Anabaptist History - Part 4 — Walter Beachy

Greetings to all of you and blessings to you for being here again. Again, if there's anyone here for the first time, I think the Myers would be, raise your hand and we'll get a copy of the outline to you.

Okay, right here in the front and there's one over here and back there, yes. Okay. And in the outline, if you want to turn to that, by the way, for those just receiving it, as a reminder to others, we will not have time in an abbreviated series like this to cover all the material, but I decided not to redo the outline, just give you the whole thing, and then we'll have to miss parts of it.

We will be coming back to that section that we're skipping now. Now, if you go to page 4, you will find, in the middle of the page there, you will find the title, Anabaptist Persecution, and that's what we'll deal with first this evening.

The Hardship of Anabaptist Persecution

I was thinking today how that it's kind of decimated your numbers a bit with the chicken pox problem, and I understand the nature of that. We raised five children, so we know all about that. But our Anabaptist forefathers would have probably considered that a very, very small problem compared to what they faced.

And frankly, and I mean this very seriously, the most difficult part of talking about our history, as far as my own personal sense of just falling way short, comes when I discuss the persecution our forebears faced.

Because I ask myself, would I have hung tough like that? How would I have dealt with what they dealt with? And would my faith have carried me through? I keep hoping and praying that if we're faithful in a time when we have it so easy, that God would give us grace to be faithful when we'd have it tough.

But the other side of it is, having it too easy does tend to make us soft, inside and out. If it's too easy, we don't have muscles here. We're not tough in that way. And if it's too easy spiritually, relationally, in our world, then we're soft on the inside as well.

But I would say to you who, for the most part, I think for all of you, probably you are younger than I am. I think I'm safe in saying that. At least if you're older than I, it's going to be by a very small margin.

But in any case, most of you, all of you here at the church are younger. And I don't want to be a prophet of doom. In fact, I don't consider myself a prophet as far as foretelling. But I have seen awesome shifts in the public sentiment in regard to Bible-believing Christians.

And I think in a case of major turmoil, whether it's economic or political or a combination of both, we could see in your lifetime and maybe yet in mine the kinds of things we would never have believed could happen in America.

“And When They Shall Ask”: Preserving Historical Memory

I'm reminded of a video that David Dueck, who is a cousin of Claire Schnupp's wife, Clara, from Winnipeg, he made a video. It was not a major movie production. Although it was quite well done. He's into video photography.

But anyway, he got the right to go back to Russia. That was his parents' roots. And he went back there back in the late 70s, early 80s. I think it was the 80s when they were still the USSR. So whatever that, it was just a bit before that collapsed.

He went back to Russia and filmed on site some of the things. And they staged things to reproduce some of what the forefathers went through. And he titled that video, And When They Shall Ask, taken from when Israel went into Jordan and God told them to put the stones there.

And when your children ask, what do those mean? Then you tell them. The whole idea of memorials and so on. And he wanted his own generation and his children and grandchildren to know their story. And the whole video starts out with the wealth and freedom and just ease with which they were living.

And a few of the Russian Mennonite young folks were studying in universities and came home at breaks and warned their parents that the country faces potential tremendous upheaval. And the parents scoffed.

That cannot happen in Tsarist Russia. But in 1917, it did. And it was a terrible nightmare beyond what we can imagine, really. It was so bad, I remember one of my friends and colleagues, now deceased, Dan Yutzi, who was studying at The Ohio State University in sociology.

And one day he saw a name of one of the students. He was doing some part-time teaching. And he saw a name that he recognized as a Russian Mennonite name, which is really usually a Dutch-Polish name.

Anyway, he sought her out. It was a young woman. And found out that she was Russian Mennonite. And so he got all excited. He said, I'm a Mennonite too. In fact, he said, I'm a Mennonite preacher. And she didn't look at all enthralled about that.

And the short story of a long sad story is that when he tried to talk to her about our faith, his faith and hopefully hers, she shook her head and said, Don't talk to me about God. She said, Where was he when our families were, our men were hung and shot, and our women raped?

Where was God then? Don't talk to me about God. Very sad. That's the other side of how to respond to a very bad situation. But our forebears left a kind of, would you say, a flaming testimony that it puts meaning, it puts meat to the words of Jesus there in Matthew 5.

In the Beatitudes, some think it's still one of the Beatitudes. Some say it isn't. I think it is. When he said, Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.

Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. I've never really faced persecution. I've had people do this, you know, in German that means dummkopf, and shake their heads.

And I've had even Christian people not understand why I believe some of the things I do. But I have never really faced persecution. And I have wrestled with that passage in 2 Timothy when Paul was referring to his own persecutions and then said, Yes, and all who live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.

So aren't we living godly? Now it is true that America is a unique political experiment in all of human history. And I have told people in other countries where I've ministered that I thank God that I had the privilege to be born and to live in America.

And always when we're gone, especially into developing countries and especially into Muslim countries, it always feels so good to come back home. But they had no choice in that. I didn't choose where I would be born.

You know, that's as ridiculous as the first rule of success. One list of rules of success I read. First rule is, choose your parents carefully. Who does? No one. So I don't really know what to make of that.

All who live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. I don't believe that's an imperative statement, meaning there are no exceptions to that. But I think he is articulating a principle there. And even though we may not know much about it now, that could change.

The First Anabaptist Baptism and the Movement’s Origins

And last evening we stopped at the point where I had just told you about the first meeting of the Anabaptists where the first known, the first recorded adult baptism, believers' baptism service took place in the Reformation context.

In other words, it was young men, at least five of the young men that were in the group of 14, would have been students at the school of ministry at the Grossmonster and were headed toward the Reformed ministry, Reformed Church ministry.

And in their studies became convinced of the very things that became the bedrock theological positions of our Anabaptist movement. And we'll want to start talking about those toward the end of tonight's session.

But the greater part of this evening we will be talking about the Anabaptist persecution. To keep me a bit on line and away from too many rabbit trails so that my wife will be a little happier and more impressed, I will use the outline and try to stay on so you can follow there and have some idea of what's coming and what I'm talking about and maybe later recall things just a bit better.

State Persecution of the First Anabaptists

The sources of our persecution back in the 16th century, and it happened right from the start. I mean, it was not long. It was only a matter of about two or three weeks before they were looking for these men.

And it was a matter of months, only a few months, before all three of the principal leaders, Grebel, Manz, and Blorock, were in prison. And it was only less than a year from that first baptism, in late 1525, some of the magistrates, in different areas where they had different magistrates in control, different political leadership, some of them, because of how quickly this spread, they made second baptism or re-baptism, they made that a capital offense, like murder.

If you are re-baptized, or if you re-baptize others, then you are subject to the death penalty. And they did begin to carry it out. Of those three, Grebel, Manz, and Blorock, Grebel died of the plague in the summer of 27, and he was underground and hidden away for about six months prior to his death, so he had only about a year and a half from the time of the baptism and the beginning of the Anabaptist movement as we know it, until he was underground and out of circulation and then died.

And we don't have any of his family as direct descendants in the Mennonite church. His wife was not willing to go with him in his journey, his faith journey, and his parents neither. And so his parents, though they had not approved of her because she was a commoner and Grebel was highborn, uppity, and they didn't approve of her, but when Grebel went heretical, they said, then they took her in and the two children that they had.

Well, they had one child and then she was pregnant with another, and I think that child was born after his death. But in any case, that family stayed in the Reformed church. We had the unique privilege through some acquaintance that J .C. Wenger had made in Europe that when we were in Europe for three months, the retired pastor of the Grossmunster church was a 14th generation descendant of Conrad.

And J .C. Wenger had made him aware of his roots. He didn't know that. And he studied Anabaptist history. I'm quite sure by now he is deceased because he was like 70 in 1977, so he'd be over 100 now. But he told us then, we called him and he said, he doesn't have real good health.

He'll meet us at the Grossmunster. He'll take us through the church and show us all the nooks and crannies. And he did. And he said, I can give you at least a half to a three quarter hour. Well, he was the one who set the time and we had nearly two hours with him.

And he spoke so highly and respectfully of Conrad Grebel and said how much he admires his faith and how much he wishes that the Reformed church would be more like his great, 12 greats, grandfather was.

Because he admitted that in Switzerland at that time about 10 of the membership actually attended church on any given Sunday. Now back to what happened to the larger group. It spread like wildfire. They baptized thousands.

One of our early leaders, Hans Hoot, who was probably the most, well we think at this point from what we can tell, that he probably baptized more than anyone else. But in just a little under two years, Hans Hoot baptized 10 ,000 people.

