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Luther was in a fair way of bringing about an amicable settlement of the differences. Philip of Hesse had at the same time come to a full agreement with the peasants in his domains, and peace seemed near, when the real genius of the whole peasant movement, Muenzer, interfered.
Leo Putz, Adolf Muenzer, Fritz Erler, are the leaders of the group, although Alex Salzmann and Ferdinand Spiegel were Erler's collaborators in the famous Wiesbaden frescoes which offended the taste of the Kaiser.
At this juncture the flame broke out in the German provinces lying beyond the Rhine. Thomas Muenzer, at a later period leader of the Saxon Anabaptists, had come to Basel in Frickthal, and Waldshut in Cleggau.
The mystics of the Middle Ages who dreamed of an approaching thousand years kingdom of righteousness had the consciousness of the injustice of class antagonisms. At the beginning of modern history three hundred years ago, Thomas Muenzer shouted it aloud to all the world. In the English and French bourgeois revolutions the same cry was heard and died away ineffectually.
Napoleon wondered that Charles V. did not seize the occasion to make Germany a united empire. Then seemed to be a time when the princes could have been stripped of their power. One of the foremost leaders of the rebellion was Thomas Muenzer. On the defeat of the peasants, he was captured and beheaded.
When Muenzer at the head of hordes of men who through his inflammatory speeches had been turned into unreasoning brutes was spreading ruin and desolation along his path, wiping out in a few days the products of the patient labors of generations, subverting the fundamental principles of honesty, justice, and morality on which the organized public life of the community and the private life of the individual must rest, and rapidly changing even the well-meaning and reasonable among the peasants into frenzied madmen, Luther recognized that conciliatory measures and arbitration would not avail with these mobs.
That Grebel and Manz were privy to this, and made frequent journeys to and from Zollikon, appears with entire certainty from reports afterward received. With Muenzer they did not become personally acquainted. Before they could accomplish this, he had traveled back to Germany; but his influence on Swiss affairs is evident from two letters sent to him soon after by Grebel and his friends.
But the seclusion of the great Reformer threw the movement largely into the hands of extremists such as Carlstadt and Muenzer to whose anarchical theories he was opposed as vehemently as to Rome.
First led by Muenzer, and after he had gone to the Hartz Mountains, by Simon Rœubli, who had been expelled from the territory of Zurich, Huebmeier set himself up as the apostle of Anabaptism, and, according to his own confession, rebaptized the greater part of the inhabitants of Waldshut.
Inasmuch as Carlstadt did not mean to enforce his strange reforms by arms, as Muenzer and the peasants were doing, Luther inclined to condone his views on polygamy. He evidently regards this matter as a matter of public policy, like prostitution, which every community and commonwealth must regulate by such statutes as can be devised, "because of the hardness of men's hearts."
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