almost every-where, and that amongst them were many of our clergy and monks. And as for those who were burnt, they in the defense they made for themselves told us that this heresy had been concealed from the time of the martyrs-and that it had existed in Greece and other countries.' All this he evidently believed. But Manichæism had not been 'concealed from the time of the martyrs;' for his predecessors had openly contended with it every-where. This heresy was a discovery of another sort to the provost of Steinfeld.

This letter aroused Bernard, who opened his batteries upon the 'wild beasts' in his Sermons on Solomon's Song.' He is especially bitter toward them because they despised infant baptism; is virulent because they refused to take oaths and observed secrecy in their Christian rites; and lays several serious things to their charge, although he professes to know but little about them. And then his little knowledge of them obliges him to bless whom he would fain curse; for he says: 'If you ask them of their faith, nothing can be more Christian; if you observe their conversation, nothing can be more blameless; and what they speak they prove by deeds. You may see a man for the testimony of his faith frequent the church, honor the elders, offer his gift, make his confession, receive the sacrament. What more like a Christian? As to life and manners, he circumvents no man, over-reaches no man, and does violence to no man. He fasts much and eats not the bread of idleness, but works with his hands for his support. The whole body, indeed, are rustic and illiterate, and all whom I have known of this sect are very ignorant.' And so he 'marveled,' as others in the Apostolic times had at the same things.

'This sect,' says Herzog, 'lived on in the regions along the Rhine, especially in Cologne and Bonn.' But it was terribly persecuted. . . . In 1163 several of them were burnt, after the Canon Echbert had tried in vain to convert them. This monk was sent to preach to death all who had escaped the stake. His sermons survive to this day, and in their dedication to Reginald Archbishop of Cologne he rehearses his disputes with these monsters,' and tells many things which he had learned about them, in part by torture and the threat of death. But his statements do not hold together. He evinces confusion, if not bewilderment, in his attempt to understand their tenets. Like most of the Catholic witnesses, he fell into the temptation of tracing this particular heresy to some of the old and proscribed 'heretics,' which carried disgrace with it, and so challenged the hatred of men and covered the new 'heretics' with obloquy. Hence, in his thirteen sermons, he labors hard to fasten upon them the faith and practices of the Manichæans; for with most of his brethren, he was afflicted with Manichæism on the brain whenever he scented heresy. He construes their observance of the Supper into a mere evasion,' and takes the word of an apostate from them, who says that they denied the birth of Christ, his proper human flesh and his real death and resurrection; teaching that all these were but a simulation. He would have us believe that they renounced water baptism altogether, substituting therefor the Consolamentum; and then takes particular pains to

tell us that their principal reason for denying baptism to infants, was found in their incapacity to receive it, and so, that it should be deferred till they came to the exercise of faith. He adds, that they were divided into several sects, yet he classes them all with Cathari, 'a sort of people' whom he pronounces 'very pernicious to the Catholic faith, which, like moths, they corrupt and destroy.' Gieseler shows that they rejected infant baptism, because baptism should be administered only to believers.1 This zealous monk betrays the entire animus of his denunciation of these Cologne Baptists, when he says of them that they sustained their positions by the authority of Scripture. They are armed with the words of the Holy Scripture which in any way seem to favor their sentiments, and with those who know how to defend

their errors, and to oppose the Catholic truth; though in reality they are wholly ignorant of the true meaning couched in those words, and which cannot be discovered without great judgment.'

In 1231 Konrad of Marburg, a fanatical Dominican monk, led a terrible persecution against this sect, and little is heard of them in Germany afterward. It is very likely that the band of thirty martyrs, of whom Milner, Dr. Henry and William of Newbury speak, were of this body. They tell us that in 1159 thirty men and women who spoke German reached England, and for their religious principles and practices were arraigned before a Council of clergy at Oxford. They were found guilty of incorrigible heresy, and Henry II. ordered, their foreheads branded with a red-hot iron; they were to be whipped through the streets of the city, their clothes to be cut off at their girdles, and then to be turned into the open fields, all persons being forbidden to give them shelter or relief. This was

