UNITARIANISM IN POLAND

CHAPTER XV

The Beginnings of Antitrinitarianism in Poland, down to 1565

 

    Thus far our history has been a story of oft-repeated failure and frequent tragedy. Wherever thinkers or preachers arose, alike in Catholic lands and in Protestant, and whether in Italy and France, or in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, who were independent enough and daring enough to appeal to the Scriptures, or to the early Fathers of the Christian Church, or to reason, against the orthodox doctrines about God and Christ, there they were inevitably called to account by both Church and State, and forced either to recant and relapse into silence, or else to suffer banishment, imprisonment, or martyrdom.  The movement was thus effectually suppressed throughout all western Europe.  From all this depressing story we can now turn to a happier one, in spite of its still being often darkened by the shadows of persecution and death, in two countries of eastern Europe, where laws were more tolerant, and the State was less subservient to the will of the Church.

   The first of these countries was Poland.  Poland was, in the age of the Reformation, a great and powerful monarchy, a little larger than the state of Texas, and one of the most free and enlightened nations of Europe.  Its capital, Krakow, boasted a celebrated university, the second oldest in all Europe, which had given the world Copernicus and other famous scholars; while its metropolis (and later capital), Warsaw, was called the Paris of the East. The Poles were a people of uncertain origin, a part of that great Slavic stock which has for centuries occupied the east and southeast of Europe.  By the ninth century the wandering tribes had become a nation with a hereditary monarchy; toward the end of the fourteenth century the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was united to Poland under the crown of the famous Jagiello dynasty; and when this dynasty became extinct in 1572, the monarchy became elective, whence its people have often loved to call it a republic.  The real power of government was henceforth in the bands of the nobility, a class comprising about a tenth of the population, and including all men who owned land or whose ancestors had owned it.  The nobles were supposed to have equal political rights, and only they might vote.  The magnates, or more powerful nobles, owned vast tracts of country, including cities and villages, and held nearly absolute sway over all upon their estates. Laws were made by their delegates meeting in Diets.  The nobles were proverbially quarrelsome and jealous of one another; so that neighboring nations, taking advantage of the weakness resulting from these internal discords, eventually fell upon Poland and carved it to pieces in three successive divisions (1772, 1793, and 1795), distributing it all among Russia, Prussia, and Austria.  Thus for a century and a quarter Poland was extinct, save in the hearts of its children, until as a result of the World War it has again been re-established among the nations.

    Poland had accepted Christianity in the tenth century, and Lithuania had done so upon its union with Poland; but the nobles were little inclined to allow foreign interference with their affairs, and for centuries after the Catholic Church had gained an almost absolute sway in western Europe, its hold in Poland was but feeble.  Even before Luther the doctrines of the Waldenses and of Hus had largely undermined its influence; and although laws against heresy had indeed been passed, they were but little enforced, so that the Reformation early and easily took root here.  The Protestant faith was introduced in several different forms, by the Lutheran Church, the Reformed Church (Calvinists), the Bohemian Brethren (Hussites), and the Anabaptists. The latter without separate organization, but as a sort of leaven, especially among the Reformed.  Of all these the Reformed Church was the most influential, chiefly among the nobility, and with it the Bohemian Brethren soon formed a union.  With the active sympathy of many of the nobles, the Reformation spread rapidly and widely.  Synods of the Catholic Church passed ordinances against Protestantism, but they could not be enforced.  By the middle of the sixteenth century the power of Catholicism bad been broken, and at length over two thousand Catholic churches became Protestant, and an overwhelming majority of both houses of the national Diet were of the reformed faith.  King Sigismund Augustus II (1548 - 1572), though Catholic, was tolerant, and refused to persecute Dissidents (as all non-Catholics came to be called), saying that he wished to be king of both sheep and goats; and immediately after his death the Diet passed in 1573 a law guaranteeing equal protection and rights to all citizens without regard to differences of religious faith, and this law later kings, when they received the crown, were repeatedly required to promise to maintain.  When shortly afterwards the candidate for the throne, being an intense Catholic, demurred about taking oath to maintain this law, he was sternly told, Si non jurabis non regnabis, If you do not swear, you shall not be king; and he had to submit.

     The first recorded instance of Antitrinitarianism in Poland, however, is found not in Protestant but in Catholic circles, and the account of it has come to us in a curious story.  There was at Krakow in 1546 a little group of liberal Catholic scholars who used to meet together privately to discuss the Protestant doctrines then so rife.  The leader of the number was Francesco Lismanino, head of the Franciscan Order in Poland, and confessor to Queen Bona, who being Italian, had obtained some of Ochino's sermons and given them to him to read.  At one of their meetings there appeared a Dutchman who passed under the name of Spiritus, and who, in turning over a book of prayers in the library of his host, and finding some of them addressed to each of the three persons of the Trinity, inquired whether, then, they had three Gods.  The subject was soon broken off, but not until it had made a deep impression on those present, of whom several later became Antitrinitarians.  Other influences also worked in the same direction.  Servetus's little books on the Trinity had already been much read in Poland; Lelius Socinus had visited Lismanino at Krakow in 1549; Stancaro, who had come to the University there as Professor of Hebrew, created much stir a little later by teaching that Christ was our mediator only through his human nature, and by thus ignoring his divinity paved the way for doubt of the Trinity, and opened a discussion which agitated the new reformers for five or six years; and undoubtedly, since Poland enjoyed closest relations with Italian culture, other Italian heretics secretly came thither or spread their views through their writings.  Thus the soil was prepared for the development we are to follow.

    Upon the Lutheran Church in Poland, Antitrinitarianism never made any impression, but in the Reformed Church in Little Poland and Lithuania it made such rapid headway that for a time it seemed likely to win the day.  Young nobles and ministers attending the universities of Germany, Switzerland, or Italy learned of the teachings of Servetus and brought them home for discussion.  The first public attack on the doctrine of the Trinity was made by a young minister named Peter of Goniondz (Gonesius).  He had been sent abroad to prepare himself for the priesthood, but while studying not only had become Protestant, but in Switzerland had discovered the teachings of Servetus, and for advocating them at Wittenberg he had been forced by Melanchthon to leave town.  Returning to Poland in 1555 be became a minister in the Reformed Church, and at the synod of Secemin early the following year he made an extended address against the doctrine of the Trinity, accepting only the Apostles's Creed and denying the Nicene and the Athanasian, and offered his views for the judgment of the synod.  The members present were so much impressed by what Gonesius had said that for a report upon his views they sent him to Melanchthon at Wittenberg, who strove in vain to convince him of his error.

    The new views made rapid progress during the next three years, and when the subject was again discussed at a synod at Pinczow late in 1558, they were found to have won many converts among both the clergy and the nobles.  Nevertheless Gonesius was condemned by a majority of the synod, and having therefore to leave the province of Little Poland he went to Lithuania, where now grown bolder in his convictions, he carried his views yet further at a synod at Brest (Brest Litovsk) in 1560, and added to them also some Anabaptist objections against infant baptism, and the lawfulness of bearing arms.  Here too the teachings of Stancaro and Servetus had prepared the way.  The synod, fearing a schism, imposed silence on him, on pain of excommunication; but he had already won to his views numerous distinguished nobles, and with their support went on his way as before.

   By far the most important of these was Jan Kiszka, who when a student at Basel had come under the liberalizing influence of Chatillon and Curione, and was thus well prepared for the new views he now heard.  He was the second most powerful magnate in all Lithuania, was owner of vast territories, including four hundred villages and seventy cities, and had unbounded influence.  He gave his powerful support to Gonesius, and made him minister of the church in his town of Wengrow, which may thus be set down as the first antitrinitarian church in Poland; and he also set up a printing press to further the cause of his faith.  Eventually he gave to the Antitrinitarians churches under his control in Lithuania or Podlachia, or built them new ones, to the number of about twenty in all.

    It was at Pinczow, however, the chief educational center of the Reformed Church thus far, that the antitrinitarian movement had the most interesting development at this period; and here, by common consent, gathered so many of those that favored it, that before long they came to be known as Pinczovians. The Reformed Church here had from the first been much influenced by Anabaptist tendencies, and was thus disposed to emphasize Scripture more than the creeds; and the long controversy carried on here with Stancaro over the doctrine mentioned above had tended to undermine faith in the Trinity.  Biandrata, who had already been in Poland a decade before as court physician to Queen Bona, but had in the meantime been in Italy and in Switzerland whence, as we have seen, he had to flee from Calvin in 1558, in that same year returned to Poland and came to Pinczow, where he found things going very much to his mind.  He heard the bold stand taken by Gonesius, and gave him his sympathy.

    Here too he found Lismanino, who had now for some time been Protestant, wavering as to the doctrine of the Trinity, and won him over to positive disbelief in it.  The minister of the Pinczow church and the rector of its school were also converted to the new views.  Biandrata, more advanced than the rest in the heresy, soon became virtually the leader of the movement; and by using the most cautious methods of promoting his views, and by taking care to use only the language of Scripture in expressing them, he rapidly won great influence among the churches of Little Poland, so that in 1560 he was chosen elder for the district of Krakow.  Calvin heard of this with the greatest dismay, and wrote letters to persons of influence in Poland, warning them against Biandrata as a most unscrupulous and dangerous heretic; but little heed was paid to his warnings.  To clear himself from any suspicion, Biandrata was, indeed, required to submit to the synod a statement of his faith; but he did so in phrases of such unimpeachable orthodoxy that all doubts were at once dispelled.

    Alciati and Gentile also soon arrived, fresh from their persecution by Calvin, and, unhindered by his warnings to the churches against them, they attended synods and took part in the discussions over doctrine.  Lelius Socinus paid a flying visit, though perhaps without influencing the course of events; and Ochino later came and for a few months added the eloquence of his voice.  The Pinczovians published two confessions of their faith in 1560 and 1561, were enthusiastic and aggressive, and steadily won adherents among both the ministers and the nobles and high officials.  The new views gained ground rapidly, and the orthodox took alarm.  Frequent synods were held, with the doctrine of the Trinity always up for debate; but as the appeal was always from the doctrine and language of the Creeds to the doctrine of the early Church and the language of Scripture, the orthodox inevitably had the worst of the argument.  Each synod showed new gains; and when at the synod of Pinczow in 1562 the liberals had the majority, and voted that ministers should abstain from speaking of the Trinity save in such terms as are used in the Scriptures, the day seemed won.  The next year they condemned the doctrine of the Trinity as Sabellian, and composed a new confession.

    The most effective preacher of the new views in the province of Little Poland was Gregory Paulus.  He had accepted the views of Gonesius when they were first expressed at the synod of 1556, but soon went beyond the Arianism of the latter and regarded Christ as simply human, while he also adopted various Anabaptist views as to baptism and the conduct of a Christian's life.  He is said to have been the first in Poland to attack the doctrine of the Trinity from his pulpit at Krakow, where he won over some of the ministers and most of his own congregation, whose exemplary lives gained them many sympathizers; and backed by the support of a powerful patron he was made minister of a congregation where crowds came to hear him.  While he was preaching there one Trinity Sunday against the doctrine of the Trinity, the spire of Trinity church was struck by lightning.  The event made a great impression in all quarters; but while the orthodox declared it was an evidence of divine anger, his friends interpreted it as a sign of divine approval of his doctrine.

    Though the orthodox party in Little Poland were now in the minority, they were still determined not to yield.  Not long after the vote of the synod of Pinczow above referred to, one of their ministers, Stanislaw Sarnicki, jealous over Paulus's advancement in the church, brought against him charges of being an Arian and a follower of Servetus.  Paulus defended himself successfully against one charge after another until at length, when it became evident that nothing could be accomplished against him through the existing synod, and Paulus's patron had now died, Sarnicki secretly convened an opposition synod solely of his own party, to which Paulus and his friends were not invited.  It disowned the authority of the previous synod, condemned Paulus and his followers as Tritheists, removed him from office, and put Sarnicki in his place.  Sarnicki had yet others deprived of their pulpits; but Paulus found a new patron and still continued to preach.  All this was in 1563.  Further efforts were made to heal the schism, but to no purpose, for the orthodox would not join in them; so that when the next synod met at Mordy later the same year, they would take no part in it. It must be remembedhowever, that there was as yet no separately organized antitrinitarian church; for all that has been related was simply an effort to free the Reformed Church from the bondage of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, and to restore the pure scriptural doctrines of early Christianity.

    Biandrata had followed Gonesius from Pinczow to Lithuania, where he had secured the powerful patronage of Prince Nicholas Radziwill, who angrily resented Calvin's attempts to shake his confidence in his guest; and he gave further impulse to the rapidly growing movement in Lithuania.  Just at this juncture, however, when what the antitrinitarian movement most wanted was an able leader, Biandrata was invited, in 1563, to go to Transylvania as court physician to the ruling prince, John Sigismund. Doubtless apprehensive as to what Calvin might yet succeed in accomplishing against him, as well as allured by the attractions of a life at court, be accepted the invitation with alacrity.  In a later chapter we shall find him founding the Unitarian movement in Transylvania and for a time guiding its destinies, and thus playing a yet more important role there than he had played in Poland, where Paulus now became the leader of the movement.

    The heresy of these early Antitrinitarians in Poland was of the mildest sort.  They insisted on hardly more than that Christ, though he might still be considered God, should be regarded as at least in some slight sense inferior to the Father; and that in stating their faith Christians should abandon the technical terms of the Creeds, and return to the simple words of the Scripture and the teaching of the Ante-Nicene Church.  They accepted the Apostles's Creed, and they were sometimes willing even to profess faith in a sort of Trinity, what they called a scriptural Trinity.  But, although this was at bottom all a purely speculative question about a fine point in theology, whether the Son were altogether equal with the Father or slightly inferior to him. The orthodox regarded the struggle with Antitrinitarianism as nothing less than a life-and-death matter for their religion, and left no stone unturned to overthrow so dangerous a heresy.  To this end they even joined with the Catholics in 1564 to secure a decree of banishment against Antitrinitarians; though, contrary to their expectation, the decree was found instead to apply to all foreign Protestants.  They appealed to the king, and it was not actually enforced except against Ochino and perhaps one or two more; but all Protestants were by this act caused to realize their common danger at the hands of the Catholics.