That takes a lot of water. Takes a lot of baptizing. Takes a lot of preaching. And others who didn't baptize that many were still out there winning people and baptizing them. And then by about the year 28, 29, 30, 15, 29, 30, many of the governments in the areas and the provinces made this deal with people.

They said re-baptism is going to be punishable by death, but if you have been re-baptized and you see the error of your way and come back to the church, and that would be Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed, the state church of whatever it was in a given area.

If you come back to the church, we will forgive you and you won't have to be jailed or anything. But if you don't, we're going to hunt you down. And they did begin to hunt people down. It was a really, really sad and terrible time for our forebears.

Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed Complicity in Persecution

And it was all three of the churches, though the Catholic church was definitely the most vicious. And I would say to their credit, don't blame the Catholics of today. Don't tell, if you have a Catholic friend or know someone who's Catholic, don't tell them, your forebears killed my forebears.

That sort of thing. Be a little more gracious than that. And actually, some years back when I was still president at Rosedale, someone gave us, wanted to give us, the two or three volumes, big thick volumes, of the Catholic church history.

It was actually an encyclopedia, Catholic encyclopedia of history. And the library committee felt like I should be the one to check it out because I was teaching history and was a bit of a history nut.

And so they, that's when you're not an historian, you're a history nut. But anyway, they asked me to look it over and see if it should be placed in our library as a resource book, you know, as a resource material.

I said, well, let me go right off to the first thing. Let's see what is said in their own work. This was done by Catholic scholars. What do they say about the Inquisition that began in the 11th century, which was basically like the CIA of the Catholic church, with authority to kill heretics if they didn't repent.

And so I went to that section on the Inquisition. The opening, and it was done by a Jesuit scholar, by the way, and that kind of scared me right off because the Jesuits are very Catholic, very loyal to the church.

But the very first statement went like this. The Inquisition is one of the darkest and saddest blots on the history of the Catholic church. And then he went on to lament in a number of paragraphs how terribly misguided the church was to ever start the Inquisition and use coercion, force, to try to make people Christian.

And I kept thinking to myself, what are all these Catholics and Protestants and some Mennonite educators who hail Augustine as such a wonderful theologian, what are they thinking if they read this man?

Because Augustine said that, and he was an allegorist of the greatest sort, the deepest sort. He said, when the church was in its infancy, that's before Constantine, on your timeline there, 313, when the church was in its infancy she could only invite people in and wield the sword of the Spirit.

But when she came of full age, and this is a quote translated, of course, from Latin, when she came of full age she could yield not only the sword of the Spirit but also the sword of steel. And if people would not voluntarily come into the church they can be coerced to come into the church and, of course, after they are in the church then they are free to roam at will.

No, not really. Because the inquisition had an inquisitor or two with several deputies or soldiers ride into town and get all the men together and would say to them, does anyone know of any heretic in this village?

And if two men had bad blood against each other you can guess the rest. It was a very sad time. And it was that kind of thing carried over into Lutheran and Reformed political circles and church circles that led to our terrible persecution.

In fairness to them they really believed I don't doubt having read both Luther and Calvin on this subject they really believed that it would destroy the culture if they allowed diversity of faith. They really believed it would.

They felt like if you did not belong to the state church the official religion that you were a real threat to the viability, the ongoing life of the culture. It would just destroy it. Well it became obvious in history that they were wrong.

And I think if those men could come back and assess history now they would agree with us that they were wrong. But their motivation may have been fairly good or the intentions were good but for a Christian to give his blessing to killing others who claimed also to be Christian simply because they wouldn't agree with them is still pretty hard to defend and to feel good about.

But that is the background for our persecution. Just a few things there under extent let's just go down through that list. This is somewhat general except for a few of these things. In the first case we don't know of any martyr before Bolt Eberle and he was killed by the Catholics in the Swiss town of Schwitz which means literally sweat.

I don't know if it was warm there or if the men just worked hard but that's quite a name for a town sweat, Schwitz, Schwitz. Anyway, Bolt Eberle was killed there as early as in May. I see a typo there without a capital on May but anyway, in May of 1525.

So that's only 5 months after the movement 4 months after the movement was born because it was January 21. There were about 2 ,000 martyred between 1525 and 1540. That was the most vicious time. But martyrdom kept going and finally ended in the early 1600s.

