Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

on nothing without the consent of the people and the clergy,” i.e., the ministers
who had charge of no church. “Deacons expounded the gospels, distributed the
Lord’s supper, baptized, and sometimes had the oversight of churches, visited
the sick and took care of the temporalities of the church.” Chr. Schmidt says:
“Their ritual and ecclesiastical organization were exceedingly simple.” f270
This was so much the case that the Romish church, not seeing any church in so
simple an organization, thought they had no churches, and Prof. Schmidt has,
thereby, been mislead into the same conclusion. In Chap. XI — noticing them
as Paulicians — they are clearly proved to have been, in church government,
Baptist.
The Albigenses were pure in their lives and a zealous people in good works.
Carl Schmidt says of them: “Their severe moral demands made impression
because the example of their preachers corresponded with their words. … In a
short time the Albigenses had congregations with schools and charitable
institutions of their own. … The Roman Catholic church, so far as it still could
be said to exist in the country, had become an object of contempt and derision.
This state of affairs, of course, caused great alarm in Rome.” f271
Thus, “the Albigensian heresy,” as Lord Macaulay observes, brought about the
civilization, the literature, the national existence … of the most opulent and
enlightened part of the great European family.” f272