The great reformers of the sixteenth century conceived of their work as clearing away the human additions and getting back to primitive Christianity as found in the Bible. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin all made their appeal directly to Scripture. Bucer exhorted believers to “reject all false speculations and all human opinions.” The Anabaptists cited the example of the first Christians as their authority for refusing to have a creed or to bear arms or to take oaths or to hold civil office, and Melchior Hofmann announced a “resurrection of primitive Christianity.” When Queen Elizabeth was masquerading as a Lutheran, for diplomatic reasons, she said she would hold to the Augsburg Confession because it “conformed most closely to the faith of the early church.” Chillingworth stated the principle of the Reformation in the words, “The Bible and the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants,” excluding ecclesiastical tradition because it furnished neither legitimate additions to the primitive faith and practice nor trustworthy evidence as to what these had been. Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists, in seventeenth-century England, all claimed the authority and example of the New Testament church in support of their respective forms of church organization and their conceptions of the ministry. One modern Lutheran writer declares that “the Lutheran Church is the old original church,” and another that “Lutheranism is Bible Christianity.” A book issued by the Presbyterian Board of Publication says that “of all the churches now existing in the world, the Presbyterian Church comes nearest to the apostolic model.” John Wesley wrote to the Methodists in America after the Revolution that, being free from the English state and hierarchy, they “are now at full liberty to follow the Scriptures and the primitive church.” More secular thinkers have made similar appeal to the ancient standards as the cure for the modern church’s ills. Rousseau “only wanted to simplify Christianity and bring it back to its origins,” says A. Aulard in his work on _Christianity and the French Revolution_. John Adams wrote in 1770: “Where do we find a precept in the Gospel requiring ecclesiastical synods, councils, creeds, oaths, subscriptions, and whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in these days?” These references do not, of course, prove that all or any of those who claimed to follow the primitive model actually did so. The point is that they claimed to do it. The restoration of primitive purity has been the standard formula for reformation. Eighteenth Century Restorationists