once seizing
the sword of sharpness and mowing down the godless therewith. In this
sense Matthys completed the transformation begun by Hoffmann. Melchior
had indeed rejected the non-resistance doctrine in its absolute form,
but he does not appear in his teaching to have uniformly emphasized
the point, and certainly did not urge the destruction of the godless
as an immediate duty to be fulfilled without delay. With him was
always the suggestion, expressed or implied, of waiting for the signal
from heaven, the coming of the Lord, before proceeding to action. With
Matthys there was no need for waiting, even for a day; the time was
not merely at hand, it had already come. His influence among the
Brethren was immense. If Melchior Hoffmann had been Elijah, Jan
Matthys was Elisha, who should bring his work to a conclusion.

Among Matthys' most intimate followers was Jan Bockelson, from Leyden.
Bockelson was a handsome and striking figure. He was the illegitimate
son of one Bockel, a merchant and Buergermeister of Saevenhagen, by a
peasant woman from the neighbourhood of Muenster, who was in his
service. After Jan's birth Bockel married the woman and bought her her
freedom from the villein status that was hers by heredity. Jan was
taught the tailoring handicraft at Leyden, but seems to have received
little schooling. His natural abilities, however, were considerable,
and he eagerly devoured the religious and propagandist literature of
the time. Amongst other writings the pamphlets of Thomas Muenzer
especially fascinated him. He travelled a good deal, visiting Mechlin
and working at his trade for four years in London. Returning home, he
threw himself into the Anabaptist agitation, and, scarcely twenty-five
years old, he was won over to the doctrines of Jan Matthys. The latter
with his younger colleague welded the Anabaptist communities in
Holland and the adjacent German territories into a well-organized
federation. They were more homogeneous in theory than those of
Southern and Eastern Germany, being practically all united on the
basis of the Hoffmann-Matthys propaganda.

The episcopal town of Muenster, in Westphalia, like other places in the
third decade of the sixteenth century, became strongly affected by the
Reformation. But that the ferment of the time was by no means wholly
the outcome of religious zeal, as subsequent historians have persisted
in representing it, was recognized by the contemporary heads of the
official R