“Judged by the reception it met at the hands of those in power, both in Church and State, equally in Roman Catholic and in Protestant countries, the Anabaptist movement was one of the most tragic in the history of Christianity; but, judged by the principles, which were put into play by the men who bore this reproachful nickname, it must be pronounced one of the most momentous and significant undertakings in man's eventful religious struggle after the truth. It gathered up the gains of earlier movements, it is the spiritual soil out of which all nonconformist sects have sprung, and it is the first plain announcement in modern history of a programme for a new type of Christian society which the modern world, especially in America and England, has been slowly realizing—an absolutely free and independent religious society, and a State in which every man counts as a man, and has his share in shaping both Church and State.”

To commemorate Nietzsche on the occasion of his hundredth anniversary is both easy and difficult. It is easy because one cannot but remember him as the prophet of our century. He is more alive in 1944 than he was in 1888 when he suddenly burned out like a volcano after the last eruption, called Ecce Homo. He knew every recess of the modern soul, its widest periphery and its hidden center. His problems are our problems and his predicament is our own. For this very reason it is also difficult to commemorate him. He is still becoming what he is, and one cannot but hesitate to sum up his final significance in the history of Western man and the Christian Occident.

“There is no city where cultured people and philosophers are to be found in greater number than in Geneva,” Voltaire wrote in March 1756. His praise had been constant since he had settled there a year before. After leaving Louis XV for the service of Frederick II, he had broken away from the latter in the most humiliating circumstances of his existence; forbidden now by the French King to return to Paris, he was in a frame of mind particularly susceptible to enjoy republican hospitality and to appreciate the very original character of his city of refuge. Geneva was as democratic as ancient Athens and ruled, in principle at least, by the universal suffrage of its citizens; its stabilility and conservatism, on the other hand, had allowed the development of a distinguished patrician society; his new residence was provided with a back-drop both picturesque and elegant. The intellectual life of the city could have been matched by very few capitals: Theodore Tronchin, the first doctor of Europe (and Voltaire's excuse for having settled there), Charles Bonnet, the naturalist and paleontologist, the philologist Abauzit, among scores of others, were in the vanguard of scientific progress. Above all, Geneva symbolized a major victory over Catholicism; true, it had stopped half way, in his judgment, but matters had progressed since the sixteenth century and the present prospects were very hopeful: “Geneva is not any more the Geneva of Calvin,” he wrote to Cideville, “not by a long shot; it is a country filled with philosophers…” And to Pierre Rousseau, a year later: “Geneva is at present perhaps the city in Europe where there are most philosophers…”

The historical consciousness of modern Western man, a trait of the cultured mind of the last half-dozen generations, seems to be the legacy to a secular civilization from the historians of the Christian church.

Since the creation of man, to be sure, rudimentary types of historical thought have doubtless existed nearly everywhere. With memory and moral freedom of choice was given to Adam the ethical situation in which historical thought appears, for history is the interpretation of social memory in relation to present decisions and hopes for the future. This absolute beginning of historical thought is forever shrouded in mystery, however, and the earliest records of such thought, ages and centuries later, bear little similarity to our patterns of history. These earliest histories are precisely what the modern historian pursues with puritan hatred, myth and legend. The first histories recount relatively little of what men have done; they tell of natural disasters, wars, and migrations primarily as the deeds of the gods. Modern secular history has sought to escape this religious aspect of its archetype, but if the thesis of this paper is correct, the attempt has been vain, the gods have been exorcised from history only by the power of other gods, and the ancient myths displaced only for a more extravagant mythology. And the vagaries of secular Western history are the recognizable corruptions of Christian church history.

The question posed in the title of this article is answered, without further research, by the obvious facts of history. The English refugees from the wrath of Queen Mary did not plan to live long enough in their temporary homes on the Continent to be regarded as inhabitants. A fruitful field for investigation, however, lies in the study of the results of this transitory sojourn in the Swiss Cantons and the valley of the Rhine.

The left-wingers of the Protestant Reformation, harassed and persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike, sought shelter where best they could. While the constantly threatening shadow of the Turkish campaigns made the kingdom of Hungary a most uninviting place of refuge, nevertheless large numbers of the persecuted, particularly Anabaptists, pressed their way into Hungary and attempted to establish colonies of their own. The unsettled state of religious affairs offered some hope of existence, perhaps of ultimate triumph of their views. However, the persecuting arms of the law of 1548 reached out to suppress them along with the sacramentarians: “they must be driven far away from everybody's estates … and they or any others must no longer be permitted within the boundaries of the kingdom.”

