would withstand our folly makes us more foolish 
 than before ; but if none withstand us, we soon get tired, and begin to gape about 
 for something new. The devil has thus the advantage that no doctrine or con- 
 ceit, however absurd it be, can lift its head above water with us without finding 
 advocates, and the more absurd it is the more readily it will find supporters." 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 335 
 
 thouglit would prove fatal Under the weight of these sorrows, 
 he thought the day of judgment, with all its terrors, was about 
 to burst on the world, and, in feverish excitement, he would 
 strain every nerve for the suppression of the dangerous heresy, 
 which he regarded the doctrine of his adversaries to be. 
 
 Zwingli, however, had no reason to be proud of a contest, carried 
 on with a man standing so high in public esteem. Although he 
 enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing his opinion, which he main- 
 tained with all Christian patience and mildness, winning one 
 victory after another, he had too much penetration not to be 
 aware of the pain which the members of the Eeformed Church 
 felt on its account. The question, " To which side shall I now 
 turn, since Luther and Zwingli are at variance?" revealed the- 
 deep rent which tore evangelical Christendom during the progress 
 of a controversy which separated two men whom aU believers 
 held in high estimation. Besides all this, the evangelical party 
 were not only subjected to hear daily from the papists the taunt, 
 " You would hold to the pure Word of God, and now you quarrel 
 among yourselves about it," but likewise to see Pope, Emperor, 
 and the Eoman Catholic princes, drawing closer to each other, in 
 measures which had for their object the total suppression of the 
 Eeformation, while, under the injurious influence of the Supper- 
 controversy, they could arrive at no union among themselves. 
 These distressing circumstances lay heavily on the hearts of many 
 evangelical men, whose intellectual eye was not dimmed by pas- 
 sionate excitement, and induced them to think of ways and 
 means to effect a reconciliation between the champions' of both 
 parties, and to extinguish the controversy. We shall now turn 
 our attention to these attempts at reconciliation, and see with 
 what success they were attended. 
 
 8. The Attempts at Union. 
 
 Even before the actual outbreak 'of the controversy betwixt 
 Luther and Zwingli, when Luther had seized an opportunity of 
 assailing Zwingli, who had not yet answered him, the Strasburg 
 divines, Capito, Bucer, and Hedio, endeavoured to bring about an 
 understanding between, the two great men, whom all venerated. 
 
336 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 and thus to prevent the great scandal, which would inevitably 
 accrue to the Keformed Church, through an open dissension of 
 opinion. Zwingli they begged, in the meantime, not to reply to 
 Luther's invectives, and they sent to Luther, as early as 1525, 
 Gregorius Chaselius, professor of Hebrew, to represent to him and 
 his friends what a dangerous conflagration might arise if so bitter 
 and intemperate writings as they had published against Zwingli 
 should be answered by him in the same spirit, at the very time 
 that they ought, with combined energy, to combat the power of 
 the Pope. They might interpret the words of institution of the 
 Holy Supper in the manner which they thought to be consistent 
 with truth, rejecting all they held erroneous and false; but they 
 ought to bear in mind those great truths which they held in 
 common with the Swiss, and regard and recognise them as 
 brethren. Chaselius was to embrace this opportunity of impart- 
 ing to Luther and his friends a better opinion of Zwingli and 
 CEcolampad, one more correspondent with truth, and more con- 
 sistent with the great services they had rendered to the Church 
 of Christ. 
 
 Gladly as Zwingli, out of love to peace, acceded to the desires 
 of his Strasburg friends, stern and obdurate was the demeanour 
 of Luther, " Satan," said he, in a work in which he replied to 
 them, "is not a man, nor the world, but a prince, and the god of 
 the world. Who should not rejoice that Zwingli and (Ecolam- 
 pad's holiness, and their churches, are so much lauded by you? 
 Yet I cannot well comprehend what you understand under this 
 holiness and these churches. We dare boast that Christ was first 
 proclaimed by us. If they be assured of their faith, let them 
 come forward and convict us of error. Either they or we must 
 be the devil's servants, there is therefore here no place for coun- 
 sel or mediation. ' What communion hath Christ with BeHal?'" 
 In this manner, the bands of mediation, knit by Christian love, 
 were torn asunder by Luther's rude hand, and the union sought 
 after ruthlessly stifled. He drew Bucer himseH into the contest 
 in the end, while all hope vanished from the meek and temperate 
 Capito, of reconciling with his opponents, " the furious Orestes," 
 as he calls Luther, in a letter to Zwingli, But there was another 
 who mourned -over the rent that these controversies spread through 
 the Eeformed Church, who formed the resolution of working out 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 337 
 
 an understanding and reconcilement. This was the highly intel- 
 lectual preacher, John Haner,* first of Frankfort-on-the-Maine, 
 afterwards of Numberg. It was he who induced the noble- 
 minded and richly-gifted landgrave, Philip von Hessen, to under- 
 take the task of mediation between the angry brethren. In 
 March 1529, the opening of the second Diet at Speyer, so im- 
 portant for the reformed Church, took place, at which, under 
 Faber's and Eck's influence, it was resolved, 24th March, with an 
 overwhelming majority: " Where the edict of Worms, (which had 
 in view the suppression and extirpation of the Eeformation,) has 
 been put in force, aU religious innovation, as hitherto, remains 
 forbidden; but where it has been departed from, and where its 
 introduction without tumult is not possible, no farther steps at 
 least, shall be taken in reformation, no questions of controversy 
 shall be discussed, the Mass shall not be forbidden, no Catholic 
 shaU pass over to Lutheranism, the Episcopal jurisdiction shall 
 not be declined, and neither Anabaptists nor Sacramentalistsf 
 shall he tolerated." The reformed princes and deputies of towns 
 handed in against this resolution the famous Protest, "because 
 the rnajority has no power in questions of conscience!' In 
 reference to the suppression of the Eeformation, the Protest said : 
 " Although it be generally known that in our states the holy 
 sacrament of the body and blood of our Lord is administered in 
 a proper and befitting manner, we cannot accept the terms of the 
 edict against the Sacramentalists, because the Imperial letter of 
 convocation has not spoken of them, because they have not been 
 tried, and nothing can be decided on so important a matter before 
 the next general Council" The adherents of Zwingli's doctrine 
 of the Supper owed this just regard to their interests as much to 
 the skilftd and influential mediation of the landgrave Philip von 
 Hessen, and Sheriff James Sturm of Strasburg, as to the sense of 
 justice of the other Protestant princes and deputies, Melanchthon 
 also, who had come to Speyer with the Elector of Saxony, writes : 
 " What just reproaches would we draw upon ourselves by con- 
 
 * John Haner writes afterwards, in December 1529, to Bucer, on this subject; 
 " I was the first who took the trouble of persuading the landgrave. Von Hessen, 
 to attempt a reconciliation between the contending parties, and this took place 
 even as early as the first Diet at Speyer." 
 
 t So the adherents of Zwingli's doctrine of the Supper were called after the 
 example of Luther. 
 
 Y 
 
338 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 demning a doctrine without having heard those who would defend 
 it." Eck and Faber's plan of dividing the Evangelicals, in order 
 the more easily to suppress them, was thus frustrated. Upon 
 Philip von Hessen's, however, desiring to form a defensive 
 alliance between the reformed princes and towns, to hold in 
 check the papal party who were closely united under the Arch- 
 duke Ferdinand, the princes under the influence of Luther refused 
 to join it unless the adherents of Zwingli's doctrine of the Supper 
 would give up their opinions, and accept Luther's doctrine of the 
 sacrament. On this account the Landgrave felt himself the more 
 induced to enter into Haner's proposal, and to endeavour to effect 
 an understanding and reconciliation between the twp Eeformers. 
 With this object in view, he invited from Speyer Zwingli and 
 Luther, with their friends, to a disputation upon the subject of 
 dispute, at Marburg, and wrote on the 9th May 1529 to Zwingli: 
 " We are at present busily engaged in bringing together to a 
 suitable place of meeting Luther, Melanchthon, and others, who 
 are nearly of jour opinion upon the sacrament, to see if the 
 almighty and merciful God would grant us grace to compare the 
 said article of belief upon the foundation of Holy Scripture, and 
 enable us to live in a harmonious and unanimous understanding 
 upon the point, for at this Diet the papists knew not better to 
 defend their perversions, abuses, and corruptions, than by saying 
 that we who pretend to cling to the pure Word of God are not 
 united in doctrine and faith among ourselves ; and verily if we 
 were united, their knavery would soon come to an end. Where- 
 fore our most gracious request to you is, that you would use your 
 best endeavours to put the matter upon a right foundation, and 
 bring us aU to one Christian and unanimous sentiment." 
 Zwingli was ready at once to accept the invitation of the Land- 
 grave, although he would rather have seen Strasburg, or some 
 other town more between Wittenberg and Zurich fixed upon as 
 the meeting-place of the conference. " If, however," he answers 
 the Landgrave, " Marburg is to be the place of meeting, I shall 
 pray the Lord that He may conduct me safely thither to the 
 praise of His glory. And I shall, indeed, repair thither, even 
 although my lords of the Council should not be quite agreed 
 about it, if only it be not against the will of God, and the weal 
 of His Church; for I entertain the confident hope that the ray 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 339 
 
 of truth, when we come together, will enlighten our eyes, so that 
 we shall give the honour to truth, and let her reign." The town- 
 sheriff, James Sturm, who supported the Landgrave's invitation 
 to Zwingli, expressed his hope that, " as the prince was ardently 
 desirous of his presence, he might, if not with his opponents, with 
 the prince himself, effect much good, and I have every confidence 
 that it will be to the glory of God, and the general advantage." 
 At Zwingli's request, the landgrave, in two separate letters, had 
 besought the Councils of Zurich to grant the Eeformer the 
 necessary leave of absence to attend this friendly (not disputa- 
 tious) conference. The little Council were unable to make up their 
 mind upon the conceding of this request, and finally they resolved 
 to leave the decision in the hands of the great Council, conceiv- 
 ing they could not well dispense, in the then dangerous position 
 of the country, (immediately after the Capeller war,) with the 
 advice and assistance of Zwingli, and also that they ought not 
 to expose the excellent man to the dangers of so distant a jour- 
 ney in part through a hostile territory. Zwingli, with whom 
 anxiety for the imion and peace of the reformed Church out- 
 weighed every poKtical and personal consideration, thought it 
 best not to await the decision. He took the road on the night 
 preceding the first month of harvest, accompanied by Professor 
 Collinus* from Zurich to Basle, leaving behind him a letter 
 addressed to the little and great Councils, in which he explained 
 the motives that led him to take this step. " The lords of the 
 common Council," he says, " not having expressly refused me 
 leave of absence, but having resolved to bring the matter before 
 you on the ensuing week, I feared, on the one hand, that your 
 Worships might not concede my request, while, on the other 
 hand, something has, in the meantime, transpired to precipitate 
 affairs, so that I am unwilling to wait till next week. While 
 realising the present state of warlike matters, the dangers, the 
 scarcity, which might induce me to remain here, I have also Con- 
 sidered the grace of the ever faithful God, who has never aban- 
 doned us, and who will overrule all for the well-being of His own 
 people, and for His own glory. I have therefore in haste taken 
 the road, because I foresaw, from your great fidelity towards me, 
 
 * According to the account of Bernhard Uriss the bookseller, Christoffel 
 Froschauer accompanied him also. 
 
S-iO ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 and the care you have of me, you would not have given me any 
 leave of absence at all." After acknowledging the great dangers 
 to which he exposes himself, he continues : " It appeared to me 
 not proper that I should be absent, because a full deliberation 
 would have been thereby rendered impossible, and the journey 
 of many excellent men of the opposite party have been made in 
 vain. And they might have interpreted my non-appearance to 
 a desire to shun so friendly a conference. On which account I 
 most humbly beseech your Worships not to interpret my hasty 
 departure to any slighting of your authority, contempt of which 
 I cannot bear to see in others, but to reflect that my absence 
 from the conference might prejudice the truth, and your good 
 name. Finally, my lords, have good hope towards God, that if 
 He permit us to reach the end of our journey. He wUl grant to 
 us His help to defend resolutely His truth, and not to disgrace 
 His Church." He farther begs that as the men of Basle had 
 resolved to send along with OEcolampad a deputy of the Council, 
 (Ralph Frei had been appointed,) they would send after him 
 Councillor XJlrich Funk to Basle. " The chief men of my most 
 gracious lords being so bowed down with age and bodily infirmity 
 as to make a long journey too onerous for them ; for we shall 
 have to ride through dark pathless woods, through bush and brake, 
 to which hardships not every one may be exposed." In con- 
 clusion, he recommends them and his journey with all the faith- 
 ful to the protection of God. His departure was so secret that 
 it was only at Basle he begged Master Stoll " to mention to his 
 wife as much as it was expedient for a wife to know ; for I took 
 leave of her without letting her know anything more than that 
 I had gone to Basle, where I had some business to transact." 
 
 During his absence Comthur Conrad Schmidt preached for 
 him, a very talented, courageous, and learned man, as Bullinger 
 calls him. Zwingli's enemies leapt for joy when they heard of 
 his secret departure. " He has taken leg bail with the rogues," 
 said some; "the devil appeared to him and ran off with him," 
 said others. In Graubund a report was circulated he was 
 drowned at Bruck, along with four Councillors. Such malicious 
 and absurd stories were, as Bullinger observes, invented and told 
 without number. The Zurich Council resolved, in the end, to 
 grant the leave of absence, and sent after him, without delay. 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 311 
 
 Councillor Ulrich Funk, with a servant, and a safe-con duct-box 
 to Basle, where the Eeformer had happily arrived, and was 
 lodged with his dear friend OEcolampad. On the 6th of Sep- 
 tember the two Eeformers went on board a vessel with some 
 reliable merchants, and in thirteen hours reached Strasburg by 
 water, and proceeded straight to the house of Canon Matthias 
 Zett* Here they sojourned till the 22d September; Zwingli 
 preached with great acceptance in the town. They then pro- 
 ceeded on their journey, accompanied by the Town-Sheriff James 
 Sturm, and the ministers Bucer and Hedio, by a circuitous route 
 through the territory of the Palatine of Zweibruecken to the 
 Hessian fortified town of St. Goar, and from hence, under Hessian 
 escort, in the company of the Councillor James of Taubenheim, 
 to Marburg, where they arrived on the 29th September, and took 
 up their quarters in the first house eastward of the Bears'-Well. 
 
 In sad contrast to the gladsome readiness with which Zwingli 
 exposed himself to the dangers of a distant journey, his serene 
 courage, the joyous hope that animated him, that the proposal of 
 the Landgrave might turn out to the honour of Christian truth 
 and Christian love ; in sad contrast to this, is the mood of mind 
 in which Luther and Melanchthon regarded the Conference, and 
 the secret arts they employed to prevent its being holden at all. 
 Melanchthon wrote to the Elector John Frederick of Saxony, 
 begging him to deny to Luther and himself leave of absence for 
 the journey; for Luther feared : " It might neither be good nor 
 salutary to speak much upon the subject with their- opponents, 
 seeing there was no hope at present of bringing, at least, the 
 heads of the party to a better, way of thinking. I know, however," 
 he continues, " how much this matter lies at the heart of the 
 landgrave, and- fear that if Luther should decline this Conference 
 with his opponents his Highness might then manifest no small 
 favour and condescension to Zwingli.. The doctrine of our oppo- 
 nents is, besides, extremely attractive, and rejoices in the assent 
 of very many men having a great name for learning in Ger- 
 
 * His wife, the learned Catherine Zett, so famous by her correspondence with 
 Superintendent Rabus, writes in one of her letters to Eabus: " I was fourteen 
 days maid and cook when the dear homely men (Ecolampad and Zwingli were 
 here at Strasburg, in the year twenty-nine (1529), in the journey, along with our 
 folks to Marburg to Dr. Luther." 
 
342 ATTEMPT AT UNION. 
 
 many;* on this account a conference is all the more dangerous. 
 But most lamentable of all is the singular demand, ' that in the 
 event of the Conference's taking place, some of the Papists shovld 
 he admitted, in the capacity of impartial witnesses, as otherwise, 
 no impartial judges being present, the Zwinglians might easily 
 boast of victory." f Upon the Elector's declining to do this hole 
 and corner work which Luther and Melanchthon suggested to 
 him, they turned to the Landgrave. Melanchthon, among other 
 things, wrote to him, " Martin fears that no good fruit will come 
 of this Conference. Wherefore, ought it not to be a matter of 
 consideration whether or not it be good to undertake it at all?" 
 Meanwhile, Melanchthon passed his time -in unspeakable anxiety 
 on the subject, and bitterly repented that he had not consented, 
 at the Diet of Spires, to the condemnation of Zwingli and his 
 adherents. Luther wrote to the Landgrave: "Although I haVe 
 but poor hopes of such a peace, your Eoyal Highness' zeal and 
 care in this matter are much to be commended, &c. &c., for in 
 truth I will not leave the opposite party the glory of being more 
 inclined to peace and union than I am. But I have especially 
 to beg that your Koyal Highness would be graciously pleased to 
 ascertain if this party be at all inclined to recede from their 
 opinion, for if not the evil will be aggravated. For of what use 
 is a meeting and a conference, if both parties are determined not 
 to yield? It appears to me as if they sought, through the zeal of 
 
 * " Did it stand thus witli Luther's lauded confidence in the self-evident clear- 
 ness and simplicity of his doctrine?" inquires Ebrard. 
 
 t Melanchthon sought to defend this very strange proposal, by saying that 
 the Papists, when they saw the Lutherans and Zwinglians collecting together in 
 a large body, might say, with some shew of reason, they were hatching a con- 
 spiracy against the Emperor. But Ebrard justly observes: " He does not desire 
 to have the Papists present simply as witnesses that no conspiracy was forming 
 against the Emperor, (by theologians!) but, in fact, as umpires, to the end that 
 the Swiss might have the worst of it. It is here evident , that behind the lofty- 
 sounding phrases of Luther of the immoveable certainty of his doctrine, and 
 the contemptibleness of his opponents, there lay concealed the greatest anxiety 
 and fear on his part, lest these very adversaries might carry off the victory in 
 public estimation. So he says, ' It is not well that the landgrave has much to 
 do with the Zwinglians; he has more inclination to them than is good. The 
 matter is of that kind that it easily affects men of acute minds, such as I hold the 
 Landgrave to be.' Thus he was so far-untrue to himself and his own honour as 
 to desire papistical auxiliaries in this matter as ' impartial.'"— Ebkakd, "The 
 Dogma of the Holy Supper," Second Part, page 304. 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 343 
 
 your Grace, to effect a piece of work out of which no good will 
 come. I know the devil well, and what he seeks, but may God 
 grant that I be here no prophet. For if there were not some 
 base design, and if they really were in earnest after peace, they 
 had hardly entered upon the affair so grandly, and with the aid 
 of so mighty and great princes ; for by God's grace we are not 
 so wild and profligate. They might long ago, and even still, by 
 writing, have made their humble endeavours to obtain peace, as 
 they boast of having made them. For I know weU that I shall 
 not yield to them a hairbreadth ; nor can I, because I am per- 
 fectly certain that they are in the wrong, while they, on the other 
 hand, are in doubt. And this is sure, that if we do not yield, we 
 shall separate from one another without fruit."* The Landgrave 
 had just as little disposition to give way to these scruples as the 
 Elector of Saxony, and so Luther was forced to make up his 
 mind to the journey to Marburg, however reluctantly, if he woiild 
 not positively offend the Landgrave, and throw him entirely on 
 the side of Zwingli Accompanied by Justus Jonas, Melanch- 
 thon, Caspar Cruciger, Frederick Mecum, Justus Menius, and 
 the Chur-Saxon Ammann von der Tann, who was given him for 
 
 * Ebrard remarks upon this in his " Dogma of the Supper," Second Part, 
 page 306. "How naive! Zwingli is challenged to a public disputation, and is 
 willing to come. Luther is full of anxiety, but now blames Zwingli for having 
 sought and occasioned the disputation, and again that he wavers in his opinion. 
 Luther will not leave the glory of pacification to his adversary, but requires he 
 should have testified in writing ' his humble endeavours for peace,' and demands 
 this from one who, for years long, had replied to his outbreaks of passion in an 
 humble and pacific spirit. He assures him ' we are not so wild and profligate.' 
 Luther demonstrates the inutility of a disputation where ' both parties come 
 together with the resolution not to yield,' and concludes from hence that Zwingli 
 must yield, for he (Luther) will come with the resolve not to yield a hair- 
 breadth. What self-irony ! Luther did not come to prove and to weigh, free of 
 prejudice, the arguments of his opponent, but from the veiy first to reject them. 
 He did not come with any confidence in the truth of his doctrine, that it would 
 sustain a fair trial, but he came concealing behind the pretensions which he put 
 forward that his adversary from the first, that is before the hearing and exami- 
 nation of the arguments of both the parties, should make the promise that he 
 was willing to yield; he came concealing behind this the fear, the consciousness 
 of the factitious character and impotency of his own arguments. He did not 
 come with the consciousness of being a man liable to err, whose mind, however 
 clear and well-intentioned, was yet of limited capacity, but he came with the 
 consciousness of unerringness &nd infallibility, he came in a subtle self-deifica- 
 tion, which cannot be denied." 
 
344 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 escort, Luther took his way over Halle, Gotha, and Eisenach. 
 Not finding at Kreuzburg, on the Hessian frontier, any written 
 assurance of safe-conduct through the country, of the Landgrave, 
 he could not resolve on proceeding, but waited till he received a 
 formal letter of safe-condtict from PhOip.* The Landgrave was 
 very angry at this exhibition of mistrust. " Zwingli," said he, 
 ' has come hither with his people all the way from Switzerland 
 without desiring from us a safe-conduct, while Luther demands 
 one, as if he could not trust us." The Saxons arrived at Marburg 
 on the 30th September, a day after the Swiss and Strasburg men, 
 and put up at the Hotel of the Bear (No. 53 Bare-foot-friar 
 Street.) The Landgrave, however, invited both parties, imme- 
 diately after their arrival, to take up their residence at the Castle, 
 hoping by this means to bring the leaders nearer, and to inspire 
 them with friendly sentiments towards each other. Philip enter- 
 tained them at the Castle in a right princely manner, so that 
 Justus Jonas was led to make the observation, " We are treated 
 thus magnificently in these Hessian woods, not from love to the 
 Muses, but from a regard to the glory of God and of Christ." 
 
 According to an arrangement proposed by the Landgrave, 
 Zwingli and Melanchthon, on the one hand, and Luther and 
 CEcolampad, on the other, were to converse together, and endea- 
 vour to come to a mutual understanding, it being considered 
 dangerous to permit the two more vehement leaders, excited as 
 they were by the recent polemical war in which they had been 
 engaged, to dispute all at once, while it was held that the way 
 to an understanding could be more easUy smoothed by CEcolam- 
 pad and Melanchthon, who were meeker and more inclined to 
 make concessions. On Friday the 1st October, Zwingli and 
 Melanchthon were conducted, after public worship, into a private 
 chamber, that these combatants might try their strength on one 
 another. The Saxons having never taken the trouble to make 
 themselves acquainted with the views and doctrines of the Swiss 
 from their own writings, but having blindly adopted every report 
 about their lives and doctrines, however absurd it might be, 
 
 ♦ What a strong contrast does this pusillanhnons anxiety present to the noble 
 heroism which eight years before he shewed on his journey to Worms. The 
 heroic spirit appears to have departed from him after he plunged into this 
 unhappy controversy, bearing with him all his passions into it. 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 34.5 
 
 brought a long catalogue of heresies with them to Marburg, 
 with which they intended to charge their adversaries. At the 
 very commencement, Melanchthon had to learn that his concep- 
 tion of Zwingli's views was incorrect. He accused the Swiss 
 Eeformer of heterodoxy upon the divinity of Christ and the 
 Trinity, while Zwingli proved that in both these doctrines he 
 entirely concurred with the first creeds of the Church. To this 
 singularly erroneous opinion, the Saxons had allowed themselves 
 to be led astray by the report concerning a writing of the same 
 Lewis Hetzer, who first commenced the breaking of the Church 
 images in Switzerland, (see Fourth Section, Chapter vii.) in 
 which he denied Christ's divinity and the Trinity, which writuig, 
 however, had been suppressed before publication at the interven- 
 tion of Zwingli In Luther and Melanch|;hon's rambling and 
 confused notions about Swiss persons and events, Hetzer and 
 Zwingli were confounded, so that, while they had hitherto laid 
 to the charge of the latter, without any scruple, all the heresies 
 of the former, Melanchthon was not a little astonished when 
 ZwingK convinced him that he had nothing in common with 
 these and similar fanatics, but, on the contrary, was at strife 
 with them, being not less vilified and hated by them than Luther 
 and Melanchthon were by Thomas Muenzer and his companions. 
 The second heresy the Saxons laid to the charge of Zwingli 
 related to his doctrine on original sin. From the distinction 
 Zwingli drew between the original corruption of our nature, of 
 which he had a deeper conception than most, and actual sin, 
 they fancied, according to the false reports they had heard, that 
 he denied original sin altogether, and placed the essence of sin 
 in the actual outward deed, Like the Pelagians and Papists. 
 Here Melanchthon and he were at one, "that original sin is 
 a defect derived from Adam, which renders it impossible 
 for man to love God, and which damns him." In the same 
 manner, Zwingli answered Melanchthon's empty accusation, 
 that he denied, like Thomas Muenzer, the illumination of 
 the Holy Spirit by the Word, explaining himself thus : " The 
 Holy Ghost works in us justification through the Word preached 
 and apprehended, that is, through the soul cmd, kernel of the 
 Word, through the thought and wiU of God wrapped up and 
 
346 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 delivered in the human Word."* It was more difficult to come 
 to an understanding on the doctrine of the Supper. Melanchthon 
 avoided any profound discussion of this question, seeking, like 
 an eel, to escape his opponent, -and assuming a thousand forms 
 like a proteus ;"f but he was soon made to experience that he was 
 opposed to one who was not to be outdone by any such gymnas- 
 tic dexterity, and who was perfectly able to keep a firm hold of 
 the subject of examination, until it was more closely investigated. 
 Zwingli took up a pen and wrote down the arguments, objections, 
 and admissions of Melanchthon, so that he might not be able to 
 shift or change his ground. The latter admitted that we pmiake 
 of the hody and blood of Christ spiritually, by believing on Him, 
 who hath given himself for us. He likewise admitted that in 
 John, chap, vi., the Lord speaks of corporeal eating, declaring it 
 to be profitless, the Capernaumites fancying they were to eat His 
 flesh corporeally, and drink His blood corporeally. He farther 
 declared, that they, the Lutherans, did not hold the view that the 
 body and blood of the Saviour were received into the mouth in 
 any defined or gross manner, but that this body was truly par- 
 taken of, although in a manner hid from the sense of our 
 faculties. To this, the reply was made by 
 
 Zwingli: This hidden manner, however, cannot be proved by 
 Scripture. 
 
 Melanchthon : It is proved by the Lord saying, " This is my 
 body, this is my blood." 
 
 Zwingli : The body of which the Lord speaks in these words 
 is, however, alone His real material body, which can only be in 
 one place, and not everywhere at the same time ; as Augustine 
 thus speaks of it. 
 
 Melanchthon : Although Augustine says it, I cannot accept it. 
 
 Zwingli: The Lord himself speaks thus, in reference to his 
 body, in the Gospel of John xvii. 11: "And now I am no 
 
 * Dr. Julius Miiller, in the third number of " Studies and Criticisms,'' year 
 1856, has admirably and most perspicuously developed the relation between the 
 efSciency of the Holy Ghost, and the means of gi-ace in the Word. The result 
 of the investigations of this able divine very nearly agree with Zwingli's, although 
 he makes no reference to him. 
 
 t The relation is taken from a confidential letter of Zwingli's to Vadian. 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 347 
 
 more in the world;" and in other passages he propounds the 
 same truth. 
 
 Melanchthon : The words of Christ, " This is my body,'' 
 are clear, and I adhere to them in their plain and simple 
 sense. 
 
 Zwingli : It is a false assumption that your interpretation gives 
 the clear sense of these words. 
 
 Not being able to come to an agreement on this point, they 
 both agreed to break off the conference, which had already lasted 
 six hours, and which, at least, impressed Melanchthon with the 
 conviction that Zwingli was not "the ignorant fanatic" he had 
 been often represented. In the conference betwixt Luther and 
 GEcolampad, which lasted three hours, the former conducted him- 
 self in a manner which discovered so much obstinacy and pre- 
 sumption that GEcolampad, on passing Zwingli, whispered into 
 his ear, " I have fallen on a second Dr. Eck."* 
 
 These interviews being declared ended on the Friday evening, 
 Zwingli, confiding in the truth of his doctrine, and according 
 to the principle which he always conceived himseK bound 
 to maintain, namely, that every Christian has the right and 
 liberty, in all matters of religion, to form his opinions for him- 
 self, according to the rule of God's Word, and under the guid- 
 ance of the Holy Spirit, expressed his desire that a public Dis- 
 putation should be held, to which every one who wished it should 
 have admission, and at which every one should be free to decide 
 for himself what opioion he should adopt. While Luther, on the 
 other hand, held it neither to be expedient nor salutary that the 
 Disputation should be thrown open to every one, the landgrave 
 and his councillors, in concurrence with Duke Ulrich, of Wir- 
 temberg, decided this preliminary, to the effect that a select circle 
 only of nobles and deputies, with the principal men of learning, 
 especially of the Universities of Marburg and Wittenberg, should 
 be present. There were accordingly but twenty-four auditors at 
 the commencement of the Disputation, which number, however, 
 was increased in the course of it, and rose to between fifty and 
 sixty, on the arrival of John Brenz, Osiander, and Agricola (of 
 
 * CEcolampad's remark had refference to Eck's coarse and arrogant demeanour 
 at the Baden Disputation. Certainly a heavy charge against Luther, bait unfor- 
 tunately one that was too well merited. 
 
348 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 Augsburg.)* The Landgrave's Chancellor, John Feige, opened 
 the Disputation, in a speech, in which he exhorted the members 
 " that they should act, as had been done on like occasions, when 
 learned men came together, who had previously written some- 
 what sharply against each other, that is, they should banish from 
 their minds all ill-humour and bitterness of feeling. Whoever 
 should do this would, at the same time, discharge his duty, and , 
 obtaiii glory and commendation. Others, however, who disre- 
 garded unity, and who obstinately persisted in some notion once 
 adopted by them (the mother of all heresies), would thereby 
 afford indubitable evidence against themselves that the Holy 
 Spirit did not rule in their hearts." -f- The Landgrave, so simply 
 attired that no one could have taken him for a prince, took his 
 seat at the same table, at which Zwingli and (Ecolampad, on the 
 one side, Luther and Melanchthon on the other, sat to decide 
 whether the Eeformed Evangelical Church, resting on one basis 
 of faith, was henceforth to remain united, or whether it was to be 
 rent into two great parties. The poet Cordus, cried in name of 
 the Church to its here assembled leaders : " Puissant princes of 
 the Word, whom the august hero Philip has called to avert from 
 us schism, and to shew us the way of truth ; the imploring church 
 faUs at your feet, drowned in tears, and conjures you, in Christ's 
 name, to set forward the good cause, that the world may recog- 
 nise in your resolutions the work of the Holy Ghost himself" 
 Before the Conference began, Luther took up a piece of chalk, and, 
 in large letters, he wrote upon the table the words, " This is my 
 body," with the object, doubtless, that, when arguments failed, he 
 might all the more firrnly cHng to the outward letter, since, 
 verily, he was resolved not to yield a hairbreadth." 
 
 The Conference began between Luther and CEcolampad, Luther 
 defending himself, in a long speech, against the imputation that 
 he, in any respect, agreed with the doctrine of the Supper held 
 
 * When Zwingli speaks only of twenty-four, and Brenz of fifty or sixty, as 
 being present, the diiference is reconcilable, on the ground that Zwingli speaks 
 of the number at the beginning, Brenz of that in the course, or at the end, of the 
 Disputation. Luther having written to Brenz not to come to Marburg, and the 
 latter having written to Osiander, and others, dissuading them from making their 
 appearance, they did not arrive in Marburg till a day and a-half after the Dis- 
 putation had begun. 
 
 t A very plain hint to Luther. 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 449 
 
 by his opponents ; he was at variance with them here, and would 
 be for ever so, Christ himself having said, with sufficient clear- 
 ness, "Take, eat, this is my body."* By the letter of these 
 words he would abide. If his adversaries had anything to 
 advocate against the truth he would hear it, and answer it. 
 CEcolampad replied, after calling upon God for illumination, " It 
 is undeniable that, in the Word of God, figurative modes of 
 expression occur ; thus, for example, " John is EKas," " The rock 
 was Christ," " I am the vine." A similar figure is contained in 
 the words, " This is my body." Luther grants there are tropes in 
 the Bible, but the latter passage is not one of these. He inquires : 
 Why should the spiritual partaking exclude the corporeal? 
 
 CEcolampad : Christ teaches the Jews, John vi., who thought 
 He exacted from them the eating of His real body, and the drink- 
 ing of His real blood, that He was, in verity, eaten and drunk when 
 He was believed upon, for that His flesh profited nothing ! Now, 
 that which Christ rejected in John vi. He cannot well be sup- 
 posed to have admitted, or commanded, in the words of the Holy 
 Supper. 
 
 Luther: The Jews thought they were to eat Christ like a piece 
 of " roasted pork." By the spiritual partaking, the corporeal is 
 not annulled. 
 
 CEcolampad : To impute such a sense to the words of Scripture 
 is to give them a sense somewhat gross. That Christ is in the 
 bread is a notion, and no subject of faith; it is dangerous to 
 ascribe so much to the outward thing. 
 
 Luther : If we, at God's command, raise a straw-halm, or a 
 horse-shoe, from the ground, it is a spiritual act. We must 
 regard Him who speaks, not that which is said. God speaks, 
 and miserable man must listen. God comnjands, the world has 
 to obey, and we all ought to kiss the Word, and not take upon 
 ourselves to look for arguments. 
 
 CEcola/mpad: But of what use is the partaking by the mouth 
 when we have that by the Spirit ? 
 
 Lviher : I do not concern myself as to what we require, I look 
 only at the words as they stand written : " This is my body." It 
 is to be believed and done unconditionally. It must be done. If 
 
 * Which is given for you, Luther, with good reason, always let drop. 
 
350 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 God were to command me to eat dung, I should do it, knowing 
 well that it would be wholesome for me. 
 
 ZwingH now took part in the dialogue. He began by admi- 
 nistering a sharp rebuke to Luther for his declaration at the very 
 outset of the debate, that he was resolved not to depart from the 
 opinion he had formed; for, in this manner, all farther instruction 
 out of the Scriptures was rendered impossible. Scripture must 
 always be interpreted by Scripture. Were we to adhere to the 
 letter of the text we must conclude that Christ had full brothers. 
 The sentences of Holy Scripture are not dark or enigmatical, like 
 the oracular responses of the, demons, but they are clear and 
 plain, if we only compare the one mth the other. He then went 
 into a more minute exposition of the section in John vi., and 
 drew from it the conclusion: "If the Lord here expressly testifies 
 that His flesh profiteth nothing in the corporeal partaking of it, 
 He certainly would neither have enjoined upon His disciples, nor 
 upon us, in the Supper, the doing of a profitless thing, that is, the 
 corporeal eating of His body. To this He says : ' AVhen ye shall 
 see the Son of man ascend to where he was before,' from which- 
 they might conclude that they are not to eat really, or corporeally, 
 of His flesh." 
 
 Luther : In the gospel, "brother" signifies a cousin, or a rela- 
 tion. The words of institution cannot be so explained. Christ 
 says, " This is my body," and it must be so. When Christ says, 
 " the flesh profiteth nothing," He is not speaking of His own but 
 of our flesh. 
 
 Zwingli : The soul is nourished by the Spirit, not by the flesh. 
 
 Luther : The body is eaten by the mouth, the soul does not 
 partake of it corporeally. 
 
 Zwingli : It is then a food of the body and not of the soul. 
 
 Luther : I have said, and say it again, the body is not corpo- 
 really eaten into our body, and wiU reserve it, whether the soul 
 also eats it. 
 
 Zwingli: You say this, however, without being able to prove it 
 by Scripture. Besides, you first denied that the soul eats the 
 body,, and now you will have it reserved. 
 
 Luther: Your whole object is to catch me in my words. 
 
 Zwingli: No ; but you speak of things that contradict each 
 other, and it is necessary to point out the truth. 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 351 
 
 Luther: I abide by the words of Christ, "This is my body." 
 They are the -words of God. If the Lord were to set before me 
 wooden apples, and command me to eat them, I should eat them, 
 knowing they would be wholesome for me, and I dare not ask ; 
 why? 
 
 Zwingli now proved, by various passages of Scripture, that the 
 sign is often put for the thing signified, and that the words of 
 the Sacrament especially are to be so explained. He censured 
 Luther for employing so silly an example as that of the wooden 
 apples. Such illustrations were not in place. "We know that 
 God neither commands us to eat wooden apples nor dung as His 
 body. The Word of God reveals to us His holy will; it is light, 
 not darkness. God sets before us nothing incomprehensible, if 
 if we will but only rightly understand His Word. Hence, if one 
 passage is not clear to us, we must compare it with others, and, 
 in this manner, investigate into the sense. Thus the Virgin 
 Mary asked, Luke i. 34, "How shall this be?" and the angel 
 answered her question. In the same manner the disciples asked, 
 John vi. 52, " How can this man give us His flesh to eat?" Why 
 should not we also endeavour to discover, from Scripture, how 
 the words of the Holy Supper are to be understood? They have, 
 however, been interpreted by Christ himself, who shewed in what 
 manner His flesh was to be eaten, and His blood drunk. 
 
 Luther : We are not to examine whether is may be taken for 
 signifies, for so we fall into interpretising ; but we are to take 
 the words in their simple sense, " This is my body." From 
 thence, poiating at the words written before him, the devil himself 
 cannot pull me. When I enter into subtle inquiries about their 
 meaning, I lose my faith and become a fool. Wherefore, give 
 glory to God, and take and believe the simple plain letters as 
 they stand. 
 
