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 to-day, and their ideal of the total separation between the spiritual and the temporal is inwrought into the texture of American institutions. The time is rapidly approaching when the Anabaptists will be as abundantly honoured as, in the past four centuries, they have been unjustly contemned.

If this is true of the Anabaptists as a whole, what shall be said of their leaders? These have not escaped the general fate of the party. They were burned, they were drowned, they were beheaded, they were tortured, they were beaten with rods; while they lived they wandered as outcasts from city to city, or dwelt in caves of the earth; and after they had sealed their testimony to the truth with their blood, men whom the world calls great in piety and good works often conspired to cover their names with undeserved infamy. Not a few of these leaders were men of the highest culture, the broadest learning of their times—scholars not