    One final attempt, therefore, was made to bring about a settlement of their differences.  With the sanction of the king it was arranged that while the national Diet was sitting at Piotrkow in 1565 a formal debate between the two parties should be held, in the presence of the great number of magnates and nobles, as well as of ministers who would be in attendance with their patrons, especially since many had not yet taken sides in the controversy.  The conditions of the debate were carefully drawn, disputants were appointed to speak for each side, distinguished nobles served as presiding officers and secretaries.  Arguments and answers to them were written out and read on both sides; the Pinczovians appealing only to the authority of Scripture, the orthodox to Scripture, the Fathers, and the Councils.  When the debate had lasted for fourteen days with no progress made toward agreement, the orthodox side suddenly broke it off without warning, and, meeting by themselves, voted to have nothing more to do with such obstinate and incorrigible heretics.  They reported their decision to the king, and henceforth refused all approaches for union.

    The breach thus made was past all mending, and the antitrinitarian party, being thus shut out from any relations with the orthodox, were forced to form their own separate organization, and all later efforts at reunion proved futile.  When a few years afterwards a federation of the several Protestant churches of Poland was formed at Sandomir (the so-called Consensus Sandomiriensis, 1570), its primary object was to unite the orthodox bodies on a common basis of faith against the Tritheists, Ebionites, and Anabaptists, whose spread had so much disturbed their peace; especial care was therefore taken to exclude these from the union, and action was repeatedly taken afterwards to make the exclusion yet more strict.  If it be said, however, that all this was a very long time ago, it is proper to remark that very recent religious history in America records the closest parallels to this action of the sixteenth century in Poland; and it sometimes seems as if the orthodox in England and America now were little less exclusive toward those who do not agree with their doctrines than they were in Poland three hundred and fifty years ago. 

CHAPTER XVI

The Organization and Growth of the Antitrinitarian Churches in Poland, 1565-1579

 

    As was seen at the end of the last chapter, the antitrinitarian party were in 1565 excluded from further connection with the orthodox party in the Reformed Church.  If they were now still to continue their existence and hold and extend their faith, instead of gradually dying out and being absorbed by other bodies, they had to organize an independent church among themselves; and this they now proceeded to do.  The new church was completely organized that same year, with its own synods, ministers, schools, and constitution.  It became officially known as the Minor Reformed Church of Poland, though its members preferred to call themselves simply Christians; while their opponents, desiring to fasten upon them the stigma of hated heresies, for the most part called them Arians or Anabaptists.  A synod was held at Wengrow at the end of the year, attended by forty-seven of the clergy from all parts of the kingdom, and by fourteen noblemen; and letters of sympathy were received from various distinguished ladies and other persons, as well as from churches in distant parts of the kingdom.  The first steps were also taken here for settling disputed questions of doctrine and practice; for it was of course but natural that having laid aside the old creeds, and looking only to Scripture for their authority, they should for a time come to different views from a book which after all represents so many different points of view.  And that the more, since they had as yet no leader who by his influence was able to direct the whole church and impress on it a common faith or policy.  For even before the church was fairly organized, the two who might best have held things together had removed.  Lismanino, having fallen into disfavor with the king, had gone to Prussia where, after a brief stay at the court of Duke Albert of Konigsberg, he had died in 1563; while in the same year Biandrata, as we have seen, had gone to Transylvania; and no one in those troublous times had arisen to take their places.

    The Minor Church, in fact, seems at this time to have been most loosely organized.  Such synods as its members held had only local influence, and no strong authority, and there was no generally accepted standard of belief.  Almost the sole point on which they were united was the one which had caused their separation from the orthodox: as to the doctrine of the Trinity, that the Father was supreme over the Son.  As soon as ever they tried to state their views on other doctrines they fell out with one another.  On three other heads in particular there were wide differences and endless controversies among them: as to the right form of administering baptism and Lord’s Supper, as to their belief about Christ and the Holy Spirit, and as to their attitude toward the civil government and their practical conduct of life.  These differences had arisen in Poland even before Antitrinitarianism, and dated back to the very beginnings of the Reformation.

    The first of these questions to trouble the Minor Church seriously was the question of baptism.  To us this may seem a comparatively trivial matter, but to them it was of the most vital concern; for had not Jesus said, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned”?  To continue the Catholic practice of infant baptism, then, when it had not been commanded or even practiced in the New Testament, or to rely upon it as baptism at all, seemed to them, as it had to the earlier Anabaptists, to be risking their hope of eternal salvation.  Gonesius had therefore attacked infant baptism when he first appeared in Lithuania, and a minister named Czechowicz had led his followers there in the same direction.  A lively controversy ensued, which was protracted through six years.  Soon after the organization of the Minor Church in 1565, at the synod of Wengrow, with delegates in attendance from all parts of the kingdom, it was prayerfully and earnestly debated for six days whether the practice of infant baptism was commanded by Scripture.  It was concluded that the practice should be given up, though some liberty in the matter was left to individual consciences.

    The next question to be settled was yet more important, and it divided the Minor Church yet more deeply.  It was the question as to what view they should hold as to the person of Christ, and the Holy Spirit.  It soon came to be accepted without serious debate that the Holy Spirit was not to be worshiped as God, but the question as to Christ caused divisions which almost split the Church.  At the synod of Lancut (1567) which was called in order, if possible, to bring about harmony on this matter, the debate between the Arians and those who held that Christ did not exist before his birth upon earth, was so angry (the nobles were said with one exception to have been more moderate than the ministers) that the judges adjourned the discussion to a synod at Skrzynno later in the same year, and prepared for a more formal and orderly discussion by choosing the speakers and laying down rules for the conduct of the debate.  A hundred and ten nobles and ministers came together from all parts of Poland and Lithuania, besides a great crowd from the vicinity, all eager to hear the discussion.  No fixed agreement was reached as to the doctrines under discussion, but it was resolved that the Trinity should be reverently and sacredly retained with this condition, that the brethren should bear with one another in brotherly love and refrain from abusing one another in controversy; that each one should follow his own conscience as to baptism and the Lord’s Supper; and that they should claim no authority over one another in matters of faith, leaving it to God in his own time (as Christ had taught) to separate the tares from the wheat.  This action was for its time a remarkable step in the direction of religious tolerance, nor has it been surpassed to this day.  It did not, however, succeed at once in healing the divisions over the belief about Christ; for at the time of which we are speaking, the antitrinitarian movement in Poland was divided over this doctrine into four more or less distinct parties, which flourished mostly in separate localities.

    The first party was led by a minister named Farnowski (Farnovius), and hence they were called Farnovians.  Like Gonesius they held the Arian view that Christ had existed before the creation of the world, and should be worshiped as God, though they did not think it right to worship the Holy Spirit.  They declared that even the religion of the Mohammedans or the Jews was better than that of Athanasius.  They also opposed infant baptism.  Farnowski held so stoutly for these views that about 1568 his followers, having won the patronage of some distinguished nobles toward the edge of Hungary, separated from the rest and established their own churches and schools.  They held aloof for nearly fifty years, but after the death of their leader they either rejoined the other Antitrinitarians or else returned to the Calvinists.

    Another party was led by Czechowicz, a minister in Lithuania, where he had great influence.  After having been for some time an Arian, he adopted much more radical views, holding that Christ was a man born like other men, but that he was sinless and was made God (so Servetus had taught), and hence should be worshiped; while those who would not worship Christ he called semijudaizers.  He opposed infant baptism, and also held with the Anabaptists that Christians ought to practice nonresistance, and neither to bear arms nor to hold civil office; but at his death he urged his followers not to separate from the Minor Church.

    Yet a third party, about Krakow, followed the lead of that Gregory Paulus whom we have already met.  He too denied that Christ had existed before the creation of the world, and also denied that he should be worshiped.  He likewise opposed infant baptism, denied the authority of earthly powers, held that Christians should neither bear arms nor hold public office, advocated community of goods after the manner of the primitive Church, and expected Christ soon to appear again to set up the millennium.

    Finally there was a party called Budnaeans after their leader, Simon Budny of Lithuania.  He was a man of extraordinarily learning, who in 1572 had published a translation of the Bible into Polish which was highly esteemed, and two years later a separate one of the New Testament.  Of these four leaders he came nearest to the views of modern Unitarians, for he declared that Christ was naturally born like other men, and that to worship him was idolatry; but though he too had numerous followers in Lithuania, yet this teaching of his seemed to the churches at large so impious that he was excommunicated, as were some others who held similar views.

    Besides these questions of theological belief, the Minor Church during its earlier years was also much distracted by another group of questions relating to the practical conduct of the members as followers of Christ.  Many of these believers were conscientiously in earnest about trying to live in this world precisely as Christ had commanded, and to make his law of love the rule which should actually regulate all their actions.  They took his teachings literally, and did not try to explain them away when they seemed inconvenient or impracticable, but meant to follow them to the letter; and they took his example and that of his apostles and the early Church as a model for their imitation.  Therefore they did not believe in offering resistance to those who did them evil, but bore their wrongs and persecutions with Christian patience; they did not believe in bearing arms, for that was the first step toward going to war and breaking the commandment not to kill; they would not accept civil office, and some of them resigned important offices under the government, for all government rested upon force in place of Christ’s law of love; they would not take oaths, since Christ had commanded, “Swear not at all”; they believed in sharing their property in common with one another, for this had been the practice in the earliest Church at Jerusalem.  These were of course principles long before adopted by the first Anabaptists, and coming by way of Moravia they had spread more or less widely in Poland.  We have already seen that Gonesius, Czechowicz, and Paulus held such views as these, and they were especially rife in the vicinity of Krakow.  These views were by no means universally adopted by the Antitrinitarians.  Some adopted them wholly, some rejected them wholly, and doubtless the majority adopted a part and ignored the rest.  A local congregation, with Paulus for its minister, was founded at Krakow in 1569 on these principles, and from that time on they were repeatedly discussed in synods at the new center of Rakow.

    The significant thing about the unfortunate divisions of which we have spoken is the fact that when the members of the new movement found themselves left all at sea after having forsaken the old orthodox Creeds, they were so pathetically in earnest to draw out of Scripture its true doctrines, and to conduct their daily lives strictly according to the teachings of Jesus, let it cost them or their churches what it might in the way of persecution by the orthodox, or of separation from their brethren.  At any cost they would remain true to their consciences.  These divisions threatened for a time, however, to prove fatal to the movement altogether; and for several years the young church was occupied in trying either to find some common ground of belief, or if that could not be, then in finding some way of getting on together peaceably in spite of different beliefs.

    A little catechism published in 1574 in the name of the Anabaptist congregation at Krakow, though probably composed by Schomann, Paulus’s colleague in the ministry there, is of great interest for being the first such work to be printed in the history of the movement we are tracing.  It is supported throughout by texts of Scripture, and teaches that Christ was a man who brought eternal life to the world, and that he is to be adored and prayed to as our mediator with God, and to be followed as an example.  The Holy Spirit is not a person, but a power of God¹ bestowed upon Christ and men. The taking of oaths, and the resistance to injuries, are forbidden.  Baptism is to be by immersion, and to be administered only to adults.  These Anabaptists in Poland, as elsewhere, tended to run into extravagances, and sometimes bordered on the fanatical; but on the whole they formed the vital heart and soul of the new church, and their influence is to be traced throughout its whole history.  The strictness of their morals, the gentleness of their lives, and their consistent obedience to conscience, never failed to win the praise of even those who were most opposed to their doctrines.

    When the members and congregations of the Minor Church were so divided in opinion during its infancy, and were so much opposed to one another just because they were divided in opinion, it must have had the less strength left either to extend itself or to repel attacks from without; and there was a far greater danger than perhaps was realized that the Church might therefore fall quite to pieces, and come to an end in less than a generation.  Another danger, however, which the members did keenly realize and acutely fear, came from the relentless and bitter attacks of their enemies. For not content with what they had already accomplished by excluding the antitrinitarian party from the Reformed Church, the orthodox at once laid further plans for overthrowing them altogether.  Uniting with the Catholics at the Diet of Lublin in 1566, they put pressure upon the king to issue an edict against Anabaptists and Tritheists (as they called the Antitrinitarians), requiring them to leave the realm within a month, and they spared no pains to get it strictly enforced.  They struck first at Filipowski who, as Treasurer of the Palatinate of Krakow, was perhaps the most influential of all the Antitrinitarians, and he barely escaped with his life.  The rest, remembering the fate of Servetus, Gentile, and others, scattered like sheep before wolves, some going into the country, others seeking shelter with nobles powerful enough to protect them.  After a time, through the influence of one of his highest officials, who was himself an Antitrinitarian, the king was persuaded to grant them indulgence during his lifetime, and so the storm blew over.

