The Enthusiasts.
As early as 1531, it was generally acknowledged that the whole body of the people would embrace the Reformation if persecution ceased. Those who were not guided by the fear of God were exasperated and enraged with the persecutors. Nor was this the worst; the want of spiritual leaders left the field open to enthusiasts who believed themselves inspired, and to impostors who pretended to be so. If the pastors are set aside, fools or knaves set themselves up as prophets, and, instead of instructing the people, lead them astray. It appears that some of the disciples of the enthusiastic divines whom Luther and Zwinglius had strenuously opposed, when driven out of Germany and Switzerland, brought their visions into the Netherlands. They knew that these lands had long been in the enjoyment of liberty, and hoped that they should be able to propagate their system there without disturbance. The persecutions of the Romish clergy threw many evangelicals into their arms. The system of these enthusiasts was altogether opposed to that of the reformers. They differed, in particular, as to the doctrine of the powerlessness of the soul for good. They consequently separated into two parties. Man, said some of their doctors, is able by his own power to obtain salvation. For these, Christ was a schoolmaster rather than a Saviour; and some of them, Kaetzer, for example, positively denied his divinity. ‘He redeems us,’ they said, ‘by pointing out the path that we ought to pursue.’[[827]] Others asserted that the flesh alone was subject to sin, that the spirit was not affected, and that it had no share in the fall. All of them looked upon the evangelical church and its institutions as a new papacy. Both alike, they affirmed, the new and the old, were about to be destroyed, and a great transformation of the world was about to be effected. It would begin by depriving kings and magistrates, and by putting pastors and priests to death.
These so-called prophets frequently made their appearance without any one’s knowing whence they came or whither they went. They began by saluting in the name of the Lord. Then they spoke of the corruption of the world. They announced the end of all things, naming even the day and the hour, and they styled themselves the messengers of God to seal the elect with the seal of the covenant. All those who were sealed were about to be gathered together from the four quarters of the world, and all the ungodly would be destroyed. They especially addressed themselves to artisans, and in them they found men more intelligent than the peasants of the rural districts, men wearied with their laborious occupations, bitter about their low wages, and full of eager desire for a better position. The principal leaders were tailors, shoemakers, and bakers. The majority of these respectable classes stood aloof from the dreams of the fanatics, and continued to earn their livelihood by honest means. But the enthusiasts among them in Switzerland, in Alsace, in Germany, in the Netherlands, and elsewhere, proposed to form a great international league, by means of which they would live in pleasure and have nothing to do. Professing themselves inspired of God for the accomplishment of His purposes, they gave themselves up ere long to the most shameful passions and the most cruel actions. It has been remarked that the most signal example of fanaticism recorded in the pages of history was inspired by an exaggerated devotion to the papal system; and those citizens of Paris have become famous, who on the night of Saint Bartholomew, assassinated, butchered, and tore to pieces those of their fellow-citizens who did not go to mass. History, however, does present to us a fanaticism yet more disgusting, if it be not more cruel. It was that of a sect which was neither Romanist nor Protestant—the enthusiasts of whom we speak. And if we consider their relations, whether with Rome or with Protestantism, it seems to us that it is no deviation from a wise impartiality to say that the cruelties of the imperial government, frequently supported by the priests, essentially contributed to plunge these unfortunate men into their extravagances and cruelties; while the Protestant divines earnestly contended against them with the pen, and the princes with the sword.
If the fire of fanaticism was sometimes brought from Germany into the Netherlands, it was most frequently kindled there without foreign aid. The fermentation which took place in certain rude and coarse natures, and the persecutions of Rome, developed there an unwholesome heat which irritated men’s tempers and inflamed their imaginations. There was no need here of Stork, of Munzer, or of Manz.
Prophets.