 Zwingli: I exhort you likewise to give God the gloiy, by 
 departing from the false interpretation you have put upon the 
 words of Scripture, by an assumption of the very thing to be 
 proven, petitio principii. Where is your major proposition, 
 (that the words bear this sense,) proved ? We shall not so readily 
 let the passage in the sixth chapter of John slip out of our hands, 
 as it throws a steady light upon the point in dispute, and shows 
 us distinctly how in truth and verity we are to eat Christ's flesh 
 
352 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 and drink His blood. Come, doctor, you must sing us another 
 song than this, for this won't do. 
 
 Luther : You are becoming personal. 
 
 Zwingli : I ask you, Doctor, if Christ did not mean here to 
 correct the misunderstanding of the Jews, who fancied they were 
 to eat His real flesh and drink His real blood ? 
 
 Luther : Mr Zwingli, you mean to take me by surprise ; the 
 passage has nothing to do here. 
 
 Zwingli: Certainly the passage has to do here, and breaks 
 your neck, Doctor. 
 
 Luther: Not so boastful, remember you are not in Switzerland 
 now, but in Hesse, where necks are not so easily broken. , 
 
 Zwingli: In Switzerland there is law and jiistice, as well as 
 elsewhere, and no man's neck is broken there for naught. I have 
 only made use of a common phrase, when I employed this ex- 
 pression to the effect that your case was gone, that you could do 
 nothing but submit, seeing that the words of Christ in the sixth 
 chapter of John totally overthrow your doctrine. 
 
 The Landgrave here interfered, saying to Luther, " I hope my 
 learned friend the Doctor will not take ill what has been said." 
 If Luther had but reflected on his usual threat, " we shall bring 
 the villain to the gallows," he would have perceived that he had 
 no great reason to complain of Zwingli's expression. 
 
 It being now exactly noon, the Conference adjourned till after 
 dinner. In the afternoon, Zwingli read the following extract 
 from Luther's Sermon on the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, 
 " Christ himself says the flesh profiteth nothing, and again, my 
 flesh gives life, how do we reconcile this? The Spirit reconciles it. 
 Christ means that the corporeal eating of His flesh profits nothing, 
 nothing profits but the faith that He has given His flesh for me, 
 and shed his blood for me. If I believe that Christ is the true 
 Son of God, that He hath descended from heaven, shed His blood 
 for me, saved me, made me righteous and alive from the dead, I 
 have enough." Melanchthon had explained this passage in a 
 similar way. 
 
 Luther: I make no inquiry how Melanchthon and myself 
 formerly explained this passage. Prove to me that when Christ 
 says " This is my body," it is not his body. I take my stand 
 and abide, and not without grounds, by the words " this is my 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNIOJf. 353 
 
 body," but yet I do not the less acknowledge that Christ's body 
 is in heaven, and also in the Sacrament. I am not concerned as 
 to its being against reason and against nature, if it be not against 
 faith. 
 
 Zwingli: This statement, however, undoubtedly contravenes 
 the articles of faith, " He hath ascended to heaven," &c. &c. If 
 Christ's body be in heaven, how can it at the same time be in the 
 bread? God's Word teaches us that Christ was in all points 
 made like unto His brethren, Heb. ii. 17. His body then cannot 
 at the same time be in different places, because this is contrary to 
 the nature of a real body. 
 
 Luther : If He hath been in all respects like to us, then He has 
 had a wife and black eyes. I have said it before, and say it 
 again : I will have nothing to do with the Mathematica ! 
 
 Zwingli: I am not speaking of the Mathematica, but of the 
 Word of God. He then, in order to show that Christ, although 
 of Divine nature, had taken upon Him the form of a servant, and 
 been made like to us, cited in the Greek text the passage from 
 Philip, ii. 7. 
 
 Luther: Let Greek alone, quote it in Latin or in German. 
 
 Zwingli : Excuse me ; during the last twelve years, I have only 
 made use of the Greek New Testament. If Christ then has been 
 made like to us, this is to be understood of His human nature. 
 Accordingly, His body, like every other human body, is finite. 
 
 Luther : I admit that Christ's body is finite. 
 
 Zwingli : If it is finite, it is also limited,* and can only be at 
 one and the same time in one place, that is in heaven, and not in 
 the bread. But now you teach that the body of Christ is every- 
 where present. 
 
 Luther : You always seek to entrap me. If I speak of the 
 body of Christ, I will not have it that one speak or think of a 
 place ; / will not have it at all. 
 
 Zwingli : What sort of language is this? Are we only to have 
 what you will, Doctor ? 
 
 * Luther could never comprehend that the two ideas, finite (Jlmtum) and 
 limited (circumscriptum) were synonymous, and he would never admit that what 
 is finite is necessarily limited. He hence involved himself in a confusion of ideas 
 from which he could only save himself by his boldly setting all consequences at 
 defiance. 
 
 Z 
 
354 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 Luther : The schoolmen have also maintained that a finite 
 body can be in several places at once. The universe is a body, 
 and yet it cannot be said that it is in any definite place. 
 
 Zwingli: It ill becomes you, Doctor, to have recourse to the 
 onions and flesh-pots of Egypt, to the Sophists ; I, for my part, 
 pay no regard to the Sophists. If you say that the universe is 
 nowhere, I beg all intelligent men to test the truth of this asser- 
 tion ; you were, however, to make good that the body of Christ 
 was at one and the same time in more than one place. 
 
 Luther : Christ says, "this is my body." Now the Sacrament 
 is dispensed in many places at once, in which one partakes not 
 only of bread, but of the true body of Christ, hence Christ's body 
 is in many places at once. 
 
 Zwingli: This does not foUow from the words of Christ, the 
 sense of which we are here investigating. You ever assume 
 that your understanding of these words, which we declare to be 
 an erroneous and false one, is the right and infallible one, and 
 proceeding from this false assumption, you avaU yourself of the 
 sophism of reasoning in a circle. Instead of which,, your proper 
 business is to prove and establish your understanding of 
 these words to be the true and right one. That the body of 
 Christ, however, is limited or circumscribed like our own, and 
 consec[uently, can only be at one time in one place, is a doctrine 
 taught us by the Fathers. Thus Fulgentius* says : " The Son of 
 God has taken upon himself the quality of real humanity, and 
 yet not less that of real divinity. Born of His mother in time 
 He is yet from all eternity, in virtue of the Godhead which He 
 has from the Father. Born of man. He is man, and, bound to a 
 definite place ; as He emanates from the Father, He is God, 
 and consequently omnipresent. In His human natiire, He was 
 when on earth absent from heaven, and He left the earth when 
 He ascended to heaven : ia His divine nature. He abode in heaven 
 when He descended, nor did Heleavethe earth when He ascended." 
 You, however, dear Doctor, have written ere now, " Every thing 
 is fuU of the body of Christ," and " if Christ had not suffered in 
 His divine nature. He were not my Eedeemer." 
 
 ' Fulgentius, Bishop of Ruspe (died 533), made himself chiefly known by his 
 defence of the Augustinian doctrine of predestination and election. 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 355 
 
 Luther: Fulgentius is not here speaking of the Supper. 
 Moreover he calls the Supper a sacrifice too, and yet it is 
 none. 
 
 Zwingli: Fulgentius is here speaking of the qualities of 
 Christ's humanity, and maintains that it necessarily foUows that 
 as man He can only be corporeally present in one place. If that 
 is true in respect of Christ's humanity in general, it is likewise 
 true of His presence in the Supper. AVhen Fulgentius, however, 
 terms the Supper a sacrifice, he does it in the same sense as 
 Augustine, who calls it a sacrifice as he himseK explains his 
 meaning, because it is a commemoration of the once offered 
 sacrifice of Christ. 
 
 Luther, after a few struggles, was obliged to admit this, 
 but fell immediately into his old habit of reasoning in the 
 circle, and drew the conclusion that Christ's body may be in 
 many places at once, because He says, " this is my body," conse- 
 quently He is now there in the bread. 
 
 Zwingli quickly rejoining: Is He there in the bread ? then 
 there is surely in one place. Methinks, Doctor, I have you. 
 
 Luther : As God will, let Him be in one place or not, I leave 
 that with God ; to me it is enough, and I abide by it, that He 
 says, " This is my body." 
 
 Zwingli: It is evident to every one that you argue from a 
 false assumption, that you describe a reasoning in a circle, and 
 that you thus, intrenched in your own opinion, obstinately close 
 your eyes against aU instruction from the Word of God. This 
 is but a miserable spite on your part. Doctor. In like manner 
 might some wilful disputant misinterpret the words of our Lord 
 to his mother, " Woman, behold thy son," persist in repeating 
 them, and, despite all remonstrances, never cease crying, No, no, 
 you must take the words of Christ as they stand, and hold simply 
 by them, " Woman, behold thy son." Would he achieve aught 
 else here, but a miserable perversion of the words of Christ ? It 
 is just what you are doing. Doctor. The holy Augustine writes : 
 " We dare not believe that Christ in human form is everywhere 
 present, we dare not, to establish His divinity, abstract the reality 
 from His body. Christ as God is omnipresent, yet by reason of 
 His true body He is in one place, in heaven." 
 
,356 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 Luther : Augustine is not here speaking of the Sacrament. 
 The body of Christ in the Supper is not as in one place. 
 
 Zwingli declining to reason any farther with an opponent 
 who withdrew himself from every species of close and consecutive 
 argument, and who overleapt with such wonderful audacity the 
 manifold contradictions into which he plunged, QEcolampad now 
 took it upon him to answer Luther. In reply to Luther's last 
 assertion, which had been already thoroughly disproved by 
 Zwingli, and which was in direct contradiction to his own former 
 admissions, CEcolampad observed : " If the body of Christ is not 
 locally in the Supper, then it is not there as a real body, for, as 
 is well known, it belongs to the essence of a body to be in one 
 definite place. Let us examine, in all friendship, what kind of 
 presence this is of the body of Christ." 
 
 Luther: You will not bring me a single step farther. If you 
 have Fulgentius and Augustine on your side, we have the rest 
 of the Fathers. 
 
 CEcolampad: Please name these Fathers, and quote the pas- 
 sages you refer to. We trust we shall be able to prove to you 
 that they are of our opinion. 
 
 Luther: We decline naming them. Augustine wrote the pas- 
 sage you have quoted in his youth, it is moreover very unintel- 
 ligible. Besides, I do not concern myself as to what the Fathers 
 teach on this head, but I abide by the words of Christ. (Here 
 he pointed again to the words written in chalk upon the table, 
 " This is my body.") See, so they run. You have not driven us 
 out of this stronghold, as you proudly imagined you would do, 
 and we concern ourselves no farther about proofs. 
 
 CEcolampad: If it be thus, the Conference had better be 
 closed. We have appealed to the Fathers of the Church for the 
 purpose of shewing that we have advanced no new doctrine. We 
 do not build upon them, but upon the Word of God. Every one 
 knows who Augustine was, and that when he expressed his sen- 
 timents, he not only delivered his own opinions, but those of the 
 whole Church of his day. 
 
 Thus the Conference concluded. The Chancellor, Feige, who 
 for his part adhered to the Zwinglian doctrine, -was dismayed at 
 the upshot. But, even yet, he exhorted both parties earnestly to 
 cultivate peace, as he had done at the beginning, and entreated 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. ' 357 
 
 them to think of measures which might promote unity. Luther 
 observed, " I know of no other measures but that they give glory 
 to the Word of God, and believe what we believe." The Swiss 
 replied: "We caimot do so, for our conscience forbids it. We 
 believe that Christ's body and blood are present in the Supper to 
 the believing soul, but not in the bread and wine." Luther: "We 
 have then done with you, and commend you to the just judg- 
 ment of God : He will discover who is right." Then CEcolampad 
 said: "We do the same, and have done with you." Zwingli, how- 
 ever, was so deeply moved by Luther's obduracy of temper, that 
 he was unable to articulate a single word; his eyes, as every one 
 saw, were swimming in tears. 
 
 Although there were no Papists at the Conference, as Luther 
 and Melanchthon desired, to decide which party gaiued the vic- 
 tory, there were yet those present who were quite competent to 
 pass a correct and impartial judgment upon it, and they have 
 done it. The Landgrave of Hessen, who bestowed the greatest 
 attention to the Disputation throughout, declared, on his dying 
 bed, that he had been won over to Zwingli's views by the argu- 
 ments the latter had advanced on this occasion. Thus, on the 
 Tuesday following Paul's conversion, 1531, he wrote to Zwingli 
 in these terms : " You must not doubt me that I shall, by God's 
 grace, continue steadfast in the truth, and neither regard Pope 
 nor Emperor, Luther nor Melanchthon, and I hope, in course of 
 time, to bring the other abuses to an amelioratioiL" Professor 
 Franciscus Lambert makes a similar confession in regard to him- 
 self He had left Zurich, where he had been brought by Zwingli 
 to a deeper acquaintance with evangelical truth, had gone to 
 Wittenberg, married there, and lived on terms of the closest 
 friendship with Luther! Prom Wittenberg he came to Stras- 
 burg, and from thence to Marburg, where he was appointed pro- 
 fessor in the newly-founded High SchooL United to both the 
 Eeformers by the ties of friendship and of gratitude, he had not 
 quite resolved, although more inclined to Luther's doctrine, which 
 view to adopt. At the commencement of the Conference, he set 
 before himself to be, as he said, like a sheet of white paper, on 
 which he prayed that the finger of God might write the truth ; 
 and, when it was concluded, he acknowledged that the finger of 
 
358 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 God had written on his heart the doctrine which Zwingli had 
 developed from the Word of God." Even Seckendorf, a warm 
 defender of Luther and his doctrine, confesses, " Luther behaved 
 at this Conference in a rude and arrogant manner, and did nothing 
 else but caU upon the Swiss to subject themselves to his opinion." 
 
 Such was the judgment passed on the conduct of both parties, 
 by men who stood in a position disconnected from both. There 
 being little hope of arriving at a more favourable result by a 
 continuance of the Conference, the Landgrave came to the reso- 
 lution of dissolving it. The sudden breaking out of a pestilen- 
 tial disease, known by the name of " The English Sweat," from 
 whose ravages each was desirous of escaping, perhaps hastened 
 this decision. Philip, however, was unwilling that the Eeformers 
 should separate without publishing some testimony of their 
 agreement in the principal truths of the gospel Zwingli, too, 
 expressed himself thus : " Let us acknowledge iu what we agree, 
 and, in regard to the points on which we differ, let us not forget 
 that we are brethreiL Peace will never prevail in the Church, 
 unless, without compromisiag the great doctrine of salvation by 
 faith, difference of opinion be permitted to exist in things of sub- 
 ordinate moment." The Landgrave expressed his full accordance 
 with this sentiment, and requested they should publish, for a 
 testimony to friend and foe, the doctrines which they in common 
 believe and confess, in a particular document. Upon its being 
 resolved to accede to this request, Luther was chosen to draw up 
 the document, a task, in his present temper of mind, of no easy 
 execution ; " I will put the articles together in the best way I 
 can ; they will still not approve them," said he moodily. He was 
 deceived; the articles drawn up by him were, one and all, accepted 
 by the Swiss, upon a few alterations being made in expression. 
 We give these articles as follows, iu the shape in which they 
 were approved of by both parties, and we subjoin, in the notes 
 below, the short observations which have been preserved to us 
 from Zwingli's pen. 
 
 1. We believe and acknowledge, on both sides, with one heart 
 and soul, that there is only one true and natural God ; the Cre- 
 ator of the heavens and the earth, and all creatures ; and that this 
 God is one in essence and nature, three in persons, namely, 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 359 
 
 Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, entirely as established at the 
 Council of Nice, and as it has been read and sung through the 
 whole Christian Church in the Nicene Creed. 
 
 2. We beheve that neither the Father nor the Holy Ghost, but 
 the Son of the Father, who was true and essential God, became 
 man, and by the working of the Holy Ghost, without the co- 
 operatioli of a man, was conceived and bom of Mary, a pure 
 virgin, according to the flesh, entirely in body and soul like other 
 men, yet without sin. 
 
 3. That this God and son of Mary, in person inseparable,* Jesus 
 Christ, ■^as crucified for us, was dead and buried, arose again from 
 the dead, and ascended to heaven, where He sits at the right 
 hand of God, Lord over all creatures, from whence He shall come 
 to judge the quick and the dead. 
 
 4. We believe that original sin, derived from Adam, descending 
 to us by generation, is a sin sufficient to condemn aU men, and 
 that if Christ had not come to our aid by His life and by His 
 death, we must have eternally died on account of it, so that we 
 could never have entered the kingdom of God, nor obtained 
 salvation. 
 
 5. We believe that through faith on Jesus Christ that hath 
 died for us, we are redeemed and freed from original sin, and 
 every other sin ; without this faith, we cannot be set free from 
 any sin, by any external work, observance, or ordinance what- 
 ever. -[• 
 
 6. That this faith is a gift of God, which we acquire by no 
 inborn, nor by any outward merit or work, nor through our own 
 power, but the Holy Ghost vouchsafes it, and works it in our 
 hearts, how and where He wills, when we hear the gospel, or the 
 Word of God.+ 
 
 7. That such faith is our justification before God, on account 
 of which God regards us as just, righteous, and holy, without any 
 works or merits of our own ; and by this faith frees us from sin, 
 
 * If He were not inseparable in person He could not be the Saviour of all. 
 For His ability to save is derived principally from His divine nature, although it 
 is only in His human nature that He hath suffered. 
 
 t It is hence faith, the spiritual partaking of the body and blood of Christ, 
 and not the reception of the sacrament, which alone brings justiiication to us. 
 
 J This article is very important; according to it, pardon of sin is not extended 
 to us by the presentation of the Sacrament. 
 
o60 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 death, and hell, graciously accepts us and saves us for His Son's 
 sake, on whom we believe, being by faith made partakers of the 
 benefits of justification and sanctification through Christ. Hence 
 all ordiuances and vows deemed necessary to salvation are 
 damnable. 
 
 8. That the Holy Ghost, to speak scripturally,* vouchsafes this 
 faith or His gifts to none without the previous preaching of the 
 Word or gospel of Jesus Christ, -|- but He works | and operates 
 faith, on whom, and as He will, by and with the preached Word, 
 Eom. X. 
 
 9. That baptism is a sacrament, appointed by God, for the 
 awakening of such faith, or to serve as a sign of it. And since 
 God's command: "Go ye and baptise," and God's promise: "He 
 that believeth and is baptised," &c., are comprehended in it, it is 
 not a mere sign or badge among Christians, but a sign and work 
 of God,§ in which our faith|| is demanded, and by which we 
 are born again. 
 
 10. That such faith by the working of the Holy Ghost, after 
 we have arrived at justification and sanctification, produces good 
 works in us, love to our neighbour, devotion to God, patience 
 under the cross. 
 
 11. That confession or counsel-seeking^ from a pastor or a 
 neighbour is not commanded, and shall not be compulsory, but 
 free, may, however, be useful for anxious, tempted and disquieted 
 consciences, priacipally by reason of absolution or evangelical 
 comfort, which is the true absolution. 
 
 * For it is also written, " Go and preach," &c., &c. ; and, " Faith cometh by 
 hearing," &c., else the preacher's office were abolished. 
 
 t By the gospel we understand generally the outward proclamation of the 
 Word. 
 
 { He the Spirit, and not the outward Word, gives faith ; hence His part in the 
 work is stated with peculiar prominence. 
 
 § Baptism is here called a work of God that none may despise or con- 
 demn it. 
 
 II Faith is demanded either from him who receives the baptism, or from him 
 who brings a child to receive baptism, to wit, from the father or the mother, 
 faith to the effect that the individual to be baptised believes the promise, and 
 desires to be admitted into the communion of the Church, or that he will be 
 instructed in the faith when he comes to years of discretion. 
 
 ^ Our opponents call confession that which we call seeking of counsel. For 
 this reason, both expressions are here used. They also employ " absolution," 
 to designate what we express by evangelical comfort. 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 3G1 
 
 12. That the magistracy, civil laws, tribunals, and ordinances, 
 where they exist, are wholesome, are commanded by God, and 
 by no means forbidden, as some Papists and Anabaptists teach ; 
 but that a Christian chosen or born to a civil ofiBce, can be saved 
 just as a father or a mother, a husband or a wife. 
 
 13. That we may either hold or give up the so-called traditions 
 and ecclesiastical ordinances appointed by man, when they do 
 not conflict with the revealed Word of God, according as the 
 sentiments of the people may be, by whom we are surrounded ; 
 and in this, our duty is to avoid giving offence, and to endeavour 
 to farther peace. 
 
 14. That infant baptism is right and necessary, since children 
 are thereby received into God's grace,* and into the bosom of the 
 Church. 
 
 15. We believe and hold, all of us, in regard to the Holy Sup- 
 per of our dear Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, that it ought to 
 be dispensed in both kinds, according to the institution of our 
 dear Lord Jesus Christ. That the Mass is no work by which 
 one can acquire or obtain for another, be he dead or alive, mercy 
 and the forgiveness of sins. That the sacrament of the altar-)- is 
 a sacrament 4 of the true body and blood of Christ, and that the 
 spiritual partaking of this body and blood is a matter of especial 
 need to every Christian. In the same manner we agree in regard 
 to the use of the sacrament, that the sacrament, as well as the 
 word delivered§ and ordained to us of God, moves weak con- 
 sciences, through the Holy Ghost, to faith and love.|l And 
 although we cannot come to a union of opinion as to whether the 
 real body and the real bloodof Christ are bodily present in thebread 
 and wine, yet each party ought to manifest Christian love towards 
 
 * That is, they who have been made partakers of grace, are impressed with 
 the sign of faith. 
 
 t They call it the Sacrament of the Altar; we the Holy Supper. 
 
 t A sacrament, t.e., a sign of the true body and blood of Christ, Accordingly 
 it is not the true body of Christ himself. 
 
 § That is, as Christ hath instituted it in His own words. Hence we should 
 beware of changing the words, or thinking lightly of them. 
 
 II The meaning of this passage is the following: We ought so to keep the 
 sacrament as Christ has instituted it. But Christ has instituted it in com- 
 memoration of himself, i.e., that we may shew forth His death, thank, praise, and 
 extol Him, that He has been crucified, and has died for us. This shewing forth 
 avails to our comfort and confirmation in the faith. 
 
362 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 the other, in so far as conscience permits it, and both ought 
 earnestly to supplicate the Almighty God, that He would confirm 
 by His Spirit the true understanding of His Word in us. Amen. 
 This important document, by which a union or agreement in 
 the principal doctrines of Christianity was declared between the 
 two sister churches, was signed by both parties. An important 
 step was. here made to a reconciliation, and if, in the spirit of 
 love, they had gone on with the erection of the edifice on this 
 basis, we should long ago have arrived at a true union of heart. 
 But unhappily the good spirit which animated Lutherin the 
 composition of these articles, soon appeared ready to abandon 
 him The Landgrave earnestly besought both parties to be 
 united, and to regard one another as brothers. Zwingli, magna- 
 nimous and noble as he always was, came forward to Luther, with 
 tears in his eyes, saying: "There are none in the world with 
 whom I should more desire to be at peace than the Wittenber- 
 gians." But the hand stretched forward in largeness of heart was 
 pushed back by Luther, with the hard words : " Ye have another 
 spirit. I am surprised that you regard me as a brother, whose 
 doctrine you recently stigmatised as false. You surely cannot 
 hold much of your own doctrine." This narrow-minded obstinacy 
 of spirit gave deep offence, not only to the Swiss and the men of 
 Strasburg, but also to the Landgrave. " Choose between the two," 
 said Bucer, " either you recognise none as brother who differs 
 from you in opinion in but a single point, and then you have 
 not one brother on earth, no, not even in your own party, or you 
 accept individuals who differ from you, in which case you must 
 accept us." Upon the Landgrave's exhorting both to shew bro- 
 therly love to one another, Luther said: "I shall testify to my 
 opponents the love that a man bears to his enemy." At length 
 both parties yielded so far to the repeated entreaties of the Land- 
 grave, as to promise that for the future they would no longer 
 irritate or give offence to each other by violent writings, words, 
 or invectives.* 
 
 * What Zwingli did out of a spirit of pure Christian lore, out of a feeling of the 
 duty of a united combination, even under existing differences, out of the feeling 
 of hope that reconciliation might yet be effected, was interpreted (by Luther 
 and his worshippers) as if he had done it from necessity, and a feeling of weak- 
 ness — as if he had been under the necessity of begging for the great honour'of 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 363 
 
 If we regard the disposition of mind in which the two parties 
 left Marburg, we shall find it thoroughly correspondent to that in 
 which they came, and the spirit which they manifested in the 
 Conference. Zwingli could write with a good conscience : " We 
 have the conscioiisness of having acted with a pure mind towards 
 God. Posterity will acknowledge it. Truth has so manifestly 
 gained the victory that, if the shameless and obstinate Luther be 
 not beaten, there never was any one beaten ; of course, only in 
 the judgment of an impartial and intelligent judge, for Luther 
 never ceases boasting he was not beaten. The Hessian nobles 
 and clergy have nearly all deserted him. The prince himself has 
 issued the command that our books may be freely read, and that 
 no clergyman adhering to our opinion dare be farther persecuted 
 or deposed from his office. The Conference has also borne this 
 good fruit, that the Papists need no longer hope that Luther will 
 return to them, as we are agreed in the other doctrines of Chris- 
 tianity, according to a.declaration made to this effect." He felt 
 deeply hurt, indeed, at Luther's obstinate exclusiveness and pre- 
 judice, and feared that Lutherdom might, in the end, prove as 
 great an incubus to Christianity as the popedom; yet he was ani- 
 mated by the joyful hope that truth in the end would triumph. 
 The warm friendship which the noble-minded Landgrave testified 
 towards him, richly recompensed him for the repulse he had met 
 with from his opponent. It is a fine spectacle, many of which 
 the great time of the Eeformation presents to us, to see the most 
 magnanimous prince of his age, who loved to manifest on occa^ 
 sions princely splendour, walking in close friendship with the 
 son of the Toggenburg herdsman in the community of a noble 
 cause. Elevated and strengthened by this lofty feeling, Zwingli 
 returned to Zurich, f uU of good resolves. (See below, Section ix. 1 .) 
 Very different was the mood of mind of Luther and his friends in 
 Marburg, and upon the home-journey. The leaning of the Land- 
 Luther's friendship, and had not obtained it. Did there not much rather lie 
 in it (Zwingli's deportment) the noble and the upright recognition of the 
 greatness and merits of his opponent? Did there not lie in it the open testi- 
 mony that his conscience, and his conscience alone, prevented him from pur- 
 chasing, at the price of a denied conviction, the union which he so ardently 
 desired? Did there not lie over against the proud Luther an act of humility and 
 self-denial on the part of the free Swiss, who in no respect stood in need of 
 Luther's favour? — Ebrarp, " The Dogma of the Holy Supper," Part ii. page 341 . 
 
364 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 grave, of his courtiers and divines to Zwingli's doctrine, had not 
 escaped them, and a feeling of uneasiness came over them, when 
 they trod the apartments of the prince's palace. " Take care," 
 said Luther to his friends, " that we do not sneeze too hard, else 
 blood wUl flow." Justus Jonas writes to Zwingli, envious at the 
 Landgrave's friendship towards him, " When you have done 
 reforming the boor's caps, you will fall, tooth and nail, on the 
 prince's ermine-hat." Luther thus gives expression to his thoughts 
 in writing, on his departure from Marburg : " I crawled," says he, 
 " like a, worm in the dust, and so tormented was I by the devil, 
 that I thought never more to have seen nor wife nor child ; I, the 
 comforter of distressed souls, was without comfort." In Marburg 
 he had denied love, his conscience gave evidence against him that 
 he had done so, and peace abandoned his soul Nevertheless he 
 boasted of having gained the victory over his antagonists in all 
 the articles, and called them " awkward in disputation, and inex- 
 perienced in it." In this, however, he only justified what Zwin- 
 gli said of him, "Luther acts like unskUful swordsmen, who, 
 when they are disarmed, say their opponent knows not the art." 
 The Marburg Disputation, despite the partial failure which 
 attended it, was of signal importance to the Eeformed Church. 
 In the first place, the attention of the followers of both the 
 Eeformers was turned, by the Marburg articles, to the common 
 ground of faith on which their doctrine stood, a gain which 
 is not to be deemed small. That which Zwingli was always 
 maiataining, in this respect, Luther now confessed by the com- 
 position of this remarkable document. Then, in consequence 
 of the reciprocal promise not to continue the strife, a calm set 
 in after the feverish excitement, which was extremely grateful 
 to all. And this calm was of the utmost consequence to the 
 Eeformed Church, for it was threatened by a heavy tempest 
 from another quarter. The Emperor Charles V. crossed the 
 Alps from Italy, in the spring of 1530, for the purpose of 
 holding the Augsburg Diet, so celebrated even in the history of 
 the Eeformation itself. The Evangelicals were, upon good grounds, 
 anxious for the safety of their Church, being well aware that 
 Charles had given his promise to the papal ambassador at Bar- 
 celona, to employ all the means in his power for the extirpation 
 of heresy in Germany, (see Section vi.) After having lived with 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 36o 
 
 the Pope five months long, during the winter 1529-30, in Bologna, 
 and taken counsel with him, he arrived in Augsburg, accom- 
 panied by Faber and Eck, and with his feelings, excited by his 
 Dominican Confessor Garzia de Loaysa, who expressed the 
 sentiments that animated him thus : " The true rhubarb for 
 heresy is force." Next to the gracious providence of God, the 
 reformed Church owes it to the firmness and courage- of the 
 reformed princes and deputies, but, above all, to the address and 
 prudence of the Landgrave of Hessen, that the blood-thirsty plans 
 of Eck, Eaber, and the Spanish monk were not carried into 
 execution. This Diet was also attended by Reformed divines ; 
 on the side of the Lutherans, by John Brenz and Melanchthon, 
 the latter of whom presented to the Emperor the Augsburg 
 Corrfession, as composed by him ; on the Zwinglian side, by Bucer 
 and Capito, (at first they did not appear ostensively,) who handed 
 to the Emperor, (probably through James Sturm,) a creed drawn 
 up by them in the name of the four Imperial towns of Strasburg, 
 Constance, Memmingen, and Lindau, the so-called Four-Towns- 
 Confession (Tetrapolitona.) The two head Reformers remained 
 at a distance from the Diet, Luther at Coburg, where he com- 
 posed the heroic hymn beginning, " Eine feste Burg ist unser 
 Gott," Zwingli at Zurich, where he drew up, in the course of a 
 few days, his own clear and weU-founded Confession of faith, 
 which he sent off by a special messenger to Augsburg* As the 
 Papists employed the diEference of doctrine between the two 
 parties with wily cunning, to divide them, if possible, the 
 Lutherans enjoyed a much higher respect from this quarter than 
 the Zwinglians, who, it was thought, could not be treated with 
 sufficient contempt. , Nay, not only was the proposal made to 
 bring about a reconciliation between the Papists and the - 
 Lutherans, but steps were taken towards effecting it, a commission 
 being appointed to draw up the conditions under which it should 
 take place. Eck and Melanchthon found themselves appointed 
 members of it, and appear to have got on very smoothly together. 
 
 * Bucer and Capito wrote on the 23d June 1530 to Zwingli, that two passages 
 in this confession gave great offence at the Diet ; the Papists were offended at 
 the passage at the end of Chap. X., where Zwingli compares the higher orders 
 of the Komish clergy to wens and humps; the Lutherans at that, ^hich speaks 
 of those who look hack to the onions and flesh-pots of Egypt, an allusion they 
 applied to themselves. 
 
366 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 In these circumstances, the Zwinglians, or to use the German 
 designation, the Eeformed party, had much to bear, both from 
 Papists and Lutherans. Bucer and Capito complained bitterly in 
 a letter to Zwingli : " You can imagine nothing less conciliating, 
 nothing ruder and more grating to the feelings than the behaviour 
 of the Lutherans towards us. The Landgrave of Hessen alone, 
 who is verily an instrument in the hand of God, for the promo- 
 tion of His own glory, confesses his faith with courage and firm- 
 ness, and has already openly maintained it before the Emperor, 
 and to every one else." Of Melanchthon's behaviour, the Land- 
 grave himself writes to Zwingli: " But what shall I say of Philip 
 Melanchthon, who goes backwards like a crab, and has been with 
 his timidity a hurtful man to the gospel of Christ; for he is 
 fallen into an error, and cannot get out of it, and many hang upon 
 him ; but he shall not, if God wiU, deceive me." But the attempts 
 at reconciliation between Papists and Lutherans were soon 
 abandoned, and Melanchthon himself saw that he had been 
 practised upon. Bucer and Capito availed themselves of this 
 circumstance, (without doubt under the. influence of the Land- 
 grave and James Sturm, the Town-Sheriff,) to make farther 
 attempts at reconciliation between the Eeformed and Lutherans. 
 In their Confession of Faith they had, without denying in their 
 sense Zwingli's doctrine of the Supper, accommodated their 
 expressions so far to the Lutheran doctrine, as to adopt the fol- 
 lowing formula: "Christ gives in the Supper His true bodyand 
 true blood, to be truly eaten and drunk, as a food of the soul" 
 The Lutherans at Augsburg having become more accessible to 
 the Eeformed after the deception put upon them by the Papists, 
 and Melanchthon having meanwhile instructed himself better 
 upon the reformed doctrine, and shewn himself more disposed to 
 it, Bucer and Capito repaired to him, and to John Brenz, to make 
 fresh attempts to procure a mutual reconciliation, which attempts 
 were made by Bucer with unwearied zeal. Bucer's object was a 
 thoroughly Christian and noble one. He himself was more a 
 clear and practised speaker than a deep thinker, much more con- 
 siderable as a practical clergyman than as a man of learning. 
 But it was these very qualities which enabled him at a glance 
 to understand and appreciate the manner in which simple 
 evangelical Christians, who were puzzled by the exact distinctions 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. . 3G7 
 
 of the theologians, took up and judged of the matter in dispute. 
 " Many persons," he writes to Zwingli, " cannot bring themselves 
 to regard the words of institution as a figure of speech; they hold 
 firm to this, that Christ is present in the Sacrament, and will not 
 farther examine whether He be in the bread or the wine, in the 
 transaction or the heart Were you to induce these people 
 to take the words of institution figuratively, and to hold only 
 the ^ritual presence, they would be led astray upon the 
 gospel itself^ and speedily fall away from it. We should here 
 follow the example of a skilful and wise physician, who, when 
 he finds the patient having an antipathy against pills, pre- 
 scribes his medicine in a mixture. We also should invest the 
 truth in a phraseology to attract the great multitude of Chris- 
 tians." Staiting from this point of view, he designed, after the 
 example of the Four-towns-Confession, a doctrinal formula, in 
 which each party might find their own views, and which each 
 might interpret for itself Melanchthon and Brenz appear to 
 have approved of Bucer's idea. He accordingly set out for Coburg 
 in order to induce Luther to agree to it, while Capito set off for 
 Zurich to gain Zwingli for it. Luther might well bring himself 
 to approve of the formula, containing, as it does, that " Christ's 
 true body and true blood is given iu the Supper to be truly eaten 
 and drunken as a food of the soul." A doubt, however, on the 
 one hand, that the Swiss would hardly subscribe it, and, on the 
 other hand, the feeling that such a settlement of the dispute was 
 more factitious than real, determined him to reject Bucer's pro- 
 posal He thus expresses himself in a letter to the Duke Ernest of 
 Luenenburg : " At your Grace's request, I have long ere this given 
 Bucer an answer in the negative, but in the friendliest and gen- 
 tlest manner possible. Fer it is not possible to arrange upon the 
 ground of his plan; nor were it good to do so. But as to what 
 Bucer pretends, that the dispute is one of words, I am willing to 
 give my life for it, it is not this, were it indeed so, such a split 
 would be soon closed up, and ought never to have been made. I 
 am, too, disposed to union, as I told- him, in many words, at 
 Coburg. My opinion is, that, for the present, enough has been 
 done till God gives further grace, and that we ought, on both 
 sides, to desist from farther writiag against each other upon the 
 subject, having sufficiently admonished each other, and sufiiciently 
 
368 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 learned each other's opinion. We shall pray, and hope till all he 
 well. Your Highness may rest assured that,, next to Christ, 
 nothing lies nearer my heart than that these people were fun- 
 damentally one with us. No death is so bitter that I should not 
 wUlingly suffer it to attain this object." What a different lan- 
 guage of conciliation is here from that which marks his polemical 
 writings! You feel, in nearly every word, that "another spirit" 
 breathes in him from that which moved him to thrust away 
 the hand of Zwingli, offered to him in conciliation. Zwingli, 
 like Luther, but in a more decided manner, rejected Bucer's 
 artificial attempt at a settlement, for nothing was more opposed 
 to his straight-forward soul than equivocation. He admitted, 
 indeed, that he could find his view expressed in the formula pro- 
 posed by Bucer, if the words were only rightly understood and 
 interpreted.* "We do not in any manner reject or blame," he writes 
 on this subject to the Council of Basle, "the confession which 
 our much loved friends and Christian fellow-citizens of Stras- 
 burg have presented to the Diet at Strasburg ; on the con- 
 trary, we esteem and hold the same to be Christianity right and 
 
 * The words certainly were always understood and explained by Luther and 
 Zwingli differently, according to their different modes of contemplating things, 
 especially the word true and trult/. For Luther, from his point of view of 
 scholastic realism, the sensibly perceptible, and at the same time tangible, was 
 alone the true, while Zwingli, with John, (as also with Plato,) regarded the 
 super-sensual and eternal, which withdraws itself from the perception of our 
 senses, but which again is contemplated by the believing soul, by the pure heart, 
 as the true and truly. The " true " bread is neither barley-brea,d nor wheaten- 
 bread, but the " eternal" Word of God, which became flesh in Christ, and which 
 eternally nourishes and strengthens our soul. The " true" light is not that 
 which affects our corporeal eye, but our soul. Thus for Zwingli the " true" 
 body of Christ, of which the beliering soul becomes partaker in the Supper, is 
 not the sensible body of Christ, but His whole divine and human appearance 
 and redeeming work, which He accomplished by divesting himself of His 
 heavenly glory, and offering himself up in sacrifice for us. This, however, is 
 not present to the senses, which can just as little seize hold of and grasp it as 
 they can perceive God. The believing soul alone, the pure in heart alone, see 
 God. It is only the believing soul, too, which is able to recognise Christ as the 
 God-man, and to appropriate to itself His redemption-work. To her Christ 
 and His redemption are always present. From the standing-point of the 
 higher intellectual contemplation, there is neither past nor future, but one eter- 
 nal present. This spiritual, believing contemplation (contemplatio fidei) is ele- 
 vated, enhanced, and confirmed by the partaking of the Holy Supper. It is, 
 however, always as different from the idea which we bear in our souls of sensible 
 things, as God is different from the world. 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 369 
 
 good. But that we are to resign a clear and fundamental under- 
 standing of the words, ' this is my body,' &c., as we have formerly 
 received, taught, and preached it, for a dark equivocal formula, you 
 can by no means desire from us, as we should thereby give our- 
 selves the appearance as if we had been formerly in error, and 
 had maintained what was untrue. We may therefore leave the 
 confession of our Christian fellow-citizens uncensured, since it in 
 no respect affects us. But if a confession be desired from us, we 
 shall express our opinions and views in clear intelligible language. 
 When you report to us that you cannot so understand the words 
 of the Strasburg Confession, that ' Christ gives us in the Supper 
 His true body and His true blood to eat and drink as a food for 
 the soul,' as if thereby Popery or Lutheranism were about to be 
 set up again, we, for our part, cannot look upon it in any other 
 light, than that in the words, ' gives to eat,' the presentation is 
 understood, and thus salvation is made dependent on the priest 
 who presents, if not now, yet eventually. We, however, do not live 
 for the present time and for ourselves alone, but for the future, 
 and for men in another age, and if we were not now to maintain 
 the truth, even to death, what confusion should we be heaping 
 up in store for coming generations?" 
 