    Nothing daunted by his recent experiences, Filipowski still attempted to make peace with the enemy.  To this end he went with some of the brethren to attend a great synod held at Krakow in 1568 by the Lutherans and Calvinists, who proposed to unite against Catholic oppression on the one hand, and Anabaptist heresies on the other.  He powerfully urged there that all parties use mutual tolerance as to doctrines on which they differed, and consent to live together in Christian love.  The orthodox would not yield an inch; one notable convert was gained there, however, in the person of Andrew Dudicz.  He was a Hungarian noble who, for his talents, learning, and the distinguished part he played in public affairs, was one of the most celebrated men of his age.  He had been councillor to three emperors, and bishop of three sees in succession, had been one of the most prominent delegates to the Council of Trent, and had been sent on various important embassies.  Having become Protestant, he had joined the Reformed Church at Krakow; but when he observed with what bitterness its leaders spoke of their opponents, and how they rejected the peaceable advances made by Filipowski, he left them for the Minor Church, whose doctrines also approved themselves to him as more reasonable, and became patron of its congregation at Schmiegel in the province of Great Poland, where he built them a church and school, which he supported till his death.

    Though again rebuffed, the Antitrinitarians still hungered for religious fellowship which they might enjoy while yet preserving full liberty of belief.  They were not a little cheered therefore when they heard the next year (1569), through the reports of a traveler, that the Anabaptists of Moravia, among whom we have already found our exiles from Italy and Switzerland hospitably received,² agreed with them in all respects except as to the holding of public office, which was against the Anabaptist principles; and since much was related of their singular piety, charity, and purity of morals, Filipowski, with several of the brethren, now undertook a mission to the Moravians, hoping to bring about some form of union with them.  Here again they were doomed to disappointment; for although the Moravian brethren were found to be otherwise all that had been told of them, they were such ardent defenders of the received doctrine of the Trinity that they did not scruple to call their visitors heathen for denying it.  The brethren therefore returned in deep discouragement, and most of the ministers of Little Poland gave up preaching.

    A turn in their affairs for the better, however, was unexpectedly to come from another quarter, through the death of the king.  Sigismund Augustus, though nominally a Catholic, was at heart much inclined toward the Reformation, having twenty years before been influenced in that direction by Lismanino; and there were indications that he inwardly favored the antitrinitarian party in the Reformed Church.  He had taken so much interest in the discussions of the doctrine of the Trinity that he got his secretary, Modrzewski, to draw up an account of the differences between the two parties, with the arguments on both sides, hoping to find some way to bring the two factions together.  The manuscript of this book (the famous Sylvae) accidentally fell into the hands of one of the orthodox party, who found it so favorable to the Antitrinitarians that he carried it away, and would not return it, lest it get into print and make converts; and it was therefore not published until twenty-five years later.  Had the king lived, the Minor Church might have had much to hope from him; but he died in 1572, and his dynasty thus became extinct.  The nobles took advantage of this occasion to make sure of securing their full rights under any future rulers.  They drew up a new law, making it a condition of the election of any new king, that he should take his oath to preserve peace among the religious sects, and they sacredly pledged themselves and their posterity, that, though differing from one another as to religion (dissidentes⁴ de religione), they would keep the peace with one another, would not shed one another’s blood, nor punish one another in any way, nor assist a magistrate in doing so, and would with all their might oppose anyone who on any pretext should attempt such a thing.  There were numerous representatives of the Minor Church in the Diet which passed this compact (the celebrated pax Dissidentium, 1573), and they became parties to it along with the rest; and although its provisions were later violated, and were eventually ignored altogether, nevertheless it became a fundamental law of the land, and secured the Minor Church an existence of nearly a century.

    Despite the persecutions they had suffered and the dangers they had run, the number of adherents of the Minor Church continued large; and under the protection of the new law it now increased rapidly, especially among the educated nobility; for they, not having been so strictly trained up in the subtleties of theology as the clergy had been, felt less devoted to the teachings of the creeds; while, like all Protestants of that period, they were keenly interested in the study of the Scriptures, and as they read those they could not but see that they contained little enough to support the peculiar doctrine of the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds.  The Diet of the kingdom was said to be filled with “Arians,” and their beliefs found wide acceptance among all classes except the ignorant peasantry who, being little better than serfs, were little regarded by any of the Protestant churches.  Within a generation churches were established in every part of the kingdom, from Danzig to Kijow (Kief), and from northern Lithuania to the Carpathians; but most numerously in Little Poland and Lithuania, while in Great Poland they were few and widely scattered.

    No mean factor in the growth of the Minor Church was the city of Rakow, founded in 1569 by a powerful magnate named Sieninski.  Though a Calvinist, he offered the residents of his new town, among other advantages, that of perfect freedom of religious worship.  Many of the Antitrinitarians therefore, being apprehensive of persecution where they were, came from all parts of the kingdom and settled here; among them Gregory Paulus who, having been driven from Krakow, founded a church at Rakow which eventually became the leading one in all Poland.  The new congregation grew rapidly, and its preachers were men of the greatest reputation.  The Anabaptists regarded Rakow as almost a new Jerusalem, and it came to be looked on as an especial object of divine providence.  For a time rather extreme Anabaptist views were rife here, and in the church school all scholars were required to learn some manual trade.  Numerous synods were held at Rakow, and it became for sixty years or more the center and source of all the main influences in the Minor Church.  The more important part of its history, however, belongs in a later chapter.

    We have now reached a point in our history where this church seemed in a way to become fairly established.  While disputes on the points we have mentioned were still rife among its members well on into the seventeenth century, yet they had now ceased to be a source of serious danger to the church’s existence; for however much in earnest the members might be over their doctrines, the principle of mutual tolerance and charity was firmly established and generally accepted among them.  Although still hated as before by both Catholics and Protestants, they now stood under the equal protection of the law which was in the interest of all the churches alike, and the age of civil persecution seemed past.  One thing was still needful, if they were to have a vigorous life and a wide growth under these favorable conditions; and that was a leader who could do for them what Luther and Calvin had done for their churches: organize their system of thought, lead them in counsel, and direct them in action.  Such a leader soon appeared in the person of Faustus Socinus.

CHAPTER XVII

Faustus Socinus and the Full Development of Socinianism in Poland, 1579-1638

 

    At the time when, as we saw in the last chapter, the Polish Antitrinitarians most needed leadership, the needed leader appeared in the person of Faustus Socinus (in Italian, Fausto Sozzini).  He organized their beliefs into a consistent system purged of extravagances and extreme positions; he ably represented them in their controversies with their opponents both Catholic and Protestant; and although a foreigner he so won their confidence and love, and so stamped himself upon their movement, that it eventually came to be known after him as Socinianism, by which name, for the sake of convenience, we shall henceforth refer to it.  Socinus was born at Siena, Italy, in 1539, and was nephew of Lelius Socinus, whom we found as one of the Antitrinitarians at Zurich in the time of Calvin.  When he was but two years old his father died, leaving him to be brought up without regular education, as he never ceased to regret; and the law, in which many of his family had distinguished themselves, never attracted him.  Soon after he became of age, the Sozzini family fell under suspicion of being Protestant heretics.  One of them was seized by the Inquisition, and the rest fled, among them Faustus, who for some two years lived mostly at Lyon, though he was at Geneva long enough to become a member of the Italian church there.   While he was at Lyon, his uncle Lelius died, leaving him his manuscripts, most of them on religious subjects.  These may well have planted in his mind seeds that were to ripen later, but for a time they seem to have made no impression upon him; for he returned to Italy the next year, and from 1563 to 1575 lived the life of a courtier at Florence, in the service of Isabella de’ Medici, daughter of the Grand-Duke Cosimo of Tuscany, remaining outwardly a good Catholic. During this period he published a book On the Authority of Holy Scripture which was highly esteemed by both Catholics and Protestants, was translated into several languages, and continued in circulation for over a century and a half.

    Upon the death of his patroness Socinus refused all inducements to remain longer at court, left Italy never to return, and went to Basel which was then a place of considerable religious freedom, and for three years applied himself to the study of religious subjects, chiefly the Bible.  While there he wrote a treatise showing much independence of thought, On Christ the Savior, in which he defended the view that Christ is our Savior not because he suffered for our sins, but because he showed us the way to eternal salvation, which consists in our imitating him; and that he did not suffer to satisfy God’s justice nor to appease his wrath.  This view was in sharp contrast to that then generally held, and although the book was at first circulated only in manuscript, and was not published until years later in Poland, it at once established his reputation as an able and independent theologian.  The result was that he was soon urged to come to Transylvania to assist in a discussion then going on there over the question whether Christians should worship Christ.  The account of that discussion will be found in a later chapter: when it was done Socinus proceeded to Poland, where he arrived early in 1579.  Here he was to spend twenty-five fruitful years in promoting the religious movement whose history we are following.  He was now forty years old.

    Coming to the capital at Krakow, Socinus found in the Anabaptist congregation there a company of Christians with whom he so much sympathized that the following year, at a synod at Rakow, he applied for admission to their membership.   Now while he had been baptized in infancy, the new church insisted that before joining it he must receive adult baptism. This he declined to have done, for he thought that it would be an admission that baptism was necessary to a Christian, which he did not at all believe, though he did not object to the practice for any that wished it for themselves.  He was also found to disagree with them on several other important doctrines.  The church therefore rejected his application for membership and refused to admit him to the Lord’s Supper.  He took no offense, however, but continued to worship with them, attend their synods, defend them against their opponents in controversy, and take part in their doctrinal discussions.  It was in these last that he did the most valuable service to the cause by bringing about harmony of opinion.   For he had a profound acquaintance with the Bible, to which appeal was always made on these occasions, and was an accomplished debater; and best of all he invariably kept his temper in controversy and never abused his opponents (as was then generally done, even in religious debate), but instead preserved the manners of a courtier, and relied upon the calm appeal to reason.

    His influence with the churches was not a little increased when, having been forced by threats of prosecution to leave Krakow, and having accepted the hospitality of a nobleman in the vicinity, he presently married his host’s only daughter, and thus became connected with many persons of great influence.  At two synods in 1584 he argued powerfully against the belief of many who expected Christ soon to appear again upon earth, and also in favor of the worship of Christ, without which, he maintained, we should be no better than Jews or even atheists.  At the request of the churches he replied to attacks that had been made upon their doctrine of the unity of God by professors in the Jesuit college at Posen.  He confuted the Arians; and the number of those who came to agree with him steadily increased, especially among the younger men.   At length, at the synod of Brest in Lithuania in 1588, where he discussed the main points of doctrine, it was clear that he had won over all but a very few of the most obstinate, and henceforth he was the acknowledged leader of the thought of the Minor Church.

    From this time on for fifty years Socinianism had a brilliant career in Poland.  Rakow was its capital and the center of its influence.  Its Calvinistic proprietor became interested in Socinianism and instituted a public discussion of doctrines between Calvinists and Socinians, and as a result of this he joined the latter in 1600.  Two years later he established a school there.  Its teachers were able scholars with reputation throughout Europe.  It grew rapidly and became famous.  Young men were sent to it from both Catholic and Protestant sources until it had about a thousand students, nearly a third of them from the nobility.  Rakow became known as “the Sarmatian Athens.”  So many came here even from Germany that special services in the German language were held for them.  In this school young men were trained up for the Socinian ministry under teachers whose fame survives among scholars to this day.  A fine press was also removed from Krakow and set up here, and on it were printed large numbers of works by Socinian writers, whose faith was thus spread in print over all Europe.  General synods for all Poland were held here every year, and ministers and nobles from all parts of the kingdom came to attend them.

    There were also churches in almost all the other important cities, and every large church had a school by its side, conducted by one of the younger clergy.

    Although Socinianism was the least numerous of the three forms of Protestantism in Poland, none had a more distinguished company of adherents. We have already noted to what extent it had spread among the nobility. One of their apologists writing later in an age of persecution fills six pages with a list of early Antitrinitarians and later Socinians who had held public offices of the highest distinction in the kingdom, and there were said to be none of the greatest families in Poland or Lithuania, even those of dukes and princes, but were related to some of the Socinians.  It is even true that for a short time one who had been brought up in the Socinian faith sat upon the throne of Russia (1605 – 1606), the so-called False Demetrius, pretended son of the late Czar.  A Catholic historian of Polish literature bears witness that the Socinians were intellectually the most advanced, cultivated, and talented of all the Polish dissidents, and that they left an enduring impression on the history of Polish literature.

    The official records of the Minor Church, though long jealously guarded, have now long since vanished from sight, so that it is impossible to say just how widely the Church extended.  But we know of a synod at Rakow in 1612 which was attended by 400 delegates, and of another in 1618 by 459, and the names of 115 churches are still on record; so that it would probably not be unfair to estimate that first and last there were as many as 300 Socinian congregations, though many of these were prematurely crushed out by persecution, or were lost through a change of patron.   Their form of government was practically the same as that of the Reformed Church.   The churches were organized into synods composed of ministers and lay delegates.   There was probably one of these for each palatinate or county, perhaps one for each province, and over them all a general synod for the whole kingdom which met at Rakow for a week or two each year.

    Each synod elected a superintendent for its own district, who appointed ministers and teachers for the local churches, assigned them their locations or removed them, and also visited the churches each year.  He was assisted by elders, both lay and clerical.  Annual synods were held in each palatinate and local synods more frequently if occasion required.  At these everything was attended to that concerned the welfare and growth of the church.  Ministers were ordained and teachers named for the home churches, and missionaries appointed to spread the faith in other countries; salaries for ministers and teachers were voted out of a common fund raised by apportionment among the churches; aid was voted for promising young men to study for the ministry at Rakow or at foreign universities; grants were made to be distributed by the deacons to widows and orphans or others in need; pensions were granted to retired ministers and teachers; aid was sent to needy brethren living abroad or banished on account of their faith; differences which had arisen between the members, if they could not be privately settled, were adjusted here, for the Socinians, following the teaching of Jesus, never resorted to the law courts except as a last resort; breaches of morality received earnest attention; and the editing and publishing of books which might spread the faith were provided for.  Any matters which could not be settled in the local synods were carried up to the general synod.

