pressor of God's people
has already been noticed: Protestantism as their persecutor, also, must
now be considered further. Protestant sects after they first became
established and got power in their own hands, acted much in the same
manner as the church of Rome did before them, persecuting, banishing,
imprisoning, and even putting to death those who refused to receive
their tenets or to conform to the system of religion they had adopted.
The Lutherans, at first a pious, persecuted people, on becoming numerous
and exalted by the favor of the great, established a certain system of
religion and then, when it was in their power, persecuted, imprisoned,
banished, or put to death all that dissented. As early after the
Reformation as 1574, in a convention at Torgaw, they established the
real presence in the eucharist and instigated the Elector of Saxony to
seize, imprison, and banish all the secret Calvinists that differed from
them in sentiment, and to reduce their followers by every act of
violence, to renounce their sentiments and to confess the ubiquity.
Peucer, for his opinions, suffered ten years of imprisonment in the
severest manner. In 1577 a form of concord was produced in which the
real manducation of Christ's body and blood in the eucharist was
established and heresy and excommunication laid on all that refused this
as an article of faith, with pains and penalties to be enforced by the
secular arm. Crellius, in 1601, was put to death.

In Switzerland, before the city of Zurich was entirely safe itself from
the encroachments of Romanism, its Protestant council condemned a young
man named Felix Mantz to be drowned because he insisted that the
baby-sprinkling of Romanism was not baptism and that all who had
received the rite ought to be immersed. This sentence was carried into
effect. The severest laws were passed in different countries of Europe
against the Anabaptists, and large numbers were banished or burnt at the
stake. See Encyclopaedia Britannica, Art. Anabaptists. Protestants may
claim this was because of their fanaticism on other lines; but it
remains a fact, nevertheless, that the chief sentiment at the base of
these laws was religious persecution and that Protestants sanctioned and
carried them into execution.

King Henry VIII., the founder of the Established Church in England,
adopted the most stringent laws to enforce its doctrines. Certain
articles of religion were drawn up, known in history as the "Blo