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The last living link with the original Christian organization was the apostle John. He died about the year 100. John contributed more to the Greek Scriptures than any other writer except Paul. At John's death, apostasy had set in. The primitive Christian congregation was showing several distinct schisms.
By the beginning of the fourth century, the truly primitive-type Christians in the Roman Empire were few. They stood out as social misfits. They were marked as "refusing military service, obeisance to Caesar, political support, reverence to idols, or any semblance to religious interfaith with their contemporaries." They kowtowed to no orthodox method of worship, "Pagan or supposedly Christian." They were in fact, branded as "atheist." It was against these nonconformists that the most savage persecutions in Christianity's history were leveled.
When the beheading block and the bloody arena failed to wipe them out, Emperor Constantine struck upon the idea of "interfaith" as a solution. He called together the religious leaders of the Empire to Nice, in Asia Minor. That was in the year 325. The purpose of the conclave was to set down a body of religious doctrines that would suit everybody. There would be one universal, or catholic, code of religion. Ruling the Empire would be easier with the churches organized.
Not everybody was happy with the product. Arius, an aged elder, spoke up for the dissident segment of Christians. He took issue with the Council on its adoption of such doctrines as the Trinity. The Council was settling, in the case of the Trinity, for the theory that the Father and Son were coeternal and coequal. But, said Arius, "The Father is a father; the Son is a son; therefore the Father must have existed before the Son; therefore once the Son was not; therefore he was made, like all creatures, of a substance that had not previously existed."
Arius got himself condemned for such arguments. The Trinity doctrine was set down to be as—quoting the Catholic Encyclopedia—"the central doctrine of the Christian religion." When Protestantism split off from the Church of Rome it retained the Trinity doctrine.
Constantine, the Pagan Caesar, condemned the writings of Arius. The aged dissident was banished into "one of the most inhospitable places in the world," the Balkan mountains.
"From the time the Nicene Creed was promulgated and accepted," conclude Jehovah's witnesses, "there was practically no more Bible study for more than twelve centuries."
During that interim the Bible "lay buried in the dead Latin tongue." Few people besides educated monks in monasteries could read it. The Church, say the Witnesses, veered all the way from Bible teachings. "A hierarchical system of Pagan origin" took the place of the "congregational system of Christian origin." The authority of man-made doctrines and traditions replaced the "God-breathed authority of the Scriptures." The Church was busy accumulating and absorbing, in the words of Cardinal Newman, "the use of temples, and these dedicated to particular saints; . . . incense, lamps and candles; votive offerings on recovering from illness; holy water; asylums; holy days and seasons, use of calendars, processions, blessings on the fields; sacerdotal vestments, the tonsure, the ring in marriage, turning to the East, images at a later date, perhaps the ecclesiastical chant, and the Kyrie Eleison." All such things were placed above Scriptural teaching and were, as Cardinal Newman admits, "of pagan origin, and sanctified by their adoption into the Church." (Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1881, pp. 355-73.)
Having this "fellowship with idols," the system of religion developed in Christendom could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be identified with the "original Christian congregation of Bible educators founded by Jesus Christ," say Jehovah's witnesses.
Peter Waldo was a wealthy merchant of Lyons, France. He arranged for the translation of the Gospels from Latin into French about 1160 (the other books of the Scriptures followed later). Waldo is cited by Jehovah's witnesses as a man who represented the minority Christians of his day. The Waldenses, say the Witnesses, were "the torchbearers for the cause of freedom" during "the gross darkness of the Middle Ages."
The name "Waldenses," by the way, is not derived from Waldo. It is an Anglicized form of the European word "Vaudois," which is drawn from a root meaning "valley." Waldenses refers to the geographical location of the people who lived in the valleys of the Po River and its tributaries. The Presbyterian Board of Publications published a study of the Waldenses in 1853. It states that the Waldenses were not founded by Peter Waldo. They had existed from time immemorial in the Piedmont valleys of nothern Italy. The peculiar dialect of the people stemmed from a very primitive form of Latin. It marked them as being "separated and cut off from Roman influence before that empire broke up under the infiltration of the Teutonic powers."