    It was from these synods, also, that those proposals for union with other churches proceeded, which were repeatedly made by the Socinians, and as often rejected by the orthodox.  Socinus had never desired to be the founder of a new sect, and he never claimed to be anything more than merely a Christian; and one of his most interesting writings is an address in which he endeavored to persuade the members of the rapidly dwindling Reformed Church of their duty as Christians to join in one free national church with “those who are falsely and unjustly called Arians and Ebionites.”  We have already noticed an early attempt to unite with the Moravian Anabaptists.   A similar move for union with the Reformed Church was made in 1580, when representatives of the Minor Church went to a Reformed synod at Lewartow hoping for a conference on the subject; but the Reformed refused to have anything to do with them, “since they were followers of Ebion, Arius, and Paul of Samosata, who had long ago been excommunicated from the Church.”  Another attempt at union was made at Rakow in 1598, but the conference which took place came to nothing, whereupon Socinus issued the address above referred to.

     A few yeras later, when it was becoming evident that Catholics, instigated by the Jesuits, were beginning a systematic policy of attack upon all Protestants, efforts were for the third time renewed for union with the Reformed.   From 1611 on several conferences with the Reformed were held, which for a time gave promise of success, on a basis of mutual tolerance of differences of belief.  But the Jesuits had poisoned the minds of the Reformed against the Socinians as enemies of all Christendom, and the Reformed refused to consider any union unless the Socinians would agree to their doctrines as to the Trinity, the atonement, and baptism; while one of their theologians published a book to show that the two could no more unite than fire and water.   Nor did an attempt in 1619 at a purely political alliance between them against the Catholics succeed any better.  Not until too late did the Reformed discover that only by all standing together could the Protestants of Poland have prevented the destruction which at length overwhelmed them all.

    Prospects for union with the Mennonites of Holland might have seemed brighter, for these were descended from the Anabaptists of earlier times,⁴ and had many points in common with the Socinians; yet the latter’s proposal in 1612 was declined as impracticable.  Twenty years later the Remonstrants of Holland, also, who had lately protested against the doctrines of Calvin, and were then suffering bitter persecution and exile in consequence, gave ground for yet brighter hopes of union; but when this was proposed to them in 1632 it was nevertheless refused perhaps because the Remonstrants had already been accused by their enemies of being Socinians in disguise, and were unwilling to do anything which could be taken for an admission of the charge.  Thus the Socinians were on every hand persistently shut off from all religious fellowship; and even as late as 1645, when a friendly conference of all religious persuasions was called together at Thorn (the Colloquium Charitativum), and when danger from the Catholic quarter was more threatening than ever, they were still refused admission to it among the other Protestants.

    The Socinians showed the depth and sincerity of their devotion to their faith not only by suffering ostracism and persecution for it, but also by their zealous and persistent efforts to spread it among others both at home and abroad.  To the very end of their existence in Poland they were active and wonderfully zealous propagandists.  Their favorite missionary method at home was through public debates, if these could be arranged with their opponents; and they had such confidence in their cause that though others might shrink from debate, they themselves never did.  They preferred to have these debates conducted like the discussions of learned men, under prescribed rules and forms, with theses and antitheses, objections and refutations, made by the debaters in due order, and preferably submitted in writing.  These would then be printed for people to read and digest at leisure.  Thus they depended far more on reason and argument than on mere eloquence or passion.  The most famous of all these discussions was one with the Jesuits.  It was carried on entirely by the pen, lasted from 1603 to 1618, and was comprised in more than twenty printed books.  In these discussions the attitude of the Socinians was never timid or apologetic, but habitually bold and aggressive; yet their imitation of the habit of Socinus in carrying on their discussions with good temper and in mild speech set a new and good example, and won praise even from their opponents.  They are said also to have won many converts through the fine spirit that prevailed in their discussions among themselves at their synods.   Their use of the printing press has already been spoken of, and it made Socinianism well known and its influence greatly feared all over Europe.  The number of religious books they published was astonishing,⁵ and a great flood of writings came forth in answer to them, from Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists.

    The Socinians also made liberal appropriations for sending missionaries into the other countries of Europe.  It was only in rare cases that these dared venture upon public preaching, for freedom of worship did not yet exist anywhere west of Poland; and more than once these missionaries were arrested, imprisoned, or banished for trying to propagate their faith, and were released only on condition of ceasing to do so in future.  Their most successful method, therefore, was to send abroad their most polished and cultivated scholars, who would form influential acquaintances, converse with them on religious subjects, put Socinian books into their hands, and thus influence the opinions of the leaders of thought.  In this way a far-reaching influence was early exerted in Holland; and such missionaries went also to Germany, France, and England.  Of course, with laws against heresy being as they were, such a thing as establishing Socinian churches abroad was entirely out of the question.

    The most effective of these silent missionaries were the young men who went to the western universities to continue the education they had begun at Rakow in preparation for the ministry.  They thus made secret converts among the students at Leiden, Strassburg, Heidelberg, and most of all at Altorf, which for a few years early in the seventeenth century was a veritable hot-bed for propagating Socinians.   The Rector of this school, Dr. Soner, had been converted to Socinianism by some Polish students at Leiden when he was studying there, and he kept up a correspondence with the brethren in Poland.  Socinian students from there flocked to his lectures, and with his encouragement made many converts among the Germans and others studying there.   These young Socinians formed a secret society among themselves, and after the manner of the learned academies of the time they gave themselves fictitious Latin names, and thus the better kept their secret.  In 1616 however their secret was discovered by the authorities, and they were arrested and for a time imprisoned; after which a few recanted, though most were expelled and returned to Poland.  One result of this foreign propaganda was that not a few of the most eminent Socinian ministers and scholars in Poland and Transylvania were men of foreign birth and education who had been converted by these means, and had then been obliged to remove thither to enjoy their faith in peace.

    Long before Socinianism had reached the widespread influence which we have described, Socinus himself had died.  His young wife had early been taken from him, leaving him only an infant daughter; his estate in Italy had been confiscated, and now, broken in fortune, health, and spirit, he retired to the home of a friendly noble at Luclawice in the foothills of the Carpathians, where he died in 1604, aged sixty-five.   Legend says that his grave was later opened and his ashes scattered by fanatics, but the place of his burial is known, and a battered monument still remains to mark the spot.  During these last years he was surrounded by sympathetic friends, most prized among them being Stoinski, the eloquent and scholarly young minister of the place.  Socinus occupied his time in writing books, and in making visits far and wide among the churches.  His last occupation was in trying to make a systematic statement of Christian doctrine for the use of the churches.  Together with Stoinski, he had been requested to revise the Catechism of 1574 then in use, and he left behind him unfinished a brief system of instruction in the Christian religion in the form of a Catechism (Christianae  Religionis brevissima Institutio), as well as the fragment of another Catechism.

    Stoinski died the year after Socinus, but their unfinished work was continued and completed after their death by Schmalz, Moskorzowski, and Völkel, and was published in Polish in 1605 at Rakow (Latin, Racovia), whence it came to be known as the Racovian Catechism.  This little book, which passed through six editions in Latin, one in German, two in Dutch, and two in English (not to mention the children’s Catechism based upon it and published in Polish, Latin, and German), was in print for more than two centuries, was very widely circulated throughout Europe, and was answered or attacked numberless times by orthodox theologians, who seemed to suffer acute fear lest its teachings should spread in their churches.  Beyond doubt it did more than any other book ever published (except the New Testament itself) to spread Unitarian ways of thinking about religion.  Its teaching therefore deserves special attention.

    The keynote to the whole system of Socinian doctrine seems to lie in the text: “This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent”; and the Christian religion is defined at the outset as a way of attaining this eternal life, divinely revealed in the Scriptures (especially the New Testament), which certain proofs show to be true, which are easy to understand, and which contain all things necessary for salvation.  Throughout the book, therefore, the proof of its teaching is drawn from the Bible, and only in a few instances are orthodox doctrines opposed on the ground that they are unreasonable.

    Man is by nature mortal, and the only way for him to gain eternal life is by knowledge of God and Christ.  It is of the utmost importance, then, that this knowledge be correct, else our hopes of eternal life would be imperiled.   We must therefore know that God is only one in person, for belief in the Trinity may easily destroy the faith in one God; and we must also know that Christ is by nature a true man, though not a mere man, for he was miraculously born.  On these two main heads there are long arguments against the orthodox view.

    We must also acknowledge Christ as God, being one who has divine power over us, and one to whom we are bound to show divine honor in adoration, and whose aid we can ask in any need; adoring him for his sublime majesty, and seeking aid of his divine power.  Those who do not do this are not Christians. Jesus was sinless, and wrought miracles.  He rose from the dead, thus assuring us that we shall rise also; his resurrection is therefore much more important than his death, though by dying for us sinful men be showed us the way to return to God and be reconciled to him.

    The Holy Spirit is not a person in the godhead, but a power of God bestowed on men from on high.

    There is no such thing as original sin, or predestination; and men are justified in the sight of God only through their faith in Christ, who now lives in heaven, making continual intercession for us, whence he will come to judge the living and the dead.

    There is only one sacrament, the Lord’s Supper, which is a memorial rite.  Baptism is only an outward rite by which converts to Christianity publicly acknowledge their faith in Christ.  Infant baptism is unscriptural, though those that practice it without trying to force it on others should not be condemned or persecuted.  The Church is a company of Christians who hold and profess sound doctrine.

    These teachings, which are all given in the ordinary catechism form of question and answer, are those that would seem most striking to a modern reader of the first edition of the Racovian Catechism.  Later editions greatly enlarged and somewhat changed this first edition; but these teachings remained substantially as given.  It may be noted that the Catechism is in close harmony with the Apostles’ Creed, so far as that goes; and indeed Socinians were always wont to appeal to that as against the later creeds.  It is noteworthy also that, except for the subject of baptism, little is found of the peculiar teachings of the Anabaptists or the Arians, though in limited localities or under individual ministers Socinians still adhered to these.  If the Catechism is far from being orthodox, it is also far from modern Unitarianism.  Yet the root of the matter was there; for in its freedom from the authority of the creeds, in its free and scholarly way of explaining scripture, in its appeal to reason and its emphasis on right conduct (both of these much more emphasized in the later editions), and in its tolerance of different opinions, it came close to the fundamental principles of the Unitarianism of the twentieth century.

    The true character and worth of a religion, however, can not be learned from its catechism or its creeds, any more than the character and worth of a man from his skeleton.  If we would truly know what Socinianism was, we must consider not only its theory but its practice.  We should need to attend its services of religious worship, hear its sermons, hymns, and prayers, observe the earnestness and devotion of the people to their religion, and above all note what effect it had upon their daily life, and what kind of characters it produced.  Unfortunately we can not do that, for as we shall soon see, Socinianism in Poland came after a century to a tragic end.  Yet fortunately there have been preserved to us some detailed accounts of their church customs, and many comments upon their characters.  We know, therefore, that the Socinians, both in Poland and in exile, were a very sincerely devout people.  They observed Sunday very strictly, holding two or three services on Sundays and holy days, to which the members often came from long distances; and there was also preaching on Wednesdays and Fridays, and frequent days of fasting and prayer were observed.  Every nobleman’s house had its chapel, and domestic worship with scripture and prayer was held twice daily.  They held the Lord’s Supper very sacred, and counted it a great deprivation to be kept away from it; and they emphasized the importance of private devotional life.  When members of their church therefore were scattered or distant from church privileges, great pains were taken to send them ministers from time to time to preach and administer the Lord’s Supper.

    Their moral standards also were very strict and strictly observed; and it was a regular part of their church discipline to watch carefully over one another’s characters and admonish one another like brothers and sisters.  If a member did wrong and did not show repentance for it, the matter was dealt with in the church meeting; and if he persisted he was forbidden to come to the Lord’s Supper.   Though they did not adopt the Anabaptist doctrines into their Catechism many of them followed the Anabaptist traditions in the conduct of their lives.  Indeed they strove to make their churches as nearly as possible like the first Christian churches, and they tried literally to follow the teachings of Jesus.  They looked watchfully after the wants of their poor, the widows, and the orphans.  They would not fight, nor go to law, nor avenge injuries, nor hold serfs; they were peaceable, patient, gentle, forgiving, unostentatious, and they lived exemplary lives.  In many respects they resembled the Quakers, though their more extreme views and practices were not adhered to always and by all their members, and tended to become modified in the course of time; yet a clear Anabaptist strain always persisted, and to the very end some refused to bear arms or to hold civil office.  This is the general testimony of both their friends and their foes.  We have already seen how eager they were to spread among others the faith which they held; and we shall see in the next chapter how ready they were to suffer the loss of everything rather than forsake it.  In fact, a recent Catholic historian says that Polish “Arianism” was the most interesting page in Polish religious history, and that no other confession in Poland can count so high a percentage of authors in the seventeenth century; and that one reason why their numbers did not become larger was that their demands were too strict.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Decline and Fall of Socinianism, and Its Banishment from Poland, 1638�1660

 

    The last chapter told the happy story of how Socinianism, in spite of many obstacles, overcame them all and rose to a position of widespread influence in Poland.  All the while it was gaining strength, however, clouds were gathering below the horizon which were eventually to break into a storm which should overwhelm in ruin not only Socinianism but at length all of Polish Protestantism.  We must now go back to trace this other story from its beginning.

    The rise of Protestantism in Poland reached its height with the Union of Sandomir (Consensus Sandomiriensis) in 1570, and the power of the Catholics in the affairs of the nation was then at a low ebb, with only a minority in either house of the Diet.  Shortly after this the orthodox Protestants proposed to put all “Arians” under the ban; but to this the Catholics would not consent, since it would seem to imply an increased recognition of the other Protestants.  This Union was repeatedly confirmed among the orthodox Protestant bodies for twenty-five years, though the Minor Church was persistently excluded from it.  Further than this however, orthodox opposition no longer attempted to go.  The trouble was instead to come from the Catholic side, and it was initiated under Cardinal Hosius, a man of great learning and of the most admirable personal character, but an extreme Catholic whose convictions led him to subordinate every other interest to the welfare of the church, and to urge that it would be to the detriment of the church for the government to keep any promise it might have made to protect the Protestant heretics in their rights, when they deserved to be utterly exterminated.

