ned leaders, Denck proceeded directly to work it out and
to develop its implications in his own fashion. He was himself sane,
clear-minded, modest, sincere, far-removed from fanaticism, and eager
only to find a form of religion which would fit the eternal nature of
things on the one hand, and the true nature of man on the other--man, I
mean, as the Humanist conceived him.[9]

Already in this Nuremberg period, Denck became fully convinced that
Luther's doctrine of sin and justification was an artificial
construction--_Einbildung_--and that his conception of Scripture and
the Sacraments was destined to clamp the new-found faith in iron bonds,
tie it to outworn tradition, and make it incapable of a progressive
{20} and vital unfolding. He declared in his testimony or "confession"
to the city council of Nuremberg in 1524, that although he had not yet
a full experience of the inward, powerful Word of God, he distinctly
felt its life as an inner witness which God had planted within him, a
spark of the Divine Light breaking into his own soul, and in the
strength of this direct experience he denied the value of external
ceremonies, and declared that even the Bible itself cannot bring men to
God without the assistance of this inner Light and Spirit.[10]

As a result of this change of attitude, the schoolmaster of St.
Sebald's was banished from the city of Nuremberg, January 21, 1525, and
from this time until his early death he was homeless and a wanderer.
He spent some months--between September 1525 and October 1526--in
Augsburg endeavouring to organize and direct the rapidly expanding
forces of the liberal movement. He was during these months, and
especially during the period of the great Anabaptist synod which was
held at this time in Augsburg, endeavouring to give the chaotic
movement of Anabaptism a definite direction, with the main emphasis on
the mystical aspect of religion. He hoped to call a halt to the vague
socialistic dreams and the fanatical tendencies that put the movement
in constant jeopardy and peril, and he was striving to call his
brotherhood to an inner religion, grounded on the inherent nature of
the soul, and guided by the inner Word rather than on "a new law" set
forth in the written word. There were, however, too many eddies and
currents to be mastered by one mind, too many varieties of faith to be
unified under one principle, and Denck's own view was too intangible,
inward, and spiritual, to satisfy