Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/196

 Nicolaus Storch, Thomas Münzer, Marcus Stubner, and their followers, whose views were of a distinctively Hussite, or rather Taborite, tendency. These prophets believed themselves to be under the direct influence of the Holy Spirit, and their immediate intercourse with the source of all truth rendered them independent of any other guidance, even that of the Scriptures. The free interpretation of the Bible which seemed a priceless boon to Luther, was a poor thing to men who believed themselves to be at least as much inspired as its writers. From their repudiation of infant baptism, on the grounds that a sacrament was void without faith, and that infants could not have faith, they were afterwards called Anabaptists, but they also held the tenets of the later Fifth Monarchy men in England. Like Luther they believed in the unfree will, but they carried the doctrine to greater lengths, and unlike him they found" inspiration in the Apocalypse. They asserted the imminence of a bloody purification of the Church, and they endeavoured to verify their prophecy by beginning with the slaughter of their opponents at Zwickau. The plot was, however, discovered, and Storch, Münzer, and Stübner fled to Wittenberg.

Here they joined hands with Carlstadt and Zwilling. Even Melanchthon was impressed by their arguments, and the Elector Frederick, mindful of Gamaliel's advice, refused to move against them. Early in 1522 iconoclastic riots broke out; priestly garments and auricular confession were disused; the abolition of the mendicant Orders was demanded, together with the distribution of the property of the religious corporations among the poor. The influence of Taborite dogma was shown by the agitation for closing all places of amusement and the denunciation of schools, universities, and all forms of learning as superfluous in a generation directly informed by the Holy Ghost. The Wittenberg schoolmaster, Mohr, himself besought parents to remove their children from school; students began to desert the University, and the New Learning seemed doomed to end in the domination of fanatical ignorance based on the brute force of the mob.

In the Edict of Worms Luther had been branded rather as a revolutionary than as a heretic, and the burden of the complaints preferred against him by the Catholic humanists was that his methods of seeking a reformation would be fatal to all order, political or ecclesiastical. They painted him as the apostle of revolution, a second Catiline; and the excesses at Wittenberg might well make them think themselves prophets. The moment was a crucial one; it was to decide whether or not the German Reformation was to follow the usual course of revolutions, devour its own children, and go on adopting ever extremer views till the day of reaction came. Of all the elements in revolt from Rome, Luther and his school were the most conservative, and upon the question whether he would prevail against the extreme faction depended the success or failure of the German Reformation.