Imprisonment, Exile, and the Scale of Martyrdom

Galley slavery however that's sentences to be oarsmen for strong men to be oarsmen on the galley ships where they had this whole row of oarsmen rowing boats on the Mediterranean because the Mediterranean had a lot of calms that sailboats couldn't use.

So they had sails and oars to keep going and to go faster. But people were sold to galley slavery as late as 1750. In fact I think it was 1749 in one case 1747 or 49, don't hold me on that date but there were about 92 or 3 men some single men and husbands rounded up in a given area of Germany I don't recall the actual town now but in South Germany and they were sold to a buyer on the sea coast for galley slavery and the local government collected the money.

They had them in prison they had tried them and they sentenced them to galley slavery to be sold as galley slaves but they did at that late a date they did allow the families to come and say goodbye to them.

The record of that says that even some of the magistrates and the soldiers or constables who guarded them wept when they saw husbands and families saying goodbye I mean yeah husbands saying goodbye to families and vice versa and sons and in some cases young men who were probably planning to marry they saw all of that terrible heartache thinking they would never see each other again that the first day's march they marched them on foot to the sea coast and that's a long way down through Switzerland and probably hit a part of France but anyway on the first day's march that first night the guards didn't really guard them very well someone was awake all night or woke up during the night and looked around the guards were sleeping paid no attention to them so they slowly one by one got up and slipped away from the camp and finally they were all gone but the guards and they took off and went back toward home and they all made it back home and the sentiment in the community was so anti what the magistrates had done that the magistrates didn't re-arrest them so it did end with a good in a good story and in a good way the estimate of total martyrs is from two to four thousand no one knows for sure and one of the reasons they don't know some of the records were destroyed some are still there and the martyr's mirror of course has record of I forget how many it's some in the twelve, thirteen hundred I think if you total them all up but in any case they also had what at that point were called Teufel Jäger.

Teufel would be baptist and Jäger in German means hunter so they had the Anabaptist hunters except they just used the word Teufel for us then and so the Anabaptist hunters were men that were deputized to watch for any suspicion of heresy and they were authorized to use the sword but to arrest people and bring them in to the jails and so on.

And if they resisted arrest they could actually kill. They had that kind of deputized power and authority. So a good bit of that sort of thing happened and who knows how many because you don't know if much of that was recorded.

The Teufeljäger and the Persecution of Hidden Believers

If any of it was recorded we had the privilege in 77 as well to go to southern Austria where we were told in the little city, little town of Wald. Wald in German means forest. In the little town called forest there is a building standing yet that had been a an inn where you could take your leave your horse.

It was like an old time motel you could leave your horse, you could get a room and you could get your meals supper and breakfast. And there were, the story is told that there were some men from the area sitting there in the evening so this thing of men going to the restaurant and sitting around chatting has an old history.

But there were these men sitting around from the community one of whom was a Teufeljäger and they saw two young men come in and when their meal came they bowed their heads to pray and give thanks and this Teufeljäger thought hmm, I wonder he went over and interrupted their meal and said are you Teufel?

And they rejected that term because it was an inference of Anabaptists re-baptizers because the Anabaptists said infant baptism is no baptism at all so they had decided to use the answer no. So they did, they said no but he knew that he knew that they did answer like that under that reasoning so he kept pushing them to the point where they would have had to lie to keep themselves from being incriminated and so they just went silent.

That's all he needed. He arrested them on the spot they didn't even get to eat their meal. He took them about 16 kilometers, 10 -11 miles on west to a castle where there was a dungeon. That castle today is still owned.

I think just a few years back we called them about staying there again, we had stayed there for about a week and when we first got there I asked the manager it's owned by the International Federation of Evangelical Students and because I was a teacher at a bible college, a bible institute they said we could stay cheap and it was so cheap we could hardly afford to live out of the grocery stores and in the tents that we were doing as a family, so we stayed in that castle which was built in the 12th century and during the reformation it was the summer home of a catholic bishop from over in Salzburg who spent his summers there and then the area went lutheran and the men went over one summer one winter when he was not there and they burned the place down, well a castle is built of stone so it took the windows and doors and the roof you know, but the catholic militia fought the lutheran militia and they took control of it again and so the catholic bishop comes back and makes all the local men work there and rebuild the place, so it was rebuilt in about 1540 some and that's basically the way the thing is now except of course they had to keep it maintained and when we got there I asked the manager, I said where is the dungeon because we know of a case where two young men were brought here and were put in the dungeon overnight and then taken on to prison after that and we lose track of them, we don't know if they were killed or if they escaped or if they served a sentence and were freed we don't know, but in any case he said why don't you just look around and see if you can find it.