    The order of Jesuits now comes into the story.  It had been founded in 1539, and had ere long come to devote itself especially to overthrowing Protestantism; and in 1564 Cardinal Hosius invited Jesuits to come to Poland for this purpose.  They came in large numbers from Spain and Germany and began opening schools all over the land, some fifty of them in all, and amply endowed.  All that the Protestant nobles seemed to realize of what was going on was that here were better schools than they had known before, taught by talented scholars and polished gentlemen, many of them of noble birth; and they therefore soon began sending their sons to these new schools for their education.  What the Jesuits intended was that these young Polish nobles, after having been kept for some years under their instruction, should many of them be won over to the Catholic faith, so that in a generation or two (and they were always willing to work on long lines) most of the ruling classes of Poland would again be back in the fold of the church.  So it turned out, for within two generations they had all Poland securely in their net, and were prepared to draw it whenever they found the time ripe.  Their policy was to win the confidence and favor of the upper classes without at first revealing their purpose, then to push against the Protestants in general whenever a favorable opportunity presented itself, and finally to divide the Protestants against one another.  This last purpose was all too easily accomplished, for the orthodox were ready enough to attack the “Arians,” and were glad repeatedly to join with the Catholics against those heretical Protestants as enemies of all Christendom.  It was not until too late, when they had themselves fallen victims to this policy, that it dawned upon them that they had been used as tools to help carry out the far-sighted Jesuit plan for overthrowing all Polish Protestantism.

    The tolerant King Sigismund Augustus II died in 1572, as we have seen, and Henry of Valois who succeeded him wore his Polish crown but a few months before going to receive a more shining one in France as Henry III.  The election to the throne next fell (1574) to Stephen Bathori, Prince of Transylvania, whom we shall later meet in connection with the history of Unitarianism in that country.  When elected he was supposed to be a Protestant, but soon afterwards he openly professed the Catholic faith and married the sister of the late king, who was under Jesuit influence.  The Jesuits therefore won his support, although through the thirteen years of his reign he maintained the liberties of the Protestants, and resisted all pressure to break his coronation oath to them, declaring that he was king only of people, but not of their consciences, which were subject to God alone.²  Yet even in his reign the Catholic reaction began, and in the strongly Catholic capital of Krakow preaching against heretics so excited the populace that from 1574 on they formed mobs which sacked the Reformed church, outraged the Protestant cemeteries, and attacked Protestant inhabitants; and similar things were done at Wilno, the capital of Lithuania.  The king indeed expressed his disapproval, but nothing effectual was done to punish these acts.

    During the long reign of Sigismund Wasa III (1587 – 1632), matters rapidly grew worse.  Persecution of all Protestants increased, and whereas at the king’s accession there were (beside the bishops) but few Catholics in the Senate, when he died the Protestants had only two members, their power was practically broken, and royal confirmation of their rights had become little more than a solemn farce.  The “Jesuit king,” as he was called, was a bigoted zealot.  He had been brought up under the influence of the Jesuits, had joined their order, and even become a cardinal; and he did everything possible to favor them.  Anti-Protestant riots, which the Jesuits stirred up among the lower classes, became more and more frequent at Krakow, where the Reformed church was at length burned and never rebuilt.  In various other cities where Protestants were much in the minority the same sort of thing occurred, churches and schools were destroyed, and any attempt at punishing the outrages was blocked.  At the same time the Jesuits were intriguing with the higher classes, all the highest offices were at their instigation given to Catholics, while the Protestant nobles were forced to content themselves with inferior offices and honors only.  This in itself furnished a powerful temptation to a Polish noble to turn Catholic again, and many of them yielded to it.

    Our main interest here, however, is with the persecution as it affected the Socinians.  Open attacks on them began in this reign, and as they had fewer powerful patrons than the Reformed, they could not so successfully defend themselves. Their meeting-place at Krakow was destroyed by a mob in 1591.  Three years later Socinus himself was attacked in the streets there and had his face smeared and his mouth filled with mud by order of a Polish knight who charged him with being an “Arian,” and with having undermined his father’s religious faith.  When his work On Christ the Savior was published at Krakow in the same year, hatred against him flamed up afresh; and at length in 1598, when he was ill in bed, a mob led by students of the university broke into the house, sacked it and dragged him half-naked from his bed and through the streets to the market-place, where they burned his books and priceless manuscripts, and threatened to burn him too unless he would recant.  He did not weaken even in sight of death, but when he saw a drawn sword above his head he calmly declared, “I will not recant.  What I have been, that I am and by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ shall be till my last breath.  Do whatever God allows you to do.”  When they saw that their threats could not frighten him, they set out to throw the stubborn heretic into the Vistula, and would have done so without more ado had not the rector and two of the professors of the university, though Catholics, rescued him by a ruse, at great risk to themselves.

    The first actual martyr among the Socinians was Jan Tyskiewicz, a wealthy citizen of Bielsk.  His relatives coveted his property, and therefore laid a plot against him.  They forced him into the office of town treasurer, and then at the end of his year of office required him to take oath that he had faithfully discharged his duties.  He wished to obey the command of Jesus and “swear not at all,” though when pressed he yielded the point; but when ordered to swear either on the crucifix or by the Trinity he flatly refused, as it had been expected that he would do.  He was thereupon accused of trampling the crucifix under foot and blaspheming against the Trinity, was insulted and flogged by the magistrate, and condemned to death and thrown into prison.  He appealed to the Supreme Court, which declared him innocent and set him free, at the same time fining the magistrate for imposing an unjust sentence.  His enemies then appealed to the queen as ruler of this district, and she approved the original sentence and ordered it executed, whereupon the king and his Council passed this sentence of death: “Inasmuch as he has blasphemed, let his tongue be torn out; inasmuch as he has shown contempt of the magistrate to whom he was subject, and of her majesty’s decree by which he was brought before the magistrate, by daring to appeal his case to the Supreme Court, let him be beheaded as a stubborn rebel; inasmuch as he has trampled upon the crucifix, let his hand and his foot be cut off; and finally, inasmuch as he is a heretic, let him be burned.”  Jesuits and monks now besought him to change his faith, promising to have the sentence revoked and his property restored; but he remained deaf to all threats or promises, and was led to the stake in the market-place at Warsaw, 1611.

    From now on a systematic policy of extermination was pursued against the Socinians.  One of them was torn in pieces by a fanatical mob at Wilno and the courts took no notice.  Before long all the highest judges were Catholic, and one accused of heresy had little chance before them.  There were sporadic cases all over the kingdom, but the first general attack took place at Lublin in 1627.  Here the Socinians had long had one of their most flourishing churches, under the patronage of very distinguished nobles, and many synods had been held here, and many debates with their opponents.  Irritated at the unfavorable results of these discussions, the Catholics at length raised a mob and destroyed the Socinian church, and from the Supreme Court which sat there got a decree abolishing the church forever.  Despite the decree, secret worship was still maintained there for some years.

    All their previous troubles, however, were as nothing in comparison with the blow that fell upon the Socinians in the destruction of Rakow in 1638, by which, as one of them pathetically wrote not long after, “the very eye of Poland was put out, the asylum and refuge of exiles, the shrine of religion and the muses.”  A Catholic had set up a wooden crucifix by the roadside near the town.  At this two boys from the school at Rakow (whether in wanton mischief or out of misguided religious zeal is not clear) threw stones till they had broken it down.  They were duly punished by their parents, but this did not satisfy the Catholics, who were only too ready to seize this occasion for striking a killing blow at Socinianism.  The boys themselves, after being arrested and brought before the Diet at Warsaw, were let go, and instead of them, at the instigation of the Bishop of Krakow, the whole community of “Arians” at Rakow was charged with responsibility for the sacrilege.  First of all, Sieninski himself, the owner of the town and the patron of the church and school, was accused of treason against God and man; and the professors and ministers were accused of having put the students up to perpetrate their wicked act.  No proof which they could offer of their innocence was admitted; nor did they regard the oath of Sieninski himself that the act had been done without his knowledge, though he was a man in his seventies, who had formerly sacrificed his fortune in behalf of his country, and had often been hailed in the Diet as the Father of his Country.  His very son, whom he had allowed to be brought up in a Jesuit school and who had hence turned Catholic, turned against him.  The protests of many members of the lower house of the Diet, of all religions, Catholic included, were disregarded.  Most of the Protestant members were won over by the Jesuits to side against the Socinians as enemies of all Christianity, although some of them later confessed that they had made a fatal mistake.  The matter was not duly tried in court at all, nor even agreed upon by the whole Diet, but was disposed of in the Senate alone by summary process of law.  It was decreed that the school at Rakow be demolished, the church taken from the “Arians” and closed, the press removed, the ministers, professors, and teachers branded with infamy and outlawed, all which, says the Catholic historian, “was executed with all imaginable diligence.”

    The church edifice was of course taken over by the Catholics, richly endowed, and dedicated to the Holy Trinity, with a suitable inscription over the door relating what had been done.  Sieninski died within a year.  The Socinian congregation, what was left of it, removed to a neighboring village, and there in the house of a new patroness continued as before to meet for worship thrice a week, and devoted all of Fridays to fasting and prayer; but the patroness died a few years later, her estate came into the possession of a Catholic, and the church became extinct.  The ministers, though outlawed, found here or there a place where they might live in concealment, and after the feeling against them had somewhat subsided they at length became settled again over congregations in distant parts of the country.³   The school was combined with that of Kisielin in Volhynia, and there continued its existence until abolished by a decree of court.  After this the chief school of the Socinians was at Luclawice where Socinus had spent his last years, and Socinian books were published there.  The press at Rakow was taken down the Vistula and set up at Danzig.

    From now on blow followed blow in quick succession.  One church after another was, on one pretext or another, closed by decree of the court.  At Kisielin, where all the inhabitants are said to have been “Arians,” and at Beresko near by, school and church were ordered razed to the ground in 1644, two ministers long since dead were branded with infamy, and the Socinian proprietor was forced to pay some 20,000 florins for harboring proscribed ministers, and he and his sons were forbidden to allow Socinian worship on their estates.  Mobs in various places would sack the homes of prominent Socinians and assault their owners, even beating them to death.  Preachers were repeatedly arrested and brought into court, and persecution seemed to follow them like a shadow.  Schlichting, one of their most famous scholars, published a Confession of Faith in 1642, and for this was branded with infamy, proscribed, and compelled to spend several years in exile; while the book itself was publicly burned at Warsaw in 1647.  In Protestant territory in the neighboring kingdom of Prussia, where the Socinian faith had by this time begun to spread among the Lutherans enough to arouse their alarm, a decree was issued in 1640 to prevent its further spread, and not long afterwards some Socinian leaders were banished from Danzig in circumstances of the most unfeeling cruelty.

    With the destruction of Rakow, the end of Socinianism in Poland was already in sight, and it never recovered from the blow; but the inevitable was still further hastened by political events, and misfortunes now came thick, fast, and heavy.  The first scene in the last act was furnished by the Cossack war.  Socinianism had nowhere been more wide-spread and firmly established than in Volhynia, in southeastern Poland.  In 1618 the Cossacks, whom an atrocious wrong done by a Polish noble to one of their chiefs had stirred up to avenge long-standing oppressions, filled with savage hatred, broke out in rebellion, and swept like a whirlwind over all that part of the country as far as the Vistula, ravaging, pillaging, and destroying all with fire and sword.⁴  Whole cities were wiped out, the atrocities upon the inhabitants were frightful, and many of them were carried into slavery.  On account of religious hatred, the Cossacks, who were of the Eastern Church, were especially savage toward the Socinians.  Many of these in the Ukraine were killed, and over a thousand of them in headlong flight left all they possessed behind them, and sought refuge with the brethren in Little Poland.  The churches in this district were never reestablished.  The Cossacks were at length defeated, but they soon afterwards joined forces with the Russians and repeated in Lithuania⁵ in 1654 the ruin they had wrought in Volhynia six years before; and here also most of the Socinian churches were either destroyed or else irreparably weakened.

    The war with Russia dragged on for thirteen years, but before it was more than a year old the Protestant King Charles X of Sweden, taking advantage of Poland’s prostrate condition, made war upon her, and within a short time had overrun a large part of the country, captured the capital at Krakow, and driven the Polish king over the border.  Deserted by their own king, and pressed by the Russians in one quarter and the Cossacks in another, many of the Poles could do nothing for a time but submit to the king of Sweden.  The Protestants doubtless may have done this willingly enough, for Charles treated them more kindly than he did the Catholics, and they had perhaps more to hope from a foreign Protestant monarch than from their own Catholic one.  The Socinians submitted among the rest; and especially in Little Poland, where their Catholic neighbors were now taking advantage of the general anarchy to plunder their rich estates and murder them wherever found, many of them from the palatinate of Krakow fled to the capital in 1656 and sought and received the protection of the Swedish king as the only one who could guarantee their safety.  Under this protection they remained for some time, again enjoying full liberty of worship.

    By the next year the tide of war had begun to turn, and Charles found himself losing ground.  He therefore called on Prince George Rakoczy II of Transylvania in 1657 to assist him by invading Poland from the south, and the latter, lured by a hope of winning the Polish crown for himself, hastened to respond to the call. His troops, savage as the Cossacks had been, ravaged the district nearest Hungary, where Socinian churches were numerous, and thus completed the devastation that had been wrought in the rest of the country.  The fact that Socinian nobles were believed to have urged Rakoczy to intervene, and that many of his followers were Unitarians in religion, must have given fresh ground for charging the Socinians with disloyalty, for they were accused of having intrigued with him against their own king.

