elegate the ministry of the word to preachers, for whose orthodoxy
they have to provide. They are bound to establish uniformity of
doctrine, and to defend it against Papists and heretics. This is not
only their right, but their duty; and not only their duty, but the
condition on which they retain office.[255] Rulers who do not act in
accordance with it are to be dismissed. Thus Zwingli combined
persecution and revolution in the same doctrine. But he was not a
fanatical persecutor, and his severity was directed less against the
Catholics than against the Anabaptists,[256] whose prohibition of all
civil offices was more subversive of order in a republic than in a
monarchy. Even, however, in the case of the Anabaptists the special
provocation was--not the peril to the State, nor the scandal of their
errors, but--the schism which weakened the Church.[257] The punishment
of heresy for the glory of God was almost inconsistent with the theory
that there is no ecclesiastical power. It was not so much provoked in
Zuerich as elsewhere, because in a small republican community, where the
governing body was supreme over both civil and religious affairs,
religious unity was a matter of course. The practical necessity of
maintaining unity put out of sight the speculative question of the guilt
and penalty of error.

Soon after Zwingli's death, Leo Judae called for severer measures against
the Catholics, expressly stating, however, that they did not deserve
death. "Excommunication," he said, "was too light a punishment to be
inflicted by the State which wields the sword, and the faults in
question were not great enough to involve the danger of death."[258]
Afterwards he fell into doubts as to the propriety of severe measures
against dissenters, but his friends Bullinger and Capito succeeded in
removing his scruples, and in obtaining his acquiescence in that
intolerance, which was, says his biographer, a question of life and
death for the Protestant Church.[259] Bullinger took, like Zwingli, a
more practical view of the question than was common in Germany. He
thought it safer strictly to exclude religious differences than to put
them down with fire and sword; "for in this case," he says, "the victims
compare themselves to the early martyrs, and make their punishment a
weapon of defence."[260] He did not, however, forbid capital punishment
in cases of heresy. In the year 1535 he drew up an opinion on the
treatment of religious error, whic