former Bullinger put
it: "God opened the eyes of the governments by the revolt at Muenster,
and thereafter no one would trust even those Anabaptists who claimed to
be innocent." Their lack of unity and organization told against them.
Nevertheless the sect smouldered on in the lower classes, constantly
subject to the fires of martyrdom, until, toward the close of the
century, it attained some cohesion and respectability. The later
Baptists, Independents, and Quakers all inherited some portion of its
spiritual legacies. To the secular historian its chief interest is in
the social teachings, which consistently advocated tolerance, and
frequently various forms of anarchy and socialism.

[Sidenote: Defection of the humanists]

Next to the defection of the laboring masses, the severest loss to the
Evangelical party in these years was that of a large number of
intellectuals, who, having hailed Luther as a deliverer from
ecclesiastical bondage, came to see in him another pope, not less {103}
tyrannous than he of Rome. Reuchlin the Hebrew scholar and Mutian the
philosopher had little sympathy with any dogmatic subtlety. Zasius the
jurist was repelled by the haste and rashness of Luther. The so-called
"godless painters" of Nuremberg, George Penz and the brothers Hans and
Bartholomew Beham, having rejected in large part Christian doctrine,
were naturally not inclined to join a new church, even when they
deserted the old.

But a considerable number of humanists, and those the greatest, after
having welcomed the Reformation in its first, most liberal and hopeful
youth, deliberately turned their backs on it and cast in their lot with
the Roman communion. The reason was that, whereas the old faith
mothered many of the abuses, superstitions, and dogmatisms abominated
by the humanists, it had also, at this early stage in the schism,
within its close a large body of ripe, cultivated, fairly tolerant
opinion. The struggling innovators, on the other hand, though they
purged away much obsolete and offensive matter, were forced, partly by
their position, partly by the temper of their leaders, to a raw
self-assertiveness, a bald concentration on the points at issue,
incompatible with winsome wisdom, or with judicial fairness. How the
humanists would have chosen had they seen the Index and Loyola, is
problematical; but while there was still hope of reshaping Rome to
their liking they had little use for Wittenberg.

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