In the esteem of Jehovah's witnesses, the Waldenses were and still are, one more among the "hundreds of Protestant sects that have sprouted." They stood by the Apostles Creed, which, say the Witnesses, includes "that notorious Pagan doctrine, the trinity." The Waldenses embraced from the earliest times "the heathen doctrines of immortality of the soul and hell-fire damnation." So, the Witnesses conclude, the Waldensian claim to apostolic origin "falls flat, for these three principal doctrines did not originate with the apostles but are hand-me-downs from the Pagan philosophers, picked up and adopted by cultists after the apostles fell asleep."
But the Waldenses did have their Christian virtues, the Witnesses say. "They have always believed the inspired Scriptures as the only source of divine truth." That way they disowned the added traditions of the church "fathers." And among other things:
"They have believed the office of Pope to be a creation of man. Papal pardons and simony they have considered a racket; nunneries and monkeries are inventions of Satan, celibacy of the clergy a snare of the Devil, and confession before a priest and death-bed repentance of no consequence. They never believed in the doctrine of the mass, but held that the Memorial bread and wine are only symbols. Image worship, worship of the cross, and temples they believe to be idolatry. Likewise the worship of Mary as 'Queen of Heaven.'"
In addition: "They have always believed that purgatory is a fable invented by men, that pilgrimages are only a means of emptying one's pockets, that holy water is no more valuable than rain water, that the so-called holy relics are nothing more than dead men's bones. They were also opposed to the shedding of human blood even in a so-called righteous war."
Another thing that rates the Waldenses high in the opinion of Jehovah's witnesses was the way they carried on their ministry. "They were most energetic in preaching what they believed and in carrying on an activity in harmony with what they preached. Their missionary zeal and the method of their preaching were in the tradition of primitive Christianity. They trained and sent out missionaries two by two, usually a younger with a veteran."
Their itinerant ministers accepted food and clothing from the people to whom they preached. But for the most part "they worked with their hands to maintain themselves and their families," the Witnesses add approvingly. "Some were merchants, others were artisans of various trades, and some, like Luke, were practicing physicians. Almost all of them had training in farming and stock raising."
The Waldenses "placed great stress on reading and studying the Bible, even back in those days before printing from moveable type was invented and when copies of the Bible were very scarce. They memorized great portions of the Christian Greek Scriptures as well as passages from the Hebrew Scriptures. They also made handwritten copies of portions of the Bible and distributed these in the form of Bible tracts."
In Peter Waldo's day the Waldenses produced the Ancient Vaudois version of the New Testament or Greek Scriptures. It was produced in what we know as the Provençal language, the common people's language. This translation pre-dated any other complete version in English, German, French, Italian, or Spanish.
The missionary work of the Waldenses must have had quite an impact. J.A. Wylie, in his History of the Waldenses, says: "There was no kingdom of Southern and Central Europe to which these missionaries did not find their way, and where they did not leave traces of their visit in the disciples whom they made."
Expansion brought persecution and suppression. Beginning about the end of the twelfth century, and for the next four hundred years, the Waldenses fell victims to the wrath and inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church. They were branded as "heretics." Pope Innocent IV consigned them to extinction, and his ruling was sustained by the most important council of the Middle Ages, the Twelfth Ecumenical Council of 1215. "Political vassals of Rome, dukes and governors, princes and kings, were sent forth to bear the Papal sword in the 'holy war.'" Armies numbering as many as 18,000 men marched to wipe out the Waldenses.
According to the Witnesses: "Some of the most horrifying pages of history are those recounting how these devout people were imprisoned in dungeons, burned at the stake, beheaded before their children, hurled over precipices. Their houses and villages were burned; their womenfolk were stripped naked and outrageously violated; their innocent children massacred."
