Notes
Review, 1883, p. 1); J. Murch, A History of the Presb. and Gen. Bapt. Church in the West of England, London, 1835; A. H. Newman, History of the Baptist Church in the U.S., New York, 1894 (Am. Church Hist. Series, vol. 2); Vedder, A Short History of the Baptists, London, 1897; E. B. Bax, Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists, New York, 1902; G. Lorimer, The Baptists in History, 1902; J. A. Seiss, The Baptist System Examined, Lutheran Publication Society, 1902; further material in the Baptist Handbook, London, 1896 ff.; Baptist Manuals, Paris, 1891-93; The Baptist Quarterly Review; and the Bibliotheca Sacra, Oberlin, 1900.
The best Baptist library seems to be that of Colgate College in the State of New York. For the history of the Quakers the collection in Devonshire House in London is considered the best (not available to me). The official modern organ of orthodoxy is the American Friend, edited by Professor Jones; the best Quaker history that of Rowntree. In addition: Rufus B. Jones, George Fox, an Autobiography, Phila., 1903; Alton C. Thomas, A History of the Society of Friends in America, Phila., 1895; Edward Grubbe, Social Aspects of the Quaker Faith, London, 1899. Also the copious and excellent biographical literature.
170. It is one of the many merits of Karl Müller's Kirchengeschichte to have given the Baptist movement, great in its way, even though outwardly unassuming, the place it deserved in his work. It has suffered more than any other from the pitiless persecution of all the Churches, because it wished to be a sect in the specific sense of that word. Even after five generations it was discredited before the eyes of all the world by the debacle of the related eschatological experiment in Münster. And, continually oppressed and driven underground, it was long after its origin before it attained a consistent formulation of its religious doctrines. Thus it produced even less theology than would have been consistent with its principles, which were themselves hostile to a specialized development of its faith in God as a science. That was not very pleasing to the older professional theologians, even in its own time, and it made little impression on them. But many more recent ones have taken the same attitude. In Ritschl, Pietismus, I, pp. 22 f., the rebaptizers are not very adequately, in fact, rather contemptuously, treated. One is tempted to speak of a theological bourgeois standpoint. That, in spite of the fact that Cornelius's fine work (Geschichte des Münsterschen Aufruhrs) had been available for decades.
Here also Ritschl everywhere sees a retrogression from his standpoint toward Catholicism, and suspects direct influences of the radical wing of the Franciscan tradition. Even if such could be proved in a few cases, these threads would be very thin. Above all, the historical fact was probably that the official Catholic Church, wherever the worldly asceticism of the laity went as far as the
