belong, however, to the banyan-tree of Anabaptism.
His writings reveal ideas and tendencies of such enlarged scope that it
appears clear that he had discovered and was teaching another type of
Christianity altogether.[3] He is the earliest exponent in the
sixteenth century of a fresh and unique type of religion, deeply
influenced by the mystics of a former time, but even more profoundly
moulded by the new humanistic conceptions of man's real nature.

There are few biographical details of Denck's life available. He was,
most probably, a native of Bavaria,[4] and he was born about the year
1495. He studied in the University of Ingolstadt, where he was
admitted among the baccalaureates in 1517.[5] In the year 1520 we
catch a glimpse of him in close association with the Humanists of
Augsburg.[6] In 1522 he was at work in Basle as proof-reader for the
famous publisher, Valentin Curio, and was living in intimate fellowship
with the great scholar OEcolampadius, whose lectures on the Prophet
Isaiah he heard.[7] In the autumn of the same year, on the
recommendation of OEcolampadius, he was appointed Director of St.
Sebald's School in Nuremberg, which was then the foremost seat of
learning in that city, {19} a great centre of classical humanistic
studies. During the first period of his life in Nuremberg he was
closely identified with the Lutheran movement, but he soon shifted his
sympathies, and aligned himself with the radical tendencies which at
this period were championed in Nuremberg by Thomas Muenzer, who, in
spite of his misguided leadership and fanatical traits, had discovered
a genuine religious principle that was destined to become significant
in safer hands.[8] Muenzer read Tauler's sermons from his youth up; in
his own copy of these sermons, preserved in the library at Gera, a
marginal note says that he read them almost continually, and that here
he learned of a divine interior Teaching. It was Muenzer's teaching of
the living Voice of God in the soul, his testimony to the reality of
the inner heavenly Word, which God Himself speaks in the deeps of man's
heart, that won the Humanist and teacher of St. Sebald's School to the
new and perilous cause. He also formed a close friendship with Ludwig
Hetzer, who, like Muenzer, taught that the saving Word of God must be
inward, and that the Scriptures can be understood only by those who
belong to the School of Christ. Having once caught the _idea_ from
these impassio