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30. Moreover, when Denck, one of the philosophers of the Anabaptist movement, was asked if he did not at least recognise the authority of the Bible, he answered that the only obligatory rule of conduct is the one that each individual finds, for himself, in the Bible. And yet these very formulæ, so vague, borrowed from ecclesiastical slangs this authority of "the book" from which it is so easy to borrow arguments for and against Communism, for and against authority, and so uncertain when it comes clearly to define what liberty is, these very religious tendencies of the revolt,—did they not already contain the germ of an unavoidable defeat? Originating in towns, the movement soon spread to the country. The peasants refused to obey anybody, and planting an old shoe on a pike by way of a flag they took back the lands which the lords had seized from the village communities; they broke their bonds of serfdom, drove away priest and judge, and constituted themselves into free communes. And it was only by the stake, the wheel, and the gibbet, it was only by the massacre of more than a hundred thousand peasants in a few years, that royal or imperial power, allied to the papal or reformed church (Luther inciting to massacre peasants more violently even than the Pope), put an end to these risings that had for a moment threatened the constitution of nascent States.

Born of popular Anabaptism, the Lutheran Reformation, leaning on the State, massacred the people and crushed the movement from which it originally had derived its strength. The survivors of this immense wave of thought took refuge in the communities of the "Moravian Brothers," who, in their turn, were destroyed by Church and State. Those among them who were not exterminated sought shelter, some in the south-east of Russia, others in Greenland, where to this day they have been able to live in communities and to refuse all service to the State.

Henceforth, the State's existence was secure. The lawyer, the priest, and the soldier-lord, having constituted a solid alliance around the thrones, could carry on their work of annihilation.