Modern Witnesses of Jehovah have retained a number of features of Waldensian Christianity. The Witnesses translate and distribute Bibles. They rely only upon the Scriptures for divine authority. They study and preach the Bible as their sole message. To them Christianity is a religion you learn with your mind and practice in your personal minsitry. Like the Waldenses, each Witness is a minister, a missionary. The Witnesses go forth by twos, one training the other, from house to house. And similarly, the two groups, ancient and modern, are targets of universal religious anathema.
Of the Waldenses the Encyclopaedia Britannica says: "Persecution gave new vitality to their doctrines, which passed on to Wycliffe and Huss, and through these leaders produced the Reformation in Germany and England."
So across this bridge we advance a couple of centuries. Here the Witnesses pick up the history of Christianity in the days when the activities of the harassed minorities were symbolized, more or less, in the person of the Englishman, John Wycliffe.
A number of nonconformists were burned to death in England in the year 1428. The deposition of one of the victims reads: "Item—Nicolas Belward is one of the same sect and hath a New Testament . . . and taught the said William Wright [for] the space of one year and studied diligently upon the said New Testament."
John Wycliffe, a Roman Catholic clergyman, lived, in these troubled times, to translate the Bible from the Latin Vulgate into the English language, "for the benefit of the common man and to the great consternation of Catholicism."
Wycliffe was a prolific writer. In his day there were no English dictionaries, no spelling books, no grammars. He is known as the father of English prose, as Chaucer is known as the father of English poetry.
He was the foremost scholar and philosopher of England's foremost university, Oxford. Because he was also Oxford's foremost theologian—so keen a Bible student that he earned the title of "Gospel Doctor"—Wycliffe belongs in the Christian tradition clamed by Jehovah's witnesses.
Wycliffe got into the thick of the fight that involved Papal benefices. These church offices carried with them, according to the account, "very lucrative incomes and political rank and were auctioned off by the Papal court of Avignon to the highest bidders."
Another bone of contention was the Papal tax. Somebody declared in Parliament that the Pope's tax was "taking five times as much from the people as the king's tax."
It seems that Wycliffe began to make a name for himself when he campaigned publicly against "the abuse of the monastic orders and, later, against the mendicant friars."
"These begging friars, of the Dominican and Franciscan orders," we are told, "had entered England comparatively recently but soon exceeded older orders in power and wealth. They roamed the countryside, mixed Bible stories with ridiculous legends and Greek fables, sold the Pope's indulgences, privileges and livings, and had great influence with the womenfolk.
"To swell their ranks," the chronicle continues, "they kidnapped youths from the universities, causing Bishop Fitzralph to complain to the Pope in 1357 that as a result of the depredations students at Oxford had dropped from 30,000 to 6,000, all because of parental fears that their sons would be kidnapped."
Wycliffe was a member of the House of Commons. He coupled together quite a train of Parliamentary proceedings against "the ever-increasing wealth of religious bodies, tax exemption for the friars, the right of sanctuary, . . . and the Pope's demand of . . . the annual vassal fee of 1,000 marks."
He held that each state enjoyed supreme jurisdiction over its own lands. The Pope, he argued, "had no right to levy taxes but merely to accept alms." Further, "it was sheer fatuity to send immense sums to the Papal court, rich as it was, when the country was so impoverished."
Among the seven Royal Commissioners sent to the Pope in 1374, to discuss grievances, Wycliffe was one. Being a Roman Catholic priest, he was later, in 1377, summoned before the church superiors. The outcome: "A dispute between one of Wycliffe's friends and the presiding bishop caused the hearing to end in a riot."
When a year later, he was again summoned—the Pope had issued five bulls excoriating him—the queen mother sent word forbidding any untoward action to be taken against him. A popular mob broke up the trial.