 Thus this too artificial attempt at union was met by Luther 
 and ZwingH with a formal declinature. Both, however, earnestly 
 longed for peace for themselves and for the Church they had 
 reformed. Both recognised with their whole heart and soul, that 
 He alone can give peace and true union who turns the hearts of 
 men like the streams of water. To Him Zwingli had applied at 
 the very beginning of the unhallowed strife,* in the noble prayer 
 which we shall here insert : " Fill us, Creatorj God, and Father 
 of all, with Thy gracious Spirit, and drive from the minds of both 
 sides all the clouds of misunderstanding and passion, as Thou 
 didst of old force the raging waves of the deluge into the deep 
 by Thy powerful winds, and causedst fruits and plants to the 
 fuU to spring up and to ripen again on the surface of the all- 
 nourishing earth. Put an end, God, to the struggle, to the quarrel, 
 and to the blind passion. Arise, Christ, Thou glorious Sun of 
 righteousness, and shine on us with Thymild rays. Alas ! while we 
 strive, we forget but too often to wrestle after holiness, which Thou 
 
 • In the introduction to his "Priendly Exegesis," ("Arnica Exegesis.") 
 
 2a 
 
370 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 requirest from us all. For Thou knowest, Lord, that we never 
 come out of these worldly contests bettered, since they are works 
 of the flesh, that sully every one that mingles in them, while the 
 righteous ever decline them to their own salvation. Preserve us, 
 therefore, Lord, from such strife, that we may not niisuse our 
 powers in them, but turn them with all earnestness to the work 
 of sanctification." The Lord heard the prayer of these men, 
 whom He had chosen to a great work Zwingli could, a few weeks 
 before his too early death, report of the conflict as of something 
 gone bye ; he was able to deliver a glorious testimony to the 
 power and effect of the Sacraments, and to manifest that he 
 recognised the significance and importance of these means of 
 grace in all their depth. To the same God of peace Luther also 
 turned himself, and thus the true peace came ever more and 
 more over his mighty soul, so that he could write in the letter to 
 the Duke of Luenenburg quoted above : " If God would grant it, 
 (namely that we be united,) I shall joyfully die and take my 
 departure, so God will" His desire was fulfilled. Just before 
 he set out on his journey to Eisleben, where he died (1546), he 
 sent for Melanchthon and said to him : '' I must acknowledge, 
 that in the matter of the Supper there has been too much done ;" 
 to which Philip answered, " Doctor, let us draw up a document 
 in which the matter may be softened." Luther replied : " Yes, 
 dear Philip, I have thought much and often upon this, but the 
 doctrine itself will be brought into suspicion ; I commend it 
 to God, "the Almighty. But do something after my death." 
 Melanchthon fulfilled this last wish of his venerated friend, with 
 alL the more sacred fidelity, that his own convictions likewise 
 impelled him to it. The Spirit that leads believers ever nearer 
 to the truth, conducted also this faithful witness to a view of the 
 Holy Supper that was very closely related to Zwingli's. A few 
 months before his death, (29th October 1559,) he was requested* 
 by his prince, the Elector Frederick of the Palatinate, to record 
 his sentiments in writing upon this subject. Hesshussius,-f- a 
 
 * Melanchthon died April 1560. He was bom at Bretten in the Palatinatej 
 lethPebraary 1497. 
 
 t Tileman Hesshussius was horn at Wesel in the year 1527. He was one of 
 that class of men who, possessing Luther's passiouateness, without his great 
 intellect, pass themselves off as double-refined Liitheran. For his unmeasured 
 
ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 371 
 
 polemical clergyman, endeavouring at that time to rake up tLe 
 embers of the old strife with a wild phrensy, " My heart's desire 
 is," wrote Melanchthon, " that the Church newly planted through 
 the preaching of the Word, may everywhere enjoy peace and rest. 
 I am therefore greatly pleased with the opinion of your Serene 
 Highness, that all strife-loving clergymen should be dismissed 
 from their pulpits, that divisions may not be sown in the young 
 tender church, and the weak in faith offended. In this strife, it 
 were best that we adhered to the words of Paul : ' The bread 
 that we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ ?' 
 and that we emphatically taught the people the benefit of the 
 Sacrament, whereby many might be induced to "take a liking to 
 this pledge, and use it often. The word ' communion' ought to 
 be explained in the following way : Paul speaks not like the 
 Papist, that the bread is changed, nor does he speak like those 
 of Bremen,* that the bread is the essential body of Christ ; nor 
 like Hesshussius, that the bread is the true body of Christ ; 
 but he says that the bread is the communion of the body of 
 Christ, through the bread one commonalty^* is made with the 
 body of Christ. The Son of God is present at the preaching of 
 the gospel, and undoubtedly works also in believers through the 
 dispensation of the Sacrament appointed by Him. He is, how- 
 ever, not there for the bread's sake, but for man's sake, as He says : 
 "Abide in me and I in you;" and, " I am in the Father, and you 
 in Me, and I in you." And with this true consolation. He makes us 
 members of himself. So the old Fathers of the Church explain the 
 Lord's Supper. But now some teach, (the Papists,) that the bread 
 
 advocacy of a one-sided view of the Lutheran doctrine of the Supper, and the 
 persecuting spirit he manifested towards all who did not agree with him in it, 
 he was divested one after the other of his professorial and clerical offices in 
 Goslar, Magdeburg, Wittenberg, Heidelberg, Brunswick, Wesel, Jena, &c., in all 
 which places he excited the most odious animosities. A synod of 20 ministers 
 formally condemned at Koenigsberg, in 1577, the doctrinal opinions of this 
 Lutheran zealot. He died in 1588. 
 
 * Under this designation we are to understand the polemical divines Timann 
 and Westphal, who persecuted with great violence the pious minister Albrecht 
 Hardenberg, simply because he cultivated friendly relations with John Lasky 
 and the Swiss. 
 
 t Melanchthon here refers to the comparison Augustine draws between the 
 many grains of corn which form one loaf of bread, and the many grapes which 
 go to forih one wine, with the members of the Church who are made one body in 
 Christ, through partaking of the Supper of the Lord. 
 
S72 ATTEMPTS AT UNION. 
 
 and the wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ ; 
 others, (the ultra-Lutherans,) that with, in, under, and beside the 
 bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ are so united 
 respectively, that the one must be emphatically and corporeally 
 present with the other; some, indeed, (John Brenz,) that 
 the body and blood of Christ are everywhere present in all 
 ends and corners of the world. Of such monstrous opinions, 
 the ancient and very learned Fathers knew nothing. Nor 
 shaU I strive with these quarrelsome individuals, who pur- 
 sue idolatry and murder, with their new and gross conceits of the 
 Lord's Supper, but I shaU simply advertise what, according to my 
 poor understanding, in my opinion, ought to be undertaken for 
 the peace and edification of the Church. I abide by my opinion, 
 that aU public disputation on the subject ought to be forbidden 
 to both parties. I invoke the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 who sits at the right hand of the Father, and gathers to himself 
 by the preaching of the gospel an ever-during communion, that 
 He would teach, guide, and preserve aU of us, and each one in 
 particular." In this manner Melanchthon discharged Luther's 
 last legacy of love, by exhorting and directing the church, 
 which they had both been instruments of reforming on the basis 
 of faith in Christ, and according to the directory of God's Word, 
 to cultivate peace, harmony, and union. It is an ennobling 
 spectacle, to see the champions of the fight, on the evening of 
 their lives, when the small patchwork of human knowledge 
 vanishes before the awful splendour of the eternal light, at length 
 stretching out to one another the hand of peace, and recom- 
 mending her to the renovated communion of the Lord as a sacred 
 legacy. And ought we here below, now that they have gone up to 
 the great Supper of the Lamb, and entered into it, to cling to the 
 infirmities of their flesh, and testify our community of saintship 
 with them, by reviving these infirmities after they had been laid 
 aside by themselves as a worn-out, ragged, and unsightly garment? 
 May the Lord of the Church, who knows His disciples by their 
 manifesting love to one another, fill us with His love, that we 
 who believe on His name, may eat of the Holy Supper of love 
 according to His mind and according to His Spirit. 
 
EIGHTH SECTION. 
 
 ZWINGLI EST HIS PRIVATE LIFE. 
 
 " Let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord." 
 
 1. ZwiNGLi's Chaeactee; Wise employment of Time foe the 
 
 DISPATCH OF MULTIFAEIOUS BUSmESS ; HIS DOMESTIC LIFE. 
 
 Baving considered the salutary work of the Eeformation of the 
 Church, as Zwingli in the strength of God accomplished it, as 
 also the manifold conflicts which this true servant of the Lord 
 had to endure in the cause of truth, we shall now turn our regards 
 to his private life, and we shall bring before the mind of the 
 reader some more cheerful images from this quarter, ere we con- 
 template his last sphere of usefulness, and the bloody event which 
 put a close to his useful life. 
 
 If we enter his house, we shall find the Eeformer simply dressed 
 in the wide canon's coat, with the priest's hat, or " Barette," on 
 his head, his countenance beaming with a cheerfulness disclosing 
 the open soul and manly courage of the Christian hero, ever 
 affable to all who had a request to make of him, sometimes 
 bursting out into indignation, if his straightforward soul lighted 
 on hypocrisy, obstinacy, or unreasonableness. But the clouds of 
 anger are soon dispersed by the ray of heavenly truth penetrating 
 them with the recollection, " We all err in many respects." As 
 to his fare he is simple, preferring above every thing else the 
 nulk-diet, to which, in his youth, he had been accustomed in his 
 native mountains. The society of his wife, the education of his 
 children, conversation and intellectual intercourse with his friends, 
 and last of aU, music, in which he exercises himself with all the 
 passion and application of an artist ; these are his pleasures. 
 Upon this man, so simple in his domestic relations, so robust in 
 health, both of body and mind, there rests a load of labours and 
 
37-i EMPLOYMENT OF TIME FOE BUSINESS. 
 
 business under wliicli every one else must have succumbed, but 
 of wbicb, by his extraordinary talents, and a wise division of 
 time, he ever discharges himself in a cheerful spirit. The early 
 hours of morning he devotes specially to prayer and the study of 
 the Scriptures, tiU the hour arrives which summons him into 
 the church to preach, or to give " The Prophesying," (see p. 113,) 
 or into the Professorial-Hall, to deliver an exegesis from the Old 
 and Wew Testaments alternately. At eleven he dines. After 
 dinner, he converses with his family, receives visits, or goes 
 a-walking till two. The afternoon is often devoted to the study 
 of the noble works of Grecian or Eoman literature, and not till 
 after supper does he again grant himself a short respite from 
 labour, either in the circle of his family or of his friends. Some- 
 times he sups in those mediaeval society -houses, or guild-rooms, 
 as they still exist in many of the Swiss towns, in the com- 
 pany of his colleagues, the members of the Council, and other 
 respectable and enlightened friends of evangelical truth. The 
 later hoiirs of evening, and even a part of the night itself, he 
 employs in writing his many letters. If business is pressing, he 
 can dispense with his night's rest, (during the Disputation at 
 Baden, for six weeks together, see page 231,) but otherwise he 
 could take the necessary quantum of sleep, as BuUinger faithfully 
 informs us.* It was only by such a careful distribution and 
 economy of his time, that with all his fine gifts of intellect, and 
 with the advantage of an iron constitution, he was able to master 
 the overwhelming amount of business which the Reformation 
 laid upon him, and to accomplish his great work. It was often, 
 indeed, a subject of lamentation to him that, owing to the pres- 
 sure of business, he was unable to bestow upon the works he 
 published the requisite elaboration and polish. This regret we 
 learn particularly from one of his letters which he wrote to 
 Vadian, one of the friends of his youth, upon his handing him a 
 copy of the well-known work, " The Shepherd," when he says, 
 " I must apologise for ' The Shepherd's' being much less filed 
 and polished than I had wished. The unlooked-for stoims 
 
 ♦ These details are taken from accounts, thoroughly consistent with them- 
 selves, of several of his friends and acquaintances, Myconius, BuUinger, and 
 Bemhard Weiss. Myconius says, in. addition, that he always studied and 
 worked standing. 
 
EMPLOYMENT OF TIME FOE BUSINESS. 375 
 
 with which the world of the present day is vexed, prevented 
 me from duly elaborating and filing not only this writing, but 
 all my earlier productions, even where the original design might 
 have been successful. Thus all my writings are much more the 
 creations of circiimstances than regular publications, and so much 
 has this been the case, that I never was in a position to finish a 
 single work, before the bookseller had begun the printing of it. 
 Hence repetitions are more frequent than they ought to be, and 
 omissions likewise, as I frequently imagined I had inserted 
 what I had only written to a friend. Now our attention is 
 engrossed by friends, now by enemies ; here a bookseller jogs us 
 for the approaching book fair, there a brother begs us for advice 
 and help, who has been ill-used by an unjust bishop. Hence in 
 answering the one, we have forgotten to write what ought to 
 have stood here in our book. But in all this we see the hand of 
 divine Providence, implanting within us the desire, that all 
 explanations and treatises whatever, but more especially our own, 
 may pass speedily into oblivion, as soon as we shall have achieved 
 the getting the Holy Scriptures into general use and perusal. 
 God has so ordered it with us, that we have only written /or the 
 occasion. Of the immense number of letters which we have 
 written, we have not been able to take a copy of a single one. 
 We have thus been obliged immediately to publish whatever 
 came first to the mouth, or flowed first to the pen; and it has 
 been justly said of our letters and writings, that they have been 
 much more talked than written." At another time, he complains : 
 " No man is more unfortunately situated than I for writing books. 
 It is owing to the evil nature of the times. Tor it drags me out, 
 who would rather keep silence and lie concealed, and compels 
 me to write, while it obstinately refuses me leisure to do the 
 work, and the years requisite for the employment of the file. 
 Hence all my works ought rather to be called sketches than 
 books. Yet I thank God for it, who teaches me by this hint to 
 suppress the hankering after glory, and to do all with simple 
 fidelity, that my writings may be the more effective to the advance- 
 ment of the glory of God, the more they want artificial ornament 
 and glitter, and that it may be obvious to all, that the arms I 
 employ are not mighty through the flesh, but through the 
 Spirit." 
 
376 HIS DOMESTIC LIFE. 
 
 The heavy load of cares and troubles which our Eeformer had 
 to bear, was to a certain extent lightened to him by the kind 
 sympathy and tender regards of a noble-minded spouse. But 
 few historical traits, indeed, have been preserved to us, to reflect 
 the character and disposition of this faithful companion of his 
 cares and troubles, that modesty and simplicity of nature which 
 belonged to her, and which is the highest ornament of the female 
 character, developing itself entirely in the seclusion and privacy 
 of domestic life; but these few traits shew us that she was worthy 
 of the faithful affection of her great husband. The like Christian 
 spirit which he unfolded in his great and far-reaching sphere of 
 labours, she manifested in the smaller sphere of household activity. 
 Thus after her marriage with Zwingli she wore no sUk dress, nor 
 gold rings, nor jewels, but was always simply attired like an 
 ordinary burgher's or tradesman's wife. The same order and 
 economy which he shewed in the employment of his time, she 
 displayed in the conduct of the household affairs, and the applica^ 
 tion of the scanty income at her disposal. In this manner, not- 
 withstanding her limited means, she succeeded in exercising an 
 open-hearted hospitality, and in ministering to the physical wants 
 of the poor and sick. Capito's wish, which he pronounced to 
 Zwingli at the wedding, was fulfilled ; she could with justice be 
 called " a fellow-servant in the Word, a help-meet of an apostle." 
 
 When Zwingli came into the family circle, he had left the 
 gown of the man of learning and the thinker behind him; he 
 had also laid aside the rough garment of Christ's warrior. 
 Wherever Zwingli was there he was all and undivided. His 
 intellectual intercourse with his wife did not consist in a talk 
 upon the learned or scientific questions of the day, or the great 
 conflicts in which the Eeformer was engaged; their topics of con- 
 versation were, the Christian ordering of the household economy, 
 and especially the Christian education of their children; and it 
 was in the happy attainment of such objects that they set the 
 joys of their domestic life. The letter is characteristic which 
 Zwingli wrote to his wife from Berne, when he attended the 
 Disputation in that town, upon his hearing that she had been 
 delivered of a girl: "Grace and peace from God, dearest 
 wife. I praise God that He hath given you a happy 
 delivery. He will grant us grace to bring up oiir little 
 
HIS DOMESTIC LIFE. 377 
 
 daughter according to His will. Send me, for my niece, 
 one or two coifs, such as you wear yourself She is of good 
 family, but not a nun ; her age is about forty. I commend you 
 to God. Pray to God for me, and for us all. Greet for me all 
 your children. Especially comfort Margaretha in my name."* 
 Thus his heart beat warmly both for spouse and children. What 
 a serious view he took of the work of education, appears from 
 his treatise on the subject, which he got printed for his step-son, 
 Gerold Meyer. We shall extract from his writings some of his 
 principles upon this subject, and here insert them:/ " The human 
 mind is like a garden, which, if not cultivated, is soon overgrown 
 with weeds. From youth up, therefore, it must be trained and 
 cultivated. If this be done, a precious treasure is harvested; 
 but where it is not done, neither hand, eye, nor tongue are placed 
 under control, and the man is an ill-regulated being. Can good 
 fruit be obtained from a garden full of weeds? This is the cause 
 that orphans and bastards mostly turn out ill ; they have no 
 parent to train and educate them." " Satan desires to nestle in 
 the hearts of the young, and to defile and destroy these as yet 
 pure vessels. Wherefore the greatest care is requisite that they 
 be trained in the nurture and fear of the Lord, and that these 
 new vessels be filled with good habits and principles. Many 
 busy themselves in hanging their likeness everywhere, that their 
 names may be made famous, and their family become iHustrious, 
 while they neglect and despise at once God's image and the true 
 living images of themselves. The peasant takes care, in fixed 
 order, to plant iu one place trees, in another vines, here wiUows, 
 there vegetables, and yonder corn, that his grounds may be 
 planted with fruits of all sorts. If parents and teachers bestowed 
 the same care upon the training of the youthful mind, we should 
 see it in a better state at the present day. It is not enough that 
 children be taught to read and to write, they must also be trained 
 to principles of morality, and to regulate their whole life. The vine, 
 like every other training plant, lays hold of everything that comes 
 in its way, without' distinction, fastens to it, and winds itself about 
 it, as, for example, round a stake or pole. For children, the 
 father is the tree or natural prop. Parents ought therefore to 
 bestow great care on the right education of their children." ^ 
 * This short letter, as well as the request sent from Basle to the intimate 
 
378 HIS DOMESTIC LIFE. 
 
 The Eeformer knew, in a very ingenious manner, to awaken 
 and to draw to himself the tender germs of intellectual develop- 
 ment, as they manifested themselves in the young hearts of his 
 children. This man, who investigated with such penetratioii 
 and zeal the sacred depths in which truth conceals itself from the 
 unconsecrated eye, who wrought in the vineyard of the Lord 
 with the lofty ardour of an apostle — this man we often find, in 
 his hours of recreation, at the cradle of his little one, singing 
 children's songs to the accompaniment of the lute or some other 
 instrument which he knew. " Music, which I have diligently 
 cultivated from boyhood,"* he writes to Faber, who reproached 
 him with it, " often renders me good service with the children, 
 in putting them in good humour or sending them to sleep." 
 Often at such moments, as he sang one of those mountain airs 
 which so wonderfully affect the Swiss heart, and recalled to his 
 memory the image of the happy days of his youth, he may have 
 sighed to escape the conflicts and troubles of life, and give him- 
 self up to the pleasures of a sense delighting with child-Hke 
 simplicity in God. Indeed he often confesses in his writings, 
 that were he to follow the flesh, he would willingly retire into 
 seclusion, and give up the contest ; but Christ impels him to this 
 work, and he will follow his Lord and not his own personal 
 inclinations. 
 
 Zwingli had, by Anna Eeinhard, four children, two sons and 
 two daughters. The eldest daughter, Eegula, bore a strong like- 
 ness to her mother. She married," in 1541, Ealph Gwalther, 
 Zwingli's second successor, as Antistes in the Zurich Church, and 
 
 friend of his family, that he might please enlighten his wife upon the object of 
 his journey to Marburg, give us a pretty clear view of the relation in which 
 Zwingli stood to his wife. The education of his children lay chiefly at his 
 heart; for this he besought the grace of God for himself and for her. From his 
 spouse he farther desires that she should take a part, through her prayers, in 
 the struggles for the weal of the Church. The stories, howerer, about his read- 
 ing satyrical verses and polemical writings to her, are to be set down as fables, 
 having their origin in rather an unhappy imitation of Luther's relation to hi 
 Kate. When she sat by Luther at the study-table, and the idle housewife asked, 
 " Doctor, is the Chancellor of Prussia the brother of the Margrave ? " (they were, 
 as is well known, one and the same person,) or when, on the occasion of a 
 quarrel between Luther and Erasmus, she was led to exclaim, " Wliat a nasty 
 toad that Erasmus is," her position is rather ridiculous than worthy of imitation. 
 ♦ Zwingli could play all the musical instruments then known, according to 
 the concurring testimony of his contemporaries. 
 
ZWINGLI AMONG HIS FKIENDS. S79 
 
 died of the plague, in 1565; the youngest daughter, Anna, died 
 eaily. William, the eldest son, died in 1541, as student of theo- 
 logy at Strasburg; Huldreich, the younger, born in 1528, became 
 afterwards deacon at the Great Minster, and professor of theology 
 at Zurich. With him the male line of the Eeformer became 
 extinct. The family of the name of Zwingli that stOl flourishes 
 in the Canton of Zurich, is descended from one of his brothers, 
 who purchased the right of citizenship in Elly, canton of Zurich. 
 
 2. Zwingli among his Feiends. 
 
 The circle that surrounded the Eeformer in his simple home 
 was not confined to the members of his family, but was very 
 maiterially increased by the visits of his numerous friends and 
 admirers, who often came from a considerable distance, seeking 
 instruction, counsel, or assistance from him. For the friends and 
 supporters of evangelical truth who lived in Zurich, Zwingli's 
 house was a general rendezvous, as well for social amusement as 
 for serious discussion, and the free interchange of thought in the 
 cause of truth. Here the heads of the State often assembled ; the 
 two heroic Eoists, the father and the son, who, one after the other, 
 filled with distinction the highest official dignity; the council- 
 lors, Ulrich Funk, who accompanied Zwingli to Marburg, a 
 Thumeisen, Werdmueller, Peier, and the still young Gerold 
 Meyer of Knonan, who had begun to devote to the service of the 
 State the great talents and acquirements which he had cultivated 
 under Zwingli's direction, and which gave the brightest promise 
 of future distinction. There were the men of the Church and of 
 science, the little, loveable, but again so courageous Leo Jud, 
 whom Zwingli often jocularly called " his little lion;" the 
 learned and noble-minded pastor, Engelhard, of the Frauen-muen- 
 ster, who despised the learned title of " Doctor," preferring rather 
 to be called a disciple of Christ ; pastor Megander, and the 
 canons and professors, Uttinger, Ceporin, Myconius, Ammann, 
 Pellican, the scholar and friend, Eeuchlius Brennwald, and Wer- 
 ner Steiner, who was forced to leave his native canton Zug, and 
 who found here a new home among friends that were dear to him. 
 Nor could the noble-minded Diebold von Geroldseck longer resist 
 
380 ZWINGLI AMONG HIS FRIENDS. 
 
 the impulse of his heart. This excellent man left Einsiedeln in 
 order to live in the vicinity of ZwingK, although once his spirit 
 was filled with a sad foreboding, when he saw the friends of 
 evangelical truth betaking themselves, one after another, to 
 Zurich, (see page 114) A select circle of friends of vocal and 
 instrumental music, placed themselves under the skilful leader- 
 ship of Zwingli, for the organisation of musical parties at each 
 others' houses. Out of these highly agreeable musical entertain- 
 ments there sprang, as citizens and peasants readily took their 
 domestic habits at this great period from their venerated pastor, 
 the fine quartette for sacred music, — ^which became general in the 
 cottages of reformed Switzerland, and which was afterwards 
 transplanted into the Church. Zwingli and his friends may 
 therefore, on good grounds, be regarded as the founders, as well of 
 those evening musical entertainments, still, at least in winter, so 
 common in reformed Switzerland, and which are attended with 
 such beneficial effects, as of the fine quartette in sacred music* 
 
 At their meetings the assembled friends discussed, the great 
 concerns of the gospel A principal subject of deliberation was 
 the mode in which it was to be carried to victory in church and 
 state, and the free preaching of the Word secured against the 
 assaults of an insolent and powerful enemy. The ministers and 
 the men of learning communicated the results of their investiga- 
 tions to one another, ever developing new views in the depart- 
 ments of Christian doctrine and science ; their discussions, 
 however, were always conducted in a spirit of pure love to the 
 truth, and free from all personal considerations. " Whoever finds 
 me wrong," writes ZwingH, " let him, with Christian love, tell me 
 I am wrong, as often as he finds me in error. Kay, if he thinks 
 fit, let him bring the truth to light, for the common good, without 
 any regard to me at all, because our friends are accustomed to 
 listen to the suggestions of the brethren. How often, for exam- 
 ple, has it occurred, that I have changed my opinion, after hear- 
 ing the observations of my colleagues, Pellican and Leo Jud, 
 and they on hearing mine. In my opinion, truth is to the 
 
 * For this opinion, here, as far as I know, for the first time, expressed, I could 
 advance many historical proofs. As, however, this is not the proper place for 
 these, I confine myself to expressing the wish that those who are interested in 
 the history of our church-music may not overlook the hint here given. 
 
ZWINGLI AMONG HIS FEIENDS. 381 
 
 human soul, what the sun is to the woiid. Wherever he rises 
 we hail him with joy, and gird ourselves cheerfully to our work. 
 In the same manner the soul rejoices iu the light of truth when- 
 ever it beams upon her; she looks joyfully up and congratulates 
 herseK that the darkness of ignorance has been chased away by 
 its radiance. As nothing can be more welcome to the world 
 than the sun, so nothing can be more lovely, more precious, more 
 sublime, in the estimation of the soul, than truth." In another 
 place, he says : " Whoever brings the truth to light, be it even 
 through a calumny of myself, becomes thereby my friend; he 
 enriches, rejoices my soul, and leads her to higher heights of 
 accomplishment. Let my enemies, then, lose no time in dissi- 
 pating from my mind the mists of error ; let them blacken my 
 name and reputation to their heart's content ; if I am illuminated 
 I am content, and already begin to be here, that which I one day 
 hope to be by God in heaven." 
 
 But from the far distance the friends of evangelical truth were 
 to be seen, like pilgrims betaking themselves to some sanctuary, 
 journeying to Zurich and to Zwingli, there seeking increase in 
 knowledge, or protection against oppression, or help in outward 
 trouble. To all, how varioiis soever their situation or necessities 
 might be, the Eeformer's house stood open, and while they par- 
 took at his table of a frank hospitality, their minds were 
 instructed by his t;onversation, and confirmed in the truth ; they 
 had higher aims pointed out to them, and they were led on to 
 nobler endeavours. What a piebald host of men from the 
 various countries of Europe, have received liberal supplies for the 
 soul and the body, in the simple house of the parish priest at the 
 Great Minster. Ulrich Duke of Wirtemberg, expelled from his 
 country, and sojourning for a time in Zurich, was one of 
 Zwingli's regular hearers, and a guest at his board. Under the 
 Eeformer's wholesome influence, the worldling gradually freed 
 himself from the snares of youthful levity to which he owed his 
 misfortunes and his banishment, and ripening into a more serious 
 and manly character, became worthier of the better fortunes 
 which his reformation afterwards gained for him. Hither, too, 
 must his bitterest enemy, Ulrich von Hutten, direct his flight, who 
 had effected by the power of his writings the Duke's fall, to find 
 from Zwingli, as already mentioned, the most magnanimous 
 
382 ZWINGLI AMONG HIS FEIENDS. 
 
 support and aid in his hour of trial, so that his ,soul lived again 
 with the best hopes for the friends of truth. Hither^ too, the 
 young Polish noble, John von Lasky, arrayed in the rich and 
 picturesque costume of the nobles of his country, directed his foot- 
 steps, while the barefoot monk, Lambert of Avignon, was to be 
 seen travelling the same road, in the gi-ey gown of his order. 
 Here the cool-headed Dutchmen, Ehodius and Sagan, met the 
 fiery Italians, who, from love to the truth, were prepared to 
 exchange their beautiful fatherland for a new home under a raw 
 northern sky. Here Anemundus Coctus, the nobleman, glowing 
 with the love of evangelical truth from Dauphiny, sought counsel 
 as to how the truth might be rendered triumphant in France. 
 Hither, too, the poor witness of the truth, Hans Eaebmann, who 
 was blinded in both eyes by the orders of the Earl of Sulz, in 
 Klettgau, was led to Zvraigli, the friend of all the afflicted, for 
 consolation and aid.* By ZwingH's influence, the cruelly mal- 
 treated minister of the gospel was elected pastor of Lufingen, 
 where, for thirty years, he laboured with blessing, and was after- 
 wards appointed pastor in the hospital of Zurich. 
 
 But although Zwingli's house was thus an asylum of safety 
 and cojisolation to the hard-pressed sons of affliction, his large 
 heart was by no means closed against manly joy ; grieving with 
 the grieved, he could also rejoice with the glad. We find him 
 soinetimes taldng a part in those civil and popular festivities, 
 which have ever been common in Switzerland, like a real man of 
 the people, that equally shares the joys and sorrows of his fellow- 
 citizens. In August 1526, the following festivity took place: 
 The friend of his youth, Burgomaster Vadian of St. Gall, came 
 with about thirty sharp-shooters to Zurich to a shooting-match. 
 In honour of these esteemed guests, ,who shortly before had 
 
 * Hans Eaebmann was a native of Thurgau, tut brought up in Waldshut, 
 and appointed pastor at Klettgau. Becoming suspected to the nobility of the 
 place as a friend of the Reformation, he had his two eyes burned out by a spoon- 
 like instrument, made red-hot, at the command of Count Rudolf, of Sulz, in the 
 castle of Kuessenberg, after the suppression of the peasant-insurrection, and in 
 this state he was sent, along with two others, who had their fingers cut oif, to 
 Waldshut. On the taking of this town he was marched out of the gate to the 
 sound of drums, and pipes, as an object of general mockery. Thus he came to 
 Zurich. In Lusingen his memory still lives in the name of a bridge, which was 
 built under his direction over the Toess, and which is called, " The Blindman's 
 Bridge." 
 
ZWINGLI'S SEARCH AFTEE TRUTH. 883 
 
 engaged to stand by Zurich with their all, and to the last drop 
 of their blood, a grand festive banquet was got, up by all the 
 guilds. To this banquet eight hundred persons marched in 
 procession through the town, trumpets, pipes, and drums playing. 
 Zwingli, too, and his colleagues, were in the number of the 
 guests. In his opinion, participation in public festivals was 
 sanctioned in Scripture, and hallowed by the example of our 
 Saviour. Let us fancy to ourselves the Eeformer, seated next 
 his friend Vadian, formerly Eector of the High School of Vienna, 
 surrounded by illustrious warriors and statesmen, begirt by a 
 circle of like-minded friends and colleagues, and fianied by a 
 crowd of enthusiastic youths, ripening into years of manhood — 
 aU. animated with the resolution of daring everything in the 
 cause of evangelical truth, and the glory of their native country ; 
 and we have one of those genuine Swiss popular demonstrations 
 in which the glory of a free Christian State finely displays itself. 
 With his friends at a distance our Eeformer carried on an 
 animated correspondence, a monument of which exists in his 
 numerous letters still preserved to us, although the collection is 
 far from being complete. These afford us a striking testimony 
 to his steady friendship, and the deep interest he took in the 
 weal and woe of individual fellow-labourers in the vineyard of 
 the Lord, as well as of the Eeformed Church generally. They 
 also present us, and all the more that they are the spontaneous 
 effusions of the moment, with a faithful image of his great soul, 
 pure at once and lofty. We see it divesting itself of all that is 
 essentially low and common, which will be found still to adhere 
 to many even of the best of his contemporaries. We see it 
 unweariedly soaring into higher regions of intellectual and moral 
 development. , 
 
 3. ZWINGLI'S Search after Truth, or his Intellectual Con- 
 verse WITH THE Holy and the Great Men of Antiquity. 
 
 If the Eeformer stood in the closest relations to the present by 
 the activity of his very practical mind, by the manifold friendly 
 relations he cultivated, both personally and by letter, as also by 
 the hot conflicts he waged with his adversaries, he kept up. 
 
38-i ZWINGLl'S SEARCH AFTER TRUTH. 
 
 in his ardent inquiries after truth, an intercourse scarcely less 
 familiar with those great and holy men of the past, whom God 
 animated with His Spirit to proclaim His truth to the world. 
 Whoever will rightly understand the Scriptures, must make him- 
 self acquainted with the languages in which they were originally 
 written, and with the various relations which characterised, and 
 the ideas cuiTent at the time of their composition, in order that 
 he may be able to distinguish the kernel of divine truth from the 
 human huU in which it was of necessity wrapped, in order that it 
 might.be made intelligible and comprehensible to the human 
 mind. Accordingly, Zwingli, after he had proposed to himself 
 the pure and imadulterated preaching of the "Word of God, 
 directed his efforts unweariedly to obtain a nearer acquaintance 
 with the sacred oracles. We have already seen with what zeal 
 he studied the writings of the N'ew Testament in the original 
 language in which they were written. We have seen that he 
 copied out all the letters of Paul in Greek characters, that he 
 might have them ever by him, and learn them by heart. From 
 this time forward he read and studied the Old Testament, not in 
 the often erroneous and incorrect Latin translation known as the 
 Vulgate, the only one in use, and authorised by the Romish 
 Church, but in the more correct Greek Septuagint. But even this 
 in the sequel was not enough for the man who would draw truth 
 alone from the fountain-head. The Eeformer, in the zenith of 
 his fame, and in the midst of his manifold reforming labours, 
 formed the resolution to learn Hebrew. A certain Andrew Boes- 
 chenstein came to Zurich, and offered to give instructions in it 
 Zwingli was his first, and probably his most enthusiastic scholar. 
 Impelled by his zeal, and favoured by his great talent for lan- 
 guages, he was soon in a position to read the most difficult books 
 of the Old Testament with ease, and to explain them in his own 
 perspicuous and fundamental manner. 
 
