The bull In Eminenti Apostolatus Specula of April 28, 1738, by which Clement XII inaugurated the long series of papal denunciations of Freemasonry, was issued virtually without warning and without much apparent provocation. Such was not the case with the Unigenitus of 1713 or the Dominus ac Redemptor noster of 1773, affecting Jansenists and Jesuits, for both movements had for years before their proscription occasioned violent controversy not only theological but political. Today the Unigenitus is the gravestone of a dead issue, while the Jesuit order was reinstituted in 1815. But the anti-Masonic Bull of 1738 has proven to be the progenitor of increasingly severe anathemas over two centuries, and the persecutions and the political conflicts to which it gave the impetus show little abatement. Rome's sudden charge of secret heresy and political sedition against a movement which theretofore had been planned and conducted with a view to avoiding, indeed even to reconciling political and theological animus, served to create, wherever the proscriptions enjoined by the Bull were executed, the anti-clerical and revolutionary features objected to! What else could have been expected from the ensuing persecutions, which brought imprisonment, confiscation, exile, and often martyrdom to multitudes of Freemasons in the eighteenth century? And how ironical that fate was for a movement whose original purpose was to unite men of all faiths, values, and classes in a spiritual, moral, and cultural brotherhood, and whose record, prior to the Bull, was one of unprecedented sectarian fraternity. But with the publication of the Bull and the suffering at the hands of the Inquisition and the secular arm which it instigated, there began a virtual crusade, such as had been directed previously against Saracens, Cathari, Hussites, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Socinians, and Huguenots; and this crusade continues, with the connivance of Catholic Fascists, to this day.

Most of the early leaders of Anabaptism were martyred after a few months or years of activity. Two of the more outstanding exceptions are Menno Simons and Pilgram Marpeck, neither of whom is numbered among the founders of the Anabaptist movement, however. With Menno the world has long been familiar, and the group with which he united now bears his name. His writings in the original Dutch, or in German or English translation, are found in Mennonite homes in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and America. But even Mennonites know little of Marpeck today. This is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that Marpeck labored among the south-German and Swiss Anabaptists, thus sustaining a more direct relationship to the main body of American Mennonites than does the Dutch Menno Simons. The persecution and oppression which the Swiss and south-German Mennonites long had to bear is responsible, at least in part, for the early disappearance of Marpeck's name among his followers. One may add that this was also the fate of Conrad Grebel, the founder of Swiss Anabaptism. Yet Marpeck was the greatest of the south-German and Swiss Anabaptist leaders, and well deserves a closer study.

Perhaps I erred in choosing the title “A Forgotten Theology.” A theology that is vital and worthwhile will not be forgotten; it will be absorbed, and by absorption it fulfills its original purpose. Only in that way can it live and have part in theological progress. Furthermore, at the meeting of the American Society of Church History, December 27, 1911, in New York, I read a paper on “The Mercersburg Theology Historically Considered.” The present paper, thirty years later is a sequel to that of 1911. Some of the doctrines of the Mercersburg men, it seems to me, have been unconsciously revived in contemporary theological thought, especially as that is expressed in the reports of the Oxford and Edinburgh Conferences of 1937.

Francis of Assisi has been made the subject of numerous studies in modern times. His dedication to absolute poverty has elicited praise from admirers of varied character. That same ideal has frequently been made the object of unfriendly strictures. All too many researchers have granted him tolerant dismissal as a naïve idealist. Such writers have damned him with the easy condescension of modern men. They have been too busy proclaiming his impracticability according to modern standards to appreciate what he was and accomplished as a medieval man.