classes offend against the law of
brotherly love and equality. This pious enthusiast easily found a
small body of followers in a time when men were weary of war after the
cruelties of the Hussite conflicts; but here, too, his theory
developed in practice into a kind of Quietism under priestly control,
an austere Puritanism, which is the very opposite of the personal
freedom of Anarchism.

[5] _Vorlaeufer des Neueren Socialismus_, Pt. i., p. 230.

Once more the Anarchist views of the Amalrikite appear at the
beginning of the sixteenth century among the Anabaptists in the sect
of the "Free Brothers," who considered themselves set free from all
laws by Christ, had wives and property in common, and refused to pay
either taxes or tithes, or to perform the duties of service or
serfdom.[6] The "Free Brothers" had a following in the Zuerich
highlands, but they were of no more importance than the other sect, we
have mentioned; utterly incomprehensible to those of their own time,
they formed the extreme wings of the widespread Communist movement
which, coming at the same time as the Reformation in the Church,
separates the (so-called) middle ages from modern times like a
boundary line. We observe in it nothing but the naively logical
development of a belief that is common to most religions: the
assumption of a happy age in the childhood of mankind (Golden Age,
Paradise, and so on), when men followed merely the laws of reason
(Morality, God, or Nature, or whatever else it is called), and needed
no laws or punishments to tell them to do right and avoid wrong; when
mankind, as every schoolboy knows from his Ovid,--

"Vindice nullo
Sponte sua sine lege fidem rectumque colebat;
Poena metusque aberant, nec verba minacia fixo
AEre legebantur, nec supplex turba timebat
Judicis ora sui, sed erant sine judice tuti."

[6] "_Der Wideraeufferen vosprung, fuergang, Secten v.s.w. ...
beschreiben durch Heinerrychen Bullingern...._" Zurich, 1561.
Fol. 32.

The transition from this primeval Anarchy to the present condition of
society has been presented by religion, both Graeco-Roman and
Judaic-Christian, as the consequence of a deterioration of mankind
("the Fall"), and as a condition of punishment, which is to be
followed, in a better world and after the work of life has been well
performed, by another life as Eden-like as the first state of man, and
eternal. But it must not be forgotten