Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

the conception of the church, in the rejection of ecclesiastical authority, and
the vindication of the universal priesthood. … This impulse to set up
externally churches of the saints could not feel content with Luther’s
reformation and turned aside into Anabaptism.” f691
Says Vedder: Herberle writes in the Jahrbucher fur Deutsche Theologie (1858,
p. 276 seq.) of the Anabaptists:
“It is well known that just these principles are found in the sects of the middle
ages. The supposition is very probable that between these and the rebaptizers
of the Reformation there was an external historical connection. The
possibility of this as respects Switzerland is all the greater, since just here the
traces of these sects, especially the Waldenses, can be followed down to the
end of the fifteenth century: But a positive proof in this connection we have
not. … In reality the explanation of this agreement NEEDS NO PROOF of a real
historical union between Anabaptists and their predecessors, for the abstract
Biblical standpoint upon which the one as well as the other place themselves
is sufficient in itself to prove a union of the two in the above-named
doctrines.” f692
Notwithstanding Vedder’s antipathy to “succession” he concedes,
“a moral certainty exists of a connection between the Swiss Anabaptists and
their Waldensian and Petrobrussian predecessors, sustained by many
significant facts, but not absolutely proved by historical evidences. Those
who maintain that the Anabaptists originated with the Reformation have some
difficult problems to solve, among others, the rapidity with which the new
leaven spread and the wide territory that the Anabaptists soon covered. …
Though the Anabaptist churches appear suddenly in the records of the time,
contemporaneously with the Zwinglian Reformation, their roots are to be
sought farther back.” f693
Again Vedder says:
“It is a curious and instructive fact that these Anabaptists’ churches were most
numerous precisely where Waldenses of a century or two previous had most
flourished, and where their identity as Waldenses had been lost. That there
was intimate relation between the two movements few doubt who have studied
this period and its literature. The torch of truth was handed on from
generation to generation, and though if often smouldered and was even
apparently extinguished, it needed but a breath to blaze up again and give
light to all mankind.” f694
Says Dr. William R. Williams:
“Amid the sufferers under Alva, when the Netherlands were so drenched with
human gore, multitudes were of our faith; and they had their share in that land
in early versions of the Scriptures for the general use of the faithful. …
Indeed, many of the Holland Mennonites hold the Waldenses to have been the