Wycliffe's religious activities, which gradually crowded out his political career, endear him to Jehovah's witnesses. Religiously, they feel, he was a reformer in the right direction. "To spread his message as well as to counteract the baneful influences of the mendicant friars," the Witnesses relate, "he instructed, trained and sent forth itinerant preachers known as the Poor Priests. The example that Wycliffe set before these was that of the seventy evangelists sent out by Jesus."
The Poor Priests, says the account, "went forth in simple attire and preached to the people from the Bible texts they had, to the extent they understood them, in churchyards, market places and in the fields.
"Their message so delighted the common folk that they often emptied the churches. They spread so that an enemy of Wycliffe complained that every second Englishman was a Lollard, or follower of Wycliffe."
As to the origin of the Lollards the Witnesses say history is confused. "In the previous century," they note, "certain devout and semi-monastic societies in Germany and the Low Countries had been termed such because of their remarkable singing or 'lollen,' as it was called in Low German. The term was also used to designate heretic." Whatever its origin, the connotation of the term in Wycliffe's day was "unfavorable."
Doctrinally, the Witnesses say that the Lollards, like the Waldenses, did not possess "the truth" on such subjects as soul immortality. Yet in Wycliffe's time "they did present a decided step forward in contrast to the teachings and practices of the Catholic Church."
Here are some of the reasons given by Jehovah's witnesses for their opinion: "They condemned use of images, pilgrimages, monastic orders, hierarchy of priests, and prayers for the dead. To them Christ's sacrifice was sufficient." No need for confessions, penances, indulgences and the mass, argued the Lollards. "Condemned also were the great temporal possessions of the Church, political offices of the clergy, and wars."
Wycliffe's attack on the doctrine of transubstantiation (that the priest has the power to transmute the bread and wine of the Mass to that actual flesh and blood of Christ) brought him a third time before a Catholic court. The verdict: He lost his post at Oxford.
Richard II, the "Black Prince," turned the heat of severest trial upon the Lollards. In 1395, Richard forced the Chancellor of Oxford to publicly condemn Wycliffe's "errors." Towards the close of his reign the Black Prince became "the indefatigable pursuer of heretics." He forced them to recant Lollardism. One church historian says:
"A [Lollard] was forced to swear to god . . . that 'from this day forward I shall worship images, with praying and offering unto them in the worship of the saints that they be made after and also I shall no more despise pilgrimages.'"
Fiery heat was applied to the minority throughout the reign of Henry IV. Lollardism, for a time, waned. Archbishop Arundel caused a law to be passed that "none should therefore preach, hold, teach . . . [anything] contrary to the Catholic faith." Offenders were "burned alive in conspicuous places, for the terror of others."
Thereafter, we read, "recantations were the rule, and the willingness to embrace martyrdom the exception." The first "heretic" to be burned at the stake in England was William Sawtrey, a Lollard and a priest of London. Sawtrey was condemned "chiefly for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation and refusing to worship the cross."
That was enough for the rank and file of the "titled and distinguished gentry" who had courted Lollardism. But there remained a hard core of Lollards who "showed themselves to be of sterner stuff." English kings came and went, but the Lollards continued on. In 1428, a number were burned to death.
A hundred years later, Erasmus, "lacking the courage of a Wycliffe," advanced the doctrine to the Pope "of the uselessness of persecution." Said he: "Once the party of the Wycliffites was overcome by the power of the kings; but it was not overcome and not extinguished."
Jehovah's witnesses believe that Lollardism during its period "came the closest thing to being Bible Christianity." The Witnesses have preserved and advanced numerous Lollard practices: Condemnation of hierarchical ecclesiasticism; personal and individual ministry; missionary work; translating, publishing, and distributing Bibles and Bible literature. Today in England the Witnesses have been called the modern Lollards.
The thread of Lollard Christianity, though badly frayed, was never snapped apart, the Witnesses find. It was saved by being transplanted from England to Bohemia. Queene Anne, wife of the Black Prince, came from there. Wycliffe's manuscripts eventually found haven there. It was in Bohemia that Lollardism found "an earnest advocate in John Huss, resulting in the Hussite movement, the forerunner of the Lutheran Reformation."
