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1528] in Bavaria. It differs somewhat, possibly for the worse, from the German of Luther, but is unspeakably better than the crabbed Swiss dialect in which Zwingli wrote many of his books. In the best of the tongues then spoken, Erasmus would have disdained to write even an ordinary letter, to say nothing of a book for the scholarly. But Hübmaier did not write for the scholarly alone or chiefly; he wrote for the common man, and he had the same kind of power with the masses that Luther showed in his address To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. The tracts that poured forth from the Nikolsburg press are among the best specimens of religious literature produced by the sixteenth century—strong, eloquent, persuasive, vital.

The ethical tone of Hübmaier's writings also marks him for distinction among the writers of his age. He is scrupulously fair to his adversaries—always fair in intention, and usually fair in deed. He never charges misconduct and heresy upon his adversaries with that light-hearted carelessness of fact which is characteristic of his age and of most of its writers—of Luther and Zwingli, for example. And the difference in tone between his controversial