tance to their special
sign, rebaptism. Chief among the Zuerich coterie may be mentioned
Konrad Grebel, at whose house the sect first of all assembled. At
first the Anabaptist movement at Zuerich was regarded as an extreme
wing of the party of the Church reformer, Zwingli, in that city, but
it was not long before it broke off entirely from the latter, and
hostilities, ensuing in persecution for the new party, broke out.

To understand the true inwardness of the Anabaptist and similar
movements, it is necessary to endeavour to think oneself back into the
intellectual conditions of the period. The Biblical text itself, now
everywhere read and re-read in the German language, was pondered and
discussed in the house of the handicraftsman and in the hut of the
peasant, with as much confidence of interpretation as in the study of
the professional theologian. But there were also not a few of the
latter order, as we have seen, who were becoming disgusted with the
trend of the official Reformation and its leading representatives. The
Bible thus afforded a _point d'appui_ for the mystical tendencies now
becoming universally prominent--a _point d'appui_ lacking to the
earlier movements of the same kind that were so constantly arising
during the Middle Ages proper. Seen in the dim religious light of a
continuous reading of the Bible and of very little else, the world
began to appear in a new aspect to the simple soul who practised it.
All things seemed filled with the immediate presence of Deity. He who
felt a call pictured himself as playing the part of the Hebrew
prophet. He gathered together a small congregation of followers, who
felt themselves as the children of God in the midst of a heathen
world. Did not the fall of the old Church mean that the day was at
hand when the elect should govern the world? It was not so much
positive doctrines as an attitude of mind that was the ruling spirit
in Anabaptism and like movements. Similarly, it was undoubtedly such a
sensitive impressionism rather than any positive dogma that dominated
the first generation of the Christian Church itself. How this acted
in the case of the earlier Anabaptists we shall presently see.

The new Zuerich sect, by one of those seemingly inscrutable chances in
similar cases of which history is full, not only prospered greatly but
went forth conquering and to conquer. It spread rapidly northward,
eastward, and westward. In the course of its victorious career it