Martin Luther, say Jehovah's witnesses, is to be remembered not only as the man who first translated the Bible into German, but as the successful challenger who courageously defied the all-powerful domination of the popes of Rome. What Wycliffe in the 14th century started in a small way Luther in the 16th century rekindled in a big way. Previously the Roman Catholic Hierarchy, by means of persecution through its hideous Inquisition, had quickly brought under control the few flames ignited by the Waldenses in France, Wycliffe's Lollards in England and Hussites in Bohemia (modern Czechoslovakia). But the reformation flames of opposition Luther started in Germany soon became a roaring forest fire in all Western Europe which overwhelmed Papal Rome's corrupt, wicked ability to handle.
Overnight Luther found himself in the foremost of a rebellion of honest-hearted Western Europeans who were crying out for deliverance from the bondage of degraded priest rule, credulity, superstition and fear. Unwittingly Luther lit the match which finally set off the powder barrel of pent-up, mounting, underground opposition to Catholicism. The Papal Hierarchy's thousand-year golden "age of faith" (as they termed it) came to an abrupt end. No longer could Papal Rome hoodwink all the people and bind them in mental slavery to the Church in unquestioning obedience to its every whim and dictate.
This destined 16th-century reaction to the long harsh rule of the Catholic church, Jehovah's witnesses hold, was actually what made possible the current four-hundred-year era of freedom, progress, enlightenment, education, and democracy of the Western world. The Witnesses claim in fact that our modern age of amazing technological development would have been impossible if there had not been this breakaway from the papal hierarchy's stranglehold of the human intellect whereby they had kept Bible knowledge and truth from the masses.
Martin Luther was born in 1483 at Eisleben in Prussian Saxony. After a stormy religious career and untouched by the murderous hands of Rome's agents, Luther died a natural death, February 18, 1546. A miner's son, he had had a stern upbringing. Luther's father was able financially to send him to the well-known University of Erfurt in 1501; in 1505 he graduated with a Master or Arts degree. At the desire of his father who was somewhat anticlerical, Luther entered Erfurt's law school in May, 1505. Two months later he suddenly renounced the world and entered the monastery of the Augustinian convent at Erfurt. When Luther's father heard that his son had taken monastic vows he became bitter. In reply to a friend who said that his son must have answered a call from heaven, Luther's father said: "Would to God, it were no spirit of the devil."
In 1507 Luther was consecrated to the Roman Catholic priesthood and later became associated with the teaching staff of the University of Wittenberg. As an Augustinian monk and priest he made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1510. The corruption, irreligion and vice Luther witnessed among the priests in Rome greatly disturbed him. Years later he said that he would not have missed "seeing Rome for a hundred thousand florins; for I might have felt some apprehension that I had done injustice to the Pope; but as we see, so we speak."
Returning from Rome to Germany he pursued his studies in the Latin Bible which was available to him and also continued to teach theology at Wittenberg University. By the winter of 1512-1513 his inner struggle of conscience became such that he began to make an independent study of basic Catholic teachings. Finally on October 31, 1517, enraged at the Catholic church's campaign of selling indulgences which to him amounted to divine bribery, the selling of forgiveness of sins, Luther nailed his ninety-five protests on the church door of Wittenberg. This one act touched off what became known as the Protestant Reformation. Luther's many delighted friends, eagerly employing the then very new art of printing, quickly reproduced and widely circulated this stirring protest so that within two weeks all Germany was informed and the righteous moved to indignation and opposition. At last some one had come along with courage to "bell the cat," that is, to publicly expose the prowling, dangerous catlike Papal Hierarchy.