So our three sons and I scoured the place and couldn't find it, we wanted to see what it looked like anyway and came back and said can't find it, he said well it really wasn't fair and he had said, we had agreed that we want to see the place anyway so he said go to the main entry and there's a sleigh sitting there on a rug move the sleigh roll up the rug and you've found the the dungeon so we got a little ladder and we took the big square stone lid off of it and we got down into that dungeon and John Glysteen a Dutch Mennonite who studied a lot of history said that at one point there's one story that says there were 16 or 18 men in that dungeon it was probably 5 feet because I could reach about 6 and I couldn't stretch out completely and the other way it was about twice that big and it was about this deep, you couldn't stand up.

How 16 or 18 men could get in there I have no idea and I was tempted if there would have been enough men up above to tell them for just a moment put the lid on but then I have claustrophobia and I was afraid I'd be the chicken so but see that's just the kind of thing that makes me ask myself how would I have handled that kind of thing.

It's a really humbling sort of thing to look at. Full toleration came in Switzerland in 1815 and in Holland in 1798 a bit earlier and full toleration means that they no longer had to pay a tax to live in an area what.

In the German language they called the Teufeltoll toll like we use it in English too. That's the word tax in German toll is tax and Teufel of course has a reference to us Anabaptists to live in areas many of them had to pay an annual tax per head in the household children men women and children and also could not meet freely anywhere.

Now this is the information gathered by others the research of others. But when I was in Switzerland I talked to an older man by the name of Gerber who was then in his 70's back in 77 and he said and he remembers his father telling about sitting on his grandfather's knee which would have been this Gerber I was talking to would have been his great great grandfather.

And hearing his this father was hearing his great grandfather tell of the times when he was a boy back in the 1830's when he could not when they could not meet except in secret. So he said that dates wrong.

It's got to be 1830 or later before Switzerland really freed people. And up to 1942 or 3 during World War II it was still on the books and the first time it got violated it went to court. It was still on the books that an Anabaptist could not own land or farm land under 1 ,000 meters 3 ,000 feet.

In other words they had the farm up on the tops of the the Jura mountains and so on. And the good land down below the Reformed and the Catholics had. And the Lutherans you know but in 1941 or 2 Samuel Gerber told me about that as well.

In 1942 there was a Reformed landowner who had a Lutheran farming for him. No he was a Lutheran landowner with a Lutheran farming for him. And he didn't like the Lutheran farmer didn't do a good job. So he asked a Mennonite farmer who was on up the slopes of the Jura the Jura mountains and what is called the Sonnenberg also do you know about the Sonnenberg church in Ohio up at Kidron, Ohio.

Yeah the Sonnenberg church comes from immigrants from that area. But anyway he asked this Mennonite to farm his land and he didn't realize that it was still on the books that they couldn't farm down that low.

Neither one of them realized it and the Mennonite said well I don't want to take it away from this Lutheran. They knew each other. Well he said you're not taking it away from him he will not farm it anymore so I want you to farm it.

So he did agree to take it but the Lutheran farmer knew that this was still on the books. So he ran to town and reported this and sure enough it went to court and the city fathers and the judge ruled that it's an antiquated law that should be stricken from the books.

Methods of Persecution and Confiscation

So the Mennonites now own land and farm land at a lower level although they still are more in the upper regions than the lower ones. Now the methods of persecution and this is the really sad part to talk about.

Many of them faced banishment from their areas along with the confiscation of their property and a lot of areas had signs around see the printing press was already in vogue and used widely. So they would have hand bills and signs and so on advertising the fact that if you turn in someone on suspicion of heresy which in that case meant anabaptism or in a Catholic area it could have been anyone of the other Protestant groups.

But anyway if you turn someone in on suspicion of heresy and they are convicted and their property is confiscated which was common then the one who turned them in would get a percentage of the property.

Can you imagine the motivation for that. But we know very few cases where neighbors turned in anabaptists. We know of a lot of cases where they helped hide them and warned them that the authorities were looking for them and things like that.

