Page:Balthasar Hübmaier.djvu/171

1526] the writers roundly rebuke Münzer for his errors, especially singling out his teaching about the sword for reprobation. Grebel and the others had evidently learned that the teaching and practice of Münzer did not in all respects agree, and so far from looking up to him as one from whom they had learned something valuable, they take him to task as an erring brother.

This theory would probably never have been broached but for the fact that the name of Thomas Münzer was loaded with obloquy, on account of his doings in Mühlhausen during the rebellion of the peasants, and therefore to establish any sort of connection between him and the Anabaptists is to discredit the latter—which is a thing that many writers, from Bullinger to our own day, have busily attempted to do. It should also be borne in mind that Münzer was not himself an Anabaptist, though often incorrectly called by that name. Though he asserts in one of his tracts that infant baptism cannot be proved from Scripture, he never abandoned the practice, and his teaching on this subject was purely academic, and filled no large place in his horizon.