Page:The English Peasant.djvu/380

 Equality ought so to prevail among Christians in the presence of good, of faith, of charity, that they cannot recognise royalty, nor public functions, nor any titles, nor distinctions. In religious matters the laws emanating from Pope or Emperor were not obligatory. "I have already said," he wrote in the "Sit'viry" (the Net of the Faith), "that class distinctions are the body of Antichrist, as well as these municipalities and these coats-of-arms where one feels the inspiration of Satan."

The people, he taught, ought not to pay either taxes, tribute, dues, interest, nor to perform the forced labour. The true Christian, however, cannot demand justice from the Royal Courts, or seek their protection. To do so is to put one's confidence and hope in a man, and to seek to be avenged by force. To support outrages with resignation, to suffer persecution, and to forget them, such is the duty of every religious man. In his view, war was murder, and its continuance had the effect of turning a whole people into a nation of assassins. He wished that criminals should not be punished but converted, and the severest penalty he would admit was banishment from the country.

His writings drew around him a crowd of disciples at Chelcice, and afterwards at Kunvald (1457). They called themselves Brethren of the Law of Christ, or the United Brethren. Soon they spread into Moravia, into Silesia, into Brandenburg, and into Poland. Without any apparent means their agents travelled everywhere; their poverty, obscurity, democratic sympathies, assisting their object to an extent money and organising energy can never attain.

II.

Sebastian Brandt's once popular book, "The Ship of Fools," the first edition of which appeared in 1494, the author complains "of the arrogance and pride of the rude men of the country." Nothing can more forcibly set forth the rise of the people in the fifteenth century than the tirade of this excellent imperial councillor. The Crusades, the renascence of pagan learning, the rise of commerce, and the discovery of new worlds, the invention