But we don't know of cases where they actually turned them in. It probably happened but it was not frequent. The common people were not usually with the authorities on these issues. But can you imagine what it would be like in some of our churches where many of our people and I don't say this disparagingly.

I'm not the kind of preacher that rants at people who have money and then when the church needs money go to them and ask them for it. I'm not that kind of preacher. I think that there are people given the gift to make money.

Others are given money by their parents and if they're responsible good stewards and don't squander their money for riotous living or just living high on the hog then I think that can be a blessing to the church.

But in any case can you imagine what would happen in our churches where in many cases there are at least some moneyed people if all of a sudden you'd have to give up everything and move out. Unbelievable.

But it may happen. It really could happen again. Imprisonment was very common. Jacob Riedmann who was the first main bishop of the Hutterite movement which in the early generations was a very spiritual movement.

Even though I don't agree with their assumption about Christian communism I don't think that's a normative thing. They take the words of Jesus to the rich young ruler sell what you have and give it to the poor.

They take that as normative but in their colonies they don't give their money to the poor you know and some of them are very wealthy and not very spiritual. Just last weekend we talked and there was in that church where I was last weekend a family from one of the Hutterite colonies and he said there was very little spiritual life until a revival hit their community their colony.

They then as a family left but his father is one of the preachers in that colony. But if we would have to face that kind of thing it would certainly be a different thing. And what I was starting to say Riedmann lived for 24 years after his conversion and he became an Anabaptist became a preacher and one of their main theologians and leaders.

But of those 24 years he spent 16 of them in prison. Amazing thing. But he wrote their first confession of faith which the more conservative Hutterites still use as their confession of faith. He wrote that while he was in prison.

Torture and the Cost of Refusing to Recant

Next is a list of the ways that they tortured people to try to get them to confess their confess where the people are meeting implicate other people tell who their leaders are and things of that nature.

These are the kinds of things they used. Many of these were tools that were present in the larger cities that had been designed by and used by the Catholic Inquisition. So if an area went Lutheran or reformed they still had those tools see and they used them to bring people to hopefully to repentance from their their quotes heresy.

So these are the ways that they would torture them. The rack is a is like a cot just a table with a drum and a ratchet on the end with ropes that would be brought up. Usually the ratchet was at the foot end and they would put cuffs around the ankles and cuffs around the wrists and then they would tighten that up notch at a time until it was real real tight and you would hang on you know to keep your your joints in place.

But then they'd warn you if you don't recant we're going to stretch you until your joints go out. And people would actually pass out from the trauma of having like their hips go out and I don't know if you've ever had a dislocated joint but they are painful they are really painful.

And people would often pass out on the on the rack if they didn't have a rack and there is a picture of this in the in the martyr's mirror. And by the way if you don't have a martyr's mirror for your family you really ought to get one and don't let the size of it scare you because you can read stories or your children can read stories out of it you know a story at a time and they don't have to read all of it but expose them to it.

But in the martyr's mirror is a story is a picture of two guards playing dice while an Anabaptist is hanging there suspended by his wrists and they tied weights to his ankles and they just waited waited until he couldn't hang on anymore and usually either the shoulder or the hip went out, a joint and then they'd cut him down if they passed out especially if they wouldn't repent.

Well they'd cut him down and sometimes just leave them lying where they fell and later come to without any medical treatment to help them with the pain they had. Hanging is what I'm referring to. They're not hanging by the neck.

You don't torture people by hanging by the neck that's fatal. And then beating. They simply beat sometimes with chains other times with rods and so on. The block was intended to be a torture but it often became a martyrdom because it was a huge log that was flat on top and had arms on the side where the arms would be put out at an angle something like that and strapped down and then they were strapped down at the ankles and a belt across the tummy and they had a huge mallet they looked like a big croquet mallet but twice as big as a croquet mallet and they would warn them we're going to break your bones unless you recant.

And they would usually start at the shins and they'd break the bones in the lower leg both legs they still didn't recant. They'd break the large bone in the upper leg they still didn't recant. They'd break the bones in the lower arm and then the upper arm.

If they didn't recant they usually passed out and some of them went into shock because of all the trauma. They didn't understand shock back then of course wouldn't have been too concerned if they did as to treating it and quite a few would have died or did die on the block.

So it was both a form of torture and a form of martyrdom. They would use red hot tongs the kind of blacksmith's tools. They would take a pliers and pull a tongue of a preacher way out as far as they could.