Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/374

 g^g GERMANY. eluded Satan as an emanation from God, who in due time would be restored to union with the Godhead, and it was not difficult to assume that his fallen state was an injustice. In 1312 Lucifer- ans were discovered at Krems, in the diocese of Passau, whose bishop, Bernhard, together with Conrad, Archbishop of Salzburg, and Frederic, Duke of Austria, undertook their extirpation with the aid of the Dominican Inquisition, which seems to have main- tained some foothold in those regions. The persecution lasted until 1315, but the sect was not exterminated, and reappeared re- peatedly in after-years. It is reported to have been thoroughly organized, with twelve "apostles" who travelled annually through- out Germany, making converts and confirming the believers in the faith. All the ceremonies of external worship were rejected, but they did not enjoy the impeccability of Illuminism, for two of their ministers were held to enter paradise every year, where they received from Enoch and EUas the power of absolving their fol- lowers, and this power they communicated to others in each com- munity. Those who were detected proved obdurate ; they were deaf to all persuasion, and met their death in the flames with the utmost cheerfulness. One of the apostles, who was burned at Vi- enna, stated, under torture, that there were eight thousand of them scattered throughout Bohemia, Austria, and Thuringia, besides numbers elsewhere. Bohemia was especiaUy infected with these errors, and Trithemius, in the opening years of the sixteenth cen- tury, states that there were stiU thousands of them in that king- dom. This is doubtless an exaggeration, if not a complete mis- take, but they were again discovered in Austria in 1338 and 1395, and many of them were burned."^ The tendency to mysticism which found its complete expres- sion in the Brethren of^he Free Spirit influenced greatly the de- velopment of German rehgious thoughtdn channels which, although assumedly orthodox, trenched narrowly upon heresy. If, as Alt- meyer argues, a period of tribulation leads to the predominance of sentiment over intellect, to the yearning for direct intercourse be- tween the soul and the Divine Essence, which is the supreme aim of the mystic, the Germany of the fourteenth century had troubles pp. 242-3, 247, 284.
 * Trithem. Chron. Hirsaug. ann. I315.-Sclir6dl, Passavia Sacra, Passau, 1879,