 Upon the importance of the study of the Hebrew language 
 Zwingli observes, in his comprehensive preface to his " Explana- 
 tion of Isaiah :" " The ignorance of Hebrew forms of expression 
 has led to an erroneous interpretation of many passages of Scrip- 
 ture, not only by those unlearned and reckless individuals, who 
 pass sweeping judgments, with the more arrogance the greater 
 their ignorance is, on aU the subjects of antiquity, but even by 
 
ZWINGLl'S SEARCH AFTER TRUTH. 385 
 
 truly pious and learned men themselves. Now certain figures 
 of speech are so peciiliar and native to the Hebrew, that it is 
 impossible to render them into any other language. Translators 
 and commentators, however, have given us the Hebrew forms of 
 expression without breaking down and reducing the figures they 
 contain, which are untranslatable into any foreign language 
 whatever, so as to present us with their real signification and 
 sense. They have not changed these images into correspondent 
 terms and figures in another language. Thus we have transla^ 
 tions in which the words indeed are counted, but the thoughts 
 carelessly and dubiously expressed. Hence obscurity, ignorance, 
 uncertainty what to make of the meaning. The still worse conse- 
 quences follow of dissension, impudent declamations, upon things 
 which one does not at aU understand, and violent invectives 
 against the opponent. For the words being understood accord- 
 ing to the-rudiments of grammar, but the thoughts not being at 
 all comprehended, the interpreter of the sense, partly out of the 
 shame of confessing his ignorance, partly out of self-love, which 
 makes us more confident than we ought to be, and attempt more 
 than we can accomplish, gives way to assumptions, and to the 
 fabrication of foolish allegories, while he ought to have turned 
 his attention to the investigation of antiquity, and made himself 
 thoroughly conversant with the customs and modes of thinking 
 of each particular age in which the authors may have lived and 
 written. Then it would have been seen that although indeed a 
 skill in composition, such as the Greeks and Eomans display in 
 the an-angement of the parts, may be missed, (although many 
 passages are to be met with to which the most finished art can 
 add nothing,) an incomparable light and warmth is discoverable 
 in the words and thoughts; then we should have penetrated into 
 the knowledge of the ideas and tropes, the images and the figures 
 of speech which meet us at every turn in the books of Scripture, 
 so that there is scarcely a single sentence in the Bible that can 
 be opened by any other keys but such as these ; then we should 
 have clearly known the thoughts of inspiration, and not rashly 
 substituted our own for the thoughts of Scripture ; then long ago 
 all uncertainty would have disappeared. I do not say this in a 
 boastful spirit, as if in my interpretation I had completely opened 
 up the sense, but because I find that my predecessors in inter- 
 
 2b 
 
386 ZWINGLl'S SBAECH AFTER TRUTH. 
 
 pretation have nowhere been more successful in the work than 
 where they had these resources at hand." The knowledge 
 of Hebrew is also requisite, in Zwingli's opinion, to the right 
 understanding of the Greek writings of the New Testament; 
 "for," says he, "the Lord Jesus and the writers of the New 
 Testament were Hebrews, and they transferred the peculiarities 
 of their mother tongue into the Greek, just as we find Latin 
 written after the German idiom, and German after the Latin 
 idiom, by those who are not thoroughly conversant with both 
 languages." The writings of Greece and Eome, too, which give 
 us so clear an insight into the relations and the modes of think- 
 ing which prevailed in ancient times, were held by our Eeformer 
 to be helps towards obtaining the true sense of Scripture, 
 although independently of this consideration, he by no means 
 undervalued these writings as models of eloquence, nor shut his 
 eyes to the manifold beauties they contain. In the light of a faith 
 kindled in his soul at the writings of the prophets and apostles, 
 the artistic beauties of the Greek and Eoman classics shone only 
 in higher lustre before his mind's eye. We observe this espe- 
 cially in the preface with which he accompanied an edition of 
 Pindar, edited by Ceporin, from which we extract the following 
 passage : " If it can be said of any one, it may be said of Pindar, 
 he had an uncorrupted intellect, that was ever striving after the 
 true, the holy, the pure. The stream of his poetry ,flows on 
 undulating in the clearest waves. All in them is learned, taste- 
 ful, pure, fitting, of antique cast, wise, noble, captivating, com- 
 prehensive, finished, SublLmely he speaks — of the gods, indeed, 
 not, however, of that crowd of gods, but, under their names, of 
 the one divine and heavenly Being.' It would take up too much 
 time to illustrate by examples aU that I have said in praise of 
 Pindar's language and imagery. I would simply kindle a Hght 
 for the curious reader, that he may hasten immediately and dig 
 these treasures for himseE In my opinion there is no Greek 
 author so well-fitted to throw light on Scripture as Pindar, espe- 
 cially on the most difficult of the Hebrew songs and hymns, as 
 for example, the Psalms and Job. For we have songs from 
 these men of God that not only surpass all others in depth of 
 thought and piety of feeUng, but which are second to none, not 
 even to Pindar's poems, in art, dignity, and grace. But neglect- 
 
ZWINGLl'S SEARCH AFTER TRUTH. 387 
 
 ing, as we do, the study of the ancients, (for we are more con- 
 cerned our own works be read than others',) we forcibly express 
 from the Hebrew p6ets a sense quite foreign to them. That we 
 may get rid of these lamentable results, at once of ignorance' and 
 presumption, let us repair to this poet, that he may lend us of 
 the gold, the silver, and the splendid dresses in which he is so 
 rich, that with his expressions we may be able to designate the 
 truth, or if it should be denied us to become acquainted with 
 herself, that we may at least make a nearer approach to it, by 
 contemplating more closely her shining vesture. I don't con- 
 cern myself with those repulsive grovellers to whom purity itself 
 is impure, and who deem it the greatest crime to read a heathen 
 poet. I am not recommending every poet, but him from the perusal 
 of whose works we cannot possibly sustain loss, but may draw 
 infinite profit and advantage, and who, in the investigation of 
 the Hebrew writings, will be of more service to us than all the 
 other Greek and Eoman poets put together. The age of antiquity, 
 like every other age, has it own peculiarities, which can alone 
 be laid hold of by a familiar intercourse with the ancients. 
 - Pindar, however, has not only in his language, but in his spirit 
 and innermost being, resemblance with this sacred age. May 
 God grant that we learn from the heathen poet to understand the 
 truth promulgated by the Hebrews, and to set her gracefully 
 before the minds of men." With the same rapid glance by which 
 Paul saw the altar to " the unknown God" at Athens pointing 
 to the alone true God, and read in the sentence of a heathen 
 poet (Acts xvii. 23-28.) the evidence of man's affinity to his 
 Creator, ZwingU, while studying the Greek and Eoman authors 
 as helps to the right understanding of Scripture, perceived in 
 them the traces of a divine revelation, made by God's grace 
 even to the heathens. " EeHgion," says he, '' has not been 
 confined within the boundaries of Palestine, since God did not 
 alone create Palestine ; He created the whole world. The animat- 
 ing and enlightening power of His Spirit shows itself everywhere 
 operative. All is divine which is true, holy, genuine; for God is 
 truth. Whoever speaks truth, speaks from God, and God has 
 enlightened him. I venture even to call that divine, which is 
 borrowed from the heathens, in so far as it is holy, tends to piety, 
 and is undeniably true. For this must come from God, no 
 
388 ZWINGLl'S SEAECH AFTER TRUTH. 
 
 matter through what channels it arrives at us. When I quote 
 profane testimony, I am not to be deterred from doiag so, by the 
 animadversions of those who have not learned that a writing 
 deserves only then to be called holy, when it proclaims the 
 mind and will of the holy, pure, eternal, and infallible One 
 Spirit. If you find then in Plato, or Pythagoras, something you 
 recognise as deriving its origin from the source of truth, you are 
 not to despise it because a mortal has penned it; it is much 
 more your duty to seek thereby a more familiar converse with ■ 
 the Deity, that you may with a clearer eye contemplate the truth, 
 inasmuch as you see that those who did not dare openly to con- 
 fess their faith in one God, yet had it within them. Wherever 
 this faith discovers itself, it is from G-od, let a man dwell among 
 the beasts. We quote the words of Seneca and of Plato, because 
 they are derived from the source of divine truth. Por we who 
 regard not who writes, but what is written, wUlingly accept 
 truth, even from the hands of the heathens, knowing that all truth 
 is of God, by whomsoever it be revealed." 
 
 Although Zwingli saw with the same clear and unjaundiced 
 eye with which' Paul read the law, written in the hearts of- the 
 Gentiles, (Eom. iL 14.) as an eternal divine revelation, the traces 
 of revealed truth as they discovered themselves in the writings 
 of Greece and Eome, hailed them with joy, and found himself 
 thereby confirmed in his enthusiasm for these master pieces of 
 antiquity, he did not close his eyes to the perversity of moral 
 vision apparent even in the best of them. It was this very 
 corruption of the moral sense which afforded him the clearest 
 evidence of the native depravity of the heart of man, as taught 
 in Scripture, and more particularly, in the Epistle of Paul to the 
 Eomans. "When Cicero," Zwingli writes, "asserts in his speech 
 for the poet Archias, that man does all from the desire of glory, 
 he so closely agrees with the statement of Paul, ' I know that in 
 me, (that is in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing,' Eom. vii. 18, 
 that his assertion appears rather the result of divine inspiration, 
 than the reflection of the ambitious and vain-glorious Cicero. 
 For how else could he so far betray himself, as to maintain here, 
 that a desire of glory is the moving spring of all our actions, 
 when in other places, he would have us to understand that it is 
 a love to virtue and the common good? His words are, 'Pure 
 
ZWINGLl'S SEARCH AFTER TRUTH. 389 
 
 virtue desires no other reward for her labours and dangers, than 
 that of honour and of glory. Withdraw from us, judges, this reward, 
 and what remains for us to toil for in this present so short and 
 fleeting life ? Without doubt, the soul, had she no presentiment 
 of faturity, nor anything on which to fix her gaze beyond the 
 boundaries of the present life, would never drudge with so many 
 labours, so many cares, so many vigils, nor would she place life 
 so often at stake. But now we see a certain power within us, 
 and the better the man is, the stronger is this power which spurs 
 us on, and encourages us day and night by the attractions of 
 glory, not to let the memory of our name perish with our exist- 
 ence, but to hand it down to latest posterity, &c. &c. Mark how 
 Cicero here discloses to us the heart of man. He tells us there 
 dwells in the mind of the best, a power or faculty that spurs it 
 on unweariedly in the pursuit of glory, and that directs to this 
 object all its thoughts, schemes, and undertakings. What, how- 
 ever, he calls a power or faculty, is, as we believers know, nothing 
 but spiritual death, and sin, and the lamentable condition of 
 fallen man, who ever loves himself, and seeks his own. If you 
 find among believers, men who deny that aU human actions have 
 their ground in glory, or selfishness, you may esteem it as certain 
 that such are not believers at all, but carnal and slaves of sin. 
 For so long as we defend ourselves, it is certain that the light of 
 the Spirit fails us, which shows and discovers the man to him- 
 self. A heathen writer must here indeed instruct us, and teach 
 us that all our plans are based in selfishness. In my opinion, 
 there is none'untouched by the desire of glory, even then, when he 
 is zealously maintaining we must despise aU glory. This is often 
 observable in Plato. Whenever he introduces Socrates as phil- 
 osophising, it is remarkable he does this with such a pomp of 
 language, and so many circumlocutory speeches, that he evidently' 
 appears most of all to have striven after glory there, where he 
 represents Socrates in the character of the greatest despiser of 
 glory. I mention these things, if possible, to open the eyes of those 
 who hang on philosophy, that they may know what is in man." 
 In this unprejudiced and serious spirit, Zwingli read the works 
 of the Greek and Eoman authors. The central point with him 
 was divine truth, as revealed in the Word of God, by the standard 
 
390 ZWINGLl'S SEARCH AFTER TRUTH. 
 
 of which aLso he measured and estimated the traces of a divine 
 revelation in pagan writings. 
 
 But the reflections of his active mind extended themselves over 
 other departments of knowledge. General history, especially 
 that of his native country, was next to that of the Church of 
 Christ, a field in which he loved to expatiate. Having trained 
 and sharpened his natural turn for history under such great 
 masters as Thucydides, Livy, and Sallust, he was prepared to 
 enter with success the dark ground of story and tradition, in 
 which historical facts are, in the earlier periods of a nation, for the 
 most part enveloped and obscured. He resolved to draw his 
 information alone from authentic sources, the course he had 
 pursued in his search after religious truth; and directing his 
 inquiries on this principle, he amassed a rich treasure of correct 
 historical knowledge, at the extent of which, we, at the present 
 day, cannot but feel surprised. Natural philosophy also attracted 
 his attention. He was led to this study by the desire to under- 
 stand more clearly the relation of natural phenomena to God the 
 Creator of the universe. " Whoever," he observes, " rises by his 
 understanding, from visible nature to the contemplation of the 
 invisible Godhead, does, and not without the illumination of God 
 himself, what is worthy of God and of himself, and extremely 
 wholesome." Thus reflection and investigation in him went out 
 from God, and found in God again their object and end, as the 
 mountains of his native country are in the morning touched 
 by the rosy tinge of God's sun, and when the shades of evening 
 descend on the earth still retain his splendours. 
 
 4. ZwiNGLi's Communion with God ; the Lofty Eeach and 
 Unshaken Constancy of his Faith. 
 
 ZAvingli's soul, indeed, found itself elevated and strengthened 
 by familiar intercourse and talk with like-minded friends, as well 
 as by the study of Holy Scripture, and the masterly works of 
 Greece and Eome, by which the holy and great men who com- 
 posed them were brought nearer to him, and, so to say, brought 
 into the circle of his friends ; but highest to him of all was spi- 
 
ZWINGLl'S COMMUNION WITH GOD. 391 
 
 ritual intercourse with God in prayer. " He strongly recom- 
 mended prayer," says BuUinger, " and he himself prayed much 
 daily." " If we become," says Zwingli himself, " more learned 
 and better by conversation and familiar intercourse with a learned 
 and good man, how much more when we hold familiar converse 
 with God. This light enlightens all ; no one nears it who does 
 not retire from it a nobler and a better man. Whoever, there- 
 fore, has accustomed himself to hold frequent converse with God, 
 and to seek help from Him, feels himself ever strengthened and 
 encouraged after prayer. In the hour of danger, he says: "O 
 Lord ! thus it has pleased Thee. But I doubt not Thou wilt so 
 order matters in Thy great goodness, that, with -the temptation, 
 Thou wilt also shew a way of escape. I know that Thou wilt 
 advance Thy glory, justice, and truth, however the adversaries 
 may storm and rage. I know Thou wilt stretch to Thy servant 
 the hand of help. And although, in the meantime, I may come 
 into peril of my life, and faU, yet I doubt not Thou wilt, after my 
 death, accomplish Thy work, and ride forth everywhere in Thy 
 glory triumphantly." In regard to the right mode of praying, he 
 thus expresses himself: "When Christ says, 'And when ye pray, 
 use not many words, as the heathens do,' He does not mean to 
 deter us from prayer, but He means to instruct us in prayer, which 
 does not consist in the multitude of words, but in fervour of faith. 
 Prayer requires only few words ; but, on the other hand, great 
 devotion, dee-p feeling. Prayer is the elevation and ascent of the 
 soul to God; let it be therefore sober, fervent, pure, and simple, 
 without the pomp of words. Many arrows let off -at once have a 
 slower flight, being hindered by their feathers ; one sent alone 
 flies swifter to the mark." By prayer, he felt his soul become 
 daily freer from earthly bonds, daily more light from above beam- 
 ing into his soul " It is with us," says he, " as with those who 
 go to sea. To them the land appears of much greater extent than 
 the sea; but the farther they stretch out to sea the more they dis- 
 cover what a small proportion the land bears to the sea. Then 
 their eyes behold many sea^monsters, and they are fiUed with 
 wonder at the immeasurable ocean which surrounds them. So it 
 is with us ; so long as we cleave to the dust, and the things of 
 earth, i.e., to our own understanding, we know nothing of the 
 works and ways of God, but when we direct our regards from the 
 
392 ZWINGLl'S COMMUNION WITH GOD. 
 
 earthly to the Divine, then we become acquainted with what 
 fills us with astonishment indeed. But what is the sea of which 
 I speak but the divine providence and economy of aU things, the 
 infinite and inexhaustible power and operation of God? Come, then, 
 let us put out to sea, and let us begin the contemplation of the 
 works of God, and we shall discover glorious things. Let us con- 
 sider the wondrous works of God, ever exercising our minds to 
 the contemplation of greater and stUl greater. Let us get rid to- 
 day of this fault, to-morrow of that, and so gradually advance tiU 
 we arrive at the perfect^ man. We dare .not stand still, for we 
 are upon our journey, and indeed we tread a very dirty and slip- 
 pery path, and have not yet reached the goal." 
 
 With such a penetrating intellect, consecrated by the prayer 
 of faith, Zwingli strove to pierce deeper and deeper into the 
 counsel of God, which filled him with the loftiest admiration, 
 and which moved him to an intense adoration of the Divine 
 wisdom and goodness. In the following passage, he very happily 
 and beautifully expresses these feelings : " All that happens, we 
 may call it accidental or predetermined, happens through the 
 omnipresent foresight of God, be it in reference to things without 
 life, or to living beings, and 'to beings endowed with reason and 
 understanding, although we may not plainly recognise it, being 
 sunk through our gross corporeal nature in the deep darkness of 
 ignorance. But when it is given to one to contemplate these 
 events from a higher point of view, God, what joy he has in 
 the discovery, everywhere of the wisdom and goodness of God. 
 Nay, the contemplation of the whole universe, all beautiful 
 though it be, is but weariness, in comparison of the rapture which 
 fills his soul when he ascends upwards to God, and adores Him 
 as the artificer of the whole. With what admiration, for example, 
 of the providence of God, is not a pious soul filled, when it con- 
 siders the case of Jeroboam, how he was ordained of God to divide 
 Israel into two kingdoms, but who was soon faithless to Him 
 who had raised him, setting up golden calves as idols, and thereby 
 bringing ruin, first on Israel, afterwards on Judah. 'For it was 
 a monstrous act of impiety to seduce the people from the true 
 God to idolatry. The divine counsel, therefore, had been very 
 unwise, to set a man upon the throne, who, in the end, was to be 
 apostate from God, if God had not beforehand resolved himself 
 
HIS LOFTY KEACH AND CONSTANCY OF FAITH. S93 
 
 as to what should happen, and determined to make use of the 
 treachery of Jeroboam. I say when the pious mind considers 
 the consequences here, it is so far from caviUing with God, that 
 it rather admires and praises His decrees. Supreme goodness 
 had determined to turn itseK for a season from the Jewish people, 
 and on the other hand, to choose idolaters. Therefore it prepared 
 the event it would bring upon Israel through Jeroboam. For 
 from this time Israel began to sink, till at length it fell under 
 the Babylonian and Eoman captivities. The heathen nations 
 who came iuto its place, triumphed, then, in the knowledge of 
 God. Is not faith, when it sees this, caught with a wondrous 
 joy? Good is ever evolved from that which God operates, 
 even although the matter may have begun with some great crime. 
 Jacob plains over his son Joseph that wild beasts have torn him, 
 while his brothers had perpetrated a fratricidal crime upon him. 
 But what a glad result crowned the whole? The father weened 
 he would die of grief ; but that became life and salvation to him- 
 self and his children, and to vast numbers besides, which was 
 begun in crime and blood. Nor is God either unjust or capricious 
 when he visits the father with sorrow, the son with hardship. 
 Or who reproaches a peasant with letting part of his wood stand 
 till the trees become tall and suitable for beams, deals and laths 
 to build a house therefrom, while he consumes another part as 
 firewood? Is not the application of the one part as well as the 
 other advantageous and useful, nay, necessary for the proprietor, 
 so that the part that is burned is actually more useful than that 
 out of which the house is built? Just as little can the misfor- 
 tunes, which befell these righteous persons, Jacob and Joseph, 
 establish an act of violence or of cruelty on the part of God : 
 partly because aU things in a truer sense belong to God than the 
 wood does to the peasant, partly because aU His works take a 
 happy result, not at the time indeed when we wish it, but when 
 it is most fitting, which He alone knows. Herod perpetrated an 
 inhuman act, when he ordered the murdering of the tender 
 helpless babes ; and yet two advantages sprang from this cruel 
 deed : one is, that we see Christ escaping, through the guiding 
 hand of God, the wicked design against his life, and that it is 
 vain to strive against God; the other is, that an example is 
 given us how impotent fury, cruelty, and fear of losing the 
 
394 HIS LOFTY REACH AND CONSTANCY OF FAITH. 
 
 kingdom, rage in vain. ! might princes oftener take this to 
 heart in our own days! From the providence of God there 
 arises predestination, or, which is the same, preordination and 
 election. Election is the free resolution, or spontaneous, decision 
 of the divine will as to who shall be saved. ' I wiU be gracious 
 to whom I wUl be gracious ; and wUl shew mercy on whom I 
 will shew mercy,' Exod. xxxiii. 19, saith the Lord. What is this 
 else but, in a pure sense of sovereignty, saying: 'I distribute 
 mercy according to my good pleasure, not moved by the prayers 
 or by the misery of those who implore me, but as a free grace- 
 gift of election. For the wicked also cry for help?' This view 
 becomes clearer and more intelligible when we weigh the words 
 which the Lord spake to Moses to put courage in him: 'And I 
 wiU harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply my signs and my 
 wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh shall not hearken 
 unto you/ Exod. vii. 3. From the case of Pharaoh we see that 
 God, by such examples of rashness and obstinacy, will manifest 
 to the world His power as well as His justice. For when He 
 hardens men so that they strive against Him, there is not the 
 slightest doubt that He does this solely to exhibit to the world in 
 them an example of His justice. The reverse foUows, when He 
 makes Moses a leader of the people, and David a king ; when He 
 has mercy on the thief dying on the cro^ss ; and on Peter, who, in 
 the hour of danger, abandoned him, and shamefacedly denied 
 him ; on them He took compassion that He might shew examples 
 of His goodness. Paul manifestly alludes to this, when he says, 
 'Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and 
 whom he will he hardeneth,' Eom. is. 18. What else does he 
 mean here but that election and rejection are both acts of God's 
 free will? The merit of our works is thus undermined. For 
 either election and free -grace must fall to the ground, or our 
 merits. For if salvation is acquired by works, it is no longer a 
 free gift. But if it is a free gift, it is no more a reward of om 
 works, as Paul proves in the clearest manner, Eom. xi But how 
 comes it that deliverance from sin, and that eternal salvation are 
 in so many passages of Holy Scripture, ascribed to faith? Let us 
 see to whom faith, this free gift of God, is given. Faith is given 
 to those who are chosen and appointed to everlasting life ; but 
 so that election goes before, while faith follows as a pledge or sign. 
 
HIS LOFTY EEACH AND CONSTANCY OF FAITH. 395 
 
 For thus Paul writes : ' For whom he did foreknow, he also did 
 predestinate ; moreover, whom he did predestinate, them he also 
 called: and whom he called, them he also justified; and whom 
 he justified, them he also glorified,' Eom. viii 29. This state- 
 ment very clearly explains our view. Paul intends to shew that 
 the predestination and choice of God are the grounds and reasons 
 of our investiture with eternal glory. Is this predestination and 
 election resolved upon, then the man is called by God, not only 
 iQ the general call, which consists iu the outward preaching of 
 the Word, but so that the Spirit opens the ear of the elect to hear, 
 and leads them to attend to that which God commands or pro- 
 mises. Those whom God calls. He pronounces righteous, i.e., He 
 makes them free from sin. Can there thus be any other justifi- 
 cation except that by faith? The whole doctrine of Christ and 
 the apostles goes to prove there is no other acquittance or justi- 
 fication but that by faith. They, however, who have faith are 
 heirs of eternal felicity. And from all this, we recognise that 
 faith is given to them who are chosen. Not as though faith were 
 a work to which the forgiveness of sins necessarily attaches, but 
 because they who have faith in God know beyond all doubt that 
 God is reconciled to them through His Son, and that the debt of 
 sin is cancelled. These, however, are so elected, that their 
 election is not only known to God, but also to them, the elect 
 themselves. Another testimony, to the effect that faith is vouch- 
 safed to the elect alone, we have iu Acts xiii. 48 : ' And as many 
 as were ordained to eternal life believed.' Mark, it was they 
 who were predestined to eternal life that believed. It is thus 
 manifest tiat they who believe know that they are elected, and 
 that they who are elected believe. When, then, the prize of 
 everlasting life is ascribed to faith, that is attributed to the later 
 act, which serves as the sealing, which properly belongs to the 
 earlier as the means. Faith is the sign of that election by which 
 truly we are saved. If the blossom of election had not preceded 
 it, the fruit of faith would never have shewn itself It follows 
 also, on the other hand, that they who hear the ground of faith, 
 but who comprehend it not, are predestinated and ordained to 
 everlasting punishment. For whoever believed the apostle's 
 preaching, was chosen to eternal life. And in regard to the 
 reverse case, Christ himself says ; ' He that believeth not the 
 
396 HIS LOFTY EEACH AND CONSTANCY OF FAITH. 
 
 gospel,' preached and heard, for the words precede ' preach the 
 gospel to every creature' is already damned. Unfaith is thus 
 as certain a sign of damnation as faith is of salvation. Adjcord- 
 ingly we observe, in passing, that those passages of Scripture are 
 to be cautiously taken, in which it is said, believers alone are 
 saved ; for this statement has reference only to those who have 
 heard and believed. The same holds good with respect to the 
 condemnation of unbelievers. Eeference is only made to those 
 who have heard, and yet have not believed. Of the others we 
 cannot judge, no man's election being known to us. We cannot 
 judge, partly because Paul writes : ' If the GentUe fulfil the law, 
 he is thereby a Jew,' shewing the law of God written in his 
 heart; partly because Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the mother of the 
 Saviour, Peter, Paul, were chosen of God already, 'as children, 
 nay, before the creation of the world, and when they had not 
 faith. It does not hold good, then, in general : ' "Whosoever has 
 not faith is damned,' but ' Whosoever has heard the doctrine of 
 faith proclaimed, and yet continues and dies in unbelief, him we 
 can perhaps count among the lost' For many do not believe 
 when they hear; then only, when they have been apprehended 
 and drawn by the Spirit like Paul. Wherefore this judg- 
 ment can only be pronounced on those who continue in 
 unbelief tUl death. In this manner the two passages 
 are reconcileable : 'Whosoever believes not is condemned,' 
 and, 'If the Gentile live according to the law, it becomes 
 to him the foreskia of circumcision.' ' For if the Gentiles, 
 who have not the law, do by nature the things contaiaed 
 in the law, they who have not the law are a law to them- 
 selves.' For there stands in the way nothing against God's 
 electing from the Gentiles such as honour, obey, and, after 
 death, unite themselves to Him. For His power of election is free. 
 If the choice stood open to me, I might rather choose the lot of a 
 Socrates, or a Seneca, who not only recognised one God over aU, 
 but also endeavoured to please Him, by keeping a pure heart to- 
 wards Him, to that of the Eoman pope, who would fam give 
 himself out for a god, or of any of the kings or princes who pro- 
 tect such idolatry. Who is there who admires not the faith of 
 the pious Seneca, who, in the eighty-third year of his age, could 
 write thus to his friend Lucilius : ' We must live in all respects 
 
HIS LOFTY REACH AND CONSTANCY OF FAITH. 397 
 
 as if we were conscious of Kving under the eyes of some one who 
 could penetrate into the innermost of our hearts. And there 
 is One who can do it. For of what use is it to keep things 
 secret from man? Nothing is hid from God. He is near our 
 souls, and comes between us when we are in the midst of our own 
 thoughts.' Thus far Seneca Now, who inscribed such a faith 
 as this iQ his heart? Wherever a man is anxious to do that 
 which pleases God, in that man is religion and faith. And 
 Jethro also proves this, who was filled to such a degree with 
 heavenly wisdom that he even rendered aid to Moses in his legis- 
 lation, the man who spoke immediately with God. The centurion 
 CorneKus is a proof of it likewise, whose alms and prayers were 
 acceptable to God even before the gospel had come to him. God 
 can immediately infuse faith into the hearts of the heathen, which 
 faith they give evidence of, and manifest by their works, as I 
 think, not without good reason, was the case with Socrates, 
 Seneca, and many others. Let none suppose that in what I say 
 my intention is to depreciate or derogate from the glory of Christ, 
 as some falsely attribute to me ; on the contrary, what I say glori- 
 .fies His name. For whoever will come to God must come to 
 Him through Christ. And although the outward gospel has not 
 been preached to those, God can save them- through Him. For 
 whoever is saved, is saved through CJirist, i.e., through the mercy 
 of God manifested to the world in Christ. For, when Supreme 
 Wisdom saw that man would suffer shipwreck through the fault 
 of a tree, it cast to him a piece of wood (the cross,) to save him, 
 and resolved to pull him ashore, giving him the promise that One, 
 bom of a woman, should bruise the head of the common foe ; else 
 through his cunning wUes the transgressors had been lost. But 
 this had not been an upright promise on the part of God, if the 
 fruit of this victory had not availed Adam. Adam, however, 
 recognised that this promised seed would not only be for salvar- 
 tion to his posterity but also to himself, and the confiding hope 
 he set in it did not deceive him. Now, Adam's guilt so affected 
 his posterity that only what is corrupt comes into the world; yet 
 Christ's righteousness has the virtue of rendering this corruption 
 noxious to us. If the question, however, be put. Did Christ 
 restore the whole human family, or only the church of believers? 
 I might shortly answer; Christ has brought, by His salvation, as 
 
398 HIS LOFTY REACH AND CONSTANCY OF FAITH. 
 
 mucli good into the world as Adam, by his sinning, brought 
 evil ; or, Adam infected the whole mass with original sin, conse- 
 quently Christ has again restored the whole mass. 'For if 
 through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of 
 God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, 
 hath abounded unto many.' (Eom. v. 15.) In short, God's free 
 election, and the law written in the hearts of all men, are true ; 
 notwithstanding those who are elected, and those who do the 
 work of the law according to the law written in their hearts, come 
 to God alone through Christ. For He, is the Son for whom the 
 Father has prepared the wedding-feast, and called the guests." 
 
 Penetrated with such a conviction of the grace of God, and 
 adoring 'the wisdom, justice, mercy, and aU-sovereignty of the 
 Highest, our Eeformer looked upon himself as an instrument in 
 the hand of Providence, selected for His great work. " Whoever," 
 says he, " is filled with the Spirit of God, is ever on the alert to 
 do something for the benefit of his neighbour, is unwearied in 
 every good work, and rather is fearful that he may do less than 
 he ought. God's Spirit is always active in the holy; they are 
 like a windmill on thejop of a hill put in motion by the pres- 
 sure of the wind. Let us bear in mind that we are instruments 
 of the divine purposes, which God employs for the execution of 
 His wdL We must therefore be active and fervent in the work, 
 not sleepy and slothful, we must not withdraw from the divine 
 work, nor take holiday, but be ever on the alert, and ready to 
 bear a hand to the work A right recognition of God's provi- 
 dence is for the holy and God-fearing one of the best remedies 
 against the dangers which threaten them from prosperity and 
 adversity. Are this world's goods our portion, beauty, health, 
 children, posts of honour? and do we recognise these as gifts of 
 Providence? What a comfort, and what zeal in God's service 
 does this feeling engender in our souls ! Comfort and refresh- 
 ment from seeing that what concerns even the body is the gift of 
 God, and that thus we may enjoy it; zeal and diligence to reci- 
 procate, in no niggardly spirit, what is freely given. From the one 
 feeling gratitude arises, from the other watchfulness over one's 
 self, and a holy walk. On the other hand, are we afflicted by 
 want, shame, or sorrow, abandonment of friends, contempt, want of 
 success, and do we trace these to Providence? how much are we 
 
HIS LOFTY REACH AND CONSTANCY OF FAITH. 399 
 
 comforted and reassured in the greatest misfortunes? With what 
 greatness of soul can such an one raise himseK above the world, 
 and esteem at a low price aU as it lies beneath him. For while 
 he says : ' This bitter cup is handed to me by Providence, I must 
 drink it, and with unshaken faith overcome by patience; thou 
 art God's instrument, He will use thee iip by using thee, not by 
 leaving thee idle. happy one whom He calls to His work ;' 
 while he so spealcs to himself, he is preparing to give up his 
 life, perceiving the whole world can promise him nothing but 
 all sorts of calamities and troubles. Will not such a saint resign 
 willingly the whole world if it were in his hands? For who 
 would not give up an estate that yielded him nothing but fruit- 
 less pains? And to this very point the believer's recognition of 
 Providence leads. For, seeing that fortime's so-called goods are 
 mutable and fleeting, so that they have nowhere a firm footing, 
 shall we not (if we act as reasonable creatures) give all diligence 
 to render our own footing at least firm, and that we do not allow 
 ourselves to be cast hither and thither with them, just as a ship, 
 to escape the storm, steers behind some headland, where it casts 
 anchor? But what else can make us strong against the waves 
 of fate but the contemplation of Providence. This it is that 
 whispers to the manly soul: 'Do not fancy that this happens by 
 chance; it is done at my command; it must be so; it cannot but 
 be so. If you bear it nobly you celebrate a glorious triumph, 
 not bythose who hail the vicious knave who but perpetrates 
 some bloody deed, but by that assembly of the blessed, in which 
 of all the righteous, the heroic, the wise, the learned, the holy, 
 who have lived since the foundation of the world, none fails; 
 where rashness no more passes for courage, hypocrisy for piety, 
 readiness of tongue for learning, nor ghbeness of tongue for wis- 
 dom. There a Judge decides whom none can deceive, and who 
 also himself deceives none.' If, however, out of indolence or 
 despair, you flee from toil and exertion, eternal disgrace will be 
 your portion; for the Captain to whom you have been faithless 
 cannot be deceived, for His eye pierces into the most secret 
 recesses of the human heart. Your fault, then, cannot be denied • 
 or concealed; for He sees written on our foreheads what we have 
 done, and sees also the sins of others. Although to men you may 
 give your sin another name, you cannot to God." 
 
400 HIS LOFTY REACH AND CONSTANCY OF FAITH. 
 
 Against the dangers, too, whicli threatened him in the preach- 
 ing of the gospel, Zwingli derived, from the assurance that he 
 was an instrument in the hands of Providence, the most exalted 
 courage. "Would you think to deter me," he intrepidly 
 exclaims, "from the proclamation and advocacy of truth, by 
 telling me that all who ever undertook it have lost their lives by 
 it; verily, by this argument you make little impression upon 
 me. For I am not ashamed of Christ that He may not be 
 ashamed of me before His Father and the holy angels. Nor did 
 He only die for the truth, but He who was the truth itself died 
 Why shall I hold up to you the apostles, since countless numbers 
 of Christians, even of philosophers and Pagans had courage to 
 die in the cause of the truth? The doctrine they taught, and for 
 which they died, did not thereby cease to be true; but this is 
 the last resource of the enemy, when he cannot bear the truth 
 nor overcome it; he arms himself to violence, sharpens the sword, 
 throws all into uproar. 'Tis long since I have learned that a 
 saint is not to be terrified thereby, and that blessed is he who is 
 evil spoken of in this world. For the more we suffer shame for 
 the name of Christ here, the greater will be our glory hereafter. 
 I pray the Lord that He may strengthen me, for few were those 
 who endured to the end." 
 
 This lofty courage both to do and to suffer, sprang up in the 
 ' Eeformer's heart from his familiar intercourse with God ia 
 prayer, and from his believing contemplation of the course of 
 God's providence, and His fatherly guidance of those who put 
 their trust in. Him. Let us see how this faith manifested itself, 
 and inspired him in the last conflicts he had to wage here below 
 in the service of his Master. 
 
NINTH SECTION. 
 
 ZWINGLI'S LAST LABOURS; HE DIES THE DEATH OF THE 
 CHRISTLAN HERO AT CAPPEL, 11th OCTOBER 1531. 
 
 " I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith : 
 Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the 
 Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, 
 but unto all them also that love his appearing." — 2 Tim. iv. 7, 8. 
 
 1. Christian Civil Eights. 
 
 We have already seen what efforts were made by the papal party 
 to suppress the Eeformation in Switzerland, and how Faber and 
 the Pope's Legate succeeded with this object in drawing into 
 closer alliance the mountain cantons, who adhered to the old 
 faith, with Switzerland's hereditary enemy — ^the Austrian Imperial 
 Power. Zurich had for a long time to trust alone to God's help, 
 and her own means, to meet this threatening combination of her 
 foes, and its hostile movements, but she was steeled and elevated 
 by the consciousness that she had a just and holy cause to 
 defend; for Zwingli's " confidence was alone set on God, and with 
 joy; wherefore he exhorted the whole town of Zurich that they 
 should set their confidence in God" But an opportunity arose 
 of uniting with reformed towns and States, who entertained like 
 sentiments to their own, and who sighed under the like oppres- 
 sion. It was then that Zurich proposed, under the influence of 
 the Reformer, the formation of an alliance to defend their civil 
 privileges, especially as this was open to them without compro- 
 mising the obligations they had come under to the Confederacy.* 
 
 * " According to the ancient treaties, the five places, (Ury, Schwyz, Unter- 
 walden, Zug, and Lucerne,) were precluded from entering into any alliances 
 with other states, without the general consent of all the Conffederates. The 
 three original states, indeed, (Ury, Schwyz, and Unterwalden,) were not per- 
 mitted even to deliherate upon the matter in their cantonal assemblies ; while 
 Zurich and Berne had reserved to themselves such a liberty when they joined 
 the Confederacy." — Hottingbr. 
 
402 CHEISTIAN CIVIL EIGHTS. 
 
 " It is well-pleasing to God," Zwingli writes upon this subject, 
 " that those who have one mind should combine together to carry- 
 on one work and one contest of God, all in the Lord, in unity and 
 fidelity. Caimot the good unite to save the sheep from the jaws 
 of the' wolf? Are they not to raise their voice against the 
 wolves, and to pull away the prey? Why should it be denied to 
 the saints to come together in an honourable manner, in order to 
 deliberate upon religion, God's glory, the common weal, and the 
 cause of truth and righteousness? Is it to be permitted to the 
 wicked only to conspire, and this for the overthrow of truth and 
 justice? The Word of God cannot, indeed, be upheld by human 
 power, but alone by the power of God; notwithstanding, God 
 uses man as an instrument and a vessel, to grant the aids of His 
 grace to other men. Now if God favours the formation of a 
 Christian union, it is plain that He will employ it to a good end." 
 Guided by these principles, Zurich entered into a union with the 
 neighbouring Imperial town of Constance. There the Reforma- 
 tion had gained such ground, through the labours of Zwingh's 
 evangelical friends, Ambrosius Blaarer, John Zwick, John 
 Wanner, and others, that the bishop and the majority of the 
 canons abandoned the town, and transferred themselves to 
 Ueberlingen and Moersburg. The Emperor threatened the town. 
 The Austrian Vicegerent in the Vorarlbergian lands, caused his 
 horse to ride up to its very gates. Constance, on this emergency, 
 applied to Zurich with the offer of a mutual defensive alliance. 
 After the negotiations had been secretly carried on for a con- 
 siderable length of time, the alliance was finally concluded on 
 the 25th December 1627,* and was called, "The Christian 
 Burgher-Eights." Its purport runs thus : 
 
 " We, the Burgomaster, Little and Great Councils, as well as the 
 citizens and whole community of the towns of Zurich and Con- 
 stance, make known: The course of events in these days having 
 rapidly assumed a very threatening aspect, many unfair attacks 
 having been made, and unrighteous things done, from which it 
 appeareth that the ruin of confederate and civil unity, and 
 detriment to the well-being and peace of our native country, wUl, 
 if the Almighty in His grace prevent not, speedily follow; we 
 
 * The deputies of " The Fire Places" had already met at Insbruck as early as 
 the 22d July 1527, to negotiate a closer union with Austria. 
 
CHRISTIAN CIVIL EIGHTS. 403 
 
 have, with the grace of God, and in the name of Jesus Christ, 
 the eternal Son of God, our Eedeemer, accepted and acknow- 
 ledged one another, with aU ours, as faithful allies. And since 
 faith and the soul's salvation is not in the compulsion or power 
 of any one, hut is a free and undeserved grace and gift of God, 
 we shall hoth of us, the parties to this alliance, each especially 
 in their separate jurisdictions, so act in matters of faith and the 
 soul's salvation, as to have confidence before God, and be able to 
 give answer according to Holy Scripture ; nor shall one party 
 disturb or attack the other on this account, nor render assistance 
 or advice to any, whoever they be, who shall so act, nor allow 
 them so to do. If, however, violence be offered to us, be it to the 
 one or the other party, by reason of faith and the evangelical 
 doctrine, by any whosoever it be, we shall, on both sides, and 
 each for themselves, and at their own costs, defend and protect 
 each other, with our lives and chattels. Each party have in this 
 ' Burger-Eight' reserved the duties they owe, and we of Zurich 
 in particular, the duties we owe to ' The Bund,' by which we 
 are connected and devoted to our dear Confederates ; as also all 
 agreements, stipulations or treaties which may have been closed 
 with any before this letter. In other respects, this Burgher- 
 Eight shall extend and be held against every one, to the exception 
 of none, without fraud or equivocation." 
 
