Germany. But a holier testimony, which flows like blood from the Gospel, contradicts the slavish interpretation and the erroneous authority; for Christ, who died for the equality and brotherhood of mankind, did not reveal his Word to serve as the tool of Absolutism, and Thomas Münzer was right and Luther in the wrong, Münzer was beheaded at Mödlin. His companions were also in the right, and they were beheaded with the sword or hung with the rope, as they chanced to be of plebeian or noble origin. The Margrave Casimir von Anspach, in addition to such executions, had the eyes put out of eighty-five peasants, who afterwards went begging about the country, and who were also in the right. How it went with the wretched peasants in Upper Austria and Suabia, and how in Germany many hundreds of thousands of peasants, who asked for nothing but human rights and Christian mercy, were slaughtered or strangled by their spiritual or temporal lords, is commonly known. But the latter were in the right, because they were in all the fulness of power, and the peasants were often led astray by the authority of a Luther and of other clergymen who made common cause with secular powers, and by untimely controversies over equivocal Biblical passages, or often singing psalms when they should have fought.
In the year of grace 1789, the same strife
