The Anabaptist movement was the continuation of the old evangelical faith maintained by the Waldenses and other Mediaeval Christians. Limborch, the historian of the Inquisition, says:
To speak my mind freely, if their opinions and customs were to be examined without prejudice, it would appear that among all of the modern sects of Christians, they had the greatest resemblance to that of the Mennonites or Dutch Baptists (Limborch, The History of the Inquisition, 1.57.London, 1731).
Dr. Allen, Professor in Harvard University, says:
Side by side with the creed which has worked itself out into such shapes as these (referring to the Roman hierarchy) has come down the primitive, obstinate, heroic, anti-sacerdotal tradition, which has made the starting point of many a radical protest, from the Puritan Novatians of the third century down to the English Independents of the seventeenth. That tradition in its most logical form is not only Protestant, but Baptist.
Dr. Ludwig Keller, a learned member of the Reformed Church, the Munster Archivist, and now in charge of the Archives in Berlin, says:
It is not to be doubted also that in the process of scientific investigation still further traces will be brought to light…Much rather can it be proved that in the lands mentioned Baptist churches existed for many decades and even centuries before the Reformation (The Baptist Quarterly, Review, VII. 28-31).
In his last work Keller says:
The "silent points of this mode of viewing history is that inside of the evangelical world an unbroken course of development and historical continuity reached far back beyond the sixteenth century is a matter of fact; and yet it equally repudiates the Catholic supposition that only since 1517 "an appalling apostasy from the true faith took place in the Western World," and that of Luther’s followers that with him the light of the Gospel first (since the apostasy) came into the world (Keller, Die Anfange der Reformation, iii, iv. Translated for The Western Recorder by Dr. Albert H. Newman).
