Page:The English Peasant.djvu/391

 were not justified by faith were the thralls of Satan, more or less his instruments, and certainly doomed to perdition. Were Christians to obey such men—were they to allow their rulers to snatch the very Bread of Life out of their mouths, and so force them and their children into the kingdom of darkness? It was no want of charity to call rulers like Ulrich of Würtemberg, and Pope Alexander II., limbs of the devil. Could St Paul's admonitions not to resist the power refer to such? "The Eternal Gospel" offered a deliverance from this dilemma. It was not the letter of a former inspiration, but a present, ever-living, ever-teaching Spirit that was to be their guide. Besides, the last age of the world had come, the long-expected Vindicator of Divine Justice was at hand, and that time the Bible prophecies should be ushered in by a great war in which the saints should take the kingdom and possess it for ever and ever.

This idea of the "Reign of the Saints," this thought that the time was at hand when Christ would take unto Himself His great power and reign, and that His saints were to prepare the way by taking a two-edged sword in their hand and executing vengeance on the rulers of a doomed world, was the secret source of the strength of the great revolt which now ensued. Leaders arose, generally preachers or old soldiers; but every class in society was represented—the wealthy middle class by the desperado James Rohrbach, familiarly called Jacquet, the perpetrator of "the Terror at Weinsberg;" the higher class by the Chancellor Wendel Hipler, who was the statesman of the movement; and by the young noble, Florian Geyer van Geyersberg, its Bayard.

Who can touch pitch and not be defiled? The very spirit of Justice itself cannot work through human nature without the Spirit of Love having to weep over much outrageous injustice and many acts of desperate cruelty. No movement of this kind has ever taken place without the friends of Justice finding themselves allied with brigands and double-dyed traitors. If the commander-in-chief, Goetz, the Knight of the Iron-hand, cannot be thus stigmatized, he at least had no real sympathy with his army, and was only drawn into the movement by the hatred he shared in common with the German nobility against the clergy and the burgher class. Under the influence of leaders like Jacquet, the war became