 This alliance, in defence of the rights of conscience and the 
 free preaching of the gospel, marks the commencement of a new 
 and higher conception of the position and duties of the Christian 
 state. The juridical state guaranteed the security of person and 
 property against capricious violence ; the mediaeval state pro- 
 tected the Church of the time, and her peculiar institutions, with 
 the iron hand of power, and persecuted with fire and sword aU 
 who, under the impulse of faith, and guided by a better know- 
 ledge, dared to overstep the fixed limits she established; but 
 freedom of conscience, the free preaching of the Word of God, the 
 Christian state, such as Zwingli comprehended and regarded her 
 to be, alone knows. 
 
 After, in the sequel, Berne (June 1528), St. Gall (November 
 1528), Biel (January 1529), Muehlhausen (February), Basle 
 (March), and Schaffhausen (September of the same year), had 
 joined " The Christian Burgher-Eight," upon the same conditions 
 
404 CHRISTIAN CIVIL EIGHTS. 
 
 and obligations, the Eeformer deemed it prudent to obtain new 
 ■allies, even beyond the narrow bounds of his native country, for 
 he foresaw with a clear glance the imminence of the danger 
 which threatened the Eeformed cause, from the growing union 
 between the Pope, on the one hand, and the Emperor, with the 
 papally disposed princes and states, on the other. In this respect, 
 his journey to Marburg had been of signal importance. In 
 Strasburg, he obtained better information with regard to the 
 -Emperor's designs, especially from the Town-sheriff, James 
 Sturm. This far-seeing statesman, who was faithfully devoted 
 to the Eeformed cause, had connections with many respectable 
 and influential men in Germany and France, through which he 
 came into possession of many important documents, disclosing 
 the Emp.eror's plans against the Eeformers. Zwingli and Ulrich 
 Funk sent copies of these deeds to the secret Council of Zurich, 
 with the observation : " These are from the right wm'kshop." The 
 contents of these are probably contained in the following com- 
 munications of the Eeformer, which he made to statesmen who 
 had his confidence ; " The Emperor stirs up friend against friend, 
 and enemy against enemy, in order to force himself betwixt them 
 as mediator, and then he decides with a partiality which always 
 leads him to consult the interests of the papacy and his own 
 power. To kindle a war in Germany, he directs the Castellan of 
 Musso* against the Graubundians, the Bishop of Constance 
 agaiast the town of Constance, the Bishop of Strasbiirg against 
 the inhabitants of Strasburg, the Duke of Savoy against the 
 Bernese, the Five Places against Zurich, the Abbot of St. Gall 
 against the town, Duke George of Saxony against Duke John; 
 to deprive the latter of his Electoral dignity, the Bishops on the 
 Ehine agaiast the Landgrave of Hessen. Thus he will every- 
 where instigate to hostility against the Eeformed towns as much 
 as he can. Then, when he has thrown the torch of war and 
 tumult in all directions, he will bring a Spanish army into 
 
 * James von Medizis, a fool-hardy adventurer, had got possession of the 
 fortified castle of Musso, at the entrance of the Veltlin, which then belonged to 
 the Union, and from thence threatened and harassed the inhabitants of Grau- 
 bnnd, the majority of whom had declared for the Eeformation. That his deeds 
 of lawless violence were perpetrated with the concurrence of the Emperor, was 
 sufficiently proved by his receiving from him the title of a Margrave, and nine 
 iiiadred Spanish troops being sent to him, to be taken into pay. 
 
CHRISTIAN CIVIL EIGHTS. 405 
 
 Germany, and he will befool tlie one party with fair but false 
 words, and make war on the other party, till he has reduced all 
 under his yoke." In Marburg the question of the Reformed 
 defensive alliance was all the more seriously discussed with the 
 Landgrave, the more plainly the danger came to be recognised 
 through the reciprocal communications made, which threatened 
 the Eeformers on the side of the Emperor and his allies. The 
 Landgrave had already endeavoured to bring about a similar 
 union between the Eeformed princes and towns of Germany, the 
 failure of which, on the obstinate prejudices of Luther, who 
 refused to co-operate with the Sacramentisers,* he witnessed with 
 deep disappointment. With all the greater joy, Philip haiLed 
 the new Reformed Defensive Alliance, which, emanating from 
 Zurich, gave promise of embracing the free Reformed towns of 
 Switzerland, South Germany, and of the Rhine. He himself 
 wished to join the alliance, along with Duke Ulrich of Wirtem- 
 berg. In the secret deliberations between the two princes and 
 the deputies of Zurich, Basle, and Strasburg, in reference to this 
 matter, it was agreed that the Landgrave should endeavour to 
 gain for the alliance the Protestant German princes and 
 the North German sea towns, while Zwingli was to employ 
 
 * After the second Diet of Speyer, a Conference of the Evangelical party, at 
 the instigation of the Landgrave, was held at Rotach (Cohurg,) to take steps 
 towards the formation of a. Protestant Defensive Alliance. Luther frustrated 
 the attempt by his scruples, to which he gave loud expression on this occasion. 
 " Such an alliance," said he, " must, without doubt, base itself on the conscience 
 and faith of those who unite, and an indispensable condition of it must he unity 
 of faith. Now faith is with the other party vacillating and uncertain, and it is 
 to be feared that in but few it exists at all. Secondly, It is dangerous by reason 
 of the Landgrave, who is a restless man. Thirdly, It is suspicious and vexatious. 
 For among such numbers it cannot be doubted that help will be more looked 
 for from an arm of flesh than from God. Fourthly, It is unchristian on account 
 of the heresy against the Sacrament; for since they cannot have their alliance, we 
 must help to defend and strengthen such heresy, and when they are defended, 
 they will be worse than ever. For as, they will not better themselves in this 
 thing, there is no hope that they will remain firm and true in other matters. 
 Let one note here the example in Joshua vii., where, for a single Achan, the 
 whole people of God were made to suffer calamity until the sin was punished. 
 It may be said the towns are one with us in all respects, except this single 
 point; but, are we by reason of unity in the others to leave this out of our 
 regard? Answer: The one is of too great importance, for all the others are 
 rendered impure by this one; he is not less unchristian, because, like Arius, and 
 many more, he denies one article of the faith." 
 
406 CHRISTIAN CIVIL EIGHTS. 
 
 his influence to the same end with the South Gennan 
 Eeformed towns, where the gospel was preached by his friends. 
 Some hope was entertained of Venice* and France becom- 
 ing parties to the Alliance, both being hostilely disposed to 
 the Emperor, and in both countries decided symptoms of evan- 
 gelical life having shewn themselves. According to the idea 
 which was specially present to the Landgrave and the Swiss 
 Eeformer, this Protestant Alliance was to extend from the Adri- 
 atic to the German Ocean, and the intention was thus to set up 
 in central Europe a Protestant power, to frustrate the dangerous 
 schemes of the Hispano- Austrian Imperial House, and its allies. 
 Nay, if the Emperor should design to fulfil the promise he 
 solemnly made to the Papal ambassador at Barcelona, by attempt- 
 ing the suppression of the free preaching of the gospel in Ger- 
 many, then, in the view of Zwingli and the Landgrave, the time 
 would have arrived when the princes of the empire, according to 
 right and their duties, ought to divest the Emperor of his Impe- 
 rial dignity, who had thus set himself up against the command 
 of God Like Saul, and thus proclaimed himself the rejected of 
 God, and remove him as head of the empire. " So great," wrote 
 Zwingli afterwards to the Town-sheriff Sturm, " is the perversity 
 and wickedness of the Emperor, that, in my opinion, the world 
 should unite to rid itself in any way of such a burden.'' He 
 wrote to the Emperor himself with aU frankness of the opportu- 
 nity given by God for throwing off the yoke of a tyrannical 
 government, and which should not be allowed to pass by with- 
 out beiug made use of In the event of the electors having the 
 courage to take up arms in defence of evangelical freedom, and 
 to depose the Emperor, the leaders of the Alliance f selected, the 
 German prince who outshone aU others in greatness of soul, in 
 courage of faith and resolution, "Philip the Magnanimous," 
 
 * We have already seen how matters stood iu France. So remarkable an 
 evangelical movement manifested itself in Venice, where the Government pro- 
 claimed its independence of the Pope, that Luther heard of it. He wrote, 7th 
 March 1528, to Gabriel Zwilling: "Your accounts of Venice, that it has received 
 God's Word, filled me with joy. To God be the praise and glory." Zwingli 
 was very exactly informed upon the state of Italy; he might, therefore, on good 
 grounds, entertain hopes of gaining over Venice to the alliance. 
 
 t To the leaders of the league, besides the Landgrave and Zwingli, there be- 
 longed Duke TJlrich of Wirtemberg, and James Sturm, Town-sheriff of Strasburg. 
 
CHRISTIAN CIVIL EIGHTS. 407 
 
 Zwingli's friend, as future Emperor. " Gracious dear Sir," the 
 Eeformer wrote to his priacely friend in reference to this plan, 
 " my writing to youi Grace thus freely and childishly comes from 
 my confidence in God that He hath selected you for great things, 
 which I dare not utter ; " to which the Landgrave answered : " Dear 
 Mr Huldreich, I hope through the Providence of God a feather 
 will fall from Pharaoh,* and that he will meet with what he little 
 expects ; for aU things are in the way of improvement. God is 
 wonderful He gives me peace, and often where I had given up 
 aU hope. The time brings roses. Let this matter touching Pha- 
 raoh remain a secret with you tiU the time arrives." 
 
 According to the agreement made at Marburg, Zwingli zeal- 
 ously exerted himself with his Protestant friends in the South 
 German free towns to promote the objects of the league. Like a 
 thunder-cloud fraught with ruiu the Emperor neared Germany, to 
 hold at Augsburg the long-announced Diet. The Eeformer's zeal 
 rose with the approach of danger to turn aside harm from the 
 Protestant Church. " Base cowards alone," he wrote to Coun- 
 cillor Conrad Zwick of Constance, "can idly look on without 
 straining every nerve to put in arms a power that shall make the 
 Emperor sensible that he labours in vain to re-establish Eome's 
 supremacy, to destroy the privileges of the free towns, and to 
 coerce us in Helvetia. Awake Lindau, awake its neighbours, 
 and be at length men. He is a fool who trusts to the friendship 
 of tyrants. Even Demosthenes teaches us that nothing is so 
 hatfeful to them as the freedom of towns. The Emperor offers 
 with the one hand bread, while in the other he conceals a stone." 
 Afterwards he wrote to the same friend, and to Burgomaster 
 Blaarer in Constance : " Only be firm and undismayed, and do 
 not be afraid of the counsels of the Emperor. The knife must one 
 day come to the grinding-stone." 
 
 Zwingli's friend, Ealph Collin, was despatched as secret'ambas- 
 sadorto Zurich, on 11th December 1829, to form relations between 
 the towns of " the Christian Burgher-right," and the free state of 
 
 * Pharaoh was the name for the Emperor, in the correspondence between the 
 Landgrave and Zwingli. Ever since the Marburg Disputation these two had 
 kept up an uninterrupted correspondence, partly carried on in ciphers, which 
 were often changed for the better preservation of the secret; various keys are 
 therefore necessary to decipher the correspondence. 
 
408 CHRISTIAN CIVIL EIGHTS. 
 
 Venice. He appeared before the Venetian Senate, and said : " It is 
 not unknown to the august senate of the Free State, long united in 
 friendship with the Confederacy, what an eye-sore the two republics 
 have been, the great bulwarks of European freedom, to the arbi- 
 trary potentates, whose only thought has been their suppression. At 
 the present moment especially, the Emperor begins anew to dis- 
 cover his dangerous designs, and never before has a union been 
 so necessary as now between the States, threatened, in the first 
 instance, by that all-devouring universal monarchy, after which 
 the Emperor is striving. To express their wishes for such a union, 
 to hear opinions upon it, to pave the way for negotiations, his 
 lords of Zurich had sent him a j'oung man, indeed, and of no 
 influence, without state or retinue, (that the Emperor and his 
 friends might know nothing of it,) yet with written credentials." 
 After the Doge had informed himself as to the extent and the 
 objects of this defensive league, of which Collin spoke as " the 
 Christian Burgher-Eight," and after requesting some farther light 
 upon it, he gave the assurance in general terms of the good-feel- 
 ing entertained by the Free State towards Zurich, and the towns 
 of "the Christian Burgher-Eight;" at the same time, however, he 
 divulged the fact, that Venice had just concluded a treaty of peace 
 with the Emperor. Outside of the Town-hall it was observed to 
 the ambassador that an earlier mission woidd have had better 
 success. Even yet, it was said, Venice, in the event of a war 
 between the Emperor and the Burgher-towns,* will render them 
 as much assistance as they can. Zwingli mentioned this to the 
 Landgrave, and the Duke Ulrich of Wirtemberg, on which the 
 latter entreated him to use every means in his power to arrange 
 the matter, and above all, to maintain a good understanding with 
 the Venetians; for they might become a strong drag-chain -f- on 
 the Emperor, and in this way they might attain the object which, 
 with greater policy, they had not yet reached. " The time and 
 
 * The Chancellor of the Repuhlic was commissioned by the Doge and Council 
 to say to Collin, "in the first instance," that Venice would assist the members 
 of "the Christian Burgher-Kight" against the Emperor in every danger and 
 emergency, with men, provisions, and money. 
 
 t A German Captain had proposed to occupy the Tyrol with eight thousand 
 Germans, and in this manner to close up the Emperor's route from Italy into 
 Germany. Graubund was to send men, "Venice artillery, horse, and money, to 
 effect this enterprise. 
 
CHRISTIAN CIVIL RIGHTS. 409 
 
 opportunity are present," said he, " and the moment must not be 
 let slip. Nor is the mad dog (the Emperor), idle, but plays one 
 trick after the other. " 
 
 About the same time that these negotiations were entered into 
 with Venice, the King of France intimated a wish, through his 
 ambassadors in Switzerland, to hear Zwingli's views as to how a 
 blow might be best dealt to the power of the Emperor; at the 
 same time he signified his desire to join as an ally " the Christian 
 Burgher-Right." The Reformer would please state the conditions 
 under which this might be accomplished. "We have already seen 
 with what zeal Zwingli laboured at an earlier period to foster the 
 evangehcal movement which manifested itself in France, and we 
 have seen that, chiefly with the hope of winning over the King 
 to the cause of the gospel, he had dedicated to him his principal 
 work, " The Commentary of the True and False Religion." The 
 second French ambassador, also in Switzerland, Lambert Maigret, 
 was devoted to the Protestant doctrine, and on terms of friend- 
 ship with Zwingli In such circumstances, it might have been 
 expected that the Reformer would have hastened to accede to the 
 wish of the King, as he had good grounds to hope that a closer 
 connection with the towns of " the Christian Burgher-Right," 
 together with the animosity against the Emperor, might induce 
 Francis I. to decide in favour of the gospel, a result which Zwin- 
 gli so ardently desired. Yet he appears to have suspected some 
 French wile in this request, for he did not accede to it until he 
 had been the third time applied to. He developed his views in 
 form of a letter from the King to the towns of " the Christian 
 Burgher-Right" in Switzerland. "As the Alliance," the docu- 
 ment, among other things, says, " which for a series of years hag 
 existed between France and all the Swiss cantons, with the 
 exception of Zurich, was displeasing to the lords of Zurich, for 
 the reason that they feared great danger from it to the freedom of 
 Helvetia, the most Christian King now declares his willing- 
 ness to form such an Alliance as shall, in no respect, be contraiy 
 to the law of God. For the most Christian King desires nothing 
 so much as that the gospel be preserved in its purity. If any 
 party be attacked for its reception or adherence to the gospel, the 
 other shall stand by and defend it ; if it, on the other, attacks, the 
 other party is only then under obligation to assist when the 
 
410 CHRISTIAN CIVIL EIGHTS. 
 
 grounds for the attack are recognised as legitimate." In handing 
 over this remarkable document to General Maigret for transmis- 
 sion, he expressed the wish, in an accompanying letter to him, 
 that the Landgrave of Hessen, Duke Ulrich of Wirtemberg, and 
 some of the South German Free towns, might be permitted to 
 join the League. Both the ambassadors answered the Eeformer, 
 on the 27th February 1530, to the effect: "The time is not yet 
 ripe to enter on such far-reaching plans." General Maigret 
 explained himseK more distinctly : " As long as the King's sons 
 are held in captivity by the Emperor, no farther negotiations on 
 this head can be gone into, because they would only tend to 
 delay the liberation of the princes." For the rest this states- 
 man contiuued to cultivate Zwingli's friendship as before, and 
 strove to remove the prejudices which prevailed, particularly in 
 France, agaiust his person and doctrine. He requested the 
 Eeformer to propitiate Francis I. for the Eeformation, to state 
 " the chief points of his creed as well as his views upon the civil 
 power, and its relation to its subjects," and to present this work 
 to the king. ZwingK fulfiUed this request. He composed three 
 months before his death the Treatise, and sent it to the king. 
 But the hopes which he and Maigret entertained for the victory of 
 the gospel in France from this step were not destined to be fulfilled. 
 Francis First's sole object in desiring to unite with the Swiss Free 
 towns was, that they might assist him in the conquest of Lom- 
 bardy ; he was a stranger to that pure enthusiasm with which the 
 Eeformer laboured and fought for evangelical truth and the rights 
 of conscience. Indeed, Zwingli had to experience, in other quar- 
 ters also, to his profound regret, that his efforts did not every- 
 where meet with that recognition to which they were entitled. 
 
 In Switzerland, Berne was particularly averse to the extension 
 of the league of " the Christian Burgher -Eight" so far beyond the 
 boundaries of the Confederacy. On this account the government , 
 of this canton refused, for a long time, to admit even Strasburg 
 into the union. "Berne always sends hears to negotiate," 
 Zwingli bitterly complained. Its consent was at last obtained, 
 and the treaty of alliance between the Eeformed Swiss towns 
 and Strasburg was confirmed, by oath, in the end of Januaiy 
 1530. On the other hand, Berne obstinately persisted in its 
 refusal to accept the Landgrave of Hessen as a member of " the 
 
CHRISTIAN CIVIL EIGHTS. 411 
 
 Christian Burgher-right," so that he was forced to conclude the 
 alliance with Zurich and Basle alone, which he did in the summer 
 of 1530. But in other quarters also, the extension of the league 
 was counteracted. The aged Erasmus had, by means of a wide- 
 spread witticism, that the Swiss Eeformer intended to introduce 
 democracy under the mantle of the gospel, rendered the princes 
 and axistocratical magistrates of the towns suspicious of the 
 measures which had their origin in Zurich. Favoured by this 
 mistrust, the Papal and Imperial party worked in secret, by 
 threats and promises, against the union of the Evangelicals. 
 Hence, in part, at least, none of the South German Free towns 
 joined the alliance except Constance. Finally, the Supper-con- 
 test was destined to operate against the extension of the league. 
 The Protestant German princes, indeed, had combined, after the 
 Diet of Augsburg, February 1530, at Smalkald, in a Protestant 
 defensive league, which had a similar object as "the Christian 
 Burgher-right;" and the members of the Four-towns Confession 
 had been admitted into the Smalkald treaty. On the Landgrave 
 of Hessen, however, expressing his desire that the Swiss Free- 
 towns should take part in it, the condition was also exacted from 
 them that they should sign the nnion-formida proposed by Bucer, 
 in the sense in which Luther explained it, previous to their 
 admissiouL At such a price, however, the Swiss refused to pur- 
 chase it. Zwingli was of the mind that " the Eeformed and the 
 Lutherans might cultivate friendship and unity for the sake of 
 their common faith, despite the difference in the doctrine of the 
 Supper, as well as Papists and Lutherans, who stood combined 
 against the Turks ; for the league is formed for the defence of the 
 land, the people, common justice, and that sum of faith and doc- 
 trine in which we are all united. If, however, they (the Luther- 
 ans,) be not willing, it is very apparent thatthis comes frommistrust 
 and arrogancy, and hence we, too, deem it not necessary io^re/er 
 a imion with them to truth. However earnestly Zwingli endea- 
 voured the union of aU Protestants for the defence of the preach- 
 ing of the gospel, and the rights of conscience, the conviction he 
 had acquired in the light of the diviae Word was too dear to him 
 to deny it, in but the smallest point, even at such a price. In 
 this manner, the fine idea of this alliance, for which the Reformer, 
 and his friend the Landgrave, were enthusiastically prepossessed. 
 
412 CHKISTIAN CIVIL RIGHTS. 
 
 came, to the deep regret of both, but imperfectly into life, like 
 some plant that too early developes itself Zwingli had foreboded 
 in a prophetic spirit what calamities would burst upon the various 
 countries of Europe if the confessors of the gospel were not to 
 unite against their common enemies for the preservation of the 
 pearl of their faith. To avert these calamities, to defend the pro- 
 clamation of the pure Word of God, and to protect freedom of 
 conscience, were the motives by which he was swayed in this- 
 department of his labours. 
 
 2. ElTPTUEE BETWEEN THE PEOTESTANT AND EOMAN CATHOLIC 
 PAETIES IN SWITZEELAND, AND FlEST CAPPEL WAE. 
 
 The alliances which the Eoman Catholic cantons of Switzer- 
 land had formed with each other, and with the Emperor, for the 
 suppression of the Eeformation, and those which the Eeformers 
 had partly concluded, partly attempted, in defence of the rights of 
 conscience, and the free preaching of the Word, made it evident 
 that a dangerous rupture was preparing between the two parties into 
 which the country was rent. Switzerland presented two hostile 
 camps, which rested their extremities on foreign lands, and which 
 sought reciprocally to weaken each other by the withdrawal of 
 adherents. An attitude gradually more resolute and bolder was 
 the result of these separate alliances. While, in the Five places,* 
 every departure from the ancient faith was visited with their 
 punishment, and threatened with that of the Emperor, Zurich 
 and Berne secured all who accepted the gospel in their ow;n pro- 
 tection and that of the towns of the Burgher-Eight." The differ- 
 ent jurisdictions, -f- which often crossed one another in the various 
 cantons, tended not a little to increase animosity; everywhere 
 
 * The Cantons Uri, Schwyz, TJnterwalden, Lucerne, and Zug, are, for short- 
 ness, called " the Five Places." 
 
 t We remind the reader of the lands, possessing themselves in part old rights 
 and privileges, which were governed alternately hy the Five Places, and hy 
 Zurich and Berne, pr sometimes by Zurich alone. Also of the peculiar position 
 of the Abbot of St. Gall, who stood for himself and his subjects in a defensive 
 alliance with Zurich, Lucerne, Schwyz, and Glarus. Toggenburg, too, which 
 was under the lordship of the Abbot, occupied a similar relation to Schwyz and 
 Glarus. 
 
CHRISTIAN CIVIL BIGHTS. 413 
 
 points of irritation and hostility presented themselves to both 
 parties down from the Bernese Alps to the Bodensee. In the 
 pleasant valleys of the Bernese upland district, where the cloister 
 of Engelberg possesses particular rights of collation from Unter- 
 walden, the majority of the inhabitants rose in insurrection against 
 the government of Berne, excited by some priests from Uri and 
 Unterwalden, and supported by eight hundred Obwalders, with 
 their banner. The Eeformation was abolished, its adherents 
 maltreated, and the Mass introduced. While Zurich prepared 
 to march to the relief of its oppressed ally, hosts of volunteers 
 armed themselves in the Mountain-cantons to support the insur- 
 gents. In the meantime, the Mayor of Erlach, at the head of the 
 Bernese troops, had, without foreign assistance, reduced the up- 
 landers to obedience, but the support of the insurrection, on the 
 part of the Oberwaldners, contrary to treaty, was, long after its 
 suppression, threatened with deserved punishment by Zurich and 
 Berne. In Bremgarten, the grey-haired Dean Bullinger, declared 
 to his congregation from the pulpit, in February 1529, "for three 
 and thirty years their pastor, he had taught them, walking in 
 blind darkness, what he had himseK learned from blind guides. 
 Might God pardon him his involuntary crime, enlighten him hence- 
 forth by His grace to lead the flock committed to him in accord- 
 ance with the precepts of His Word, whereto he was firmly 
 resolved." The Town-Council, which a year before had come 
 under a formal agreement with "the Five Places" to keep the town 
 ta the ancient faith, deposed Bullinger from his office. He sought 
 help in Zurich. His re-settlement in his pastoral office could not 
 be obtained; the community, however, passed a resolution that 
 the new pastor whom they should elect " must preach the Old 
 and New Testaments according to their Divine meaning, and 
 thereby they would leave the matter in God's hand." Gervasius 
 Schuler, who was next elected, and Henry Bullinger, son of the 
 Dean, who soon afterwards was called to the place, fulfilled this 
 promise with joy and blessing to the community. The Eeforma- 
 tion gained the ascendant in Bremgarten, in Mellinger, and in 
 several more of the neighbouring communities, Zurich and 
 Berne protecting the Evangelicals, while " The Five Places" 
 threatened apostacy from the old faith with punishment. In 
 Thurgau and in Eheinthal, alternately governed by Zurich and 
 
41 -i CHEISTIAN CIVIL EIGHTS. 
 
 "The Five Places," the cause of the Eeformation gradually 
 advanced. Many of the communes sought from Zurich evan- 
 gelical pastors. But the governors from " The Five Places," as 
 James Stocker, of Zug in Thurgau, and MelcMor Gysler, of TJri 
 in Eheinthal, persecuted the Evangelicals with all severity, 
 punishing them with imprisonment, the rack, stripes, and con- 
 fiscation. Preachers had their tongues cut, others were beheaded 
 or burned; Bibles and all evangelical books were taken away 
 and destroyed. On the other hand, these papistical governors, 
 who made a boast of their zeal for the ancient faith, committed 
 the most wanton excesses and debauchery, which, without any 
 sense of shame, they attempted to justify, and in this way they 
 gave still greater offence to the Evangelicals, who were led to 
 look from the Word of God for a higher standard of morality in 
 governors than in private individuals. In this position of affairs, 
 "The Five Places" protecting their officers, Zurich and Berne the 
 evangelical people, animosity rose to so great a pitch between the 
 two parties, that it threatened every moment to break out into 
 open hostility. Another apple of discord for the parties was the 
 rich cloister of St. Gall, in its peculiar relation to the cantons of 
 Zurich, Lucerne, Schwyz, and Glarus.* The Abbot of this 
 cloister, as prince of the empire devoted to the Imperial house, 
 was, by reason of his wealth and great influence in Switzerland, 
 one of the most dangerous enemies of the Eeformation. Never- 
 theless, it gained many adherents among his subjects, especially 
 after the beginning of the year 1529, when James Frei, member 
 of the Zurich Council, and a zealous friend of the Eeformation, 
 was appointed lieutenant of the country. The doctrine of the 
 anti-Scriptural character of spiritual supremacy, proclaimed by 
 Zwingli with all emphasis, met with a hearty reception, not only 
 from the majority of the Abbot's subjects, but also from many 
 of the brothers. The Abbot, Francis von Geissberg, who lay 'sick 
 of the dropsy, found himself quite unable to offer any opposition 
 to the progress of the Eeformation, and had himself hastily carried 
 
 * The Abbot had concluded a defensive alliance with the above-named can- 
 tons for his whole possessions, in which they engaged to defend him and his 
 monastery, as well as his subjects, in all their rights and liberties. In exercise 
 of their right, and in conformity with their engagement, the four states sent 
 every two years a lieutenant to Wyl, who was a member of the secret Council 
 of the Abbot, and immediately followed him in rank. 
 
CHRISTIAN CIVIL EIGHTS. 415 
 
 to his fortified castle at Eoshach, where alone he considered 
 himself safe. Four days afterwards, Burgomaster Vadian took 
 possession of the cathedral, from which he ordered the images to 
 be removed; the treasures of the cloister the monks had carried 
 off to Einsiedehi. The Abhot died at Eoshach, on the 21st 
 March; his death, however, was concealed for some time, until 
 the monks succeeded, in an Ulegal manner, indeed, in electing a 
 successor. Kilian German, descendant of an honourable family 
 in Toggenburg, a shrewd and clever monk, hitherto the great 
 steward of the cloister had this perilous dignity conferred upon 
 him. Soon after the election, he succeeded in obtaining the 
 recognition of Schwyz and Lucerne, and the Pope's confirmation 
 of his appointment, while from Austria he received the assurance 
 of powerful support for the maintenance of his position. Upon 
 this, he immediately declared, in plain terms, that he would not 
 rest satisfied till he and his convent were again in possession of 
 their rights, the images replaced in the church, and the Mass 
 again celebrated within its walls. Zurich, on the other hand, 
 requested, at ZwingH's advice, which was asked and given, that 
 Kilian should first of aU establish, by the Scriptures of the Old 
 and New Testament, that monkery is good and well-pleasuig in 
 the sight of God, else that he should lay aside the cowl, and 
 abandon monkery; as abbot, Zurich would never acknowledge 
 him, since as protecting power, it had undertaken the duty of 
 defending the Christian people in the maintenance of their rights. 
 This state, accordiagly, would never allow the spiritual yoke to 
 be again pressed on the household of God: "Hence," says 
 ZwingU on this opinion, delivered by him, " either our lords with 
 their Christian fellow-citizens of St. Gall, and all the people 
 of God who have pledged their lives and property to our 
 lords, that the Word of God shall be admiaistered, desist, and 
 become perjured to their oaths, or the Abbot KHian desists." 
 While Zurich and St. GaU pressed with aU their power for the 
 dissolution of the cloister, and the land's-lieutenant Frei secured 
 the subjects of the cloister in the liberties and institutions which 
 the Zurich country people enjoyed, the Abbot Eolian took his 
 measures in secret, with the help of "The Five Places" and Austria, 
 to recover his rights and dignity. The affair therefore presented 
 a very embarrassing aspect. 
 
41 6 CHEISTIAN CIVIL EIGHTS. 
 
 At length, Garter, a district under the superiority of Schwyz 
 and Glarus, became the occasion of raising the animosity between 
 Schwyz and Zurich to a formal outbreak of hostilities. The 
 Eeformation had manifested itself in some communities of this 
 district in iconoclastic acts. The Schwyzers, accordingly, 
 menaced their subjects with war and with punishment for these 
 acts of violence, and ordered the images to be again set up, and 
 the Mass to be re-established. The menaced sought help in 
 Zurich. Zurich assured them of protection, in so far as they 
 should be assailed on the ground of their evangelical faith. 
 
 While embarrassments thus increased, and animosity between 
 the parties rose to such a pitch of violence, the friends of the Ee- 
 formation made a last attempt to settle disputes on an amicable 
 foot, and to accomplish a reconciliation with their adversaries. In 
 a diet, (21st April 1529,) which was held in Zurich without "The 
 Five Places," it was resolved to call upon these cantons, through 
 an embassage, to withdraw from their alliance with Austria, to 
 desist from persecuting the Evangelicals, and to prohibit the 
 invectives that were so shamefully uttered among their subjects 
 against the evangelical members of the Confederacy. " United 
 in one faith in Christ, our worthy ancestors maintained freedom 
 between man and man against every foe. The Evangelicals have 
 never fallen from this faith, but they wish it renewed in its 
 ancient purity and power. Why do you ally yourselves against 
 us, your old and tried Confederates, with Austria, the hereditary 
 enemy of Switzerland, and mahgn us as heretics and infidels ?" 
 The magistracies of " The Five Places" (the deputies were only 
 allowed a hearing before the Councils in Schwyz,) answered these 
 well-meant representations haughtily, and with contumelious 
 expressions. " Only no preaching," they shouted to the speaking 
 deputy in Zug. In Uri : " We might wish the new faith eternally 
 buried." In Lucerne : " Your seditious parsons undermine the 
 faith as erst in paradise the serpent swung his folds round Adam 
 and Eve. We wiU preserve our children and children's children 
 from such poison." In Stans : " We'U have nothing more to do 
 with the new sect, and sha'nt meet them at the Diet." In 
 Sarnen : " We and the other Wald towns are the true old Con- 
 federates who first took you into the union, and now, verily, you 
 mean to be our masters, and oppress us. But the Emperor, 
 
ETJPTUEE BETWEEN PEOTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 417 
 
 France, Savoy, and our lord of Musso will know to hinder you." 
 The ambassadors saw, on the house of the Town-Clerk, a great 
 gallows painted, on which the arms of Zurich, Berne, Basle, and 
 Strasburg were suspended. Thus the attempted reconciliation 
 was put away by " The Five Places," with a rude and overbear- 
 ing arrogancy, deeply wounding to the feelings of the evangelical 
 party. 
 
 It was not reverence to the faith of their forefathers, and 
 attachment to old customs, which inclined them to this course 
 of procedure, but it was the general corruption of manners in high 
 and low, engendered by the taking of pensions and donations 
 from foreign princes, and the baneful participation in mercenary 
 warfare.* It was because the preaching of the pure Word of 
 God revealed this corruption in light, and rebuked it with godly 
 seriousness ; it was because the Eeformers sought to dry up the 
 sources of it by the total prohibition of foreign pensions, and of 
 mercenary warfare ; that the leaders of the people were animated 
 with such bitter hostility to the Reformation in the old cantons. 
 
 In the opinion of the Eeformer, the Protestant towns had not 
 only the right, but the duty was imposed upon them of inter- 
 fering to prevent these crying evils, and of compelling "Tlie 
 Five Places," even with force of arms, to abolish the pensions 
 and mercenary wars, by which their native country was brought 
 to the verge of destruction, to permit within their territories the 
 free preaching of the Word of God, which is given to all men for 
 salvation, and to leave faith in the gospel unpunished. "The 
 Confederacy," he writes, " is like one town or community. Now 
 if an individual in a community in which all the citizens enjoy 
 equal liberty and equal rights, grossly sin, the others must punish 
 him for it, else they make themselves partakers of his sin, and 
 God will punish them for it as well as the offender. Since, then, 
 the procedure of "The Five Places" is so blasphemous and so 
 ruinous to the whole honourable Confederacy, we must punish 
 them for it, or we have to fear that we shall be extirpated with 
 
 * The licentiousness which then prevailed among mercenary soldiers, exercised 
 a most corruptive influence on the morals of the people, not only in Switzer- 
 land, but also in Germany. In 1551 the German states handed in a complaint 
 to Maximilian II., that the mercenaries, on returning from foreign service, were 
 guilty of the greatest enormities. 
 
 2 D 
 
418 EUPTUEE BETWEEN PEOTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 
 
 them, we, their feUow-citizens, brethren, and Confederates, being 
 guilty with them. Let it not be objected, they have their own 
 power, their own right, their own government ; away with such 
 an objection, when they employ their power in the suppression 
 of the gospel, and the maltreatment of their brethren. Of the 
 twelve tribes in Israel, each had its own princes and its own 
 rights. But when, in the tribe of Benjamin, that monstrous 
 iniquity was perpetrated on the Levite, Judges xix. xx., and this 
 tribe did not punish the evU-doers, and the other tribes were 
 remiss in interfering, God visited them all in punitive justice. 
 The army of the twelve tribes was twice beaten by the Benjamites, 
 and lost forty thousand men; it again slew five-and-twenty 
 thousand Benjamites. When rude arrogance reaches such a 
 pitch, as we see is the case in the inhabitants of ' The Five 
 Places,' it cannot be otherwise tamed but by force. By mildness 
 and indulgence, these people will just as little be amended as 
 the wolf will be hindered by the meekness of the lamb from 
 tearing it in pieces. Since they will neither repent nor obey 
 God, nor listen to His Word, but, on the contrary, punish those 
 who proclaim His Word, and those who receive it, there is no 
 other remedy but to put them right by the strong hand." 
 
 Zwingli's idea was that the evangelical towns should quickly 
 and resolutely, but according to a well-conceived plan, invade 
 the territory of the five cantons, from different quarters at once, 
 with their overwhelming force in artillery and men, so that these 
 might speedily be convinced that all resistance was useless, and 
 that it would only lead to their destruction. He thought that 
 the prohibition of foreign pensions and of mercenary warfare, as 
 well as the liberty to preach the Word of God, and to accept it 
 as the directory for faith and practice, might be gained for the 
 inhabitants of " The Five Places" by a bloodless campaign. The 
 glowing zeal which filled the Saviour of the world, when He 
 purified His Father's house from the doings of covetousness with 
 the whip of cords, inspired also the Eeformer to remove the 
 disturbers of the pure worship of God from the vaUeys of his 
 native land with force, that under the preaching of the gospel, 
 and faith in Christ, it might once more become a dwelling-place 
 for the glory of the Most High. " We have ere this helped many 
 a worldly lord to land and men. Let us now, in the name of 
 
RirPTUBE BETWEEN PROTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 419 
 
 God, help our Lord Jesus Christ to His sovereignty in our land. 
 But, take up the matter boldly and in a Christian spirit." Such 
 was his watchword. The wretched condition which a part of 
 his native country was in, where the good found no protection, 
 the bad no punishment, was intolerable to him. In this dis- 
 position of mind, he Avrote to his friends in Berne, who warned 
 him of war: "Be steadfast, and be not afraid of war; for the 
 peace which some impress upon us is war, and the war I wish is 
 peace. We thirst for no man's blood, and seek no personal 
 interest of our own; our object is to tame these upstart tyrants 
 who rise against God and suppress His Word, and to tear their 
 usurped power from their grasp. If this is not done, neither 
 evangelical truth nor her heralds and followers are safe. W^e 
 have no cruel thoughts; what we do is with a paternal and 
 benevolent purpose. We wish to save some who, led away by 
 the wicked, will perish in their ignorance. The liberty of preach- 
 ing the gospel, and of beKeving in it, I should wish -alone to 
 conquer. I pray you only put confidence in me. With God's 
 help I shall abide worthy of it." 
 
