the municipal election of the 21st the Anabaptists secured a majority on the Council; and Knipperdollinck, the executioner of the sect, became Burgomaster. Six days later there was a great prayer-meeting of armed Anabaptists in the town-hall. Matthys roused himself from an apparent trance to demand in the name of God the expulsion of all who refused conversion. Old and young, mothers with infants in arms, and barefooted children, were driven out into the snow to perish, while the reign of the saints began.
Like the earliest Christians they sought to have all things in common, and as a commencement they confiscated the goods of the exiles. To ensure primitive simplicity of worship they next destroyed all images, pictures, manuscripts, and musical instruments on which they could lay their hands. Tailors and shoemakers were enjoined to introduce no new fashions in wearing apparel; gold and silver and jewels were surrendered to the common use; and there was an idea of pushing the communistic principle to its logical extreme by repudiating individual property in wives. The last was apparently offensive to public opinion even in purified Munster, and the nearest approach to it effected in practice was polygamy, which was not introduced without some sanguinary opposition, and did not probably extend far beyond the circle of Beuckelssen and the leaders of the movement. These eccentricities were regarded by their authors as a necessary preparation for the second coming of Christ. That the end of the world was at hand was a common idea of the day. No one was more thoroughly possessed by it than Luther; but while he set little store on the Book of Revelation, the Anabaptists of Münster found in it their chief inspiration. They conceived that they were making straight the path of the Lord by abolishing all human ordinances such as property, marriage, and social distinctions. The notion was not entirely new; at one end of the religious scale the Taborites had held somewhat similar views, and at the other, monastic life was also based on renunciation of private property, of marriage, and of the privilege of rank. The idea of preparing for the Second Advent gave the movement its strength, and stimulated the revolutionists of Münster to resist for a year and a half the miseries of a siege and all the forces which Germany could bring against them.
The rule of Matthys the prophet was brought to a sudden end by his death in a sortie at Easter, and his mantle fell upon Jan of Leyden, probably a worse but certainly an abler man. His introduction of polygamy provoked resistance from the respectable section led by Mollenbeck, but they were mercilessly butchered after surrender. "He who fires the first shot," cried Jan, in words which might have been borrowed from Luther's attack on the peasants, "does God a service." After his victory he dispensed with the twelve elders who had nominally ruled the new Israel, and by the mouth of his prophet Dusentschur
