Page:Balthasar Hübmaier.djvu/230

 bookseller at Wittenberg, and when the Peasants' War broke out he made his way to Thomas Münzer at Mühlhausen. Captured at the battle of Frankenhausen, where Münzer and his peasants were overthrown, he obtained his liberty by convincing his captors that he was in the camp as a book-peddler and not as a soldier. His plea may have been true, but there is plenty of evidence in his subsequent career that he had fully made his own the chiliastic and anarchistic principles of Münzer. To the preaching of these he gave the rest of a stormy and checkered life.

He joined Denck for a time in Augsburg, in the spring of 1526, and was baptised by this Anabaptist preacher, who had himself but a little before been baptised by Hübmaier. Up to this time, though opposed to the baptism of infants, Hut was not definitely connected with the Anabaptists; henceforth his labours were confined to that sect—or, more properly speaking, to one party among the Anabaptists. There had always been certain of these who rejected the tenet of non-resistance, to this extent at least—that the godly might use the sword against the ungodly, in setting up the