 While the contemptuous and offensive answers returned by " The 
 Five Places" excited the most indignant feelings in Zurich, events 
 immediately intervened thereon which stirred up the flame of 
 war, afready glowing strongly under the embers into a complete 
 outburst. The pastor of a congregation in Zurich, James Kaiser,* 
 called Schlossar, had received a call to the parish of Oberkirch, 
 in Garter, and intended to obey it in Martinmas 1529. Mean- 
 while, he was in the habit of repairing as often as he conveniently 
 could to Oberkirch, where the Eeform'ation had found an entrance, 
 to strengthen this congregation in the faith, by his preaching of 
 the Word. Upon one of these journeys he was suddenly fallen 
 upon in a wood near Utznach, by six men, bound and carried 
 away to Schwyz. This infamous surprise and attack on the 
 public highway were made at the orders of the Schwyzer gover- 
 nors in Utznach, in obedience to the instructions sent to all officers 
 of "The rive Places," "to take prisoners, and deliver over to the ma- 
 gistracy, aU preachers and adherents of the new doctrine." Zurich 
 
 * Kaiser was bom at Utznach. As parson in the island of Ufenau, he had 
 preached with great zeal against the images, arid thereby incurred the vehement 
 hatred of the Schwyzers. 
 
420 EUPTUEE BETWEEN PROTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 
 
 immediately sent a deputy to Schwyz, with an emphatic remon- 
 strance in favour of the guiltless preacher of the Word, and the 
 request that he should be set at liberty. Glarus, which, along 
 with Schwyz, governed the Garter lands, demanded, in accord- 
 ance with law and right, that the prisoner should be tried before 
 the courts of justice in Garter. But all intervention in behalf of 
 the unhappy prisoner was fruitless. The authorities in Schwyz 
 condemned him as a heretic to death, by fire, which he was forth- 
 with to suffer. The unfortunate witness for the truth, who, on 
 hearing the sentence of death pronounced against him, was taken 
 by surprise, exhibiting pusillanimity and weeping loudly, was 
 soon thereafter so strengthened by the grace of God that he went 
 joyfully to the stake, and praised the Lord Jesus Christ, in the 
 midst of the flames, that He had deemed him worthy of dying 
 for the sake of His holy gospel. " Tell in Zurich how he thanked 
 us," cried a Schwyz councillor with insulting brutality to trea- 
 surer Edlebach, who had brought the mediation for the unhappy 
 man. " If you had had the interests of the parsons as much at 
 heart," wrote the Schwyz Council to that of Zurich, "as you 
 describe in your letter to us, you would have kept him with you, 
 and not have left him to our people.- This would have been most 
 agreeable to us, and it would have been better for him." 
 
 Seven days after the martyrdom of this Ptotestant clergyman, 
 certain of the Eeforming party brought the intelligence to Zurich 
 from "the Free Offices" that the Unterwaldners who, on account 
 of their support of the insurgents in the Bernese upland, had 
 been excluded for the dixration of one "office" from the govern- - 
 ment of the subject-lands, were sending a party of armed men to 
 escort a governor to Baden. At the same time, they had sworn 
 " to take vengeance for the burning of the idols on the Evan- 
 gelicals." At the same moment, Zurich learned that the Austrian 
 officials, on the Swiss frontier, were enlisting men, and arming 
 for an irruption. Under the impression produced by these various 
 reports, the Zurich Council, on the 3d of June, resolved on war, 
 and proclaimed it, in the first instance, against Schwyz. " We 
 have received," wrote Zurich to Schwyz, " your haughty and con- 
 temptuous letter, and have understood it. You reproach us with 
 not keeping the treaties ; we imagine they have been better kept 
 on our part than by you. You have persecuted or delivered up 
 
EUPTUEE BETWEEN PROTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 421 
 
 to enemies, or yourselves martyred and slain, many an honest 
 man, 'because he gave God the glory, and joyfully confessed his 
 faith. You have abused, reviled, and maltreated our people who, 
 by God's grace, are pious, worthy Christians, and come of an 
 honest stock. A holy priest, resident in our town, and xinder our 
 protection, you have fallen upon outside of your jurisdiction, car- 
 ried off, and, for the Word of God's sake, and to God's high dis- 
 pleasure and contempt of us, have insolently, and in defiance of 
 law, condemned to burning. Since, therefore, we see that neither 
 law nor justice have place ainO-ng you, we resolve, for the salva- 
 tion and maintenance of Divine tmth, for His and our own 
 honour, to punish, according to the wiU of God, such arrogance, 
 violence, and evil-doing, and shall, as far as God's grace and 
 strength permit us, not only take vengeance for the same in act, 
 but we shall warn you, therefore, and will thus maintain our 
 honour. You will have it so, and have driven us to this by your 
 violent procedure." Eesolute and deliberate action on the part of 
 the Zurich government testified to the fact that they were serious 
 in this declaration of hostilities. The active force was imme- 
 diately called out, distributed and employed, according to a well- 
 conceived plan of war. Five hundred men, under Ulrich StoU, 
 marched out against " the Free Offices," and, strengthened by a 
 hundred Bremgarten burghers, occupied the cloister of Muri, in 
 order to prevent the approach of the governor from Unterwalden. 
 Four hundred men, under the command of Hans Escher, were 
 posted at the eastern end of the Lake of Zurich, to observe Schwyz, 
 the same number, under James WerdmueUer, at Eueti, with the 
 design of encouraging the Evangelicals of Toggenberg, Garter, and 
 Glarus to join them. The principal body, consisting of four 
 thousand picked warriors, fully armed, and well furnished with 
 artillery and provisions, marched, on the first intelligence that 
 "the Five Places" were arming in full force, and had written to 
 Austria, on CappeL Zwingli, armed with his halberd,* rode with 
 the main body; along with him Francis Zingg, and the Comthur 
 Schmidt, who had been appointed by the Council field preacher. 
 At the same time, Eudolf Lavater, governor of Kyburg, was 
 
 * The Swiss field-chaplains carried a weapon on service up till the most recent 
 time. Zwingli's halberd, which he had already used in the battle of Marignano, 
 had no other significance than the later side-weapon of the field preacher. 
 
422 EUPTUEE BETWEEN PKOTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 
 
 instructed to march against Wyl with five hundred men, who 
 were assigned to him for this purpose, to take prisoner the Abbot 
 of KHian,* to occupy for Zurich Thurgau and Eheinthal, and to 
 protect the frontier against Austria With such a display of cir- 
 cumspection and resolution, the Zurich Council acted quite in the 
 sense of Zwingli, who, in all likeliliood, had drawn out the plan 
 of war. -f 
 
 Zurich justified these steps in a document which it caused to 
 be printed. It is said in this, among other things : " It is weU 
 known to all, how ' The Five Places' have for years insulted, reviled, 
 despised, injured, oppressed, and attacked us in many respects. 
 Yet we have considered what the Lord Jesus Christ suffered for 
 our sakes, and for God's glory have patiently borne and submitted 
 to these, in the hope that an amendment might take place. 
 Measures being now, however, so plainly taken for the suppres- 
 sion of the gospel, we will rather suffer death itself than allow a 
 course of procedure so shamefiil before God and all the world to 
 continue." After recounting their grievances, they solemnly deny 
 that they have taken up arms to rob, to burn, or to shed blood, 
 but to punish the authors of the disorders and violence com- 
 plained of in " The Five Places." " If, however, we be met with 
 opposition, we shall, with the help of Almighty God, stake our 
 all upon it, and shall shew to the present and future times what 
 it is to break good faith and solemn treaties, and that the highest 
 God's service is to live a godly life, and to protect justice between 
 man and man, with self-sacrifice. May the gracious Lord over- 
 rule all, for whose glory we expose ourselves to these dangers 
 and costs, in the hope that He will defend his own people, with 
 His power and favour, as in the days of old." 
 
 Courage, resolution, and a joyful readiness to shed their blood 
 in the defence of evangelic truth and Christian order in their 
 
 * The Abbot Kilian received intelligence of this design against him, and fled 
 in all haste to Suabia. 
 
 t We have yet two plans of war from Zwlngli's pen, which testify his accurate 
 knowledge of the military tactics of the period, as well as that his object was to 
 bring about, by a rapid and general development of all the forces at command, 
 as speedy and bloodless a decision as possible. "When, however, nothing 
 remains but to fight gallantly, or to deny God and His Word, let the good town 
 of Zurich rather lose money, blood, life, than apostatise from acknowledged 
 truth." 
 
RUPTURE BETWEEN PROTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 423 
 
 native land, filled the breasts of the Zurich warriors. On the 
 evening of the 9th of June, they encamped near Cappel, and sent 
 the next morning their declaration of war to the army of " The 
 Five Places" assembled at Zug. This declaration, as weU as the 
 report of the setting out of the Zurich host, had caused, ia inner 
 Switzerland, the men capable of bearing arms to be summoned 
 to their standards. Zug, which saw itself first threatened, 
 anxiously begged for help from the other places. Volunteers 
 hasted thither first of all, then followed the banners of Schwyz, 
 Uri, and Unterwalden. Lucerne had marched against " the Free 
 Offices." Zurich wished the war begun immediately on its de- 
 claration. Close after the departure of the trumpeter with the 
 declaration, William Toenig, leader of the vanguard, marshalled 
 his men for attack, and was on the point of leadiag them across 
 the boundary, when the Landamman ^bli of Glarus, rode 
 from Baar up the hiU, and pressingly begged a hearing before 
 they advanced farther. A halt was ordered, and the leaders 
 approached the Amman to learn his request. " The Five Places," 
 said he, " are armed ; but it is a misery to them that blood is 
 about to be shed. I entreat you for a delay of a few hours, for I 
 know that the messengers of our Confederates are set out from 
 all quarters to negotiate a piece. Is a peace, by which one can 
 live accordiug to the gospel, not possible between those who have 
 often stood man to man against the common foe ? Honoxuable 
 dear lords of Zurich, for God's sake prevent the division and 
 ruin of the Confederacy." ^bU's speech, and the respect ia 
 which he was held by many, as a friend of the gospel, and an 
 enemy of mercenaryism, had the effect of inducing the leaders to 
 despatch couriers to Zuiich for instructions as to how they should 
 act. But ZwingLL went up to -^bH, with the words, " Godfather 
 Amman,* you will have to give answer to God for this mediar 
 tioiL Because the enemy are in our power and unarmed, they 
 give us fair words. You believe them and mediate. Afterwards, 
 when they are armed, they wiU not spare us, and then there will 
 
 * While parson of Glanie, Zwingli had become god-father of the Landam- 
 man. At this time, probably, the custom which still exists in Graubund was 
 generally prevalent in Switzerland, of the pastor's being god-father to the 
 parents of all the children he baptises ; for Zwingli had in Zurich many god- 
 fathers in families in which he could hardly have stood as god-father in baptism. 
 
424 EUPTUEE BETWEEN PEOTESTANTS AND PAPISTS, 
 
 be none to mediate." The Landamman replied : " My dear God- 
 father, I trust in God that good will come of it; let us act 
 always for the best." 
 
 The position which Berne and some of the other allies of 
 Zurich took up in this campaign, exercised, for the progress and 
 result of the mediation, an influence important indeed, but alto- 
 gether paralysing as to any thorough and honourable settlement 
 of affairs. The Eeformation had, in Berne, among the nobility, 
 and in isolated districts among the country people, still many 
 concealed enemies, who made their influence even- secretly felt 
 in the Council. " We are," Haller wrote to Zwingli, " in our 
 government as rotten as ever, and it is much to be feared that 
 in the new election to the Great and Little Councils just 
 approaching those who have shewn themselves hostile to the 
 Word of God will all come to the surface of the water again. 
 Think of us only as if we could effect no good." Thus it hap- 
 pened that the usually so belligerent Berne sent one message of 
 peace after another to Zurich; nay, went so far as to inculcate 
 upon this state the lesson that " faith is not to be implanted by 
 spears and halberds."* When Zurich had at length resolved on 
 war, called upon the allies for aid, and Treasurer Edlebach, in 
 commission of his government, had requested the Bernese depu- 
 ties in Lenzburg to give orders for their force to advance into 
 " the Free Offices," and join the Zurich host, under Ulrich Stoll, 
 they replied, " They had no instructions as to marching either to 
 Zurich or Muri. If the Zurichers had begun the war without 
 them, they might finish it without them." Upon another press- 
 ing summons which Zurich made in writing, and sent by depu- 
 ties to Berne, the Great Council of the canton gave the follow- 
 ing answer: " We pray, we remind and exhort you, that you do 
 not overstep, with your host and banner, the boundaries of your 
 own territory, and that you attack none. If you yourselves be 
 first attacked, or are injured either in land or people, we shall not 
 abandon you. We have in haste called a Diet of all the Con- 
 federates to meet at Aarau. If ' The Five Places' give satisfac- 
 tion for libels and vituperations, renounce the alliance with 
 
 » Just as this observation in itself is, it did not come well from the mouth of 
 the Bernese government of the time, who had paid very little attention to it, at 
 the introduction of the Keformation in their own territorv, and in Wadtland. 
 
KUPTURE BETWEEN PROTESTANTS AND PAPISTS, 425 
 
 Austria, and punisli Dr. Murner, we are inclined to peace. 
 If you, however, or ' the Five Places,' do not hold yourselves 
 as we do, we shall apply force to you and them." With this 
 object Berne enrolled 5000 men, and sent them, under Mayor 
 von Diessbach, an enemy of Manuel's,* to Aarau and Lenz- 
 burg. They were joined by the auxiliaries sought by Zurich 
 from Basle, Muehlhausen, and Biel, while the Glarners occupied 
 Garterland, and declared themselves neutral Three hundred 
 well armed men from St. Gall, and twelve hundred Thurgauers 
 marched to Cappel to strengthen the Zurichers. On the other 
 hand, two thousand Wallisers had marched to the aid of " The 
 Five Places." Upon the whole the warlike force which took 
 the field on both sides is given at 30,000 men. 
 
 As Landamman ^bH predicted, negotiators of peace soon 
 arrived in Zurich from AppenzeU, Graubund, Freiburg, and Solo- 
 thurn. Even from Strasburg the town-sheriff, James Sturm, came, 
 not alone as a messenger of peace, but also in the name of his 
 native city, bringing the grateful intelligence to the Zurichers, 
 " that the inhabitants of Strasburg will not suffer them to want 
 either for money or com, and, in case of need, would stand by 
 them with their property and lives to the last." The Council of 
 Zurich answered the assembled host of warriors at Cappel, in 
 reply to their question how they were to act in respect of ^bli's 
 request, by praying them in the meantime to suspend all hostili- 
 ties, and not to cross the frontier. " The deputies," the Council 
 wrote, " will be sent to the Diet for negotiating peace, because we 
 entertain good hopes that through the mediation of pious and 
 upright men, an honourable and godly peace will be concluded. 
 The decision, however, rests with the army, for according to 
 ancient practice Zurich is there where her banner waves." For 
 this reason the Council requested the army to forward their far- 
 ther resolutions to the Zurich deputies at the Diet in Aarau. 
 Zwingli, who, in the event of any fatality to himself, had com- 
 mitted to writing a statement of the object of the war, which he 
 intrusted to confidential men, prescribed, in name of the army, 
 
 * Nicolas Manuel deserved well of the Reformation in Berne, for his great 
 merits as a satyrical poet. See "Nicolas Manuel. Life and Works of a 
 Painter, Poet, Warrior, Statesman, and Reformer of the Sixteenth Century, 
 communicated by Grueneisen." Stuttgart, 1837. 
 
426 BUPTUEE BETWEEN PROTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 
 
 the following conditions of peace: " 1. That the Word of God of 
 the Old and New Testaments be allowed to be freely preached 
 through the whole Confederacy, and that all alliances concluded 
 against it be dissolved, and declared null and void; on the other 
 hand, that none be compelled to abolish the Mass, images, and 
 other ceremonies ; for the Word of God will undoubtedly blow 
 away such dust. 2. That through the whole Confederacy the 
 receipt of pensions,* hires, and donations from foreign masters be 
 forbidden, and that all bind themselves to the observance of this 
 prohibition by oath. 3. That the authors of the pension system, 
 and the distributors of annuities or donatives in ' the Five Places,' 
 be punished in person and property, on the ground that they are 
 the originators of the present dissensions. 4. That 'the Five 
 Places' bear the expenses of the war, and that Schwyz in par- 
 ticular pay down one thousand florins to the children of the mar- 
 tyred Kaiser." In his letter to the Zurich Council, with which 
 Zwingli accompanied these conditions of peace, approved by the 
 War Congregation, the Eeformer thus expresses himself : " I am 
 extremely anxious that the proposals in question may not be 
 treated with levity or with carelessness. : In or^er in some mea- 
 sure to meet the growing corruption of the times, and to hold 
 the godly and believing people to the Word of God, I have been 
 compelled, both by word and deed, to press for decisive measures, 
 but I expressed to the Council that when I began to be warlike 
 in my sermons they might be pleased to give no heed to it, for 
 my wish neither was war nor bloodshed, but the suppression 
 of the pensions, and of all injustice. Now, however, that it has 
 come, in the course of God's providence, to an outbreat, I trust 
 in God that it wiH fall out to His own glory, and to the honour 
 of Zurich. I only fear that you may be deceived by the apolo- 
 
 * The pensions were, in the then Swiss relations, nothing else but the Judas- 
 pay with which neighbouring princes rewarded, under this name, influential men 
 for the game of treachery they played against the interests of their country. 
 To what a frightful pitch this mischief had reached appears from a rerelation 
 made by the French ambassador in Switzerland. His king had sent to this 
 country, from 1512 to 1531, 1,135,547 crowns of gold, to be applied alone in 
 pensions, a sum which, in the present relations of money, may be quadrupled. 
 As the preaching of the gospel had of necessity to combat this atrocious system, 
 all the pensioners were enemies of it. "All," says' Zwingli, " but pensioners 
 are willing that the Word of God should be preached." 
 
EUPTUEE BETWEEN PEOTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 427 
 
 getic words and flatteries of our enemies, and induced to enter 
 into a peace worse than war itself. When I press for harsh mea^ 
 sures, I do it solely to terrify the pensioners, that they may the 
 sooner yield, otherwise I am very well disposed to a clemency 
 which is with God, as I hope you are well aware. Wherefore, 
 dear gracious lords, be courageous and firm, and so we shall, with 
 God's help, lift the waggon out of the ditch. Our Confederates of 
 Berne are faithful to the principle of freedom in matters of faith, 
 and insist that the alliance with Austria be broken off. Let us 
 therefore boldly combat the pensioners, and we shall thus 
 arrive at unity of faith and govenoment, and shall have waged a 
 better war than ever was waged. Entertain no anxiety on our 
 account, for our men are obedient and well-behaved, friendly and 
 faithful to one another. Some " black horses," indeed, are an 
 exception, for they are as black here as in Zurich. Yet they 
 shall, by God's grace, nowhere drag the waggon but where the 
 honour and weal of the town of Zurich demand it. Therefore, 
 let us occupy here our threatening warlike position, but be ye 
 wise, brave, and steadfast, and so we shall, with God's help, 
 attain to unity, and conclude an honourable peace. I hope God 
 will once more set up our Confederacy, and this He wiU. do if 
 you only maintain a resolute attitude against the pensions, for 
 you see how the gospel is gaining the upper hand everywhere, 
 but the pensions destroy everything. Wherefore be a wall of 
 brass against this corruption." He communicated to the leaders 
 of the different companies instructions how to act in particular 
 circumstances which might arise, with the same clear and com- 
 prehensive glance, and in the same cautious spirit with which 
 he pointed out to the Council its procedure, while the ardent 
 zeal of an apostle glowed within his bosom. The extension of 
 the gospel, and the implantation and cultivation of Christian 
 morality and discipline were the objects of his heart's desire. 
 Whoever knows the fidelity with which Zwingli devoted his 
 great intellectual powers and rich acquirements to the service of 
 his Lord, will not blame him that he attempted too much, or 
 more than a single man was able to" perform. They will rather 
 admire in him the divine wisdom, uniting in one man varied and 
 lofty gifts for great and glorious purposes, just as on the same 
 
428 EUPTUEE BETWEEN PROTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 
 
 Swiss mountain, whose summit is clothed with perpetual snow, 
 we see the vine blossoms Mowing and the fiery wine ripening. 
 
 The business of peace was introduced at the Diet in Aarau 
 with an extension of the truce. The deputies of "The Five 
 Places" replied to Zurich's grievances with whining complaints, 
 that they were the innocent victims of persecution, who had been 
 attacked contrary to all right. Once more Zwingli wrote to the 
 Council : " I note well how matters stand. Now they make few 
 speeches, pray and beg, for none can do these things better than 
 such people. Let us only quit the field, however, and in one 
 short month they wiU return and attack us. Act with vigour, 
 I beseech you, in the first instance, do not throw away our advan- 
 tages, and accept only an honourable peace, and one that will be 
 fruitful of good results. For God's sake do something brave. 
 By my life I will not mislead you, nor yield an inch myself." 
 As the decision lay with the army, the umpires, to be nearer the 
 camps, removed to Steinhausen in the canton of Zug. Here the 
 negotiations were resumed and continued. 
 
 The army throughout its several companies was favourable to 
 peace, on the conditions set down by Zwingli. In the camp of 
 the Zurichers, the greatest order prevailed. Zwingli preached 
 every day, or if not, Comthur Schmidt, or Francis Zingg, or 
 another clergyman. There was prayer both before and after 
 meals. Not a curse nor a quarrel was to be heard in the camp. 
 Strumpets, who at this time followed the armies in shoals, were 
 sent away as soon as they shewed themselves. There were no 
 dice, cards, nor any games which might occasion wrangling; but 
 national songs were sung, and the men exercised themselves in 
 leaping and putting the stone. Zwingli's spirit governed the 
 whole host, and all were animated with the desire (uni-fervent, as 
 Berhard Weiss expresses himself,) to overcome and put down 
 the pensioners, who had brought such mischiefs to their country. 
 The Bernese warriors also participated in the wish that .an end 
 might be put to the nuisance of pensions : " Let any one consult 
 your army," said Zwingli to a Bernese ofiicer, "I know that 
 your people as well as ours abhor the pensioning." Even in the 
 camp of " The Five Places," Landamman .^bli was often applied 
 to and in private, by the common soldiers, to get prohibition of 
 the pensions made an article of the peace, for many were dis- 
 
EUPTUEE BETWEEN PEOTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 429 
 
 gusted at the overbearing manners of these upstarts, who so 
 quickly enriched themselves at the expense of the common weal. 
 Nor was there any animosity against the Zurichers here amongst 
 the common men. They were in great want, while the latter had 
 everything in abundance. Once, accordingly, a party of them 
 crossed their outposts, that they might be taken prisoners by the 
 Zurichers. They were taken, carried before a captain, liberally 
 supplied with bread, and ordered to repass the frontier. One 
 day some men from Waldstadt brought a vessel of milk, and 
 placed it on the boundary line, calling out to the Zurichers : 
 " "We have good milk here, but nothing to break into it." The 
 latter then brought some bread, and so the soldiers of the two 
 hosts eat, laughing to each other, out of the same pail. On one 
 happening to take a piece of bread lying by his opponent, the 
 other usually struck him, jocularly, with his spoon, saying: 
 "You dare not cross the boundary." The Town-Sheriff, James 
 Sturm, of Strasburg, who was standing by, and a witness of the 
 scene, said : " You Swiss are a strange people ; although you are 
 by the ears, you cannot forget your old friendship, and become 
 speedily the best of friends." 
 
 In this disposition of the warriors of both armies, there seemed 
 every prospect of negotiating an honourable peace, such as 
 Zwingli with all his heart desired. The majority of the captains, 
 however, and leaders, were animated with quite another spirit. 
 Especially in respect of the pensions, they were desirous of a 
 very different issue to the negotiations. In the Zurich camp 
 itself, there were some of the leaders, (Zwingli calls them " the 
 black horses,") who having enriched themselves by princely 
 largesses, ardently desired the removal in Zurich of the prohibi- 
 tion against the pensions also ; held in check by Zwingli's power- 
 ful influence, they were, however, obliged, for the present, to 
 desist from their schemes. But matters wore a worse aspect 
 among the Bernese in reference to this point, so that even 
 Mcolas Manuel was forced to declare, at a meeting of the Zurich 
 captains, that for Zwingli's demand, " abolition of the pensions 
 by ' the Five Places,' " no support could be expected from Berne. 
 On the other hand, the leaders of the troops of " The Five Places" 
 found aU the greater support amongst their partisans in the 
 Zurich and Bernese camps. " It was generally known," says 
 
430 RUPTURE BETWEEN PROTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 
 
 Bullinger, " that the pensioners defended one another with zeal,, 
 and had rather seen the whole country brought to the verge of 
 ruin than that a hair on the head of one of their party had been 
 touched." This firmly united party sought, by every means of 
 secret intrigue and base calumny, to undermine Zwingli's repu- 
 tation, and to weaken his influence. " Treachery surrounds me 
 on every side," writes the Eeformer to Ambrosius Blaarer, " and 
 if I escape it now, I have alone to thank the Almighty for my 
 preservation, for all the wicked have conspired against me." He 
 gives expression to his cares and the wishes of his heart in the 
 following hymn, which he then composed : — 
 
 " Lord raise the car 
 From out the ditch of war ; 
 Or hlack as night 
 Will be our plight. 
 Our evils flow 
 From those that sow 
 
 Base treachery; 
 Who Thee despise, 
 And 'gainst Thee rise 
 Insolently. 
 
 " Lord shake off those 
 That are Thy foes; 
 But Thine own sheep, 
 Guide Thou from off the steep 
 
 To pastTires wide; 
 Within Thy fold may they abide, 
 Who Thy laws keep. 
 
 " Ordain that wrath 
 No longer burn; 
 That we to truth's old path 
 Again return. 
 
 These armies then shall raise 
 United praise, 
 And ever sing 
 To Thee Eternal King." 
 
 It has been erroneously stated by some of Zwingli's biographers, 
 that the Eeformer composed this hymn after the peace of Cappel. 
 BuILinger distinctly mentions that it was composed while the 
 negotiations were going on. He set the hymn to music, as well 
 as those we have already communicated; and it was sung and 
 played in princely courts, and in towns far and near. 
 
EUPTUKE BBTWEEK PROTESTANTS AND PAPISTS. 431 
 
 The unwearied efforts of the negotiators were crowned with 
 success ; and a treaty of peace was drawn up, which was accepted 
 and signed hy the leaders of tlie army, on the 24th of J6ne 1580. 
 The chief points in it were : " As faith cannot be implanted by 
 force, no compulsion shall be exercised against ' The Five Places' 
 and their people in this respect. Neither party shall attack or 
 punish the other on account of their faith. In the common lord- 
 ships, those who abolished the Mass, removed or burned the images, 
 shall not be punished. In future, the majority shall decide as to 
 the abolition or retention of the Mass, and other rites. There 
 shall be no insolent individuals sent, none but men of honour 
 and integrity shall be into these lordships. The alliance with 
 Austria having been concluded solely on the ground of religion, 
 it shall be dissolved, and the papers cancelled. AU maledictions 
 and invectives on either side are forbidden, and will be punished. 
 ' The Five Places' pay the war-costs, according to an estimate to 
 be made by the negotiators, and Schwyz gives a compensation to 
 the children of Kaiser, the pastor who was burned. If ' The Five 
 Places refuse to pay the war-expenses, the towns may close their 
 markets against them. It is recommended to ' The Five Places' 
 to abolish the pensions and mercenary service." 
 
 The impression made upon the two parties by this peace was 
 very different. Berne hailed it with enthusiastic acclamations, 
 and Zurich, too, celebrated its festivities of joy, as the army 
 returned within the walls of the town, without having shed a 
 drop of blood; "The Five Places" quitted the field, embittered, 
 and in no respect improved. Zwingli was not unconscious of 
 the important results obtained by the bloodless campaign. In 
 this sense, he wrote to Conrad Sam, pastor at Ulm, SOth June : 
 " We have brought home with us a peace, which is, as I hope, 
 honourable ; for we have not marched out to shed blood. Not- 
 withstanding, we have sent our adversaries home with a wet 
 cloth about them. First of all, let me tell you that their letter 
 of alliance with Austria was cut in pieces before my eyes by 
 Landammann AeblL Greet for me all believers. God has again 
 shown tliat the lofty ones of this earth can accomplish nothing 
 against Him." Another feeling, however, oppressed him, when 
 he thought of the intrigues and profligacy of the pensioners, 
 which had made themselves felt in an important degree in this 
 
432 EEFOEMING LABOURS IN HIS LATTBE YEAES. 
 
 expedition. " He was wont," as Myconius informs us, to say, 
 " he had encountered in this campaign more baseness of heart 
 and intriguing than he had ever met with in his personal 
 experience during his whole life, or had ever read of" In his 
 eyes, it appeared that to have roused these wicked and profligate 
 men without taking from them their sting, was a signal blunder 
 which Zurich would yet bitterly bewail. Looking at the peace 
 from this point of view, he expressed himself thus in one of his 
 sermons : " The peace of Cappel will have this result, that we 
 shall not long have to fold our hands idly over our heads." 
 
 3. ZWINGLl'S EeFOEMING LaBOTTES in the LATTEE YEAES OF 
 
 HIS Life. 
 
 Much as the cause of civil liberty, and a better ordering of the 
 social relations of his native country, occupied Zwingli in the 
 later years of his life, he yet never for a moment lost sight of the 
 grand work he had to perform, as minister of the gospel, and 
 theologian. Were we only acquainted with the fact that, from 
 1529 till the summer of 1531, he composed and published his 
 two Commentaries on the Prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, his 
 profound Treatise on the Providence of God, and the two Confes- 
 sions of Faith, addressed to Charles V. and Francis I., we should 
 have every reason to admire his zeal and faithfulness in the study 
 of the sacred record, in unfolding the Divine truths contained 
 within its pages, and pressing them on the heart and conscience 
 of the church and the world. But we know also that he never 
 ceased his activity, up to the last hours of his life, in the spread 
 of the Eeformation to distant lands, and in the introduction and 
 administration of evangelical order and discipline within the 
 Eeformed Church of his own. From Zurich as a centre the gos- 
 pel continued to add to the number of its adherents, especially 
 after freedom of conscience had been guaranteed by the peace of 
 CappeL In the wealthy cloister of Wettingen on the Limmat, 
 which, on account of its vicinity to Zurich, lay more than any 
 other within the influence of the powerful current of the Eefor- 
 mation, the Abbot George Mueller, and the whole cloister, with 
 the exception of two monks, proclaimed their acceptance of the 
 
EEPORMING LABOUES IN HIS LATTEE YEAES. 433 
 
 gospel. They shaved one the other their beards, changed the 
 dress of their order for the costume of the country, listened 
 devoutly to the sermons which Sebastian Bertli of Zurich delivered 
 to them, and shortly thereafter they proclaimed the gospel them- 
 selves, and sang German Psalms. The cloister ceased to be a 
 house of gambling, drunkenness, and debauchery; it was soon 
 after turned into a school. The Comthur, Albrecht von Muelinen, 
 in Hitzkirch, mentions to Zwingli, on the 3d August, that the 
 good people there had resolved a second time, with a majority, 
 that they would alone hear the preaching of the pure Word of 
 God, of the Old and New Testaments, without any addition, and 
 begged the Eeformer to send them an evangelical preacher. Here 
 likewise the Eeformation found an entrance in spite of the threats 
 of Lucerne. In the Italian Provinces also, beyond the Alps, a 
 better day appeared to be dawning since 1 530. James Werd- 
 mueller was sent by the government of Zurich, in the exercise of 
 their rights, as governor to Locarno, with instructions " to act in 
 a Christian spirit, and, in regard to the Word of God, to observe 
 the orders given." He found a Carmelite monk in Locarno, who 
 read much in the New Testament, and who from henceforth 
 resolved only to preach from Paul's Epistles. Werdmueller put 
 Zwingli's writings into his hands, and had reason to hope that, 
 with the aid of this monk, he would gain the whole bailhwick 
 to the gospel. A Papistical historian of the time describes the 
 activity of Zwingli and his friends in the following words : " A set 
 of wretched disturbers of the peace burst into the Five cantons, 
 and murdered souls, by spreading abroad their songs, tracts, and 
 little testaments, telling the people they might learn the truth 
 itself from these, and one did not require any more to believe 
 what the priests said." 
 
 Some scattered signs, favourable to the Eeformation among the 
 people of " The FivePlaces," induced Zwingli once more to make 
 a resolute attack upon the stronghold of the Papacy in old Swit- 
 zerland, and, if possible, to carry evangelical truth here to victory. 
 To this end the principal ministers of Zurich, Berne, Basle, and 
 Strasburg, assembled in Zwingli's house, at Zurich, on the 5th 
 September 1530, and resolved to address a letter, drawn up by 
 Zwingli, and signed by all present, to aU the Councils and con- 
 gregations in question, in which, among other things, it is said : 
 
 2 E 
 
484 REFORMING LABOURS IN HIS LATTER YEARS. 
 
 " You know, pious, gracious, and dear sirs, how, by union, small 
 things become great, and how, by dissension, all things go to 
 wreck and ruin. Discord and strife arise from selfishness, which 
 itself is a native propensity of the human heart, and which is only 
 .then extinguished within us, when God, by His Word and Spirit, 
 implants in our souls love to the commonwealth. Therefore, 
 ;gracious and dearly beloved sirs, despise not our petition, but let 
 the Word of God be freely preached among you, and let God 
 walk among you. Your godly ancestors have never set them- 
 selves above the Word of God, nor forbidden their pastors to 
 preach the same,, nor commanded them to teach to the people the 
 Popish inventions of purgatory, image- worship, and absolution, 
 as is now done. By these means, however, poor souls are turned 
 from the true well of salvation, from the living God, and from 
 the mercy vouchsafed to us in Christ, to a service highly displeas- 
 ing to God, and to hopes that afford us no comfort in the hour of 
 trial ! then, let the Word of God be freely preached, and 
 direct your walk and conversation according to its Divine pre- 
 cepts, as your forefathers have done ; then will union and strength 
 flourish again amongst us. Two drops of silver unite as soon as 
 that which separates them is removed. Eemove you too, then, 
 that which divides us and our towns, namely, the prohibition of 
 God's Holy Word ; then the Almighty will make us one as our 
 fathers were one. Then your native country will be as of yore, an 
 asylum for all the persecuted saints, and, when you have finished 
 your journey through this vale of tears, a terror to evil-doers, but 
 the hope of believers, you will receive the crown of everlasting 
 joy as your portion. Herewith we commend you to God, and 
 may He be pleased, ever more and more, to make His will known 
 to us, and conform us to it." This letter, although it was read to 
 the deputies of " The Five Places," at a Diet in Baden, remained, 
 like many a former attempt, destitute of all result. 
 
 With the same apostolic zeal with which our Reformer laboured 
 for the wider extension of evangelic truth, he directed his efforts 
 to the erection of Synodal assemblies, which he himself attended, 
 for the farther development and regulation of the new church. 
 Towards the end of autumn 1529, a meeting of five hundred 
 clergymen took place at Frauenfeld, at which individual clergy- 
 men were subjected by Zwingli to a strict examination into their 
 
EEFOEMING LABOURS IN HIS LATTER YEARS. 435 
 
 walk and conversation, in order, by a majority of the Synod, to 
 remove unworthy or iacapahle pastors, who, for the most part, 
 had got in through the Papistical Church, and to put tried men 
 in their places. The Eeformer returned to Zurich over Constance 
 and Steine on the Ehine, at both which places he preached. A 
 second Synod, which met likewise at Frauenfeld, on the l7th 
 May 1530, was held, with the object of securing to the ministers 
 fixed and competent salaries, as had already been done in Zurich. 
 On the 18th December 1530, the Eeformer attended a Sjmod at 
 St. Gall, over whose deliberations he had been called upon to 
 preside. Here the matter of church-discipline and excommunica- 
 tion came to a discussion, in which Zwingli's principles, as they 
 have been already detailed by us, gained the supremacy, the 
 Christian magistracy being exhorted to punish vice, and to remove 
 scandals. For Thurgau, where, as we know, governors from " The 
 Five Places" alternately exercised the supreme power, twelve 
 superintendents were named, who, as a highest court of morals, 
 were appointed and authorised to punish sins and crimes that 
 caused scandal, and gave public offence. At St. Gall, too, Zwin- 
 gU preached in the Cathedral to a very numerous congregation. 
 The people afterwards collected under his windows, and, by sing- 
 ing and instrumental music, testified -their love and esteem for 
 him. In April 1531, ZwingH received a call to his native vale 
 of Toggenbuig, there, at a Synod in Lichtensteig, also to prove 
 and arrange ecclesiastical matters. In his native valley, as every- 
 where else, he was greeted with a reception full at once of hearti- 
 ness, enthusiasm, and veneration. 
 
 In Zurich, Zwingli's Eeforming labours were specially directed, 
 in the latter years of his life, to a transformation of social relations 
 to a conformity with the demands of God's Word. The Council 
 also deciding in ecclesiastical matters, justice required that no 
 enemy of the Church of Christ should hold the of&ce of Council- 
 lor. There being, however, declared enemies of the Eeformation 
 in this body, ZwingU seized the opportunity of a sermon, which 
 he preached on the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah, of urging the 
 necessity for the removal of unbelieving members from the Coun- 
 cil The effect of this sermon was, that, first of all, the members 
 of the Great Council had to make a declaration of their faith 
 before the guilds, and to give a promise of attendance on the 
 preaching of the Word, and participation in the Sacrament, 
 
436 RBFOEMING LABOURS IN HIS LATTER YEARS. 
 
 according to the evangelical mode of dispensation ; next, that the 
 Little Council had to exercise the like personal discipline over its 
 members. Councillors who refused to tender the above promise 
 were excluded from office, while, from the nobility to which the 
 greater number of members hostile to the Eeformation belonged, 
 the privilege was withdrawn of electing from its body a larger 
 number of Councillors than another guild. These measures were 
 directed chiefly against the aristocracy of the town; the burghers, 
 however, were also made to feel, under ZwingH's influence, the 
 effects of the gospel in checking abuses. In 1530, a great scarcity 
 prevailed in Zurich, and in the whole of Switzerland. At this time 
 the inhabitants of Strasburg gave a fine testimony of their Chris- 
 tian sympathy with this town, by sending a considerable present 
 of corn, by which cheap bread was obtained for many of the poor. 
 The bakers and millers presented a very unfortunate contrast to 
 this generous liberality of strangers. They made use of the 
 scarcity to enrich themselves by shortening the weight, and 
 thereby gave occasion to a general complaint among the citizens. 
 Zwingli, in whose eye avarice and usury were the most hateful 
 vices, zealously bestirred himself against this robbery, and called 
 upon the Council to put an end to it. The Council immediately 
 took the necessary steps to check it; they opened several of the 
 public granaries, and from this time forward corn was ground, and 
 bread baked, under its of&cial superintendence. Frauds by mil- 
 lers and bakers were rigorously punished by imprisonment, or 
 heavy fines. Usury was visited with stiU greater severity. Squire 
 Conrad von Euemlang, who had been on several occasions con- 
 victed of this offence, was condemned to death, and beheaded. 
 
