dication to the reigning monarch and an assertion
that it was approved by learned and grave men of the Society of Jesus.
It taught that the prince holds sway solely by the consent of the
people and by ancient law, and that, though his vices are to be borne
up to a certain point, yet when he ruins the state he is a public
enemy, to slay whom is not only permissible but glorious for any man
brave enough to despise his own safety for the public good.

If one may gather the official theory of the Catholic church from the
contradictory statements of her doctors, she advocated despotism
tempered by {606} assassination. No Lutheran ever preached the duty of
passive obedience more strongly than did the Catechism of the Council
of Trent.

[Sidenote: Radicals]

A word must be said about the more radical thought of the time. All
the writers just analysed saw things from the standpoint of the
governing and propertied classes. But the voice of the poor came to be
heard now and then, not only from their own mouths but from that of the
few authors who had enough imagination to sympathize with them. The
idea that men might sometime live without any government at all is
found in such widely different writers as Richard Hooker and Francis
Rabelais. But socialism was then, as ever, more commonly advocated
than anarchy. The Anabaptists, particularly, believed in a community
of goods, and even tried to practice it when they got the chance.
Though they failed in this, the contributions to democracy latent in
their egalitarian spirit must not be forgotten. They brought down on
themselves the severest animadversions from defenders of the existing
order, by whatever confession they were bound. [Sidenote: 1535] Vives
wrote a special tract to refute the arguments of the Anabaptists on
communism. Luther said that the example of the early Christians did
not authorize communism for, though the first disciples pooled their
own goods, they did not try to seize the property of Pilate and Herod.
Even the French Calvinists, in their books dedicated to liberty,
referred to the Anabaptists as seditious rebels worthy of the severest
repression.

[Sidenote: _Utopia_, 1516]

A nobler work than any produced by the Anabaptists, and one that may
have influenced them not a little, was the _Utopia_ of Sir Thomas More.
He drew partly on Plato, on Tacitus's _Germania_, on Augustine and on
Pico della Mirandola, and for the outward framework of his boo