Naturally, such flaming zealots as Guido de Bres were always in danger of their lives and regularly obliged to flee their homeland for safer foreign cities. By 1568 the situation had become 80 serious in the Netherlands that many of the citizens became convinced that Philip meant to wipe them all out—men, women, and children. Charles had been accused by some of trying to ‘quench the fires of reform by his subjects’ blood, but Philip was feared even more. He is said to have vowed stubbornly to make a wilderness of the Netherlands: rather than to allow it to be inhabited by heretics. Yet the Protestant Netherlanders proved tough, wily, and just as stubborn as Philip. They were remarkably hard to intimidate. Often un- usually literate, according to one historian, ‘it was their boast that. . even the fishermen who dwelt in the huts of Friesland could read, and write, and discuss the interpretations of Scrip: ture." “The Netherlanders. especially the Re formed, did not give in. Some of them went “underground,” others fled to towns just across the German ‘border, particularly Wesel and Emden, De Bres remained in the Lowlands, serv. ing the Reformed churches in Tournai, Lille, and Valenciennes. It. was for these churches that he prepared, in 1559, the first draft of the Belgic Confession. ‘A copy was sent to Calvin, who approved its contents, The preachers in Emden likewise ap- proved it, A copy, together with a letter to Philip IT, was tossed over the castle wall, but nobody knows whether the emperor ever’ road it, An underground synod, meeting in Antwerp in 1566, adopted it. And since that time the Belgic Confes- sion has remained one of the three standards of faith of all Reformed churches of Dutch origin. Born in the fires of political end religious oppres ion, the Belgic Confession became the theolog ical tallying point of the Reformed people in their heroic struggle against the Spanish Inquisition. De Bres himself became one of an estimated 100,000 Dutchmen who lost their lives during the persecution, which scholars affirm to be more devastating than all the ancient persecutions by the Roman Empire. By the night of May 30, 1567, when Guido de Bres faced his killers, the Calvinist Reformation in the Netherlands was so deeply rooted it could no longer be eradicated. ‘A major modern historian of the Reformation, R. Bainton, has commented on why Calvinism gained the upper hand in the Netherlands: ‘The success in the Netherlands may well have been due to the fact that Calvinism was better suited (than Lutheranism) to be the religion of a resistance movement. The activism of the Calvinists, their progress in France in divest- ing themselves of all of the earlier scruples with regard to the legitimacy of armed resis- tance to tyramny, their heroic devotion to the glory of God by erecting his kingdom upon earth made them just the group to “drive the Spanish vermin from the land.” (The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century) ‘The Anabaptists on the Left ‘The Netherlands Calvinists inherited, then, an activism from Calvinist France whieh, combined with a native resourcefulness, made them hard to tyrannize. But in the same Netherlands was another group, or a number of groups, of ac tivists. Their resistance o Spanish Catholic con- trol was both less controlled and less successful than that of the Calvinists. Loosely called “‘Anabaptists” because of their belief in adult rebaptism, these people were keenly impatient with the reforms of Luther and Calvin, regarding them as half-baked and half-hearted reforms. ‘THE BELGIC CONFESSION 37