 The serious and earnest spirit in which Zwingli impressed 
 upon the magistracy the duty of punishing dishonesty and usury, 
 reminds us of Peter's zeal against Ananias. Necessary, however, 
 as this severity was for the protectioyn of Christian order in the 
 State, it did not fail to draw after it much hatred and crimina- 
 tion of the Eeformer ; for Bullinger observes, " that, from time 
 immemorial, the preachers of the Word of God who reprove 
 injustice have been more hated and blamed than those who com- 
 mit injustice." We shall soon see the bitter fruits of that enmity 
 and hatred which ZwingU earned for his Christian faithfulness 
 and love, by taking up the thread of the narrative at another 
 point, and carrying it forward to its sad close. 
 
ORIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAR. 437 
 
 4. Origin and Close of the Second Cappel War; Zwingli's 
 
 Death. 
 
 Zwingli's gloomy forebodings as to the consequences of the 
 peace concluded at Cappel soon proved to be but too well 
 founded. "The five Places" had left the field with animosity 
 burning in their bosoms, and renewed in their own homes the 
 oath to continue steadfast to the faith of their fathers, and 
 to visit apostasy from it with vengeance. The interpretation 
 they gave to the treaty of peace was directly the reverse of that 
 put upon it by the evangelical towns. Holding resolutely to the 
 article, that none should compel them to abandon their faith, they, 
 on their part, refused to grant, the same freedom to the Evange- 
 licals. In the common lordships, the majority of the reigning 
 places should, iu their view, decide also in questions of faith, and 
 not the majority of the burghers of each commune, as the evan- 
 gelical towns with right demanded. In respect of the war- 
 expenses, which "The Five Places" were to repay to the evan- 
 gelical towns, differences of opinion prevailing, the men who had 
 negotiated and drawn out the treaty of peace were called together 
 to decide both questions in dispute. Berne desired that the war- 
 expenses should be first settled; Zurich, that religious liberty 
 should be first of all secured. " We hold," said the Zurich depu- 
 ties, according to the instructions given them, " that the honour 
 of God and the gospel should be first of all cared for, and that 
 the article regarding liberty of faith, for the sake of the poor pri- 
 soners, whom we ought, from Christian brotherly love, to rescue, 
 should be carried out ia all its extent, and with aU our power, 
 and that, in reference to the costs, we should shew ourselves 
 more conceding, that it may be seen we are not seeking our own 
 interests, but the glory of God first of all." Berne now joining 
 in the demand made by Zurich that the Word of God must also 
 be permitted to be freely preached and read in the territory of "The 
 Five Places," the Landamman at Baechi, in Schwyz, declared : 
 " They would so hold themselves, in respect of the Word of God, 
 and other things, that the towns should be perfectly satisfied ; 
 only that no farther demands were to be made upon them than 
 
438 ORIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAR. 
 
 the present one in respect of the faith." The umpires held to- 
 this declaration, and expressed their hope " that ' The Five Places' 
 woidd come up to it, and satisfy justice, and so act as itheseemed 
 pious, honourable, and God-fearing men to act." In the event, 
 however, of this not being done, the towns would he justified in 
 closing their markets against them, and in shutting out all sup- 
 plies of provisions. 
 
 The Landamman of Baechi had, indeed, expressed the sen- 
 timents of many upright men in " The Five Places," but in the 
 communes, and otherwise in public, men of another stamp took 
 the lead. The profligate pensioners, with a host of savage and 
 corrupt mercenaries at their backs, succeeded everywhere by 
 bullying and force in carrying out their objects. Thus it was 
 resolved at Schwyz, August 1529, at a public meeting, presided 
 over by Landamman Eychmuth,* that every one might insult the 
 Evangelicals at pleasure, and trick themselves out with fir-boughg, 
 (the sign of a challenge). The same party had the ascendancy 
 in Zug, Lucerne, and XJnterwalden. They continued, in spite of 
 the articles of the treaty, to pour forth against the Evangelicals, 
 but especially against Zwingli, and the people of Zurich, a torrent 
 of invectives and abusive libels, such as only the vilest and most 
 corrupt minds could invent and utter, nay, they even proceeded 
 to acts of violence, so that the few families in Schwyz and Zug 
 that were devoted to the Eeformation, were forced to leave these 
 cantons. These proceedings were, indeed, disapproved of by 
 many in " The Five Places," as a declaration of the deputies of 
 Uri, at a separate Diet, held in Brunnen, proves, when they say : 
 "That in many places improper language, has been held, and 
 party badges carried, all which things are dangerous to the peace 
 of the land. If war should arise from such doings, their help 
 could not be counted on;" but this remonstrance produced no 
 improvement. 
 
 The party of the mercenaries in " The Five Places" entertained 
 fresh hopes from the Diet, to be held by Charles Y., at Augsburg, 
 in the summer of 1530. They accordingly despatched an 
 
 * Rychmuth was also one of those upstarts enriched hy pensions. The well- 
 known Cardinal Schinuer used to say, punning on his name: " I found him poor 
 in spirit, and made him rich in spirit, but the King of France made him proud 
 in spirit." 
 
ORIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAR. 439 
 
 embassage thither, which made its appearance at the Diet with 
 great pomp, and was received by Charles with marked distinc- 
 tion. If it cannot be proved that the Emperor himself gave 
 them assurances of help and support, it is beyond all doubt that 
 the bitterest enemies of the Eeformation and of Zwingli, such as 
 Eck, Faber, and the Pope's Legate, did not withhold from the 
 ambassadors of " The Five Places" " a good word." The Austrian 
 officials, too, towards the frontier, such as Martins Sittich of Ems, 
 and the Earl of Sulz, maintained with them a very confidential 
 intercourse. The language of the mercenary party of " The Five 
 Places" was accordingly bolder in the sequel. They said : " They 
 had had a march stolen upon them in the peace of Cappel, and 
 had been curtailed in their liberties. Therefore they would not 
 rest tUl they had regained their old freedom." Landamman 
 Eychmuth declared to his countrymen, at a meeting of the people : 
 " Let them be only bold and intrepid ; the letter of alliance with 
 Austria, which they were obliged to give up at Cappel, would 
 be again renewed by King Ferdinand whenever they desired it." 
 The ever-increasing embarrassments in reference to the cloister 
 of St. Gall, contributed not a little to fan the flame of hostility 
 into an outbreak of war. The Abbot German, who had been 
 obliged to flee the country, also appeared before the Emperor at 
 Augsburg, praying for help that he might be reinstated in his 
 rights and dignity. He was assured of support through Martins 
 Sittich, and the Archbishop of Constance ; however, in his return- 
 journey from Augsburg, the abbot was drowned in the neigh- 
 bourhood of Bregenz. The monks who had remained true to 
 him, and who lived at Einsiedeln, under the protection of the 
 government of Schwyz, hastened to elect a successor in Diethelm 
 Blaarer of Wartensee. On the other hand, Zurich and Glarus 
 availed themselves of the death of the Abbot Kilian, to dissolve 
 the cloister entirely. Previously to this, a decree had been pub- 
 lished by these two cantons, according to which the lieutenant 
 of the district for the time being, was required to swear an oath, 
 before entering on his office, that he would be favourable to the 
 Word of God, and protect it. The monastery of the town of St. 
 Gall was now sold; the jewels and ornaments stOl remaining 
 were applied to the benefit of the poor; and the Toggenburgers 
 were allowed to redeem their fealty. Although Zurich drew no 
 
440 OEIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAE. 
 
 particular advantage from these measures, it certainly overstepped 
 tlie jurisdiction it possessed as protecting Canton. But after- 
 wards, in the autumn of 1580, when the demand was made to the 
 Lucerne lieutenant to swear to the decree above-mentioned, 
 before entering on his office, and when, upon his refusal, the 
 Zurich lieutenant Frei continued to conduct the official business 
 after the period of his office had expired, "The Five Places" 
 raised loud and bitter complaints against Zurich's autocratic 
 proceedings in these respects. About the same time, the 
 Unterwald governor Kretz, in Eheinthal, was obliged to flee 
 before his indignant subjects, having excited their fary by the 
 gross licentiousness of his life, and the flagrant neglect of his 
 duties. In vain did the Kheinthalers turn to the government of 
 Unterwald with the prayer that they would replace the faithless 
 and hated official by a man of honour and integrity. Instead of 
 this, a deputation of " The Five Places" came with the intention 
 of reinstating the banished lieutenant in his office; the latter was 
 seized, taken prisoner by the incensed populace, and carried in 
 safe custody to Altstatt. Although the inhabitants of Zurich 
 took no part in these acts of self-help, they were nevertheless 
 accused of it by " The Five Places," the Eheinthalers belonging to 
 the Eeformed party. 
 
 At a Diet held January 1631, at Baden, the deputies of "The 
 Five Places" made loud complaints against Zurich's self- 
 constituted and capriciously exercised authority. While the 
 Zurich deputies repelled the reproaches made against their 
 canton, they accused " The Five Places" themselves of violation 
 of the treaty, inasmuch as the Evangelicals, instead of finding 
 protection within their borders, were exposed to the grossest 
 injustice. At the request of Zurich, a new Diet was summoned 
 for March 1531. At this Diet, the Zurich deputy read a long 
 list of insults and injuries perpetrated on the Evangelicals, on 
 the part of " The Five Places ;" the doers were named, and time 
 and place exactly given, that " The Five Places" might have the 
 less excuse for declining Zurich's requisition, that the guilty 
 should be visited with due punishment. "With an indifferent, 
 cold, coloured apology, invented with aU duplicity, and destitute 
 of all show of truth," as -the Zurich narrator says, the deputies 
 of " The Five Places" attempted in vain to clear themselves of 
 
OKIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAE. 441 
 
 the accusations laid to their charge. During the discussion of 
 these matters, deputies appeared from Graubund at the Diet, 
 with a petition, praying aU the Confederates for help against the 
 CasteUan of Musso, who had surprised and murdered a Grau- 
 bund deputation, on their return-journey from Milan, and had 
 now made an inroad into VeltHn, with troops put at his disposal 
 by the Emperor. Indignation seized the Confederate deputies 
 at the insolent violation of the law of nations by the audacious 
 adventurer; the delegates of "The Five Places," however, 
 remained cold and insensible, and could scarcely conceal the 
 mischievous joy they felt at the misfortunes of the Protestant 
 Graubunders. All the other cantons and towns were ready to 
 render instant assistance to their oppressed allies;* but "The 
 Five Places" refused, under the cover of some empty excuses. 
 The Eeformers saw in the audacious proceeding of the Castellan 
 of Musso the first step towards the suppression of evangelical 
 truth contemplated by the banded papal Imperial party, which 
 had leagued together for this object, while the words and deeds 
 of the chief men in " The Five Places" were by no means cal- 
 culated to teach them another lesson. "Our lord of Musso," 
 they said, " is a good Christian, and therefore the Zurichers and 
 Graubunders levy war upon him. If ' The Five Places' were 
 to render aid here, it would be to change a good friend into an 
 enemy." At the same time, they hectored about the favour of 
 the Emperor, and other foreign priaces. " Every week," said the 
 mayor Honegger, "publicly, the lords of 'The Five Places' 
 receive letters from the Emperor, exhorting them to do nothing 
 against the lord of Musso, but to remain at home." 
 
 Such seditious proceedings, carried on with a rude insolence, 
 and boasted of with the most shameless audacity, could no longer 
 be passed over with impunity by the Protestant Confederates, 
 unless they were to expose themselves to supreme contempt. 
 None, perhaps, recognising more clearly than Zwingli the 
 dangers impending the Eeformed doctrine and Christian order 
 
 * The Duke of Milan, on learning that the Confederates had sent an army of 
 eleven thousand men to succour the Graubunders, expressed his dissatisfac- 
 tion at this step, and undertook himself to bring the war with the Castellan to 
 an end, the Confederates and the Graubunders leaving him two thousand of 
 their men in his pay. 
 
442 OEIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAR. 
 
 from this audacious party in " The Five Places," which formed 
 a part of the great papal Imperial league, he strongly inculcated 
 the duty of repressing them, and holding them in check. In 
 order duly to appreciate the counsels and the zeal of the 
 Eeformer in this regard, it is necessary to contemplate these in 
 the light of the principles that guided him, and that grand design 
 which animated and inspired him in all his efforts during his 
 whole life. He assumed that God has given His Word to aU 
 men for salvation, even as He causes His STin to arise equally 
 upon the just and unjust ; he claimed, then, on the ground of a 
 divine right, that it should be freely read and preached. To this 
 he joined the demand, in the first instance, for his native country, 
 to which he was devoted with peculiar affection, that all the 
 relations of life and manners, as well as of public justice, must 
 be renewed and recast, in conformity with the principles laid 
 down in the Word of God. Every barrier which interposed itself 
 to the free preaching of the inspired record, or which limited the 
 freedom of faith and of conscience, must fall before the power of 
 an economy constructed on the basis of God's message to sinful 
 man. Breathing the spirit of an Old Testament prophet, Zwingli 
 recognised, in the divine Word alone, the directory for his actions, 
 and would rather have sacrificed his life than yielded an iota to 
 any authority which set itseK up against God and His Word. 
 He opens up to us a glance into his inmost soul, in an observar 
 tion which he makes, and which he set down in writing, about 
 this time, upon the thirty-eighth chapter of Jeremiah. Upon 
 the words which the prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord : 
 " Thus saith the Lord, He that femaineth in this city shall die 
 by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence : but he that 
 goeth forth to the Chaldeans shall live ; for he shall have his Hfe 
 for a prey, and shall Uve," Zwingli remarks : " We must here well 
 consider that higher necessity imposed upon the prophets. Is it 
 not downright treachery to counsel that those who desire to "save 
 themselves should pass over to the enemy? Could treachery be 
 more plainly expressed than it is in these very words? Wben, 
 indeed, God enjoins us to do anything contrary to general opinion, 
 when He lays some command upon us to do what human laws 
 rightly forbid and menace with punishment, then we find our- 
 selves apparently betwixt the door and its hinges. But the man 
 
OKIGtN AND CLOSE OP THE SECOND CAPPEL WAR. 44<3 
 
 tliat fears God does not concern himseK about the threats of the 
 world. To advance the counsel of God, whatever may happen 
 to himseK, this is his duty. A carrier, who has a long journey 
 to perform, must lay his account that both team and harness 
 win be worn out, but yet he brings the goods he has undertaken 
 to convey to their destination. We are God's team and harness. 
 All is knocked up, worn out, in bad order, but yet our heavenly 
 leader accomplishes his holy purposes. Therefore, let not con- 
 flicts and trials dismay us; for through them that result is 
 obtained which God desires. If we are not permitted to behold 
 the happy issue of events, we have but the fate of heroes in war. 
 They win the most glorious victories who bear the heat of battle, 
 or who fall in the thick of it, and, in either case, are very different 
 from mere spectators. Courage, then ! even although we must 
 encounter many sufferings and dangers in the renovation of the 
 Christian Church, and the reconstruction of a right Christian 
 economy, and may not outlive the success of our efforts. The Judge 
 sees us, and crowns us after the battle. Our brethren enjoy the 
 fruits of our sufferings, while we in heaven partake of an ever- 
 lasting reward." 
 
 Thus ZwingU found himself called by God to contend for, and 
 to secure to all Christians, the free preaching of the Word of 
 God, and the rights of conscience, and to set up in Switzerland a 
 Christian economy in Church and State, according to the directory 
 of the Word of God. Now, he found, " that," as he expressed 
 himself in one of his sermons, as reported by Bullinger, " the 
 pensioners were the greatest obstacle in the way of aU good. 
 Zurich owes it to the Confederacy to insist that disgraceful 
 insults, breach of faith, and tyranny, meet with due punishment, 
 and to lend their aid in preventing pious and innocent people 
 from being relentlessly expelled from their homes, in defiance of 
 the prescriptions of treaty, and all the principles of justice." 
 
 In Zwingli's opinion, there were only two methods of humbling 
 the party devoted to mercenary service and foreign pay. The 
 first, which appeared to him the most expedient and efi&cient, 
 was an invasion of the territory of " The Five Places," by means 
 of an overwhelming force, such as might be raised by the towns, 
 with the declaration that their only object was to punish the 
 pensioners, and to secure the free reading and preaching of the 
 
444 ORIGIN AND CLOSE OP THE SECOND CAPPEL WAB. 
 
 Word of God, without disturbing any one in the exercise either 
 of his rights or in his faith. In this manner, he hoped to attain 
 the object in viewwithout much difficulty. The second method, 
 which he intended to- recommend in the event of the iirst not 
 being approved of, was to dissolve the Confederacy, in respect of 
 " The Five Places," and to divide the common lordships accord- 
 ing to the population. By this measure, ZwingU thought to 
 defend, at least, the territory of the Evangelical cantons, as well 
 as the greater part of the common lordships, from the acts of 
 violence and corrupting influences of the pensioners. The 
 government of Zurich was disposed to a warlike invasion; and 
 so early as the 12th May 1531, the matter had been discussed at 
 the Burgher Diet in Aarau. 
 
 The opinions of the Bernese were to this effect : The conduct 
 of the Wald towns, in respect of the Word of God, undoubtedly 
 justified an armed intervention; yet the powerful connections 
 which " The Five Places" maintained, could not be overlooked, 
 as well as the fact that the inhabitants were intrepid and bold 
 warriors. The prevailing famine, too, the general destitution, 
 and the approaching harvest, which would be destroyed by a 
 campaign, ought not to be disregarded. In this way, the 
 innocent would be punished with the guilty by the war, which 
 would be an act of great injustice. They, on the other hand, 
 proposed to close their markets against " The Five Cantons," and 
 to permit neither corn nor wine, salt, iron, nor steel to be 
 imported amongst them, until they should allow the Word of 
 God to be freely read and preached, both in the common lord- 
 ships, and in their own territories, and untU they shall punish 
 the shameless libellers and calumniators of the Evangelical party. 
 This measure, they said, was in accordance with the decision of 
 the umpires, and would have the effect of stimulating the well- 
 meaning and honourable part of the inhabitants to act against 
 the pensioners,. so that the latter would be compelled to desist 
 from their violent and iniquitous courses. 
 
 Zurich, under ZwingH's influence, gave this proposal a deter- 
 mined opposition. " It was unwise, since the advantages already 
 gained were thereby sacrificed, and time was given to ' The Five 
 Places' to arm, nay, they were actually compelling them to arm 
 and fight. Since their good friends in ' The Five Places' were 
 
OEIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAR 445 
 
 just as mncli affected by the embargo as the pensioners, they 
 would thereby be transformed into enemies, and forced to go with 
 the crowd. A just war is not contrary to the Word of God, but 
 it is contrary to the Spirit of this Word to deprive the innocent 
 as well as the guilty of bread, and to send the evils of famine 
 among the sick, the old, and women great with child, who had 
 already enough to suffer under the tyrannous government of the 
 pensioners." These remonstrances of Zurich were frustrated by 
 the general support which Berne's proposal met with from the 
 rest of the Burgher-towns, so that at length the Zurich govern- 
 ment was forced to yield " with pain and sorrow, and only out of 
 respect for its allies." Accordingly, it was passed into a resolu- 
 tion, 15th May. This result grieved none more than Zwingli. 
 After the announcement had been read upon the following Sun- 
 day, which was Pentecost, from the pulpit, according to an old 
 Swiss custom, Zwingli interwove in his discourse the following 
 observations upon it: "He who does not hesitate to treat his 
 opponent lite a criminal must take the consequences ; if he do 
 not strike, he himself will be struck. Ye men of Zurich refuse 
 ' The Pive Places' meat and drink as though they were criminals ; 
 rather, I say, let the blow follow your threats at once than that 
 the poor innocent people among them should be put to the slow 
 process of starvation. Axe you of opinion that no sufficient 
 ground exists for their punishment? Why, then, do you refuse 
 them meat and drink? Depend upon it you force them, by such 
 measures, to take up arms, to march over the frontier, and to 
 punish yourselves. And so it will be." These words made a 
 different impression upon different auditors. Some looked upon 
 them as seditious ; others regarded them as a new proof of the 
 faithful concern of the Eeformer for the weal of his afflicted 
 country. 
 
 The embargo being once resolved upon and proclaimed to the 
 Wald towns by Berne and Zurich, whose territory bordered on 
 the other, it was administered by Zurich with all stringency. 
 Even the inhabitants of the districts governed conjunctly by these 
 towns and ' The Five Places' were forbidden to bring provisions to 
 their own rulers, a measure which appeared, even to some of the 
 Evangelicals, to be too great a stretch of severity. One cry of 
 indignation and despair resounded from the valleys and moun- 
 
446 ORIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAR. 
 
 tains of inner Switzerland. A scanty harvest had already raised 
 the prices of aU provisions, a plague, the English sweat, spread 
 terror and misery everywhere, and now their own Confederates 
 would sharpen these sufferings hy the embargo. The guUtless 
 children, the pregnant women and the sick were now to be 
 deprived of the bread and the wine necessary for their aliment 
 and sustentation ; even the flocks, the care of which lies so near 
 the heart of a pastoral people, were to want the necessary salt. 
 The complaints of ' The Five Places' found an ominous echo in the 
 common lordships, and even in Berne and ZuricL It is un- 
 christian, said many, and contrary to the Word of God. Paul 
 writes : " If thine enemy hunger, feed him ; if he thirst, give him 
 drink ; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head" 
 But you prevent that from reaching the guilty and the innocent 
 together,. which God gives freely to all for their support and 
 nourishment. This disposition was everywhere turned by the 
 mercenary party to advantage with great address. Not only did 
 all the inhabitants of ' The Five Places' stand by this party as one 
 man, but in Italy, at their cry for help, troops were enhsted by 
 the Papal Nuncio, while WaUis armed to spring to the aid of her 
 co-religionists in their extremity. All games, dances, and other 
 amusements, were, during this time of trial, prohibited in the 
 Wald towns, while general devotions, and pilgrimages to Einsie- 
 deln, and other sanctuaries, were ordained. At the same time it 
 was run to arms to open the passes sword in hand. 
 
 If the embargo on provisions re-established union in ' The Five 
 Places, and led to vigorous and decided action, it operated, 
 especially in Zurich, like some sharp and disorganizing poison. 
 Party spirit rose to the ascendant in an ominous manner, whUe 
 vigorous action was everywhere more and more paralyzed. In this 
 morbid disposition of the pubKc mind, it is not to be wondered 
 at that the man who, during the last eleven years, had carried 
 Zurich on along a path, dangerous and precipitous indeed, to a 
 high and glorious object, by the inspiration of his own daring 
 enthusiasm and lofty, spirit, should have now sunk in the gene- 
 ral esteem; but we are oppressed with a feeling of disgust when 
 we see him made responsible for a measure which he opposed 
 with aU his might. He was represented to the angry populace 
 as the sole author of the civil war — as the cause of all the 
 
ORIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECO'ND CAPPEL WAE. 447 
 
 miseiy — as a demagoguish leveller and overturner of old and 
 long-established rights— as a tyrant like a Landenberg and a 
 Gessler. The burgher was made to believe that he sought the 
 favour of the peasants, to reduce, with their assistance, the 
 power of the towns; the peasant who, in the present state of 
 affairs, saw his cabin, his unprotected property, the lives and 
 fortunes of his family in continual peril, was given to understand 
 that he alone stood in the way of a peace with " The Five 
 Places." Dissimulation, mistrust, and dissension increased even 
 in the Council* The nobility, the millers and the bakers, whose 
 interests suffered by the measures which had been adopted, 
 raised---in union with the partisans of the pensioners, and the 
 relatives of the monks, who, from their nonconformity to the 
 Eeformed order of things, had been forced to leave the Cantons- 
 one unanimous voice of condemnation against the Eefotmer. 
 With profound grief, Zwingli saw himself paralyzed in his effi- 
 ciency, and his work exposed to the highest danger. 
 
 In this disposition of the public mind, Zwingli appeared before 
 the Council on the 26th July, and said with deep emotion: 
 '' For eleven years I have preached the Gospel among you, and 
 warned you in a paternal and faithful spirit of the dangers 
 which would threaten the Confederacy, if ' The Five Places,' 
 that is to say, the party which lives by pensions and mercenary 
 service, should gain the upper hand. All that I said has been of 
 no avail; and even now, you elect to your Council men who 
 covet this blood-money. Such men are, however, the best 
 friends of ' The Five Places,' and the most dangerous enemies of 
 the Gospel You wiU not obey the truth, and yet you wiU 
 make me responsible for all the mischief I therefore desire my 
 dismissal, and wiU look out for some other means of supporting 
 myself" With tears in his eyes, he took his departure. 
 
 The Council was overwhelmed by this speech; the feeling 
 that with the departure of Zwingli a great calamity impended 
 Church and State, impressed all the members of the assembly. 
 They commissioned the two burgomasters, along with the most 
 esteemed friends of the Eeformer, to hold an interview with him, 
 and to endeavour to dissuade him from his purpose. After three 
 days which he took for deliberation, Zwingli appeared again 
 * J. J. Hettinger's History of the Confederates. 
 
448 ORIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAR. 
 
 before the Council, and said: "As they had promised amend- 
 ment, he would remain with them, and would do his best, till 
 death itself, with God's grace." For a moment, Zurich appeared 
 to summon up her energies again to resolute action; but soon 
 the blighting effects of party spirit re-appeared with new force, 
 while " The Five Places" gave still plainer intimations of their 
 determination to compel the removal of the embargo by force of 
 arms. 
 
 Great exertions, indeed, were made by the deputies of those 
 places in Switzerland, to which faction had not spread its bale- 
 ful influence, and by the ambassadors of France, Milan, and 
 Neuenburg, for the maintenance of peace, and for bringing about 
 an amicable settlement of existing differences. Six diets, one 
 after another, were held, with this object, in Bremgarten; but the 
 demands of both the parties were so opposed to ' each other, that 
 it was impossible to mediate. The deputies of "The Five 
 Places" required, as a preliminary step to the entering on any 
 negotiation, the removal of the embargo in the first instance; 
 Zurich and Berne, on the other hand, demanded that the reading 
 and preaching of the Word of God should be declared free, not 
 only in the common lordships, but in the whole of Switzerland ; 
 for, said they, it is more cruel to deprive hungry souls of the 
 bread of hfe, than to lay an arrest on mere victuals for the body. 
 Zwinglij although personally he was ready to lay down his life 
 for his convictions, beheld with a deep anxiety for the cause 
 of the Gospel, that the embarrassments of their situation, and the 
 dangers to which they were exposed daily increased. An open 
 rupture still appeared to him less disastrous for the Evangelical 
 towns than longer inactivity. During the time that the diets 
 were held in Bremgarten, he took advantage of the darkness of 
 night to repair to this place, in order to discuss with the Ber- 
 nese deputies the critical situation of the Eeformed party. The 
 interview took place in Bullinger's house, and the substance of 
 what passed is communicated to us by him. Zwingli said : " I 
 fear that matters will have a bad ending from the treachery that 
 prevails. The embargo laid on provisions was a very inauspi- 
 cious measure for the towns. If it be given up, the party of the 
 mercenaries will only be rendered more arrogant ; if it be per- 
 sisted in, "the Five Places" will invade us, will involve manvin 
 
ORIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAR. 449 
 
 ruin, will bring loss to the Church of Christ, and will throw 
 aU into anarchy. Nay, it is much to be feared that the inhabit- 
 ants of " The Five Places" will only be rendered more inveterate 
 in their hatred of the Gospel by these measures, and not so 
 quickly come to the knowledge of salvation. We shall again 
 have to suffer from the opposition of Popish priests, &c." The 
 Bernese delegates promised to do their utmost to induce their 
 government to adopt a decided course of action. Before day- 
 break, Zwingli left Bremgarten with his friends, that it might 
 not be known to the delegates of " The Five Places, that he had 
 been in the town." Bullinger convoyed him part of the way 
 homewards. Upon his desiring to return, Zwingli took farewell 
 of him three times, boding that he would never more see him. 
 "God preserve thee, dear Henry, remain faithful to the Lord 
 Jesus and His Church," were his last words, which, in the spirit 
 of prophecy, he addressed to his worthy successor Bullinger. 
 
 In external nature, things took place which filled the minds 
 of men, already oppressed with a painful sense of the dangers 
 impending on their country, with gloomy apprehensions. A 
 comet of unusual size was visible in the heavens in the August 
 of this year. Zwingli, too, contemplated it on the night of the 
 15th August, with his friend, George Mueller, the former Abbot 
 of Wettingen, in the churchyard close by the great Minster. 
 " What may this star signify, dear Huldreich ?" inquired Mueller. 
 " It wiU light me," replied Zwingli, " and many an honest man 
 in this Confederacy, who would willingly see truth and right 
 victorious, to our graves." "With God's grace, No!" said 
 Mueller, " God will not let such a catastrophe happen." " He 
 wUl," rejoined Zwingli, " He will, for a confirmation of His truth. 
 But if the rod begin at the house of God, then woe to the enemies 
 of the Gospel Yet God will maintain His cause, although it 
 came so low that it is believed to be in ruins. I trust the cause 
 itseK; it is right and good; but I trust the people as Little as I 
 can. Our only comfort is in God." It was reported to Zwingli 
 by a Bernese official, that in the neighbourhood of Bragg, in 
 Aargau, blood had flowed out of the earth in streams. Another 
 said, that a shield had been seen in the air in Zug, and that 
 shooting by night was heard in the Eeuss. Upon the Bruenig, 
 standards were seen flapping in the heavens, and ships were seen 
 
 2 F 
 
450 ORIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPBL WAE. 
 
 cruising ahovA on the Lake of Lucerne, filled with ghostly war- 
 riors. Everything announced direful events to gloomy minds. 
 Zwiagli, for his part, saw the plainest omens of coming disasters 
 to his church and country in the general dislocation of counsel 
 which prevailed among the Evangelicals, in the growing power 
 and audacity of the mercenary party, and in the almost universal 
 unfaithfulness and treachery which this party spread like a nei> 
 work over the whole land. Once more he raised his voice with 
 energy: " Be it so," said he, in one of his sermons, "no faithful 
 warning is of farther use ; you wUl not punish the pensioners who 
 lift their head so proudly. They have strong props among you. 
 But a chain is .forged, and it is prepared to strangle me and 
 many a good Zuricher. For it is to ruin me that aU this is 
 done. I am ready; and suhmit myself to the will of God. These 
 people shall never be my masters. But to thee, Zurich ! they 
 will give the reward of iniquity, and will drive a stake through 
 thy head, for so thou would'st have it. Thou wUt not punish, 
 them, and they will punish thee. Nevertheless, God will pre- 
 serve His Word, and their glory will speedily have an end. 
 May the Lord guide His own people, and protect His Church." 
 
 Once more, the deputies of Glarus, Freiburg, AppenzeU, Stras- 
 hiug, and Constance, met together, in order if possible to concoct 
 a peace. The following propositions were to serve as a basis for 
 negotiations: (1.) The examination and punishment of libellers 
 to be committed to the umpires. (2.) TTiose who had been 
 banished for the gospel to be allowed to return to their homes, 
 without the fear of any farther persecution or punishment. (3.) 
 Touching matters of faith, all to remain by the articles of the 
 land-peace, and everything else to be decided by the Diets. (4.) 
 On these preliminaries being settled, the embargo to be taken off. 
 Zurich and Berne manifested their wHlingness to accept these 
 proposals, but the ambassadors of peace found no ear in " The 
 Five Places." The war for which these cantons had long been 
 secretly arming was considered as already begun. Accordingly, 
 the delegates, when they returned from thence, exhorted the 
 towns to prepare for the worst, and to arm. " The Five Places" 
 proceeded without delay to action whenever their deputies had 
 resolved, at a Diet in Brunnen, to declare war against Zurich 
 and Berne. The passes were secretly watched, that none might 
 
OEIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAR. 451 
 
 pass through and give the Evangelicals warning of the intended 
 invasion. Thereon, on the 9th of October, a body of twelve 
 thousand men took the road for Hitzkirch in the direction 
 of " The Free Offices," marking their path by all the horrors 
 of war, while the main body, eight thousand strong, marched 
 upon Zug the same evening. The general distress they endured 
 united these warriors to a man, so that only one resolution 
 animated them : to punish the enemy, to open the passes, and to 
 secure their independence. Strengthened in body and soul by a 
 substantial meal, and the services of the Church, they proceeded, 
 early on the morning of the 10th, to the Zuger-Allmend, and 
 took the oath to the standards. Their leaders exhorted them to 
 a courageous behaviour. To this united and resolute action, the 
 conduct of the Zurich government presented a melancholy con- 
 trast. They had, indeed, as early as September, on the report 
 reaching their ears, that " The Five Places" were arming, elected 
 a coimcil-of-war, consisting of the experienced warriors, Eudolf 
 Lavater, John Schweizer, and William Toenig, and furnished 
 them with full authority to levy men according to the necessities 
 of the State, and to employ them in the defence of their country ; 
 but this authority thay immediately neutralised by another 
 resolution. Indignant at the cabals of a party in the govern- 
 ment, Lavater withdrew to his governorship at Kyburg, and only 
 returned on the 9th of October to the town, at a summons from 
 the government. Already, on this very day, the government 
 had received intelligence from the Abbot of Cappel, and from 
 peasants, of the danger with which they were threatened ; but 
 they were unable to nerve themselves to any resolute action, and 
 satisfied themselves with despatching members of the Council to 
 the spot to obtain information. The Councillors Ulrich Funk 
 and Thumeisen arrived at Cappel, where the people of the 
 country had already collected, in arms, to defend themselves, and 
 who were bitterly complaining of the negligence of the govern- 
 ment. In these circumstances, Funk and Thumeisen remained 
 where they were, to hearten the country people, and sent back 
 to the government advices that they should get the army drawn 
 together as speedily as possible, and sent forward to Cappel, as 
 the enemy were already marching on this place from Zug. 
 On the 10th October the Great Council assembled at Zurich, to 
 
452 ORIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAR: 
 
 take measures necessary for the defence of the country. Banneret 
 Schweizer strongly urged that the van, under its captain already 
 named, George Goeldli, should be immediately despatched to 
 Cappel, and that the main body of the army should follow with 
 as little delay as possible. There was a long deliberation upon 
 this point, for there was a party in the Council that put every 
 iron in the fire to frustrate all resolute action on the part of the 
 Council. In the meanwhile, messenger after messenger came 
 from Cappel praying for speedy assistance. It was at length 
 resolved to send Goeldli forward with six hundred men and 
 artillery. This reinforcement arrived in Cappel during the 
 night. 
 
 Immediately after Goeldli's departure, Lavater, with the con- 
 currence of a council-of-war, hastUy summoned, which "Zwingli 
 also attended, expressed his desire that a general levy of the 
 people should be made, ia order to hasten, with as great a body 
 of men as possible, to the rescue of their invaded country. But 
 Lavater was disappointed of getting his design carried through ; 
 the Great Council, it was said, must first of all meet and decide 
 upon it. Thus precious hours were again wasted: for it was 
 evening ere the Council authorised, by a formal resolution, the 
 measure which had been suggested by the Commander-in-Chief. 
 A night of horrors descended on the canton of Zurich. The earth 
 appeared to reel on its foundations:* bells screamed from the 
 church-towers, traitors roamed through the land, spreading false 
 rumours, and increasing the general turmoil. In the morning, 
 the great banner was set up at the Town-Hall, but it clung to 
 the pole, and refused to unfurl — in the eyes of many, a bad omen. 
 Slowly and in scanty numbers the warriors dropped in. It 
 happened that it being necessary to despatch two bodies of 
 troops to Waedensehwyl, and " The Free Offices," many had gone 
 thither who had been designated to the main body. The march 
 could not begin till mid-day. Zwingli had been appointed field- 
 preacher, for both his friends and enemies wished his appoint- 
 ment, although for different reasons. Nor did he himself hesitate 
 for an instant to accept the post in this hour of danger : " I stand 
 intrepidly prepared for the worst," he had written shortly before 
 to a friend, " for God is my stay." Painfully bitter, however, 
 * There was an earthquake felt on this night. 
 
OMGIN AND CLOSE OF THE SECOND CAPPEL WAR. 453 
 
 was the farewell he took from his spouse and children, whom he 
 had a presentiment he should never see more. But it was the 
 Lord's cause for which he was going out to battle ; and the Lord 
 has said: "Whosoever loveth son or daughter more than me, is 
 not worthy of me." When he was in the act of mounting his 
 horse, the animal reared and fell backwards. His friends turned 
 pale, who saw it. " He will never come back," said they one to 
 the other. Hardly seven hundred men, instead of four thousand 
 as was expected, gathered round the standard. Upon Myconius 
 seeing this little troop marching out in great disorder, and Zwingli 
 amongst them, he was seized with such an agony of spirit, that 
 he could scarcely stand upright. For a few moments, Zwingli 
 was seen leaving his comrades, and marching by himself; 
 and one of his friends, who followed behind him, heard him 
 praying with great fervency, and committing himself, soul and 
 body, and especially the Church, to the Lord. Arrived at the 
 top of the Albis, WiUiam Toenig, the captain of the sharp- 
 shooters, gave it as his opinion, they ought to wait till their 
 small numbers had been increased by farther accessions ; but the 
 sound of cannon from Cappel announced that the van was already 
 engaged. Zwingli hereon said : " If we wait till the great body 
 of OUT friends arrive, our help will come too late. I will, in God's 
 name, go to the brave fellows, and either die with them or help 
 them." Lavater also thought they could not wait upon reinforce- 
 ments, as treachery was disorganising and frustrating everything. 
 Thus the banner arrived at Cappel at three o'clock. 
 
 Here the fight had lasted already three hours, although only 
 with caimon. The Zurich artillery, admirably served, and advan- 
 tageously posted, maintained a great superiority over that of 
 " The Five Places." Confusion spread for a time through the 
 ranks of the Eoman Catholic army, which was spread out upon 
 a morass, and lay exposed to the cannon of the Zurichers, so that, 
 as BuUinger thinks, terms of peace would have been readily 
 listened to by them at that time. But the saying of Zwingli to 
 the Landamman Aebli was destined to prove true : " When they 
 attack us, then there will be none to mediate." Some men of 
 courage among the Zurichers were for taking advantage of the 
 enemy's evident confusion, but Captain Goeldli, who had a brother 
 in the hostile army, and who seemed to have his heart there also. 
 
