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104
Balthasar Hübmaier
[1524-
"Thorough" could under any circumstances have had his entire approval. And he was able to argue from the Scriptures against the radical position with an exegesis that was ingenious if not correct. He insisted that the tares should be allowed to grow together with the wheat, that the strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and the like.
The question of infant baptism seemed to Zwingli at first open to doubt. He avows that for a time his mind was not at rest on this question,[1] and the like was true of his friend Œcolampadius. But when they saw later the practical bearings of the
- ↑ "For the error also misled me for several years, so that I thought it would be much better to baptise children first when they had come to a good age." Vom Touff, vom Widertouff, und vom Kindertouff, Zwingli, Op. II., i., 245. "Although I know, as the Fathers show, that infants have been baptised occasionally from the earliest times, still it was not so universal a custom as it is now, but the common practice was, as soon as they arrived at the age of reason, to form them into classes for instruction in the word of salvation (hence they were called catechumens, i. e., persons under instruction). And after a firm faith had been implanted in their hearts and they had confessed the same with their mouth, then they were baptised. I could wish that this custom of giving instruction were revived to-day, viz., since the children are baptised so young, their religious instruction might begin as soon as they come to sufficient understanding. Otherwise they suffer a great and ruinous disadvantage, if they are not as well religiously instructed after baptism as the children of the ancients were before baptism, as sermons to them still preserved show."--Quoted by Jackson, Huldreich Zwingli, p. 243.