    When his fortunes were now at the lowest ebb, the Polish King John Casimir had made a solemn vow that if he won back his kingdom he would purge it of heresy; and when the Swedes had at length been expelled from the country, he set about to fulfill his vow, beginning with the Socinians, who were charged (however unjustly) with having been during the war the most disloyal of all, as well as the most bated and incidentally the weakest of the Protestant sects.  The scattered brethren were only just beginning to come out of their hiding-places and to hope for the blessings of peace at last, when they were again attacked, their houses burned, their goods plundered, and themselves wounded or murdered.  The Diet made only an empty response to their appeal for protection, and then proceeded in 1658 to enact a decree to expel the Socinians utterly and forever from the land.  It revived a decree against heresy which in 1424, more than a century before the Reformation, had been passed against the Hussites, had long been obsolete, and had been virtually abrogated by the Diet; and deliberately disregarding the law of general toleration which had been passed in 1573 and had been solemnly confirmed by every monarch since then, including the reigning king, it passed a law that if any one were found in the realms daring to profess or spread or preach the Arian doctrine, or to protect or comfort its adherents, and were lawfully convicted thereof, he should be subject to the law referred to, and without delay be put to death; but since they desired to show mercy, if any such person were found unwilling to renounce his errors, he should be granted three years to collect his debts; though meanwhile he should hold no worship of his sect, nor hold any public office.  There still remained, however, one Socinian member of the Diet, Tobias Iwanicki, and he invoked the liberum veto against the law; but so determined were the great majority to banish the Socinians at all costs that it was disregarded.

    This law struck its victims like a thunderbolt; but as if it had given them too generous indulgence in granting them three years to settle up their affairs, the next Diet shortened the term to two years, fixing the final date as July 10, 1660, though reminding them that the law would not be enforced against those who returned to the Catholic Church.  Some of the most wealthy nobles went over to the Reformed Church as the least of the evils, but this was soon forbidden by a new law.  Many of the common people, having no means of leaving the country, in desperation professed the Catholic faith as the only alternative to death; though even of these some later returned to their former faith.  Striking misfortunes soon after befalling some of these apostates were interpreted by those who had remained faithful as judgments of God upon apostasy.  The Catholics on their part felt that they had their reward, for the king declared that from this time on he began to be more successful against his enemies, and the Pope honored him with the coveted title of Orthodox King.

    The Socinians, unable to believe that they must really suffer the cruel fate decreed against them, turned in every direction to find a way to avert it.  They petitioned to the king, endeavoring to show that they agreed with the Catholics in fundamentals, since they accepted the Apostles’ Creed; but in vain.  Some of the Socinian nobles who had been under the protection of the Swedish king at Krakow, and had followed in his train when he withdrew from the city, sought his influence to get the Socinians included with the others who had adhered to the King of Sweden, in the amnesty provided for in the treaty of Oliva which made peace between Sweden and Poland; but Lutheran opposition prevented this.  The Elector of Brandenburg, who had helped Poland to defeat Sweden, used his influence in their behalf, but to no purpose.  As a last resort, three or four months before the expiration of the time, many of the wealthiest Socinian nobles asked for a friendly discussion of the religious differences existing between themselves and the Catholics.  The Bishop of Krakow gave his sanction, and the Governor of Warsaw opened his palace at Roznow for the purpose.  In the end but few of the Socinians thought it safe to attend, but they were represented in debate by Andrew Wiszowaty, grandson of Socinus; while the Jesuits and other orders sent their ablest disputants.  The debates lasted five whole days.  Wiszowaty proved himself by far the ablest debater, and made a deep impression upon many of the Catholics present.  One of his principal opponents confessed to the governor that had all the devils come out of hell they could not have defended their religion more ably than this one man.  The result of the discussion was that the Catholics became somewhat milder in their persecution, and on the other hand that many of the wavering Socinians were confirmed to persevere in their faith.  Every inducement was offered the Socinians to renounce their faith and return to the Catholic Church; and Wiszowaty was promised by the governor a life estate and a generous pension if he would change his religion, but he could not be moved.

    Ever since the decree had been passed the Socinians had been generally treated as outlaws, and little protection had been afforded them.  Happy were those who had taken early opportunity to dispose of their property.  Those who waited until it was clear that there was no escape for them were able to sell only at the greatest sacrifices, some for a tenth of the real value, some for a twentieth, while some were unable to sell at all, and had to content themselves with a mere promise to pay, or to leave their property to well disposed friends to sell for them.  Meanwhile the faithful took every measure possible to preserve their churches and their faith from extinction.  At their synod in 1659 they laid all plans for holding worship and carrying on their church life in foreign lands as before, provided for publishing a book on the government of their churches; and that the memory of their past might not perish even though their children should at length live under other skies and forget the Polish tongue, they appointed one to write down their history.

    At last the fateful day arrived, when those who could still do so took their departure, carrying with them only their most valued possessions.  Many indeed were quite unable to get away at all.  It was estimated that a thousand families were left behind in the greatest destitution, especially in the palatinate of Krakow, and these had to go into hiding in remote places, or to seek the protection of friends who ventured to take the risk.  It was but a minority that were able to emigrate.  Every inducement to become Catholic appealed to those who had still dared remain.  Property, honors, and offices would at once be restored to them.  On the other hand any who aided them in any way, or had the least intercourse with them, were subject to confiscation of property without remedy; and since many were suspected of still lying concealed or being protected in the kingdom, another decree was passed in 1661 charging officers to use all diligence to search out and arrest any who could be discovered in the country.  All such were proscribed and their names posted at Warsaw, and without further hearing or opportunity for defense, all, whether women or girls, or those enfeebled by age or illness, were required to leave without the least delay, nor were even Socinian wives safe, whose husbands had turned Catholic.  The husbands were fined for having “Arian” wives.

    One of the ministers named Morsztyn at the risk of his life stayed behind in Poland with his son to minister to the scattered Socinians, and he continued in this office as late as 1668.  Wiszowaty also made his way back in the first winter to comfort the poor, the widows, and the orphans who had been unable to get away and who now flocked to him as soon as they heard of his arrival; and he repeated his visit the second winter.  A synod was even held in Poland in great secrecy in 1662, at which two ministers were appointed to look after the brethren scattered throughout the land.

    A deep thrill of horror and of sympathy ran through the more liberal Protestants of Europe over the cruelties of this exile and the sufferings of the Socinians, whose books had now for a generation or more been read and appreciated, and whose leaders were famous, in Holland and England.  In response to an appeal, aid in generous amount was therefore raised by a Remonstrant pastor named Naeranus in Holland, by a member of the Church of England named Firmin, whom we shall meet again in our history, and by Socinians living in Holstein; and this was carefully distributed among the suffering brethren in Poland or in exile, wherever any could be learned of.  This distribution in Poland continued as long as five years after the banishment, but after that we have no further record of the survivors there.

    We have seen that the banishment of the Socinians from Poland was brought about by cooperation between the Catholics and the orthodox Protestants.  The latter did not realize that they were thus being used as tools to dig their own graves.  It was not long, however, before they woke up to what they had done.  With the Socinians once out of the way the Catholics soon began to increase their persecution of the other Protestants.  The Bohemian Brethren, the next weaker sect, were expelled a year after the Socinians, and by 1668 the power of Protestantism in Poland was practically crushed.  In 1716 freedom of religious worship was forbidden to all Protestants except in their older churches; and in 1733 and 1736 their most important political rights were taken from them. When after a long struggle the old rights of Dissidents were again restored in 1767, it was too late to be of much good to the orthodox Protestant cause, which has never since had more than a feeble existence in Polish lands; and of course it was forever too late for the Socinians.

CHAPTER XIX

The Socinians in Exile, 1660-1803

 

    The history of religious persecution has scarcely a more pathetic and tragic chapter than that of the Socinian exiles from Poland.  The sufferings of the Pilgrim Fathers are nothing in comparison to it.  Many, as we have seen, were obliged to remain behind in Poland, though of these some doubtless managed to remove later.  The rest must have been gradually absorbed in the other churches, or else have died off within a generation.  Those that went into exile scattered in every direction, but we are able to trace six distinct colonies of them who held together for a longer or shorter time, in Transylvania, Silesia, the Rhine Palatinate, Holstein, Brandenburg, and Prussia, not to mention Holland, whither many from these various colonies eventually went, there at length to mingle with the liberal Dutch churches, in which they found a hospitable home.

    The largest migration sought to find a new home in Transylvania where, as we shall see in the next division of this history, there had long been well organized churches of their own faith, with which they had maintained friendly if not intimate relations for nearly a century.  Their petition to be received into that country, however, was for some reason at first denied by the prince then ruling.  They therefore separated into two divisions and for a time found welcome with two Protestant nobles of Hungary.  One of these divisions went to Kesmark in Szepes (Zips) County and was hospitably received by Count Stephen Thököly, who had a ready rebuke for an English clergyman who reproached him for thus sheltering heretics.  It was here that Wiszowaty made the headquarters from which he returned for two winters to comfort the faithful remaining in Poland.  What at last became of this colony does not appear, but as we hear little further of them, it is probable that they soon broke up, some of them following Wiszowaty to Silesia, while most of the rest proceeded before long to join their brethren in Transylvania.

    The other division set out to seek the protection of Prince Francis Rhedei at Huszt in Marmaros County.  They were a wretched company of more than 500, with a train of 300 wagons bearing such few household possessions as they could take with them. Hardly had they crossed the Carpathians into Hungary when they were set upon by a band of freebooting Hungarian soldiers known in the country as "the Devil's fiends," who were supposed to have been secretly informed and incited to the act from Poland.  They were plundered of their possessions, their provisions, and even the clothes they wore, and were maltreated in every way.  The larger part of them, staggered by this new calamity, turned back in despair to Poland and professed the Catholic faith, or else sought refuge in Prussia.  The rest, destitute and half naked, but hardened to dangers, pushed on toward their destination.  After spending the winter at Huszt, about 200 of them comprising some thirty families went on the next year, and at length reached the metropolis of Unitarianism at Kolozsvar.  The brethren there had just been overrun by Turks and Tatars in the war then raging, and had themselves been plundered of nearly all that they had; but when they heard of the sad plight of their brethren from Poland, they sent out wagons to meet them, supplied them with food and clothing, and gave them shelter.  Yet here, in a strange and severe climate, and weakened by hardship and exposure, they were almost immediately attacked by the plague, and barely thirty of them survived it.¹  A new prince had now come to the throne, Michael Apaffi I, and when he offered them the shelter and protection which no other sovereign in Christian Europe would grant them, they made arrangements for permanent settlement in the country, after which others from Poland doubtless joined them.  They were granted the rights of citizenship, and a church of their own was set aside for them to worship in; but they were long in extreme destitution, and even after fifty years they were still obliged to appeal to their more prosperous brethren in other lands for aid in supporting their church, their school, and the poor.  Yet their numbers gradually increased, so that in 1707 they sent out colonies to other parts of the country, and for some time they had in all four churches.  At about this time some of them planned to return to Poland, and funds were raised to assist them in doing so; but when the venture was made in 1711, the bare chimneys of their burned homes, and the religious hatred with which they were received by the inhabitants, discouraged them so much that the attempt was given up.

    The Polish Socinians in Transylvania at length suffered the inevitable fate of any small colony in a strange land.  The original exiles died, their children intermarried with the Transylvanians and became scattered, and thus they gradually forgot their mother tongue and became mingled with the surrounding population. As long as it was possible, they maintained worship in the Polish language and had Polish ministers; but it became more and more difficult to secure ministers, and congregations gradually dwindled.  The last Polish preacher at Kolozsvar died in 1792; and his congregation had already united with the Hungarian Unitarian Church there eight years before.  The other three churches had become extinct considerably earlier.  The descendants of the Polish exiles were not ungrateful to their Unitarian friends.  Many of them rose to high position in public life and acquired wealth; and one of them named Augustinowics dying in 1837 left the Unitarian church a bequest of 100,000 florins, which long amounted to more than all the rest of the funds of the church combined.

    A second company of exiles crossed over the western border of Poland into Silesia, where scattered Socinians had long lived, from among whom had come several well-known ministers to the Polish churches, and where yet more had lately settled as refugees before Rakoczy's invasion in 1657.  Many were received under the protection of the Queen of Poland in her principalities of Oppeln and Ratibor where she shielded them from the attacks of the Catholic clergy; but as they were widely scattered they were able to form no congregation, and we hear no more of them.

    A considerable number, however, including some of the most distinguished nobles and ministers, sought refuge just over the border at Kreuzburg, where they hoped to find toleration among Protestants who were themselves being threatened with persecution for their faith.  They did not expect to settle here permanently, though they hoped to have indulgence from the Duke of Brieg, who was of the Reformed faith, until they could arrange their affairs in Poland, provide for the brethren left behind them, and make plans for a new home, if perchance there were no turn of fortune in their favor.  Instead they were ordered to leave within three days.  Some of them went on and thus disappear from our view.  The rest petitioned the Duke for leave to stay a few days longer, and when this leave had expired it was extended for three months more, on condition of their not carrying on any propaganda or holding public worship.  By the time this period had elapsed, the prejudice against them had evidently subsided, and they were quietly tolerated and allowed to meet privately for worship in their own homes.  Publicly they worshiped with the other Protestants.  The Bohemian Brethren had tried hard to persuade the Duke not to let them stay, but the Lutheran ministers and citizens were in the main kind to them; and while they were not allowed to bury their dead in the Protestant cemetery, they were assigned a small one of their own.  Although most of them were nobles, they were nearly all left poor, and knowing no trade, and being ignorant of the language of the country, they found the greatest difficulty in making a bare living.  In this extremity the gifts of money received from Holland and England were like manna from heaven; and the letter which twenty-six of them signed making acknowledgment of these gifts, and relating the story of their banishment and their present circumstances, is one of the most interesting documents in their whole history.