Shocked by this rebellion in Germany, the Pope of Rome finally issued a bull of excommunication against Luther in 1520, dismissing him from the Catholic church. Ignoring this action of the Pope, Luther continued as a priest to preach and teach. On December 10, 1520, Luther, in public, spectacularly consigned this papal written decree to the flames. He also released for wide publication his great reform treatises, the Address to the German Nobility, The Babylonic Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of a Christian Man.
The next year, 1521, Roman Emperor Charles V called for an assembly at the city of Worms of high church dignitaries and German princes to hear Luther's defense against the Pope's orders. After a two-hour defense spoken in German, repeated for two hours in Latin, Luther concluded: "Unless I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture or by an evident reason—for I confide neither in the Pope nor in a council alone, since it is certain that they have often erred and contradicted themselves—I am held fast by the Scriptures adduced by me, and my conscience is taken captive by God's Word, and I neither can nor will revoke anything, seeing that it is not safe or right to act against conscience. God help me. Amen." Today, on a global scale, Jehovah's witnesses "maintain the same Biblical stand that did Luther so rightly."
Incidentally, in April, 1523, nine nuns escaped from the convent of Imptsch near Grimma, fled to Wittenberg, and appealed to Luther for protection. Among them was nun Catharina von Bora whom Luther married in 1525 in further defiance of the Catholic church. In time they came to have six children, three sons and three daughters.
During years that followed Luther made the first translation of the entire Bible into German. He also made great progress in his Scriptural studies, "coming to some very accurate glimpses of Bible truth." Note the following quotations from Luther's early works, which were printed and widely distributed.
In an exposition of Jeremiah 23:1-8 Luther says: ". . . but this name Jehovah belongs exclusively to the true God." From Ein epistel aus dem Propheten Jeremia, von Christus reich und Christlichen freyheit, gepredigt durch Mar. Luther, Wittenberg, 1527.
"I permit the Pope to make articles of faith for himself and his faithful—such as 'the soul is the substantial form of the human body,' 'that the sould is immortal,' with all those monstrous opinions found in the Roman filth-pile of resolutions." From his Defense, prop. 27, "Adversus Execrabilem Antichrist Bullam" (Luther's Works, Vol. 2, folio 107, Wittenberg, 1562), first published in 1520. Also Zion's Watch Tower, 1905, p. 228.
"Therefore the Scripture calls death a sleep. For as one falls asleep, he, when he awakes in the morning, knows nothing about how the falling asleep happened, nor about the sleep itself, nor the awakening, so shall also we on the last day arise with haste and not know either how we came into death or through death." Kyrkopost, 1 band., no. 29, par. 9, sid. 259. See also Watch Tower Reprint Vol. 1, p. 408.
"Hereof it must follow that they who lie in the graveyard and sleep under the ground do not sleep as profound as we do on our beds. For it may happen that your sleep is so profound that you must be called ten times before you hear once. But the dead will hear at the first calling of Christ, and awake, as we here see of this young man and of Lazarus." Evang. Luk. 7. 11-17, par. 8.
"Let this be unto you an excellent alchemy and a masterpiece that does not turn copper or lead into gold for you, but changes death into a sleep and your grave into a sweet room of rest, and all the time elapsing between Abel's death and the last day into a short little while. The Scripture gives this consolation everywhere." Kyrkopost, 1:a band., no. 109, par. 39-47, sid. 434-436.
Today Jehovah's witnesses publicize that neither Luther nor his present-day admirers "have held fast to these and many more original Scriptural teachings advocated by Luther. Regrettably those admirers of his have followed a course of watering down and compromise." For example:
By 1530 Luther's Greek scholastic friend Melanchthon had persuaded him to be party to a proposal now known as the Augsburg Confession. Melanchthon wrote up this creed-like document and presented it before the assembly at Augsburg of Emperor Charles V together with his princely and hierarchic co-rulers to effect a reconciliation between the vast number of followers of Luther and the Roman Catholic church. In this way Melanchthon and Luther hoped to bring about an internal cleansing of the Papal church by inducing her to reform some of her ways. "But the assembly flatly rejected this proposal. Luther's supporters were left holding the bag of compromise which was full of half truths and repudiations of some of Luther's earlier right views. Upon this sacrifice of compromise, the Augsburg Confession, many of the present-day separate Lutheran sects were founded."