in the depth of winter, and every one of them perished with hunger and cold. These appear to have been the first heretics deliberately murdered in England, for what Newbury calls 'detesting holy baptism' as practiced by Rome. The dates' and general facts suggest these as the victims of German persecution, for Echbert says of the Cologne Baptists: They are increased in great multitudes throughout all countries, to the great danger of the Church, for their words eat like a canker, i and, like a flying leprosy, run every way, infecting the precious members of Christ. These in our Germany we call Cathari; in Flanders they call them Piphles; in French, Tisserands, from the art of weaving, because numbers of them are of that occupation.'

The term Cathari has also been applied to another thoroughly Baptist sect, which arose in the very dawn of the century: the PETROBRUSIANS. Their leader was the great reformer, Peter of Bruis. In order to prevent confusion, it may be well here to define what is meant by the term 'Baptist,' when used to characterize one of these historical bodies. A Pedobaptist is one who baptizes babes. An Antipedobaptist is one who rejects the baptism of babes. But this does not of necessity make him a Baptist; for the Paulicians, Cathari, Albigenses, and in fact the modern Quakers, all cast infant baptism aside, but administered no baptism at all. Hence all these have rejected the baptism of babes as a matter of course, but we cannot, for that reason, number them with Baptists. An 'Anabaptist' is one who baptizes again for any reason. The Novatians and Donatists were 'Anabaptists,'

and reimmersed those who came to them from the Catholics. At the same time the Catholics were 'Anabaptists,' when they reimmersed those who came to them from what they called the heretical bodies. They were therefore Pedobaptists and 'Anabaptists' at the same time. But a Baptist proper, in modern parlance, is one who rejects the baptism of babes under all circumstances, and who immerses none but those who personally confess Christ under any circumstances; and those who are thus properly immersed upon their faith in Christ, we have a right to claim in history as Baptists to that extent, but no further.

For this reason we cannot honestly claim several of the Cathari sects as Baptists, simply because volumes might be filled with reliable evidence to show that they hated infant baptism with downright hatred. They opposed it with all their might and even ridiculed it as an unmeaning ceremony, which they classed with images, prayer for the dead, purgatory and such other gear. Often, indeed, they were obliged to have their babes immersed by the Roman priests, because the civil as well as the ecclesiastical law of the land in which they lived laid them under grievous penalties for refusing. But as a moral institution they treated it with contempt, as thousands who are not Baptists now do. Yet what were their views of the immersion of believers in water? Many of them knew but little about it; they had never seen a believer immersed. The baptism of babes enforced by the civil power had well-nigh driven it from nominal Christian countries, made so by the

strong clutch of law. They could not be immersed if they would, as believers; for this was unlawful. Deprived of this right, the civil and ecclesiastical law drove them into Quakerism, in counting the believer the subject of a higher baptism, as they called it, in the Consolamentum. And what was that? Ermengard de

scribes it thus:

When they wish to impart the Consolamentum to any man or woman, he that is called Greater and ordained, having washed his hands and holding in his hands the book of the Gospels, admonishes him or them who come to receive the Consolamentum that they place their entire faith in that Consolamentum. And so, placing the book on their heads, they repeat the Lord's Prayer seven times, and then the Gospel of St. John, beginning with the words, "In the beginning," and going as far as the passage which reads, "Grace and truth through Jesus Christ." Thus is the Consolamentum completed. Do you ask by what persons it is administered? We answer, by those among them who are called the ordained. But if none such be present, there be those who among them are called the Consolati (by them), it is administered, and if there be no men present, even women may administer it to the sick. They believe that by it the remission of every sin and the cleansing of every stain is accomplished, without any satisfactory penance whatever, if they die immediately after. They say even that no one, save he who has received that Consolamentum from the Consolati, can by any work, not even by martyrdom, nor if he keep himself as much as possible from all sins and faults, reach the heavenly kingdom. And they believe this also, that if he who administers the Consolamentum should have fallen into any of the sins they call criminal, as, for example, to eat an egg, or fish, or cheese, or to slay a bird, or any animal save reptiles, or even into any of the sins the Roman Church calls criminal, then the Consolamentum does the recipients no good. Nay, they hold the recipient should again have it administered by another, if he desires to be saved.'