In 1533, agents of the Government discovered arms in the possession of some of the enthusiasts.[[828]] ‘Assuredly,’ said Queen Mary, ‘this is not far from sedition.’ Melchior Hoffmann, a Suabian fur-trader, a clever, eloquent, and audacious man, had before this time spent some years at Embden, in East Friesland, and had given himself out as one called of God to contend against the doctrines of the pope, of Luther, and of Zwinglius, and to manifest the truth to the world.[[829]] John Matthison, a Haarlem baker, an acute, daring, and immoral man, now at Amsterdam, had enthusiastic raptures, and asserted himself to be Enoch.[[830]] He pretended that as such he was charged to announce the coming of the kingdom of God; he predicted sufferings so horrible against those who refused to believe him, that the poor people in their terror fancied they already saw hell opened before them; and subdued by alarm they blindly believed every thing that Enoch told them. Among his disciples was one John Bockhold, a Leyden tailor, whom he ordained, and whom he sent out with eleven others (twelve apostles!) to preach the new Gospel. The restitution of all things is at hand, said these new prophets. A spiritual and temporal reign of Christ is approaching. None will be admitted but the righteous; the ungodly must be destroyed beforehand. Even ministers must take the sword and establish the new kingdom by force. Then, desirous of assigning to each his part, they declared that ‘Luther and the pope were, indeed, both of them false prophets, but that Luther was the worst.’[[831]] ‘The times of persecution are ended,’ cried they, in the midst of the populations terrified by the cruelties of Charles the Fifth; ‘you have nothing more to fear. The moment is come in which the faithful will triumph over the whole earth, and will render unto tyrants double for the evil which they have done them.’ If any one hesitated to believe the prophets, they charged him with resisting the Spirit of God; called him Korah, Abiram, or Jambres; and the poor people, afraid of opposing a divine mission, accepted with trembling the promises which were to put an end to their sufferings. The tailor Bockhold preached thus at Amsterdam, Enkhuysen, Alkmaar, Rotterdam and elsewhere, establishing in all these places small communities of the faithful, numbering from ten to twenty persons. The thought that the cruel tyranny of Charles was about to be brought to judgment, and that it was necessary to hasten the end, took possession of men’s minds. They became restless, and had no thought but of taking vengeance on those whose instruments were the pit, the fire, and the sword.
Delusions.
One night, in a solitary spot in the province of Groningen, a man rose in the midst of a great multitude which had come together from all quarters. He was naked to the waist, his soul was troubled, his intellect disordered, his thoughts incoherent; and, in a state of the strangest hallucination, he cried out with an unsteady and inharmonious voice, ‘I am God the Father.... Kill, kill the priests and the monks; kill the magistrates of the whole world, but especially those who govern us. Repent ye, repent ye! Behold, your deliverance is at hand.’ This maniac, whose name was Hermann, gave utterance to terrible groans and vociferations,[[832]] and heated and inflamed as he was, he drank great draughts of wine to allay his thirst.
The rumor was continually gaining ground that the hour of judgment was approaching, that all the faithful would be saved, but that unbelievers would perish under severe chastisements. More than three hundred men hurried together in a single night, filled with alarm, and demanded with loud cries the baptism which was to shelter them from the judgments of heaven, and they received it, convinced that all those who had not received it were going to perish.
A spirit of darkness was more and more diffusing itself among the poor and ignorant men who were terrified by the executions. It seized even upon the most vulgar classes, worked them up to a state of fatal fear, and subjected them to the force of extravagant imaginations. One night, a young gardener[[833]] got up and went to the bedside of Hermann, who gave himself out as the Father eternal, and said to him, ‘I am the Son of God.’ Then, filled with pity for the wretched ones who were persecuted by the agents of the emperor and of the priests, and who did not believe in the deliverance proclaimed, he cried out, ‘O Father, have pity on the people: have pity! and pardon.’ A great crowd had assembled; he took a cupful of strong drink and drank it, intending to honor the Holy Spirit; then mounting on a chair, he uttered piercing cries, proclaiming himself the Son of God. Seeing his mother in the crowd, he turned to her: ‘Dost thou not believe,’ he said before them all, ‘and dost thou not confess that thou hast brought forth the Son of God?’ The poor woman, astonished and alarmed, not knowing what had happened to her son, replied quite simply that she did not. The deluded man then flew into a rage and so terrified his poor mother that she stammered out, tremblingly, that she did believe it. But one of the men who were present, having declared that he for his part did not believe it at all, the demoniac seized him and hurled him violently into the filth of a dunghill that lay near a cow-shed. ‘Behold,’ he said, ‘thou art lying in the abyss of hell.’ A robust man, who had good sense and was indignant at these fooleries, now seized him and threw him down. Others, not very tolerant, threw themselves upon the raving maniac and overwhelmed him with blows; so that the unfortunate man had much difficulty in making his escape by flight from the hands of those who so roughly chastised him. As to Hermann, he was arrested by order of the magistrate, conducted to Groningen, and cast into prison. The atrocious cruelties of Louis XIV. also gave rise to similar acts on the part of enthusiasts. But there is no room for comparison between the sincere and often pious Camisards and the coarse and impure fanatics of the Netherlands. These facts of different kinds agree only in showing the fatal consequences of the criminal persecutions of the papacy. The sect of the enthusiasts, however, became purer in course of time.