A history of the work of redemption. Containing the outlines of a body of…

Thus did the devil, and his great minister Antichrist, rage with such violence and cruelty against the church of Christ! and thus did the whore of Babylon make herself drunk with the blood of the saints and martyrs of Jesus! and thus, by these persecutions, the Protestant church has been much diminished! Yet with all have they not been able to prevail; but still the Protestant church is upheld, and Christ fulfils his promise, that "the gates of hell shall not prevail against his church."

(5) The last kind of opposition that Satan has made to the Reformation is by corrupt opinions. Satan has opposed the light of the gospel which shone forth in the Reformation with many corrupt opinions, which he has brought in and propagated in the world.

Here, in the first place, the first opposition of this kind was by raising up the sect of the Anabaptists, which began about four or five years after the Reformation itself began. This sect, as it first appeared in Germany▪ were vastly more extravagant than the present Anabaptists, are in England. They held a great many exceeding corrupt opinions. ⟨p. 229⟩One tenet of theirs was, That there ought to be no civil authority, and so that it was lawful to rebel against civil authority. On this principle, they refused to submit to magistrates, or any human laws; and gathered together in vast armies, to defend themselves against their civil rulers; and put all Germany into an uproar, and so kept it for some time.