Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

oasted of the number of his illegitimate children. Alexander was a monster
of iniquity, who gave dispensations for crimes that cannot be written.
Baronius says that the vilest harlots domineered in the papal see, at their
pleasure changed sees, appointed bishops, and actually thrust into St. Peter’s
chair their own gallants, false popes. Take the simple case of John XII.
Bowden wrote: ‘The Lateran palace was disgraced by becoming a receptacle
for courtesans; and decent females were terrified from the pilgrimages to the
threshold of the Apostles by the reports which were spread abroad of the
lawless impurity and violence of the representative and successor of two
others equally vile.’ But these were no worse than Sixtus, who entered a
house of ill-fame in Rome, the inmates of which, according to Justin, paid his
holiness a weekly tax, which amounted sometimes to twenty thousand ducats
a year. The purest spirits in the hierarchy blush to tell the hard narrative of
monastic life in the sixteenth century, although it made pretensions to spotless
virtue. Archbishop Morton, 1490, accused the abbot of St. Albans with
emptying the nunneries of Pray and Sapnell of modest women and filling
them with vile females. The clergy kept concubines openly from the popes
down. … For centuries the fanaticism of Rome had immersed all people in a
state of nudity. … Rome practiced the same indecencies in flagellation,
borrowed from the heathen feast of Lupercale, in which, according to Virgil
and Plutarch, young noblemen walked through the streets naked, cutting
themselves with whips and rods, in austerity, while sacrifices were burning to
their gods. The same barbarity was practiced by Christian woman of France,
Mezeray being authority. For two centuries this flagellation madness ran
through Bavaria, Austria, the Upper Rhine and Italy, nay through Saxony
itself. These morbid fanatics practiced all stages of undress, formed a
brotherhood, swept in thousands through these lands, singing hymns, having
revelations from angels and the Virgin, and with a letter from Christ himself,
which they exhibited in their pilgrimages. Motley calls the Munster men
‘Furious fanatics, who deserve the madhouse rather than the scaffold;’ and
how much better were Catholics and Protestants in practicing the same
things?” f523
Says Vedder, who is too ready to credit slanders on the ancient Baptists:
“Fanatical outbreaks in South Germany had no connection with Hoffman.
Their chief leader, if not instigator, was Thomas Muntzer. He is invariably
called an Anabaptist, but in reality he never belonged to that body. It is true
that he wrote and spoke against the baptism of infants, but he regularly
practiced it, and was therefore a Pedobaptist. The disorders of his leadership
cannot be laid to the charge of the Anabaptists.” f524
Says Prof. Geo. P. Fisher, D.D., of the Anabaptists:
“The church they insisted must be composed exclusively of the regenerate,
and they insisted, it is not a matter to be regulated and managed by civil
rulers. Under the name of Anabaptists are included different types of doctrine
and Christian life. It is a gross injustice to impute to all of them the wild