Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/381

Rh win was a banker, and continued in active business while found- ing the community of the Grün Wöhrd and writing the treatises which were the support and the comfort of the faithful. Yet the chief of them all and his immediate disciples founded a hermitage in the wilderness, where they devoted themselves to propitiating the wrath of God. The unutterable wickedness of man called for divine vengeance. Earthquakes, pestilence, famine, had been dis- regarded warnings, and only the intercession of the Friends of God had obtained repeated reprieves. The Great Schism, in 1378, was a new and still greater calamity, and in 1379 an angel mes- senger informed them that the final punishment was postponed for a year, after which they must not ask for further delay. Still, in 1380, thirteen of them were mysteriously called to assemble in a "divine diet," to which an angel brought a letter informing them that, at the prayer of the Virgin, God had granted a respite of three years provided they would constitute themselves "prisoners of God," living the life of recluses in absolute silence, broken only two days in the week from noon to eve, and then only to ask for necessaries or to give spiritual counsel. To this they assented, and not long afterwards they disappear from view.

The Friends of God are noteworthy not only as a significant development of the spiritual tendencies of the age, but they have a peculiar interest for us from their relations with the Church on the one hand and with the Brethren of the Free Spirit on the other. They were an outgrowth of the latter, though they avoid- ed the deplorable moral extravagances of the parent sect. The "Ninth Rock," which was the supreme height of ascetic illuminism of the Beghards, reappears in the same sense in the most notable of Rulman Merswin's works, attributed until recently to Henry Suso. It is no wonder that Nider confounded the Friends of God with the Beghards, though Merswin's "Baner Buechelin" was written for the purpose of denouncing the errors of the latter. In much, as we have seen, they differed from the current doctrines of the Church, carrying their aberrations further than those which in the seventeenth century were so severely repressed in Molinos and the Illuminati. To these they added special errors of their own. Many Jews and Moslems, they said, were saved, for God aban-