454 ORIGIN AND CLOSE OF THE -SECOND CAPPEL WAR. 
 
 refused to give his consent to this surprise, which volunteers were 
 willing to execute. A wood on the flank of the Zurich army- 
 was to have been occupied by volunteers ; by Goeldli's orders, 
 they were prevented from doing this, and it was occupied by the 
 enemy without difficulty. In this manner, Goeldli frustrated 
 everything calculated to bring about a favourable result ' for the 
 Zurichers. He always put forward the instructions he had 
 received, to avoid a battle till the banner had arrived. 
 
 The Zurichers held a Council, after the arrival of the Com- 
 mander-in-Chief, as to what in the circumstances had best 
 be done. Some were for retreating till the army had been 
 strengthened by accessions, but the majority were in favour of 
 encountering the enemy where they stood. " We must place 
 our confidence m God, and not in our own numbers and strength ; 
 our fathers have often by God's help conquered a whole army 
 with a handful of men." As it was late, no attack was expected 
 for the day, and measures were taken for bivouacking. Goeldli 
 received orders to occupy Moenchbuehl, that they might not be 
 surrounded by the enemy. 
 
 The leaders of the army of " The Five Places" also held a 
 council-of-war. Here, likewise, the majority refused to listen 
 to any attack for the day; "it was too late," they said, 
 " and it had never been the custom of their ancestors to shed 
 blood on holy Childermas-Day." A practised warrior. Governor 
 Jauch, joins the circle of councillors. He states how he had 
 found the wood unoccupied, from whence the Zurich army was 
 visible, weak, and, unprepared against an attack. He begs 
 for a few volunteers, with whom he engages easily to vanquish 
 the enemy. Caspar Goeldli, brother to George, here interposes, 
 saying : " I know the Zurichers well, if you don't beat them to- 
 day, they will beat you to-morrow." Jauch hastened back to the 
 wood, where he found three hundred arquebusiers, and four 
 hundred men-at-arms, with spears and halberds, waiting for him. 
 With these he attacked the enemy on the front and on the flank, 
 issuing from the wood. The enemy, though unprepared, speedily 
 feU into order of battle. Lavater advanced, lance in hand, and 
 cried with a loud voice : " Brave men, remember the glory of 
 God and of Zurich, and stand firm/' ZwingK also turn,ed to 
 them, and said : " Cheer up, my noble fellows, and fear not. If 
 
ZWINGLl'S DEATH. 45o 
 
 we are to suffer, it is nevertheless in a good cause. Commend 
 yourselves to God, who is able to talc e care of us and of ours. 
 The Lord's will be done." The battle began with great asperity. 
 The body that, under GoeldH, should have held the Moench- 
 buehl, fled with rapidity, traitors shouting out behind them: 
 " Flee, flee, good men of Zurich, not one wiU be spared alive." 
 Thus scarcely a thousand men were opposed to the eight times 
 stronger force of "The Five Places;" yet victory for a 
 time hung in suspense, for the Zurichers fought with the 
 courage of lions, and the enthusiasm of Christian heroes, 
 willing to offer up their lives for the noblest possessions. 
 But soon they Jell thick, like the precious grain in autumn, 
 beneath the strokes of their embittered foes, and at length were 
 obliged to abandon the battle-field, leaving upon it more than 
 five hundred, who slept the sleep of death, or who were writhing 
 in the agony of death-wounds. Zwingli, too, the faithful shep- 
 herd of the flock, rested among his sheep. He had bent himself 
 down, soon after the beginning of the combat, to comfort with the 
 words of life a fallen countryman, when a stone struck his helmet 
 with such force that he was cast to the ground. He soon sum- 
 moned up strength to rise again, but a hostile spear gave him 
 immediately a fatal stab. "What evil is it? They may kill the 
 body, the soul they cannot kill;" these were his last words. The 
 day had now declined, and night was spreading her black 
 canopy over the field of battle. The flames of evening-Ught were 
 dying fast away from mountain-peak to mountain-peak, while, in 
 the valley below, souls were leaving their bonds of clay, and 
 winging their flight heavenwards. Above, the stars of God were 
 shining, for a testimony that, when the earthly light is extin- 
 guished within us, the heavenly light arises in our souls. 
 
 Zwingli had fallen near a pear-tree. He was leaning on it; his 
 hands were clasped, his lips moved ii; prayer, while his eyes were 
 directed heavenwards. In this state, a party of marauding sol- 
 diers found him. "Will you confess? Shall we fetch a priest?" 
 they cry to him. The tongue which had once so eloquently com- 
 batted error is now dumb, but the man of God makes a motion 
 with his head signifying a negative. " Then call upon the mother 
 of God and the blessed saints in your heart," they shout to him 
 again. " No, I will not deny my Saviour," were the words he had 
 
456 ZWINGLl'S DEATH. 
 
 used in his last sermon, and this decisive negative, which pro- 
 ceeded from a living faith that Christ is the only Mediator 
 between God and man, he still signifies by a motion of his head 
 in death. " Die,* then, obstinate heretic," said Bockinger, an 
 officer from Unterwalden, and with that he gave him a fatal stab. 
 The next day his countenance was still flushed as when he pleached. 
 The town-parson, Schoen Crunner of Zug, formerly convent-mas- 
 ter of Cappel, could not restrain his tears when he heard of his 
 death. " Whatever thy faith was," said he, " I know that thou 
 wast a true-hearted Confederate ; God be merciful to thy soul." 
 But the savage rabble of mercenaries carried their hatred to the 
 witness of truth even against his body. It was quartered by the 
 hand of the common hangman, burned, and the ashes mixed with 
 the ashes of a swine, that it might be impossible for his friends 
 and admirers to identify his remains.-|- " Mortals can indeed rage 
 against his body," wrote Leo Jud, soon after, " they can annihilate 
 it, and abuse the ianocent even after his death ; but the death of 
 the brave cannot be disgraceful, nor the death of the saint miser- 
 able. He stin lives, and lives eternally the unconquerable hero, 
 and leaves a memorial behind him which no fire can consume, 
 nor flame destroy. In the body he was put to death by those 
 to whose well-being he had devoted a whole lifetime of zeal. 
 While endeavouring to bring back his countrymen to the worship 
 of the one true God, and to transform their corrupted manners 
 into the ancient simplicity and proved integrity of their ances- 
 tors, he is led by an unavoidable fate to the battle-field, and 
 there deprived of his life, by those for whose security and welfare 
 he had exposed himself to every danger, and to general hatred. 
 Yet he had a glorious lot. God, whose glory he ever sought 
 and defended, at the sacrifice of his life, will make the memorial 
 of this man famous, and will not suffer it to perish. All honest 
 men, who have partaken of his benefits, and have tasted of his 
 incomparable love and affection, will contribute to this end accord- 
 ing to their ability." 
 
 A great number of Zwingli's friends and fellow-labourers in 
 
 * Zwingli died at the age of forty-seven years, nine months, and eleven days. 
 
 t Thomas Platter went a few days afterwards over the iield of battle, and 
 found Zwingli's heart unconsumed in the ashes, which was regarded as an evi- 
 dence of Zwingli's faithful love to his country surviving even death. 
 
ZWINGLIS DEATH. 457 
 
 the cause of God and truth shared his fate. The noble Baron 
 von Geroldseck, the Comthur Schmidt, abbot Joner of Cappel, 
 and two-and-twenty clergymen, sealed their faithfulness to the 
 gospel with their blood. ZwingH's friends, Ulrich Funk, Thu- 
 meisen, the hoary-headed Canneret Schweizer, and Toenig, the 
 captain of the archers, were not divided in death from their 
 common friend. The young Gerold Meyer of Knonau proved, by 
 his heroic death on the field of battle, that he had well learned 
 the lessons taught him by his paternal friend, in regard to the 
 duty of fighting and dying in the cause of truth, and in the 
 defence of his fatherland. 
 
 Dreadful messages of death were communicated one after the 
 other to the noble spouse of the Eeformer. She lost in this 
 battle not only her husband Huldreich, and her son Gerold, but 
 besides, a brother, a brother-in-law, and a son-in-law. But she 
 had been directed by ZwingH to a well from which she could 
 draw consolation in rich measure. Even on earth, she expe- 
 rienced that the memory of the just man is a legacy of blessing 
 which he bequeaths to all connected with him. AVlien that 
 excellent man BuUinger was appointed ZwingH's successor, he 
 not only cared with all the fidelity of a disciple for the church, 
 deprived of its pastoral head, by the death of his master, but he 
 cared with all the love of a son for the widow and children of his 
 departed father. They were immediately, upon his entrance on 
 ofi&ce, taken into his own house, and regarded as members of his 
 own family. Anna ZwingK survived her husband seven years ; 
 she then, through a gentle death, joined him in heaven. 
 
 As BuUinger cared for the church, renovated by his deceased 
 friend, and for his family, he cared likewise for his good name, 
 which the world was too apt to libel after his death. With the 
 words which he wrote to this end, we shall close our life of the 
 noble Zwingh : " The victory of truth is alone in the hand of God, 
 and is not bound to any particular person or age. Christ was 
 also put to death, and his enemies thought Him vanquished, but 
 forty years afterwards the standard of His victory was planted on 
 the ruined walls of Jerusalem. Truth accordingly does not 
 triumph in not being tried ; rather in the trial she finds her confir- 
 mation. But here faith, patience, and a steady endurance are 
 necessary to us. The strength of the Christian rises with his 
 
458 ZWINGLl'S DEATH. 
 
 weakness. Therefore, dear brethren in Germany, stxffer not our 
 want of victory to offend you, but persevere in the "Word of God. 
 This has ever conquered, even although the holy prophets, apos- 
 tles, and martyrs have been reviled and slain for it. Blessed are 
 aU they who die in the Lord. Victory, too, follows in its time, 
 for a thousand years are with God as one day. Nor is the victory 
 a single one, but each combatant is crowned with victory who 
 suffers and dies for the truth." 
 
 THE END. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Acolyte Chaplain, Zwingli made, by the 
 Pope, 30. 
 
 Adam and Christ compared, 397, 398. 
 
 Adrian IV., Pope, letter to Zwingli, 
 209; overtures to Zwingli, 210. 
 
 Alliance of the five Papal cantons with 
 Austria, 235 ; in defence of truth, 
 and Zwingli's views of, 401, 402; for- 
 mation of, 402. 
 
 Am Gruet combats Zwingli's views on 
 the Supper, 145. 
 
 Anabaptists, Zwingli warns against, 
 181; they pretend to found on Scrip- 
 ture, 238 ; break images, 252 ; their 
 character, and overtures to Zwingli, 
 247, 250; their leaders, 249, 250; de- 
 cree of Zurich Council against, 253; 
 disputation with, 254; condemned at 
 Dietof Speyer, 337. 
 
 Angel-Consecration, feast of, at Kin- 
 siedeln, 24. 
 
 Appenzell, spread of the gospel in, 179 
 
 Archeteles, Zwingli's work entitled, 67 
 
 Articles drawn up by Luther on Sup- 
 per Controversy, and signed by Zwin- 
 gli, with Comments, 358-362. 
 
 Assassination employed against Zwingli, 
 85. 
 
 Assistants, Zwingli's, at Zurich, 40. 
 
 Asylum for the persecuted in Switzer- 
 land, 202. 
 
 Augsburg, Dietof, 364; Zwingli sends 
 his Confession of Faith to, 365; 
 Papists, Lutherans, and Reformed at, 
 366-369. 
 
 Augustine monk's correspondence with 
 Zwingli, 206, 207 ; its mysterious ces- 
 sation, 208. 
 
 Augustine on baptism, 273; on the Sup- 
 per, 355, 356. 
 
 Authority of the Church, Hofmann's 
 views of, 132. 
 
 Baden, Disputation at, 225-232. 
 
 Baptism, Zwingli's views of, 255; found- 
 ed by John the Baptist, 263. 
 
 Banquet, Zwingli attends, 383. 
 
 Basle, Zwingli at the school of, 5; 
 teaches Latin, and occupations at, 7. 
 
 Berne, Zwingli at the school of, 5 ; im- 
 portance and progress of gospel in, 
 186, 187. 
 
 Binzli, Zwingli's teacher, 5. 
 
 Bishops of Chur, Constance, and Basle, 
 
 invited to the Disputation at Zurich, 
 
 131 
 Brothers, Zwingli's, letter to, 89-92. 
 Bucer designs doctrinal formula for 
 
 Supper, 366-369 ; rejected by Luther 
 
 and Zwingli, 369. 
 Burgher-rights, alliance of, 402. 
 
 " Calender, Black," oif Thomas Mumer, 
 233. 
 
 Canon, Zwingli made a, 82. 
 
 Capito, early friend of Zwingli, 7 ; visits 
 Zwingli, 31. 
 
 Carlstadt, fanaticism of, 287. 
 
 Carthusian monks, letters from, 170, 
 172. 
 
 Catechumens, 150. 
 
 Chanting, 150. 
 
 Cathedral at Great Minster, Reforma- 
 tion of, 112. 
 
 Celibacy, Zwingli's opinions on, 121. 
 
 " Christian Introduction," Zwingli's 
 work entitled, 139, 140. 
 
 Chur, meeting of Diet at, in favour of 
 Reformation, 182; hostile measures 
 of the bishop, 183; Zwingli's letter to 
 inhabitants of; its effects, 183, 185. 
 
 Cipher, Zwingli corresponds with Land- 
 grave in, 407. 
 
 Civil power in Zurich interferes in re- 
 ligion and morals, 99. 
 
 Classics, Zwingli studies, Zwingli's love 
 for, 6, 386-389. 
 
 Cloisters, their reformation, 115. 
 
 Coctus Anemundus, 203, 205. 
 
 Coin, Zurich, Uri prohibits, as if from 
 sacrilege, 233. 
 
 Comander forwards Reformation in 
 Graubund, 182. 
 
 Commentary, Zwingli's, " on the true 
 and false religious," dedicated to 
 Francis L, 206. 
 
 " Common Lordships," 213. 
 
 Como, history of gospel in, 206, 208. 
 
 Communion with God, Zwingli's, 90- 
 393. 
 
 Concubinage of the clergy, 121. 
 
 Confessional, Zwingli's opinion of, 152. 
 
 Congratulations on Zwingli's recovery 
 from plague, 80, 81. 
 
 Constance, Zwingli is consecrated at, 9 ; 
 pastoral letter of Bishop of, against 
 
460 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 the Reformation, 65; answer of Bi- 
 shop of, to Zwingli's " Christian In- 
 troduction," 144. 
 
 Correspondence, Zwingli's, 168, 353. 
 
 Council of Zurich, their appeal to the 
 people, 145. 
 
 Decatalia, reference to, 279. 
 
 De Falconibus, his intimacy with 
 Zwingli, 75, 80. 
 
 Design to ensnare Zwingli, 227-230. 
 
 Diet, at Faber's instigation, moves 
 against Zvringli, 69 ; petition of evan- 
 gelical clergy to, 69-7 1 ; resolves to sup- 
 press Reformation by force, 144, 212. 
 
 Discipline in Zurich, 162, 163. 
 
 Disputation — on religion, the first, at 
 Zurich, 100-108; the second, on im- 
 ages and the mass, 131-139; at Baden, 
 225-232; with Anabaptists, 254-280; 
 on the Supper, 344-352. 
 
 Divorce, Zwingli's opinions on, 155. 
 
 Dominican monks desire to have 
 Zwingli, 6. 
 
 Dream, Zwingli's, 146. 
 
 Durer Albrecht, the painter, 333. 
 
 Ebrard, extract from Dogma of the 
 Holy Supper, 342, 343; 362, 363. 
 
 Ecclesiastics, country, ignorance of, 139. 
 
 Eck, Zwingli's school-fellow, 6; chal- 
 lenges Zwingli to a disputation, 225; 
 Zwingli's answer, 226. 
 
 Economics of the times, 108. 
 
 Education, extract from treatise on, 
 377. 
 
 Egentius of Ereiburg, 77. 
 
 Egidius k Porta, lettersfrom, to Zwingli, 
 and mysterious cessation of, 206, 207. 
 
 Einsiedeln, Zwingli's call to, 19; Zwin- 
 gli's preaching at, 28. 
 
 Elaboration, Zwingli complains of want 
 of time for, 374, 375. 
 
 Election, 244, 394, 400. 
 
 Emperor, his designs against Reform- 
 ers, 404; their alliance against, 407. 
 
 Engelhard resigns canonship in favour 
 of Zwingli, 82. 
 
 Erasmus, his encomium on Zwingli, 12 ; 
 meets Zwingli at Basle, 18; Zwingli's 
 reflections on a poem of, 18. 
 
 Evangelical clergy, meeting of, and 
 petition to the Diet, 69-71; persecu- 
 tion of, 212. 
 
 Excommunication, Zwingli's sentiments 
 on, 159; by the Anabaptists, 162. 
 
 Expositions, Zwingli's, at Zurich, 41. 
 
 Faber, Zwingli's school-fellow, 6 ; his 
 relations to Zwingli, 55; changes his 
 
 sentiments, 57 ; congratulates him on 
 his recovery from plague, 81 ; speaks 
 at Conference, 102 ; leagues with 
 Ennius to take Zwingli prisoner, 211; 
 intrigues with the Pope and Emperor, 
 224; Zwingli's letter to, 230; hostility 
 to Zwingli, 235; strives to disunite 
 Reformers, 337. 
 
 Eahr, cloister of, 23. 
 
 Faith, Zwingli's views of, 241-244 ; jns- 
 tificationi'by, in Christ, 397. 
 
 Family, Zwingli's, 378, 379. 
 
 Farel, letters of, to Zwingli, 191, 192. 
 
 Fasts, Zwingli's sermons on, 58; his 
 opinions on Fast-laws, 63, 64. 
 
 Ferdinand, Archduke, issues from Ofen 
 decree against Reformation, 235. 
 
 " Five Places," or " Cantons," their alli- 
 ance with Austria, 235. 
 
 Friends, Zwingli's Evangelical, 86-87; 
 in the circle of, 379. 
 
 Foreign service, Zwingli's declamations 
 against, 42-49. 
 
 France, progress of gospel in, 203-206. 
 
 Fulgentius' views on the Supper, 354- 
 356. 
 
 Germans look with hope on Zwingli's 
 labours, 87; Zwingli's letters to, 201, 
 202. 
 
 Germany, Zwingli's interest in its refor- 
 mation, and influence on, 193, 198. 
 
 Geroldseck, 23, 29; his foreboding, 114. 
 
 Glarus, Zwingli's call to, 8; his depar- 
 ture from, 19; letter to parishioners 
 of, 174; its effect, 175. 
 
 Goeldi, H., 9. 
 
 Gospel, order of the Council to preach, 
 55; monks oppose, 56. 
 
 Grebel, James, executed for receiving 
 foreign pensions, 234. 
 
 Greek, Zwingli copies Paul's Epistles in, 
 16. 
 
 Guild-rooms, Zwingli sups at, 374. 
 
 Haller, Zwingli's correspondence with, 
 186, 188; opinion of Zwingli, 193. 
 
 Hebrew, Zwingli studies, 384; his views 
 of the importance of, 384-387. 
 
 Hedio, his opinion of Zwingli's preach- 
 ing, 29. 
 
 Hesch, letter from, 171. 
 
 Hessen, Landgrave of, joins Christian 
 Biu'gher-rights, 405 ; undertakes to 
 mediate between Luther and Zwingli, 
 337; writes to Zwingli, 338; entei"- 
 tains both parties at castle, 344; i^ 
 won over to Zwingli's views, 357. 
 
 Hetzer writes against images, 125. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 461 
 
 Hildegard Abbess, 25. 
 Hofmeister Sebastian, 135. 
 Hoffmann accuses Zwiugli, 64; his de- 
 fence of Popery, 141. 
 Holidays at Zurich after the Eeforma- 
 
 tlon, 157. 
 Hottinger, Nicolas, removes a crucifix, 
 
 126; banished, 139; beheaded, 213, 
 
 214. 
 Hospitality, Zwingli's, 381, 382. 
 Hutten, Ulrich von, 202, 203. 
 Hymns, Zwingli's, 78-80, 430. 
 
 Ilanz, Disputation at, its effects, 185. 
 
 Images, Zwingli's opinions on, 127-130; 
 their removal at Zurich, 143. 
 
 Immorality of the Romish Church con- 
 trasted with superior morality of the 
 Reformed, 152. 
 
 Imperial throne, election to, at death of 
 Maximilian I., 50. 
 
 Imperial towns, Zwingli's letter to, 198- 
 201. 
 
 Indulgences, Samson sells, 31, 34 ; Zwin- 
 gli's opinions on, 32. 
 
 Innovations discountenanced, 142. 
 
 Inspiration, helps for discovering sense 
 of, 385-388. 
 
 Institutions for sick and poor called 
 into existence by Reformation, 120. 
 
 Interpretation, right principles of, 238- 
 241. 
 
 Ittingen, cloister of, burned, 216; con- 
 sequences, 216-222. 
 
 Jerusalem, knights of, letter from one, 
 and Zwingli's reply to, 169, 170. 
 
 Jodocns, Dr., his opinion on ecclesias- 
 tical authority, 132. 
 
 Joner, Wolfgang, speaks at Religious 
 Disputation, 104. 
 
 Journey, Zwingli's, to Marburg, and 
 stories about, 340, 341. 
 
 Jud, Leo, his first introduction to Zwin- 
 gli, 8; appointed Zwingli's successor 
 at Einsiedeln, 33; elected pastor at 
 Zurich, 41 ; interrupts Augustine 
 monk in preaching, 95 ; marries, 122 ; 
 attends Disputation, 133; writes on 
 Supper Controversy, 330. 
 
 Lasky, John of, 196. 
 
 Latin, Zwingli teaches atBasle, 7 ; founds 
 a school for, at Glarus, 11. 
 
 Lay preacher. Burgomaster Vadian, 
 180. 
 
 Leave of absence, Zwingli quits Zurich 
 without, 339, 340 ; Luther seeks re- 
 fusal of, 341. 
 
 Leo YIII., bull of, 24. 
 
 Leo X., 31. 
 
 Licentiousness of the priesthood, its in- 
 fluence on Zwingli, 13. 
 
 Lichtensteig, Zwingli insulted at, by 
 Schwyz Deputies, 178. 
 
 Linth, Zwingli's meditations on banks 
 of, 10. 
 
 Literalists, their false principles of in- 
 terpretation, 240. 
 
 Liturgy, an old one, leads Zwingli to in- 
 vestigate, 17; Zwingli's on the Sup- 
 per, 146-149. 
 
 Lucerne, reply of, to attend Disputa- 
 tion, 131 ; Zwingli burned in effigy at, 
 212. 
 
 Luther compared with Zwingli, 73; 
 Zwingli refuses to be called a fol- 
 lower of, 74; his encomium on, 75; 
 strives to avert his excommunication, 
 76; his temper contrasted with that 
 of Zwingli, 327-330 ; seeks Papists as 
 umpires, 342; attends Disputation at 
 Marburg, 330-370; his last thoughts 
 on Supper Controversy, 370. 
 
 Magister, Zwingli receives title of, and 
 thoughts on, 8. 
 
 Magnanimity, act of, on part of Bernese, 
 191. 
 
 Marburg, Conference on Supper pro- 
 posed to be held at, 338; Zwingli's 
 journey to, 339-341; Luther's, 341- 
 344 ; English Sweat breaks out at, 
 and ends conference, 358 ; agreement 
 by disputants signed at, 358, 362. 
 
 Marignano, battle of, 16. 
 
 Marriage, Zwingli's, 123; opinion on, 
 154; Zurich laws on, 156. 
 
 Mary, Virgin, adoration of, 26-29. 
 
 Mass, Rechberg's opinion of, 23; Dis- 
 putation on, 135; falls into desuetude 
 at Zurich, 145. 
 
 Mass-canon, 125. 
 
 Melanchthon fears the Conference on 
 the Supper, 341 ; proposes Papists as 
 umpires, 342 ; appointed to confer 
 with Zwingli, 344-347; vacillates at 
 Augsburg Diet, 365, 366; dies, 370. 
 
 Monasteries, their suppression in Zu- 
 rich, 119. 
 
 Monks, Zwingli's opinions of, 116-118. 
 
 Morality, Zurich laws upon, 159. 
 
 Mumer's invectives on the Reformers, 
 228, 231, 233. 
 
 Music, Zwingli's skill in, 5, 6. 
 
 Musso, Castellan of, harasses with his 
 army Graubund, 405. 
 
 Nunneries, reformation of, 1 1 5. 
 
 CEchslin, John, 23; imprisoned, 215; 
 parishioners attempt his rescue, 216. 
 
462 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 CEcolampad attends Baden Disputa- 
 tion, 231 ; takes part in Supper Con- 
 troversy, 330; confers with Luther, 
 and opinion of him, 347; disputes 
 with Luther, 348-350. 
 
 Organ, in worship, abolished, 151. 
 
 Parochial labours, Zwingli's, 11, 12. 
 
 Pavia, effects of battle of, in Switzer- 
 land, 223. 
 
 Pension, Zwingli's, from the Pope, 14; 
 abolished in Zurich, 52 ; Zwingli re- 
 signs his, 52 ; Grebel beheaded for 
 receiving, 234. 
 
 Persecutions in Lucerne, Schwyz, and 
 Thurgau, 229. 
 
 Pfaeffer, mineral waters of, visited by 
 Zwingli, 77. 
 
 Pilgrims to Einsiedeln, 25; Zwingli's 
 preaching to, 28. 
 
 Pindar, Zwingli's praise of, 386, 387. 
 
 Plague, Zwingli attacked by, 77 ; effects 
 of, on his constitution, 81. 
 
 Poison employed against Zwingli, 84. 
 
 Popularity, Zwingli's, 53. 
 
 Preacher, Zwingli, at Einsiedeln, 24, 28. 
 
 Prophesying, introduced by Zwingli, 
 113; its beneficial operation, 114. 
 
 Protest against the Diet of Speyer, 337. 
 
 Pupils, Zwingli's, regardfor him, 11. 
 
 Rseubli, first priest who marries, 122; 
 becomes Anabaptist, 250. 
 
 Bebaptism, badge of Anabaptism, 250. 
 
 Reformation, Zwingli's language on, to 
 Papal Legate, 30; principles of, 110.; 
 
 Eeinhard, Anna, Zwingli's spouse, 122- 
 124. 
 
 Registers, baptismal and marriage, in- 
 troduced in Zurich, 165. 
 
 Regius tJrbanus, his encomium on 
 Zwingli, 193, 194. 
 
 Reformed Church of Zurich described 
 by Zwingli, 165, 166. 
 
 Reformer, first, Luther or Zwingli, 326, 
 327. 
 
 Rhenish towns, spread of gospel in, 196. 
 
 Roist, Burgomaster, closes Second Dis- 
 putation, 139. 
 
 Sabbath, its sanctification, Zwingli's 
 opinion on, 157; laws on, 158. 
 
 Sacraments, significance of, 245-247. 
 
 Samson, Monk, sells indulgences, 54. 
 
 Salvation, who saved?""l37, 396. 
 
 Salzmann's letter to Zwingli, 83. 
 
 Schinner, M., his rise, influence, and 
 overtures to Zwingli, 14. 
 
 Schucker, Anabaptist, fratricide com- 
 mitted by, 285. 
 
 Scriptures, dissemination of, in mother 
 tongue, 173. 
 
 Sebilla, P., Zwingli's letter to, 203-205. 
 
 Seneca's faith contrasted by Zwingli 
 with the Pope's, 396, 397. 
 
 Shortsightedness, Zwingli's, 127. 
 
 Singing, Congregational, 150. 
 
 Smalkald, League of, compared with 
 " Christian Burgher rights," 411. 
 
 Speyer, Diet at, condemns Anabaptists 
 and Sacramentalists, 337. 
 
 Spiritual and temporal powers com- 
 bined, 161 ; spiritual generalship 
 manifested by Zwingli, 237, 238. 
 
 St. Gall, Cloister of, apple of discord to 
 parties, 414, 415. 
 
 Stillstand, Court of, 160. 
 
 Stories, Swiss and Biblical, their influ- 
 ence on Zwingli, 3. 
 
 Studies, Zwingli's, 383-390. 
 
 Suabia, Zwingli's influence in, 193. 
 
 Supper, the Lord's, proposed to be in- 
 troduced, 141 ; first celebrated in 
 Zurich, 146-149 ; Luther on, 286-305. 
 
 Synods, introduced in Zurich, 163-165. 
 
 Tschudis the, pupils of Zwingli, 11-33. 
 
 Temptations, Zwingli exposed to, 13, 14. 
 
 Theses, Zwingli publishes his, 109. 
 
 Toggenburg, Zwingli's ' native vale, 1; 
 spread of gospel in, and Zwingli's let- 
 ter to inhabitants of, 175-178. 
 
 " Twelve Places" move Zurich to depose 
 Zwingli, 214. 
 
 Uncle, Zwingli's, Dean of Wesen, 1-5. 
 Union, attempts at, between Lutherans 
 
 and Zwinglians, 335-372. 
 Valla first made the Bible known at 
 
 the era of the Reformation, 326. 
 Venice, request to, to join Protestant 
 
 Alliance, and result of, 408. 
 Vienna, Zwingli at the High School of, 6. 
 
 "War, Zurich engaged in, against the 
 
 French, in Lombardy, 15; Cappel, 
 
 437-458. 
 Wattenwyl, Margaretha Von, letter 
 
 from, 169; Provost Von, 187. 
 Werner, Steiner, letter from Zwingli to, 
 
 on the infatuation of the Swiss, 236. 
 Wirths, the three, arrested, and Hans 
 
 and John executed, 217-221. 
 Wittenbach, Zwingli's instructor in the 
 
 Word of God, 7 ; his prediction, 7. 
 Woelflins, the, Zwingli's masters at 
 
 Berne, 4. 
 
 Zug, Diet at, requests Zurich to suppress 
 Reformation, 214, 215. 
 
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 in every respect, as perfect, complete, and accurate as possible, would have jus- 
 tified a subscription price of double a guinea and a half, and it is only by a very 
 large demand that they can ever hope to be remunerated. It is requested that 
 the Subscriptions may be remitted as early as possible. 
 
 The whole work is issued under the Editorship of the Rev. Andrew R. 
 Eausset, M.A., late University and Queen's Scholar, and Senior Classical and 
 Gold Medalist, Trinity College, Dublin, Editor of Homer's Iliad, Livy, and 
 Terence. 
 
 " We are heartily glad that this important work, of an English Translation of Bengers Gnomon, 
 has not only been fairly started, but has been successftdly completed. Bengel's Gnomon has always 
 been held in the highest estimation by all competent judges, as presenting a very remarltable, 
 probably unexampled, combination of learning, sagacity, critical tact, evangeUcal unction, and 
 terseness and condensation of style. Its growing popularity in Germany is, like the popularity of 
 Calvin's Commentary on the New Testament, as edited by Tholuck, one of the very best signs of 
 the times. • « • * The enterprising Publishers have secured, for this purpose, the services 
 of several accomplished and thoroughly qualified scholars. Mr. Fausset, of Trinity College, 
 Dubhn, acta as general Editor and Superintendent, and undertakes the translation of the Commen- 
 tary upon the Gospels of Marli, Luke, John, and Acts of the Apostles. The Eev. James Bandinel, 
 of Wadham College, Oxford, has translated Bengel's General Preface, and his Commentary upon 
 Matthew's Gospel. The Kev. Dr. James Bryce, late of Aberdeen, has translated the portion upon 
 the Epistles to the Romans and Corinthians, and has undei-taken the rest of Paul's Epistles. The 
 Rev. Dr. Fletcher of Wimbome has executed the translation of the remainder of the work, on the 
 Catholic Epistles, and the Apocalypse." — From British and Foreign Evangelical Review, April, 1858. 
 
 " There are few devout studeuts of the Bibje who have not long held Bengel in the highest 
 estimation, nay, revered and loved him. It was not, however, without some apprehension for his 
 reputation with English readers that we saw the announcement of a translation of his work. We 
 feared that his sentences, terse and condensed as they are, would neccssaiily lose much of their 
 pointedness and force by being clothed m another garb. But we confess, gladly, to a surpnse at 
 the success the translators have achieved in preserving so much of the spirit of the ongmaL We ore 
 bound to say that this first instalment is executed in the most scholarlike and able manner. The 
 translation has the merit of being faithful and perspicuous. Its publication will, we are confident, 
 do much to bring back readers to the devout study of the Bible, and at the same time prove one of 
 the most valuable of exegetical aids. The 'getUng up' of those volumes, combmed with their 
 marvellous cheapness, cannot faU, we should hope, to command for them a large sale. —Eclectic 
 
 "This toinslation is particularly good, characterized by accuracy and strength, and enriched, 
 moreover, with many valuable original notes by the translators;- We earnestly commend it to all 
 our readers as one of the very best commentaries on the New Testament Scriptures. —Chm-ch of 
 EngUmd Monthly Review, Nov. ISbl. . _,i p, , v •» „< if. i„o,.^o.q 
 
 "This work is of great critical hnportance, fully sustammg the merited celebnty of its learned 
 author It is a book for the Chi-istian student for the ministiy, for the Christian pastor, and <or 
 the laborious inquirer into the mind of God in sacred Scripture."— a™(ta» WUntss, Nov. 1867. 
 
" The translation of the ' Gnomon' into English will be hailed as a coramon hoon to the carefW 
 student of Holy Scripture. In this noble work, which is beautifully got up, the publishers have 
 laid all denominations of Christians under a deep obligation, and we hope their spirited effort, 
 made at great expense to themselves, will be duly appreciated and amply rewarded by an extensive 
 sale of these most valuable and important volumes." — Methodist New Connexion Magazine. 
 
 '* The whole work is executed in the best taste, and the rising clergy of Great Britain will 
 scarcely show themselves so lukewann, or so devoid of good judgment, as not to possess them- 
 selves of one of the very best commentaries on the New Testament now to he found iij our 
 language." — Christian Times. 
 
 For the convenience of such as may wish only a portion of the Commentary, the 
 volumes are sold separately at 8s. 6c?. each, {except Vol. II., 10s. 6rf.) 
 
 Vol. I., Introduction, Matthew, Mark ; Vol. II., Luke, John, Acts ; Vol. III., 
 Romans, Corinthians ; Vol. IV., Galatians to Hebrews ; Vol. V., James to the 
 end. 
 
 Just published, in Crown 8vo, Price 4s. 6d. cloth, 
 
 A PLEA FOR THE WAYS OP GOD TO MAN; 
 
 Being an attempt to Vindicate the Moral Government of the World. By 
 William Fleming, D.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of 
 Glasgow. 
 
 " This puhlication is worthy of the name it hears, and the University ivith which its author is 
 connected, and is one of the most valuahle that has issued from any of the Scottish Universities 
 for many years. The hook, as a whole, is worthy of standing side hyside with Butler's Analogy."— 
 British Standard. 
 
 " Those who read the hook will have no hesitation in declaring that the several subjects indicated 
 in it are ti-eated with great skill and ability, and, generally speaking, successfully." — Glasgow 
 Courier. 
 
 " Dr. Fleming's book is of a philosophical nature; having laid down and vindicated the principles 
 on which his argument is based — and this he has done in a clear and unpretending way — ^he 
 descends from the controverted topics to the serener region of contemplation, and admiration 
 stiikes us as rendering his work no unmeet companion for the quiet hour of reflection, or for the 
 chamber of distress. Reason and Revelation are seen to be in beautiful harmony; and it is his 
 aim to show that while clouds, engendered by earthly vapours, may descend around the sufferer's 
 head, they are not wholly untinged by a reflected radiance, earth-bom as they are, but shall soon 
 
 be dispersed by the dawn of the Sun of Righteousness — the breaking of the eternal day 
 
 Our exhausted space constrains us abniptly to break off. "We can only say that Dr. Fleming -s 
 book is not likely to be the less useful, that it is free from the ' jargon of philosophy ;' that its 
 statements are distinct and clear ; and that, on flt occasions, the author rises with his subject, and 
 addresses the reader in a strain of chastened and persuasive eloquence. In regard to lucidness of 
 thought and arrangement, and correctness of expression, his book may be advantageously read by 
 aspirant teachers of theology and expounders of Scripture." — M'^PhaiVs Journal. 
 
 " This volume is executed in a learned, pious, and thoughtful manner." — Clerical Journal 
 
 Just Published, in Medium 8vo, Price 10s. 6d., cloth, 
 
 A MANUAL OF CHURCH HISTORY. 
 
 By Henry E. F. Guericke, Doctor and Professor of Theology in Halle. Trans- 
 lated from the German, by William G. T. Shedd, Professor in Andover 
 Theological Seminary. 
 
 "Here is a Manual of Church History which may be confidently recommended, without reserve 
 or qualification, to students belonging to all evangelical churches. Guericke is thoroughly ortho- 
 dox. As compared with Hase, whose manual — scientifically and artistically the very best of all 
 manuals of church history — we recently introduced and warmly commended to our readers, it may 
 briefly be said, that Guericke's evangelical belief and feeling give him a more lively and appreciative 
 interest in the internal history of the Church — ^that he devotes more attention to the developi:pL|pnt 
 of doctrines — and that te presents more perfectly the range of thought and substance of opitfion 
 distinguishing the works of the principal writers in successive ages of the Church. 
 
 "We r^oice in the appearance of this volume, and heartily thank Professor Shedd for it. It is 
 no mere literal rendering of the original; if it had been, it would, as many competent judges 
 declare, have been confused in arrangement of the matter, and most cumbrous in style ; but Pro- 
 fessor Shedd has wisely translated with freedom, and has unproved the structure of the work."— 
 Nonconformist, Sept. 2, 18-57. 
 
 " The Manual of Professor Guericke, which has just been produced in this country in an English 
 dress, is a valuable attempt to compel the theological student to take something more then a cur- 
 sory view of the earlier centuries of our religion."' — Literary Churchman. 
 
 " We are glad that a Manual of Church History has appeared, which exhibits at once undoubted 
 orthodoxy, and that grasp of mind which is alone capable of treating such a subject with a lumi- 
 nous and lively brevity."' — Clerical Journal.