Mike Farris:
One of the rare things that united Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans was their utter contempt for Separatists.

One of their chief complaints was that these separatists denied the very concept of a Christian nation—that is, a church that is composed of the entire population of a nation, willing or not.

The first to face the fires of persecution in Elizabeth’s reign were a group of Flemish Anabaptists who were arrested on Easter Sunday, April 3, 1575, while worshipping in a private house just outside the city gates of London.

One of those scheduled for execution was Hendrick Terwoot, a 25-year-old who had been married only two months before his imprisonment. The other was Jan Pieters, a much older man with nine dependent children.

A special petition urging leniency for Pieters in light of his family was unavailing with the presiding bishop. Terwoort’s and Pieters’s pleas to the queen are an eloquent memorial to religious liberty:

May it also please your majesty in your wisdom and innate goodness to consider, that were it not right, but hypocrisy in us to speak otherwise than [we] in our consciences think; and also that it is not in our power to believe this or that, as evil-doers who do right or wrong as they please. But the true faith must be [im]planted in the heart of man by God; and to him we daily pray, that he would give us his Spirit to understand his word and gospel.

I’m Mike Farris.