    Kreuzburg was the most convenient center where the exiles might gather from the various quarters to which they had scattered.  They therefore continued to hold their synods there, to which delegates came from Transylvania, Prussia, Brandenburg, and Holland, so that Kreuzburg became for the time a sort of capital for Socinianism, as Rakow had once been.  After providing for their immediate necessities, the first care of the exiles here was for the brethren still remaining in Poland.  During eight years they appointed ministers to return secretly to visit them and confirm them in their faith. They provided for the training of young ministers, and for the publication of controversial works and commentaries in support of their doctrines.  They sent agents in various directions to see if a place could be found where they might settle; and these efforts proved more or less successful, so that by 1669 only three noble families and a few commoners remained of the Kreuzburg company.  Most of them seem to have joined the exiles in Prussia, though a few scattered about in Silesia, to whom the brethren in Prussia for the next ten years sent back a minister each year to preach and administer the Lord's Supper.  The last of these itinerant missionaries died while on his journey to them in 1680.

    Another and smaller company of exiles settled in the Rhine Palatinate.  It has been seen in a previous chapter that early in the Reformation the antitrinitarian Anabaptists were mercilessly persecuted in various parts of Protestant Germany;³ and from that time on the German princes, strongly Lutheran in faith, had never shown the least tolerance to those that denied the doctrine of the Trinity.  There had been repeated cases of expulsion of students in various German universities, or even of imprisonment or banishment, for being unsound on this point; various princes had issued decrees against deniers of the Trinity; and the few ministers who had ventured to follow Servetus or Socinus suffered imprisonment or exile, most of them taking refuge among the Socinians in Poland or the Unitarians in Transylvania.  As early as about 1570 there had been a little group of these in the Palatinate itself, of whom one, Adam Neuser, had been imprisoned for some time at Heidelberg, and another, Johannes Sylvanus, had been put to death, while yet others were banished, by the zealous Elector Frederick III, "the pious."

    His great-great-grandson, the Elector Karl Ludwig, however, was more tolerant.  Moravian Anabaptists had already built a church under his protection, and a number of Socinian refugees bringing their minister with them had already been kindly received.  A Polish Socinian knight of great influence also helped secure favor for his brethren; and as the Elector was using every means to attract settlers to rebuild his city of Mannheim, long wasted by wars, he took pity on the exiles and granted them refuge there.

    The synod at Kreuzburg in 1663 sent two of its best-known ministers, Wiszowaty and Stegmann, to prepare the way, and a company of exiles soon followed.  They lived there three years, happy under the Elector's protection.  They not only held their customary religious services for their own members in their private houses, and occasionally ministered to other exiles farther down the Rhine at Wied; but they also zealously tried to spread their faith among others by means of personal conversations and the circulation of their books.  The Elector himself grew deeply interested in their views, and had many religious conversations with Wiszowaty; but when his subjects began to show the infection of heresy, the Lutheran clergy took notice and had the Socinians baled into court at Heidelberg, where they were forbidden henceforth to discuss religion with any one, or to circulate their books.  This restriction at once took away half of what made life there seem worth living for them; a war broke out with Lorraine; and a visitation of the plague attacked a great part of the inhabitants.  They therefore decided to emigrate. Some of them may have returned to Silesia or removed to Prussia, but most went with Wiszowaty to Holland where he had formerly studied and had many warm friends among the Dutch, where many of the brethren already were, and where we shall soon meet them again.

    A fourth band of exiles found a brief refuge in the duchy of Holstein.  Stanislaw Lubieniecki, a famous Socinian courtier and scholar, had intimate relations with various courts in Europe.⁴  He had followed in the train of the King of Sweden when the latter left Krakow; and when he at last saw no hope of being permitted to return home, he went to Copenhagen, hoping to find a place of refuge for the exiles in the realm of King Frederick III of Denmark.  Here he so much won the regard of the king that the apprehension of the Lutheran theologians at court was aroused lest the king, with whom he often talked on religion, should become an "Arian."  He at first secured royal permission for the exiles to settle at Altona; but later, upon request of the secret synod held in Poland in 1662, he sought a place of settlement for them at Friedrichstadt, where Remonstrant and Mennonite refugees from Holland, and Quakers from England, had been received and tolerated.  He obtained permission from the local government for the exiles to settle there with full enjoyment of civil and religious rights, and to hold religious worship in private houses after their custom.  He then sent word to the brethren living on the borders of Poland, and incurred very large expense to help them remove that same year (1662) to their new home, where they established a congregation with their own minister, and sought, though with no success, to effect a union with the Mennonites or the Remonstrants who were living there as religious refugees like themselves.

    Unfortunately permission to settle had not also been obtained from Christian Albert, the ruling Duke of Holstein, and it was not long before he was persuaded by the Lutheran superintendent to command them to leave his territories.  They therefore went on to Holland, where many of their brethren were now gathering from different quarters.  Lubieniecki took up his residence at Hamburg, where he held important diplomatic offices, and incidentally made use of his opportunities with people in high station to interest them in his religious views.  After he had lived there several years, however, the clergy secured his banishment from the city on the ground that he had corrupted the religious faith of a Lutheran divinity student; though before the sentence could be carried out, he died of poison in suspicious circumstances.  Even then the clergy used all their influence to prevent the burial of his body in the church at Altona, and having failed in this they still prevented the usual funeral honors from being paid.

    A fifth group of exiles established themselves under the rule of the Great Elector Frederick William in the Mark of Brandenburg, and formed churches at several places not far from Frankfurt on the Oder, having for their last settled minister Samuel Crellius, member of one of the most famous families of Socinian scholars and preachers.   Yet nothing could save them from succumbing to their environment.  In a generation or two their descendants were speaking only German.  Their numbers grew steadily fewer.  In 1718 only some twenty-five adult males remained, and in 1725 Crellius gave up his charge.  After this the members were annually visited for some time by a minister from the churches in Prussia, who preached and administered the sacraments to the survivors; but by 1758 they had completely vanished.  How seriously these exiled Socinians took their religion is illustrated by the letter which two brothers Widawski, officers in the Prussian army, wrote to Crellius in 1717, asking whether, being far from any church of their own faith, they might partake of the Lord's Supper in the Reformed Church.

    Crellius went from Brandenburg to England, where he formed the acquaintance of numerous liberal divines in the English Church, and thence to Holland, where he died in 1747.  He left two sons, Stephen and Joseph, of whom it is related that when they were studying at a gymnasium in Berlin they were told that they might stay there no longer unless they would join the Reformed Church, since otherwise the gymnasium would get a bad reputation.  They did not yield to the demand.  They later emigrated to America among the first settlers of the colony of Georgia, where the former became a justice of the peace, and the latter a planter.  They are the only Polish Socinians known to have come to America.

    The last country in which the Socinians tried to establish a new home was the duchy of Prussia (now East Prussia), which like Brandenburg was governed by the Great Elector.  The prevailing religion here was Lutheran, though the Elector himself was Reformed, and disposed to be tolerant.  When he came into power in 1640 he appointed as governor of the province his relative Prince Boguslaw Radziwill, who in the war with Sweden had helped to make Prussia independent of Poland.  One of his ancestors had given his powerful protection to the early Antitrinitarians in Lithuania, where he had himself enjoyed close relations with the Socinians; while his cousin Janus had defended them at the Diet of Warsaw in 1638 in the debate over the destruction of Rakow.  The governor was therefore disposed to protect the Socinians to the limit of his power, so that many of them came to Prussia in 1660, chiefly from Lithuania which lay just over the border.  He made one of them his secretary, and had others in positions of influence in his court at Königsberg; while the Elector also had several of them among his councilors. With such powerful friends at court, many of the exiles sought refuge in various parts of Masuria, hoping to be allowed to live there quietly under the governor's protection; and several of them acquired large estates there on which the brethren might live around them in villages in the old Polish fashion, and establish congregations for worship.  Stragglers thus kept arriving for several years from Poland or from the other exile colonies.

    No sooner had the exiles arrived, however, than the Lutheran clergy began incessantly to work for the banishment of these "Arians."  They got edicts to this effect passed against them, and the right of holding public worship was denied them.  Meanwhile they must have had some assurance from friends at court that though decrees might be passed to pacify the Lutherans, the governor would be slow to execute them; for in 1662 they organized a church at Konsinowo (Andreaswalde), and later one at Rudawki (Rutow).  They also sent delegates to synods at Kolozsvar and Kreuzburg, held synods of their own, received aid for their poor from their friends in Holland and England, and sent aid to the exiles at Kolozsvar.  Nevertheless the fear of banishment constantly hung like a sword of Damocles over their heads, for it could never be predicted when the Lutherans might bring upon the Elector pressure too great for him to resist.  To forestall such a fate the governor's secretary, Przypkowski, addressed to the Elector in 1666 an eloquent defense of those so unjustly persecuted (Apologia Afflictae Innocentiae), in which he corrected common misstatements as to their doctrines, showed how peaceable and inoffensive they were, and pointed to the examples of toleration shown them in Transylvania, Silesia, the Palatinate, and Holland.  The edict was not withdrawn, but the Elector connived at their staying a while longer.  Not long afterwards they even established a congregation with a minister at Königsberg; and they presented to the Elector a confession of their faith, carefully based on Scripture throughout, free from controversy, and calculated to soften prejudice against them.

    Their friend the governor died in 1669, and the Lutherans thereupon obtained another edict from the Elector denying them further toleration, but again they appealed to his sympathy, mercy, and sense of justice; and while the orthodox kept urging that the decree be enforced, he on his part recommended to his Council to be mild.  Feeling that they were in imminent danger, however, the Socinians now sought the intercession of the King of Poland, who wrote urgent letters to the Elector, the new governor, and the Ministers of State, pleading the distinguished ancestry of the exiles, and asking toleration for them as former subjects of Poland.

    This appeal was effective, and from now on the Elector strove to protect the Socinians.  They had indeed to take care not to arouse the Lutherans by doing anything to spread their faith, as by holding public services, engaging in religious discussions, or circulating their books; but within these limits they now went on for more than a hundred years leading a quiet, normal church life.  They held regular synods, kept in touch with the exiles in other lands sent their young ministers to Holland for training, and maintained their traditional standards of morals and piety.  Now and then they had to be admonished not to engage in propaganda, but for the most part they were no longer seriously molested.

    They built a church and school at Konsinowo in 1721, and for a time they grew bolder; and their influence began to spread so much that the Lutheran clergy became alarmed, and public worship was again forbidden in 1730.  However it might be delayed, the inevitable fate of a weak minority surrounded by a people of another faith could not be finally escaped.  It was to avoid just such a fate in Holland that the Pilgrims emigrated from there to America.  Their number steadily declined.  In the course of time some died.  Some removed to Holland or England, Transylvania or Poland.  Some married Lutheran or Reformed wives, and their children were brought up in another faith.  They continued to hold their worship in Polish, but at length for their children they had to use a German catechism along with their Polish one.  They were debarred from public office, public honors, privileges, and the professions; they could not get permanent title to property or make profitable investments.  By 1750 they had lost connection with the brethren in Transylvania, and the smaller of their two little churches became extinct with the death of its minister in 1752.  When the congregation at Konsinowo wished a few years later to build a new church, they were long delayed by litigation over the property.  When in 1776 they at length got leave from King Frederick the Great to build, with full freedom of public worship granted, they had grown so few and poor that after twelve years only some materials had been collected, and it is doubtful whether the new church was ever built at all.  For in 1767 nominal religious freedom had been restored in Poland, and it is more than likely that some of the Socinians then returned to their ancestral home.  Their last minister, Schlichting, died about 1803, and the surviving members sold and divided the church property in 1811.  Thus expired the last Socinian church in history.

    Individual Socinians still continued to live in Prussia, holding true to the faith of their fathers, and some of them holding responsible public offices.   The last recorded sentiment of any of them has a surprisingly modern sound: "that true religion consists not in name or form, but in uprightness of life."   Two aged Socinians were still reported in the religious statistics of Prussia for 1838, a Schlichting and a Morsztyn, and the last survivor died in 1852.  Long before that date, however, the free faith for which the Socinians of Poland had gone through over two centuries of persecution at home or in exile, had won fuller freedom and made greater conquests, under happier conditions, in England and America than they perhaps ever dreamed.  There we shall follow the story a little later.  Meantime we have to turn to a land of considerable religious freedom, which served as a sort of bridge over which Socinianism was to pass from Poland to England.  We must trace the little known history of Socinianism in Holland.

CHAPTER XX

Socinianism in Holland, 1598-1750

 

    While we have seen in the previous chapter that two of the companies of Socinian exiles bravely maintained their churches for far over a century, it may already have been noticed that from all these exile colonies the roads seemed to lead at last to Holland.  There we are able to trace the influence of the Socinian spirit and teaching long after the last Socinian church had perished.  The way for the exiles had long been preparing in Holland.  We have found antitrinitarian Anabaptists there near the beginning of the Reformation, and their leaven continued to work among the people long after they themselves had been put to silence.  Individual Antitrinitarians were found in Holland all through the sixteenth century, and each of them must have had his considerable circle of followers, though only one of them is known to have had any connection with the movement in Poland.  They were all of them more or less subjected to persecution.  William (the Silent) of Orange, however, made freedom of worship one of the conditions of peace with Spain in 1578; and although this was by no means always observed, and religious persecution was occasionally practiced down to nearly the middle of the eighteenth century, complete religious toleration remained a sort of national ideal from William on.  Despite all lapses, and the fact that public worship was not strictly legal except for the Reformed Church, Holland was still in 1660 the only country in Protestant Europe which professed to grant religious toleration to all citizens on its soil.

