the Elector of Saxony to seize, imprison, and banish all the secret Calvinists that differed from them in sentiment, and to reduce their followers by every act of violence, to renounce their sentiments and to confess the ubiquity.  Peucer, for his opinions, suffered ten years of imprisonment in the severest manner.  In 1577 a form of concord was produced in which the real manducation of Christ’s body and blood in the eucharist was established and heresy and excommunication laid on all that refused this as an article of faith, with pains and penalties to be enforced by the secular arm.  Crellius, in 1601, was put to death.

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

King Henry VIII., the founder of the Established Church in England, adopted the most stringent laws to enforce its doctrines.  Certain articles of religion were drawn up, known in history as the “Bloody Six Articles.”  Concerning these the People’s Cyclopaedia says:  “The doctrines were substantially those of the Roman Catholic Church.  Whoever denied the first articles (that embodying the doctrine of transubstantiation) was to be declared a heretic, and burnt without opportunity of abjuration; whoso spoke against the other five articles should, for the first offense, forfeit his property; and whosoever refused to abjure his first offense, or committed a second, was to die like a felon.”  Art.  Henry VIII.  “The royal reformer persecuted alike Catholics and Protestants.  Thus, on one occasion, three Catholics who denied that the king was the rightful head of the church, and three Protestants who disputed the doctrine of the real presence in the sacrament,... were dragged on the same sled to the place of execution.”  In speaking of that period of history and of the religious persecutions of the times, Myers says:  “Punishment of heresy was then regarded, by both Catholics and Protestants alike, as a duty which could be neglected by those in authority only at the peril of Heaven’s displeasure.  Believing this, those of that age could consistently do nothing less than labor to exterminate heresy with axe, sword and fagot.”  General History, p. 553.