destined to be hard and painful, which was in his
lifetime doomed to failure, was not self-chosen. "I opened my mouth,"
he says, "against my will and I am speaking to the world because God
impels me so that I cannot keep silent. God has called me out and
stationed me at my post, and He knows whether good will come of it or
not."[46]

{30}

It is not often that a man living in the atmosphere of seething
enthusiasm, pitilessly pricked and goaded by brutal and unfeeling
persecutors, compelled to hear his precious truth persistently called
error and pestilent heresy, keeps so calm and sane and sure that all
will be well with him and with his truth as does Denck. "I am heartily
well content," is his dying testimony, "that all shame and disgrace
should fall on my face, if it is for the truth. It was when I began to
love God that I got the disfavour of men."[47] He confesses that he
has found it difficult to "keep a gentle and a humble heart" through
all his work among men, to "temper his zeal with understanding," and to
"make his lips say always what his heart meant,"[48] but he did, at
least, succeed in loving God and in hating everything that hindered
love. In an epoch in which the doctrine was new and revolutionary, he
succeeded in presenting the principle of the Inward Word as the basis
of religion without giving any encouragement to libertinism or moral
laxity, for he found the way of freedom to be a life of growing
likeness to Christ, he held the fulfilling of the law to be possible
only for those who accept the burdens and sacrifices of love, and he
insisted that the privileges of blessedness belong only to those who
_behave like sons_.

[1] The best studies on Denck are Heberle's articles in _Theol. Studien
und Kritiken_ (1851), Erstes Heft, and (1855) Viertes Heft. Gustave
Roehrich's _Essai sur la vie, les ecrits et la doctrine de Jean Denk_
(Strasbourg, 1853). Ludwig Keller's _Ein Apostel der Wiedertaeufer_
(Leipzig, 1882). The last two books must, however, be followed with
much caution.

[2] One branch of the Anabaptists held that the "saints" may, however,
rightly use the sword to execute the purposes of God upon the godless,
and to hasten the coming of the Thousand Years' Reign of the Kingdom.

[3] I have included him, in my _Studies in Mystical Religion_ (1908),
among the Anabaptists, but he can be called one only by such a loose
use of the word that it ceases to have any _definite_ significa