This account is abundantly sustained by indisputable evidence. And this socalled 'spiritual baptism' was administered because they cast aside material water as 'evil' or 'corrupt,' while the Romish Church immersed therein. How can we count such people as Baptists, whatever their views of infant baptism may have been? So far as the question of baptizing babes was concerned, they were Antipedobaptists; and so far as immersion in water was concerned, the Romanists were better Baptists than they.

There he saw the

In the Petrobrusians we find a sect of Baptists for which no apology is needed. Peter of Bruis seized the entire Biblical presentation of baptism, and forced its teaching home upon the conscience and the life, by rejecting the immersion of babes and insisting on the immersion of all believers in Christ, without any admixture of Catharistic nonsense. He was a converted priest, it is believed a pupil of Abelard, brought to the Saviour's feet by reading the Bible. difference between the Christianity of his day and of that of the Apostles; and he resolved to devote his life to the restoration of Gospel Christianity, and began his work as early as A. D. 1104. He threw tradition to the winds with the double sense of Scripture, and took its literal interpretation. With this went the doctrine of transubstantiation, holding the Supper as a merely historical and monumental

act. He held the Church to be made up of regenerated people only, counted the bishops and priests as he knew them, mere frauds;, and cast aside all the ceremonial mummeries of the Romish hierarchy. He would not adore images, offer prayer to or for the dead, nor do penance. He laughed at the stupidity which holds that a child is regenerated when baptized, that he can be a member of Christ's flock when he knows nothing of Christ as a Shepherd, and demanded that all who came to his churches should be immersed in water on their own act of faith. He had no controversy on the subject of immersion with the Romish priests, for they practiced nothing else as the custom of their. Church in his day, nor for a century afterward; therefore no separate Baptist body was needed for that reason. His great offense was that he reimmersed those whom they had immersed as babes when they became disciples of Christ and were regenerated by the Spirit of God.

The chief testimony that we have of him is from Peter the Venerable, the Abbot of Clugny, and a brief passage from Abelard. This Peter, his deadly opponent, gives a full account of his doctrines and tried to crush him; but, singularly enough, never breathed a syllable against his practice of immersing, for that was Peter's own practice, only its subjects were babes. The venerable monk, 'Maxima Biblioth.' (xxii, 1035), defines the views of the Petrobrusians precisely as would an able Baptist of to-day, and attempts to answer them with the exact stock arguments of 1886. He says: The first article of the heretics denies that children below the age of reason can be saved by the baptism of Christ; and affirms that another's faith can do those no good who cannot yet exercise faith of their own, since, according to them, it is not another's but one's own faith which, together with baptism, saves, because the Lord said, "Whosoever believeth and is baptized shall be saved." He makes them say in another place, 'It is an idle and vain thing to plunge candidates in water at any age, when ye can, indeed, after a human manner, wash the flesh from impurities, but can by no means purify the soul from sins. But we await an age capable of faith, and after a man is prepared to acknowledge God as his and believe in him, we do not, as you slander us, rebaptize, but baptize him; for no one is to be called baptized who is not washed with the baptism wherewith sins are washed away.'

The Abbot stood side by side with Bernard in his Biblical scholarship and mental force. They were the leading defenders of the Catholic faith in France, and threw themselves into the gap with all their might to defend her against these simple Gospel Baptists. Instead of bowing to our Lord's words as an obedient disciple, Peter indulged in this absurd reasoning: 'Has the whole world been so blinded and hitherto involved in such darkness, that to open their eyes and break up the long night it should, after so many fathers, martyrs, popes and heads of all the Churches, have to wait so long for you, and choose Peter of Bruis and Henry, his disciple, as exceedingly recent apostles, to correct the long error? If this be true, it is manifest how great an absurdity follows. For then all Gaul, Spain, Ger