Coming to its three-hundredth anniversary, the Westminster Assembly encounters in the United States somewhat more congeniality than it has experienced in a considerable rather recent period. Were they aware of it, this might not greatly concern its members, for they did their work through good report and ill, in the strength of their own convictions. But the fact has significance. One reason for it is a change in the theological climate. After a predominance of other influences the understanding of the Christian gospel which the Reformation brought in and the Westminster divines held is again in the ascendant. This has occurred in a time like that of the Reformation and like the century of the Assembly, of violent political change, calamitous war, deep anxiety, widespread despair. In such times the Christian doctrines of the judgment and providential purpose of God, of the evil and absolute need of man, of God's revelation and sovereign redeeming grace, of a salvation beyond history, for which the men of Westminster stood and yet stand in their works, find sympathy denied to them in more prosperous and self-sufficient years.

This study is not intended to give a complete bibliography of contributions by or on Dutch Mennonites. The writer plans to do this in a later study. This article is limited to giving an outline of the historiography of the Dutch Mennonites and to tracing the trends of development in this field. The main writers and their works will be mentioned.

The “age of reason”—so often an unfounded characterization of the eighteenth century—had no more aggressive exponent than David Williams ( 1738–1816). Born in Glamorganshire, he fulfilled a promise exacted by his dying father to enter the dissenting ministry and was ordained to a Somerset congregation in 1758. His theological views proving unsatisfactory to this group he removed to an Exeter congregation in 1761. For its use he prepared a “Liturgy on the Principles of the Christian Religion,” but the older members objected to his ideas and he to their morals, and in 1769 he took a congregation in Middlesex where he remained four years. Thereafter he turned to writing of which he did a great deal in the next two decades, mainly controversial in nature.

In the castle of Coburg there is a singular emblematic fresco of the seventeenth century. It depicts the wedding procession of Duke John Casimir, which is led by knights, falconers, and musicians. Then, drawn by the nuptial car, defile two sets of attendants—four councillors for civil affairs and three for ecclesiastical. So the Duke sets forth for Cythera, the isle of Venus. Here is a graphic symbol of the twin bureaucracy at the service of every German prince.1 The principle of cujus regio, ejus religio inevitably made pleasure, convenience, and power the motive of administration, sacred as well as secular.

This remarkable man (father of an even more remarkable son, Emanuel Swedenborg) is familiar to students of Swedish church history through the works of Tottie,1 Annerstedt,2 Cornelius,3 Pleijel,4 and others, but now he makes himself known to us more intimately through his autobiography, published at long last, and edited by Dr. Gunnar Wetterberg, Librarian of Lund University.5 He tells us that, because “children like to have their ancestors' portraits and see what they were really like,”6 he undertook, in his old age, this “Jesper Svedberg's biography written by himself, truthfully and in detail, and read through annually and augmented, to remind himself of God's good and strange providence. Bequeathed to his children and descendents for the necessary instruction in how to traverse the world happily,—to whom may God give his grace!”7 He states, somewhat naïvely, “No one can know me better than I myself, especially since, with God's grace, I take sufficient care that self-love shall not blind me and lead me astray.”8 (In spite of which “sufficient care,” the work has been disrespectfully described as a biography “written by a onesided, enthusiastic, and uncritical admirer”9!) He made seven copies, one for each of his children, of which four are still extant. To one who has leafed through the 1100 folio pages of the Linköping MS, struggling hopelessly to decipher the faded script, with its peculiar spelling and sentence structure, Dr. Wetterberg's achievement seems nothing short of miraculous!

The Armenian Church's devotional writers, by way of eminence, are of the Middle Ages, or what is known as the Silver Age of Armenian Literature, namely, Gregory of Nareg, and the Catholicos, Nerses the Graceful.

The seventeenth century was a period of tremendous currents and cross currents of theological thought and ecclesiastical development. There were scholasticism and pietism; orthodoxy and liberalism; intolerance and tolerance; confessionalism and syncretism; hierarchy against clergy; state interests and church interests. These vital currents of thought were not confined to the mainland of the Continent, but were to be found also in the development of Swedish ecclesiastical thought and life. Some men were carried on rapidly by the fast moving streams while others were dragged down into the whirlpool of the conflict of ideas and destroyed. Johannes Matthiae, the Comenius of Sweden, was one of those who were engulfed by the conflict and brought to ecclesiastical defeat.