    The first Socinians to introduce their faith into Holland were Ostorod and Woidowski, two ministers from Poland, who while visiting the University of Leiden in 1598 sought to make converts among the students there by conversations and by circulating books which they had brought with them.  They won to their way of thinking a German student named Ernest Soner who, as we have already seen,¹ afterwards did so much for their cause when he was teaching at Altorf.  They also made the acquaintance of the young Arminius, who was later to lead a movement against Calvinism and pave the way for Methodism; and although they did not make an Antitrinitarian of him, yet it is hard not to believe that they did plant liberal seeds in his mind, and persuade him to accept some of the principles of Socinianism.  For it began a generation later to be persistently charged that he had himself been a Socinian, and his followers in the Remonstrant Church showed much sympathy with the Socinians who came to Holland.  The authorities had these two under suspicion almost from the day of their arrival, and seizing their books submitted them to the Leiden theologians, who pronounced their teaching little better than Mohammedanism.  A trial was had, and after various delays it was ordered that the books be publicly burnt, and that their owners leave the country within ten days.  After this it was several years before Socinianism again made any stir in Holland.

    A dozen years later a liberal wing in the Reformed Church had begun to oppose the extreme doctrines of Calvinism; and when their leader, Arminius, died, Conrad Vorst was appointed his successor as professor in the University of Leiden.  It was not long before he was charged with being a Socinian.  Though he himself denied the charge, King James I of England believed it, had one of his books publicly burnt in 1611, and himself wrote a confutation of it, and finally protested to the Dutch government against their tolerating such a heretic.  Agitation against him was kept up for some years; and the end was that in 1619 he was removed from his chair as a heretic, and was banished from the country.  Three years later he died in exile in Holstein, hunted to death by his persecutors.

    These persecutions however, were not enough to keep Socinianism from spreading in the country.  Polish students kept coming to study in Dutch universities, especially after Altorf had been closed to them, and of course they embraced every opportunity to spread their views.  The orthodox became alarmed, for they considered all this as blasphemy against God.  Their synods kept urging that this heresy destroyed all Christianity and the hope of immortality, and that it ought to be severely repressed, lest Holland get a bad name in the Christian world; and they induced the States General to pass decrees against Socinianism in 1628, though as the magistrates in the larger towns were much disposed to be tolerant, little came of them.

    The Remonstrants had by now separated from the Reformed Church, and within a generation several of their professors and many of their ministers were known to be more or less Socinian in their thought; while professed disbelievers in the Trinity were received into many Dutch churches without objection.  More than once, therefore, the brethren in Poland sent their most persuasive embassador to try to bring about some sort of union with the Remonstrants in Holland.  When the latter had been for a time driven into exile by the Reformed, the Polish brethren offered them aid if in need, or a refuge in Poland; and again during their brief stay at Friedrichstadt they tried to form a union with the Remonstrants living in exile there.  But there were too many points of difference between them, and though they willingly gave individual Socinians a tolerant welcome in their churches, the Remonstrants steadily denied that they were Socinians; nor indeed were they, save in occasional points of agreement.

    When the Socinians were driven from Rakow in 1638, many of them sought refuge in Holland.  This caused a fresh outburst of opposition against them, and further attempts to repress them.  The Reformed synods took action against Socinians almost every year, and petitioned the States General to put them down.  The States General in turn repeatedly caused proclamations against them to be posted, and passed laws forbidding the printing or sale of Socinian books, or the holding of Socinian meetings, on pain of heavy fines, imprisonment, or banishment for blasphemy.  Though books were now and then seized and burnt, the printing of them mostly went on as before; they were sold and read, and Socinianism steadily spread among the people.  For as in Prussia, so here, though the government might try to pacify the orthodox by passing the laws they desired against “the blasphemous and wicked Socinians and their impious heresies,” as the Synod of Dort called them, yet it would do little to enforce them.

    This was the general situation when the Socinians were finally banished from Poland in 1660 — Socinian views working like an invisible leaven all over Holland, Socinian books being widely read, Socinians everywhere making personal converts, and Socinian scholars in friendly intercourse or active correspondence with many of the leaders of Dutch thought.  It was not long before considerable numbers of the exiles found their way to Holland, to join their brethren already established there.  There can not have been a great many of them altogether: counting those that had come after their expulsion from Rakow in 1638, those that may have straggled along from time to time as persecutions grew heavier in Poland, and those that came after their banishment in 1660, there were probably only a few hundred, perhaps not more than a few score, though these were destined to exert a great influence.  The liveliest sympathy was felt for them.  When the exiles sent out a pitiful appeal for help in their distress, some Remonstrant ministers gathered a large sum of money and sent it to the brethren at Kreuzburg for distribution; and a generation later, in response to a similar appeal, a generous sum was sent to the Unitarians in Transylvania, whose church and school had been destroyed by fire.

    The Socinians in Holland had no recognized leader about whom to gather, and they made no attempt to establish churches there.  They had never wished, indeed, even in Poland, to form a separate religious body, and had done so only when excluded from the Reformed Church there.  In Holland this was not necessary.  For instead of being universally outcast as heretics, they were graciously received, in spite of their differences of belief, at the worship and sacraments of the tolerant Remonstrants and Mennonites.  They seem for a little while to have held meetings for worship among themselves in their private homes, but these can not have been continued long; for they soon found in many of the Dutch congregations the fellowship they had so long craved, being treated not as strangers and foreigners, but as Christian brethren.

    We must now turn to see how the influence of the Socinians was exercised in various quarters, first of all among the Remonstrants, whom we have several times mentioned already.  Protesting against the strict Calvinism of the Dutch Reformed Church, these had been driven out of it in 1619.  For several years they were banished from the country by the orthodox.  They were opposed to the bondage of creeds, taking only the Bible as their authority.  They strongly advocated religious freedom, and tolerance of differences of belief; and they tended toward a more liberal theology.  All these things were calculated to create sympathy between them and the Socinians, and twice in time of persecution attempts had been made to bring about a union between them. Several books, indeed, were published by Socinians on the one hand or by the orthodox on the other, to make out that the two were in essential harmony with each other.  Yet though they agreed in their bottom principles, there was too wide a difference in their particular beliefs.  In especial, the Remonstrants as a whole could not accept the Socinian view of the Trinity, the nature of Christ, and the atonement.  They were repeatedly charged with being Socinians, and as often they denied the charge, consistently declining the Socinian name, and rejecting the most distinctive Socinian doctrines.  Nevertheless the thought of the Remonstrants came to be profoundly influenced in the Socinian direction. Their leading theologians adopted more and more of the Socinian way of thinking; some of them translated and published Socinian works; and the result was that after two or three generations more than half the distance that had separated them had become closed up.

    If Socinianism influenced the Remonstrant churches mostly by the effect it had upon the thought of their leading thinkers and scholars, in another quarter, among the Collegiants, it won wide and deep influence over the common people.  These were not a separately organized sect, but simply a group of congregations made up of lay members of other churches, who came together frequently to hold what may best be described as prayermeetings (collegia, hence their name).  At the time when the Remonstrant ministers had been banished from the country, these meetings began to be held among the laymen, in order that even if they had no minister to preach to them they might still have some sort of religious worship; and they succeeded so well that even after the ministers returned they were continued independently of the organized churches, and were maintained till near the end of the eighteenth century.  These collegia were held in some thirty of the Dutch cities and villages, with a sort of headquarters at Rijnsburg, near Leiden.  They consisted simply of Scripture, prayer, hymns, and speaking by whoever wished to take part.  The Collegiants had no creed, and they encouraged the greatest freedom of speech and the most perfect tolerance of differing views.  Socinians early began to attend these meetings, and as they were permitted to speak their views as freely as any, they found here a great opportunity for spreading their faith.  Although the Collegiants were by no means wholly converted to them, these views found more friends among them than in any other religious body in Holland; and in the opinion of many, the Collegiants were nothing but Socinians under another name.  Some of them indeed openly advocated Socinian teachings, and two of their leaders were even invited to become teachers in the Socinian school at Rakow.  At Amsterdam, where some of the most prominent Socinians had joined them, they published a Dutch translation of the Racovian Catechism in 1659, as well as of Servetus on the Trinity, and of various other works by Socinus and his followers.  But perhaps the most marked service which they rendered to the cause was when one of the Collegiants had collected and published in eight stately folio Latin volumes the works of the leading Socinian scholars (the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum), which were sold at a very low price, were widely circulated among the educated, and had a wide and deep influence upon the religious thinking of Holland and other lands.

    Although the Collegiants were at first made up entirely of Remonstrants, after a generation or so by far the largest number of them came from the Mennonites,⁷ with whose principles and practices they had much in common.  The Collegiant movement thus became a sort of bridge over which Socinianism passed freely into the Mennonite Church, whose religious and moral life it was to influence as deeply as it had influenced religious thought among the Remonstrants.  It may be remembered that the Mennonites were originally gathered together out of the Anabaptists who had survived the persecutions of the time of Luther; and that in the beginnings of the antitrinitarian movement in Poland the Anabaptists were very influential, and that many of their views were cherished by the later Socinians.  The Socinians thus had from the start more in common with the Mennonites than with any one else in Holland.  Both objected to the use of creeds, and took their religion directly from the Bible; both emphasized practical Christian life far more than any particular doctrine; both tried literally to follow the teaching of Jesus; both preferred baptism by immersion.  Such points of contact had long drawn them into sympathy with each other.  Ostorod and Wojdowski, therefore, before they left Holland, had tried to interest one of the Mennonite leaders; and as early as 1606, through the medium of a Mennonite congregation at Danzig which had friendly relations with the Socinians there, it was attempted to bring about a formal union between them.  Negotiations to this end were in progress for several years, and for a time they promised to succeed; but at length the proposal was regretfully declined by the Mennonite leaders in Holland, on the ground that they had not yet become enough agreed among themselves to be ready to undertake union with others.   They may also well have hesitated to imperil the freedom of worship which they had so hardly won, by formally uniting with a body far more heretical than themselves.

    Like the Remonstrants, the Mennonites were repeatedly accused of being Socinians, and they invariably denied the charge.  Of course they never completely agreed with the Socinians.  Nevertheless, by way of the Collegiants and otherwise, Socinianism gradually spread among the Mennonites all over the country until one of their two factions became frankly liberal on most points of belief; and when in 1722 the 150 Mennonite ministers of Friesland were called upon by the local government to subscribe to a Trinitarian confession of faith, they refused almost to a man.

    Though among the other bodies of which we have spoken Socinianism steadily worked as a leaven, and thus doubtless had greater influence than it could have enjoyed had it existed as a separately organized church, yet on the Reformed Church in Holland it never made any impression.  On the contrary, the Reformed leaders for two generations kept publishing books against it, passing hostile resolutions in their synods, and continually spurring the States General up to action.  At length, however, even the Reformed preachers gradually became reconciled to the presence of Socinianism in the land, and no longer feared the danger of the heresy as they once had done, so that the opposition gradually flattened out.  Intolerance lasted longest in Friesland, where the last act of persecution of Socinians was in 1742.  From that time on the Socinians are scarcely heard of any more: they had lost their separate identity, and had become absorbed into the general religious life of the country.

    Much influence as Socinianism had in Holland, however, it must not be supposed that the influence was all on one side; for it was itself also influenced not a little by what it found in Holland.  After their banishment from Poland the churches in exile usually sent their young ministers to the Remonstrant seminary at Amsterdam to be trained, and the liberal professors there naturally influenced the course of their thought.  The changes that thus took place in later Socinianism are to be seen in the later editions of the Racovian Catechism.  Its doctrines became nearer to those of the Remonstrants.  The system of belief taught by Socinus had in some respects been rather cold and rigid; but as influenced by the Remonstrants Socinianism became broadened and enriched.  Instead of still taking its doctrines only from the Bible, it now came to rely more upon reason; it now made a personal faith in God the central thing in religion, instead of an intellectual belief about God and Christ; it learned to attach more importance to the death of Christ; and it abandoned some of the extreme Anabaptist views of the earlier time.  In fact, so much had their doctrine become changed from that of their fathers that some of the later Socinians declared that they were no longer Socinians, but Unitarians, and that few or no real Socinians any longer existed.

    On the other hand, the contribution of Socinianism to Dutch Christianity was large and permanent.  Whether its particular doctrines were accepted or not, its spirit prevailed, and that was the really important thing.  As the spirit of tolerance which Socinus had so much emphasized spread, greater stress came to be laid on moral conduct and practical Christian life, and less on belief or feeling; and the Bible came to be studied not, as before, chiefly for the sake of supporting certain dogmas, but in the more reasonable way used by the Socinian teachers, and in the free spirit of modern liberal scholarship.

    It is at this point that we must take our leave of Socinianism, for it is here that it crosses over into England, enters upon a new stage, and presently takes a new name.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries England had closer relations with Holland than with any other country.  Many Socinian books published in Holland were circulated in England and made converts there; in time of religious persecution many English Protestants sought refuge in Holland; and many English ministers received their training there.  By these means the Socinian principles of freedom, reason, and toleration, as well as many of the Socinian doctrines, were taken to England and deeply influenced its religious thought and life.  How this new stage developed remains to be told in later chapters.  Meanwhile we must first turn back for a time to Transylvania, where a movement of Unitarian thought began at almost the same time as in Poland, and instead of becoming extinct there also, has continued an unbroken existence down to our own day.