Martin Luther represented a movement that did more than throw off the ecclesiastical authority of Rome. Jehovah's witnesses say that he planted the seeds of a doctrinal reformation as well, although the doctrinal reformation did not "get to first base" until the 1870's. The signing of the Augsburg Confession in April, 1530, and the Westminster Confession in 1648, by the representative Protestant faiths sealed Protestantism's cohesion to the principal doctrines of the Roman Catholic mother church—for example, the trinity, hell-fire, and soul immortality. Protestantism, in short, adopted the Nicene Creed.
Real doctrinal reformation, going deeper than Luther, than Wycliffe and the Lollards, than Waldo and the Waldenses, and digging back beyond Arius of the fourth century into the "first-century primitive Christian teachings set out by Jesus Christ and the apostles," was, say Jehovah's witnesses, to await the movement symbolized by a nineteenth-century Bible student named Charles Taze Russell.
By Russell's day, of course, Rome had waned as a world ruler. The Protestant Reformation was "degenerating" so rapidly that "with every golden jubilee it celebrated the appearance of fifty new schisms." Darwin had rocked the smug complacency of orthodoxism with the anti-Bible doctrine of evolution. Although church-book memberships grew, a lot of people were taking religion with a sack of salt. The time was ripe for a re-evaluation of things that people had just naturally taken as "unquestionable and unanswerable." People were going to have to find in the Bible a new hope, a new faith, a new outlook; or they were going to have to ditch the Bible along with the fables of the Illiad, at least, as far as being a live and divine force in religion.
Within another half century the iron fist of communism would be knocking at Christendom's doors.
If the hand of Rome's priest-rule had been thrown off and the field opened to a "buyer's market" for competitive Protestant brands of religion, then it was naturally to be expected that a "consumer's union" would, by and by, take religion into the Bible laboratory and test it for "what it was worth against what it was advertised as worth."
In other words, a doctrinal reformation, "an era of deep, penetrating and continual Bible research," was impending.
Jehovah's witnesses feel that when their immediate predecessors, the Bible Students, plunged into an "objective examination of Christendom's doctrines," they were taking the biggest single step since the days of Jesus toward restoring "doctrinal teachings originating in the Bible," teachings that had been buried under "more than fifteen centuries of Pagan sludge."
Here was a movement that would collide dramatically with the whole body and soul of Christendom—Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, as well as Islam. It was a work that would "trace the teachings of Protestants back to the Catholics and from the Catholics back to Pagan philosophers like Socrates and Plato." It would probe beyond the Council of Nice. It would reach into the vitals of "first-century primitive Christianity." It would bring to light a religion that to Christendom would appear new, strange, unorthodox, nonconformist, and unwanted by the modern world.
The movement would, for the first time, "drive dissident Protestantism back into the arms of Mother Rome" in a unified front against the "doctrinal reformation."
Evolutionist atheism, sweeping across the minds of more than half the people of Christendom, might leave mankind with no faith in orthodox religion, as Galileo with his theory that the earth was round knocked the props from under Christendom's "unquestionable" preachment that the earth was flat. The religious movement that dawned about the 1870's would discredit orthodox religion in general as thoroughly, or more so, than evolution. However, it would vindicate the Bible, not turn people away from the Bible, like evolution. Those who embraced it would become Bible students of the Waldensian-Lollard zeal.
While the Bible Students would not attract the general body of Christendom any more than did the original Christians, the Arians, the Waldenses, or the Lollards, their impact would be increasingly felt.
The man who stands in history as the symbol of the Bible Students is Charles Taze Russell. He was also the last living link with modern Witnesses of Jehovah.
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