The first twenty-five years were full of privations and persecutions. The reader will understand that in Germany the maintenance and regulation of religion is considered one of the duties of the State, and a disturbance of religious order was punishable by law, just as a disturbance of social order would be with us. It seemed outrageous and detrimental to the interests of society that artisans and laborers should assume to teach and preach, and even to administer the ordinances. Existing laws were applied to them, or new laws were framed to meet their case. As late as 1852, a law was enacted in the principality of Bückeburg, a small state in northern Germany, providing that any emissary of the Baptists found within the boundaries of the principality should be imprisoned for four weeks, and that the punishment should be doubled on a repetition of the offense. Any one attending the meetings was to be imprisoned for four weeks; any one conducting them, for eight weeks; any one baptising, or administering the Lord’s Supper, for six months. One of the old veterans of those days has counted up that he was imprisoned thirty-three times, and in nineteen different jails. Nor were the jails very pleasant places to be in. But sometimes they turned even the prisons into places of joy and prayer. There is just a smack of holy malice in the story of one brother who tells how six of them were imprisoned together for holding a Baptist meeting. As soon as they were lodged in jail, they used the government’s own house and the government’s chairs to hold a glorious Baptist protracted meeting that lasted for four weeks.