rsity graduates--and the statesman could
not admit in his categories a purpose that was sectarian as against the
state church, and democratic as against the existing aristocracy.

[Sidenote: 1523]

His first work against them shows how he was torn between his desire to
make the Bible his only guide and the necessity of compromising with
the prevailing polity. As he was unable to condemn his opponents on
any consistent grounds he was obliged to prefer against them two
charges that were false, though probably believed true by himself. As
they were {155} ascetics in some particulars he branded them as
monastic; for their social program he called them seditious.

The suppression of the Peasants' Revolt had the effect in Switzerland,
as elsewhere, of causing the poor and oppressed to lose heart, and of
alienating them from the cause of the official Protestant churches. A
disputation with the Anabaptist leaders was held at Zurich; [Sidenote:
November 6-8, 1525] they were declared refuted, and the council passed
an order for all unbaptized children to be christened within a week.
The leaders were arrested and tried; Zwingli bearing testimony that
they advocated communism, which he considered wrong as the Bible's
injunction not to steal implied the right of private property. The
Anabaptists denied that they were communists, but the leaders were
bound over to keep the peace, some were fined and others banished. As
persecuting measures almost always increase in severity, it was not
long before the death penalty was denounced against the sectaries, and
actually applied. In a polemic against the new sect entitled _In
Catabaptistarum Strophas Elenchus_, [Sidenote: July 1527] Zwingli's
only argument is a criticism of some inconsistencies in the
Anabaptists' biblicism; his final appeal is to force. His strife with
them was harder than his battle with Rome. It seems that the reformer
fears no one so much as him who carries the reformer's own principles
to lengths that the originator disapproves. Zwingli saw in the
fearless fanatics men prepared to act in political and social matters
as he had done in ecclesiastical affairs; he dreaded anarchy or, at
least, subversion of the polity he preferred, and, like all the other
men of his age, he branded heresy as rebellion and punished it as crime.

[Sidenote: Theocracy]

By this time Zurich had become a theocracy of the same tyrannical type
as that later made famous by {156} Gene