Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

would not adore images, offer prayers to or for the dead, nor do penance. He
laughed at the stupidity which holds that a child is regenerated when baptized,
that he can be a member of Christ’s flock when he knows nothing of Christ as
a Shepherd, and demanded that all who came to his churches should be
immersed in water on their own act of faith. … No one is to be called baptized
who is not washed with the baptism wherewith sins are washed away. … The
Petrobrussians were a thoroughly anti-sacerdotal sect, whose hatred of
tyranny threw off the Roman yoke of the twelfth century; a democratic body,
in distinction from the aristocratic organization. … They demanded the words
of Christ in the New Testament for everything and not the traditions of all
inner and favored few. … The Petrobrussians were thoroughly and deeply
anti-Catholic in all that conflicted with the gospel. While they were
Puritanical they were not ascetic. They abolished all fasts and penance for sin
because Christ only can forgive sin, and this he does on a sinner’s trust in his
merits. They held marriage as a high and honorable relation not only for
Christians generally, but for priests. … With them a church did not mean an
architectural structure, but a regenerated congregation, nor had consecrated
places any charm for them; for God could hear them as well in the market
place as in the temple. … The death of Peter was not the end of his cause.
Labbe calls him ‘the parent of heretics,’ for almost all who were then branded
after his day trod in his steps; and especially all Baptist heretics. … When,
like Elijah, God took Peter to heaven in a fiery chariot, he had Elisha ready to
catch his falling mantle, in the person of Henry of Lausanne, or as
Cluniacensis much prefers to put it, he was followed by Henry ‘the heir of
Bruis’ wickedness,’ This petulant author imagined that Peter’s principles had
died with him, and like a simpleton writes: ‘I should have thought that it had
been those craggy Alps, and rocks covered with continual snow, that had bred
that savage temper in the inhabitants, and that your land being unlike to other
lands, had yielded a sort of people unlike to all others. … Such a bold soul
had Christ been preparing in Henry, the next brave Baptist of the; Swiss
valleys. He had formerly been a monk at Clugny and had joined himself to his
master, Peter of Bruis, in the midst of his toils; and thus had caught his spirit
and been numbered with his principles. … He then made common cause with
Peter, as Melanethon did with Luther. … The land swarmed with Henry’s
followers.” f312
The opposition to church buildings, mentioned in the foregoing, was probably
to them only as almost deified by the Romish church. As the Petrobrussians
had been accustomed to church buildings only as used by the Romish church
they may have opposed them in toto. If they did indiscriminately condemn
church houses that in no way rendered them unbaptistic, since church houses
are not a Baptist article of faith or necessary to the existence of a Baptist
church. That the extravagances of the times should drive the Baptists of those
ages into extremes is not to be unexpected. Yet God preserved them from
essential departures from the faith. (See Chapter V of this book.)