church kept the Sabbath, with a line of continuity back to the Garden of Eden. When forms of mixed Christian worship began, with the Christianising of pagan festivals, building Christian churches over sacred pagan wells and introducing days to commemorate people and events, those who chose to be faithful to the pure truths of the Bible found it harder and harder to uphold God’s way of life without penalties to property or life. At the time of the laws being passed to consecrate Sunday, many of the remaining Christians fled to secret and secluded places in the wildernesses of Europe to follow their consciences in the things of God, and to bring up their families according to the Bible’s teachings. They continued to keep the seventh-day Sabbath and to conduct adult baptism as a way of showing and publicly demonstrating a commitment to serve God. They believed in the right of the individual to believe and practise what he or she believed, but not only that, they taught that each had the right and the freedom in God to teach and preach the Word of God even though it went against the State.
This line of Christianity also continued in parallel with the official Christian line, yet hidden, until the times of the Reformation. Initially, when these persecuted people saw the stand of the Reformers, some allied themselves with the new cause, and hailed it as the freedom they had hoped and prayed for. It was not long however before they realised that the Reformers did not wish to accept them among them and in fact hated and persecuted them as much as the Papal church itself had done. Those who believed in baptism were executed by drowning to show the Reformers’ hatred of believers’ baptism.
Baptism symbolised an individual’s right to follow his conscience rather than the authority of state or church. The Reformers did not accept the separation of church and state. Some of them actually sowed the seeds for alternative state churches with different names – e.g. the Lutherans and Calvinists. Disappointed, the persecuted ones again withdrew to the wild places of the earth for safety. With the institution of the Jesuits, the ‘Society of Jesus’, their persecution continued with increasing force.Heresy was hated. To choose a way of life that was different from the majority view was to risk one’s life. The Sabbath and believer’s baptism (as opposed to christening) continued to be the principle features of this line of Christianity.